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      PRAISE FOR NINE LIVES

      ‘An unforgettable book ... one of the most tragic and horrifying memoirs to emerge from the Second World War.’

      Neal Ascherson

      ‘Reveals a major hidden episode in Europe’s bloody history of ethnic violence .... The parallels with recent events in the Balkans are striking.’

      The Observer

      ‘An exceptional book ... it tells a story from a perspective we rarely, if ever, are able to see.’

      Anne Appelbaum, Literary Review

      ‘Vivid and disturbing ... Ably reconstructed with the help of Julian Preece, Lotnik’s memoir sheds lights on a relatively unknown conflict waged within the larger drama on the Eastern Front, and hence on the topical theme of how neighbours can turn on each other with terrifying savagery, as we have recently seen in the Balkans.’

      Times Literary Supplement

      Waldemar Lotnik was born in 1925 near Lublin, where he was brought up on his grandfather’s farm until the age of seven. His parents then fetched him to live in Kremenets, a garrison town in the Polish part of the Ukraine. After the events described in his book, he settled in London. He is married with two children and four grandchildren and has not returned to Poland since leaving the country in the summer of 1945.

      Julian Preece was born in Birmingham in 1962 and brought up in Somerset. He studied German and French at Oxford University and is now Professor of German at Swansea University. His books include The Life and Work of Günter Grass and, as editor, The Cambridge Companion to Kafka.

      NINE LIVES

      Ethnic Conflict in the Polish-Ukrainian Borderlands

      Waldemar Lotnik

      with

      Julian Preece

      Serif

      London

      First published 1999

      This e-book edition first published 2013

      by

      Serif

      47 Strahan Road

      London E3 5DA

      www.serifbooks.co.uk

      Copyright © Waldemar Lotnik and Julian Preece, 1999, 2013, 2015

      Foreword copyright © Neal Ascherson, 1999, 2013, 2015

      Copyright © Serif, 1999, 2013, 2015

      The moral rights of Waldemar Lotnik, Julian Preece and Neal Ascherson have been asserted.

      All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted or stored in a retrieval system, in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from the publishers.

      British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data.

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data.

      A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

       ePub ISBN: 978 1 909150 14 0

      e-book produced by Will Dady

      Cover design by Pentagram

      Contents

      Preface

      Foreword

      1 Caught in the Middle

      2 Escalation

      3 Capture and Flight

      4 The Ukrainian Massacres

      5 In the Puszcza Solska

      6 Majdanek, April–July 1944

      7 The Road to Freedom

      8 Agent for the NKVD

      9 The Free Cavalry, May–July 1945

      10 Escape to the West, July 1945

      11 The End of the Free Poles

      Afterword by Julian Preece

      Chronology of Polish History, 1918–1945

      Select Bibliography

      Acknowledgements

      Preface to the e-book edition

      It is extremely pleasing to both of us that more than a dozen years after print publication on the sixtieth anniversary of the outbreak of the Second World War, Nine Lives is still finding readers around the world. The book quickly established itself on university reading lists in the USA as a unique personal testimony to a tragic and little known Eastern Front sideshow. It continues as well to be recommended by word of mouth and bought by individuals. On the other hand, interest in both Poland and the Ukraine has been slight. The Polish-Ukrainian massacres appear to be a topic which remains difficult to discuss in both countries. There have been no translations of Nine Lives. For this electronic edition we have corrected a few minor errors and inconsistencies which somehow crept into the original book and we thank readers (in particular Richard Tyndorf from Canada) for pointing some of these out to us. Nothing else has been changed. A couple of additions could be made to the list of selected reading, however. The critical material in English on the conflict is still sparse but lately Timothy Snyder has made the subject his own, first in The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569-1999 (2003), which has a chapter on the ethnic cleansings in the region, and more recently in the best-selling Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (2010). Snyder gives more context than we were able to but does not attempt to count the victims. What is clear from his account is that President Kravchuk’s figure of a total of half a million Polish dead, which is quoted in the ‘Postscript, 1989-92’ to the ‘Chronology of Polish History, 1918-1945’, is an exaggeration. The figure seems more likely to have been around one fifth of that – see Halik Kochanksi (The Eagle Unbowed: Poland and the Poles in the Second War (2012).

       For the ease of the Anglophone reader, we have left off the diacritics from Polish names for people and places.

      May 2013

      Foreword

      This is one of the most tragic and horrifying memoirs to emerge from the Second World War. At its centre is an episode so dreadful – and so firmly suppressed by the Communist authorities of Poland and the Soviet Union – that it has taken 50 years for a candid account to appear in English. This is the genocidal war fought between Ukrainian and Polish partisans in the borderlands either side of the River Bug, a merciless war of mutual extermination which cost tens of thousands of lives – almost all civilians – and which was routinely accompanied by massacre, rape and torture on a Rwandan or Bosnian scale.

       Waldemar Lotnik was sucked into this bloodbath as a teenager. He fought as a Polish guerrilla against the Ukrainian bands, who were closely supported by the Nazi Wehrmacht. Half a century on, he has the courage to admit and describe his own share in the killings of prisoners and civilians, and the far worse atrocities committed by some of his own comrades. History will judge whether the Ukrainians behaved with even greater savagery, as Lotnik claims.

       Because of the author’s fearless candour, Nine Lives is a unique witness to the terrifying moral and political chaos which fell on Poland as the war ended and Soviet troops replaced the Nazis. He was put into the Nazi death camp of Majdanek, which he only just survived. Emaciated but free, he was recruited into the new Communist armed forces of Poland and sent to Russia to train as a Soviet intelligence agent. Defecting, he joined the remnant of Poland’s non-Communist partisan army now fighting a hopeless guerrilla war against the Soviet occupation.

       Finally, he decided to escape and, after many incredible adventures and brushes

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