Ukrainian Prisoners-of-Wars and Internees from Eastern Galicia in the Polish Camps, 1918–1921
This project comprehensively examines a forgotten topic within Polish–Ukrainian history: Ukrainian prisoners-of-wars and internees from Eastern Galicia in the Polish camps from 1918 to 1921. Shortly after the Polish–Ukrainian war broke out, Polish authorities started to arrest and intern many Ukrainian civilians who took part in building the Western Ukrainian People’s Republic; simultaneously, a large group of officers and soldiers of the Ukrainian Halych Army ended up in the camps as a result of lost combat operations. The third group were soldiers of the Red Ukrainian Halych Army, who went to the camp of Tuchola in May 1920 after disarmament in Greater Ukraine by the Polish Army.
In the course of his research, Weglewicz aims to address many questions related to Ukrainian captivity in Poland. The most important topics are: the attitude of Polish civilian and military authorities toward Ukrainians, the organization and development of the camps according to the law (including Polish – Ukrainian agreement of February 1st, 1919), the number of POWs and internees in Polish captivity, and matters of life including alimentation, cultural life, runaways, material conditions, everyday life, violence, illnesses, and death rate.
The research is based on unpublished archival resources from the Warsaw, Cracow, Lviv, Kyiv, Ivano-Frankivsk and Przemysl archives as well as published books, press, and scientific articles.
Wiktor Weglewicz is a PhD candidate at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow, Poland. In 2018 he received a grant for research for his PhD thesis from Polish National Science Center “Etiuda 6”, part of which he is carrying out at HURI. He also received a Visegrad Fund scholarship to the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in Kyiv (2017) and twice received Erasmus scholarships (University of Florence, 2012-2013, and Charles University in Prague, 2015-2016). He is the author of several articles focused on the history of POWs and internees in Poland after WWI, published in Poland, Ukraine and Russia. He has presented the results of his research at conferences in Cracow, Warsaw, Kyiv, Lviv, and Kharkiv.