Olga Solarz

Phantom Pain, or about Greek Catholic Churches Demolition and Divine Justice in the Bieszczady Region after 1947

After the year 1947, as a result of displacements of Ukrainian population, cultural landscape of the Bieszczady Mountains has undergone major transformation. They left behind their homesteads and temples of foreign ceremonies, which represented and labeled unfamiliar values, without giving the new area a chance for complete customization. Thus its demolition or transformation into churches was for Communist authority, and new residents of those lands, psychologically needed to create the Bieszczady world from the beginning. Since the devastation of the Sanctuary often contradicted with Christian values, thus very often people from outside were employed to perform those tasks. Everything was taking place to the ambient reaction of the people, according to the principle of not mixing in the Will of God. Inscribed by me records from several Bieszczady town residents show however that phantom pain resulting from deeply hidden sense of guilt is not alien to them, and the story of a penalty of God, which affected the perpetrators, adopted the “absolving” function.
 

The presented excerpt of the study is an outline of the problem of trauma of Ukrainians displaced as part of the Operation Vistula in 1947 and effect it had on the next generations (children and grandchildren). The stigmatization and repressive actions that affected this community both from the state apparatus and local communities have taken their toll and forced them to adopt a range of protective measures. One of them was assimilation, another mimicry. Ukrainians who wanted to preserve their own national, religious and cultural identity often chose the "way of success". They dealt with sense of inferiority, sense of threat, injustice and regret with the need to achieve higher social positions and wealth that gave comfort in an uncertain times. Education, wealth, and social position were meant to help overcome fear, strengthen self-esteem and let them feel equal to Poles. In families who chose the silence strategy, the way to achieve safety was to forget. Trauma associated with the Operation Vistula and the decades-long post-war stigmatization of Ukrainians who wanted to preserve their own identity, had passed on the second and third generation to return in a situation of oppression.