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The most detailed and solidly researched history of the pre-World-War-II OUN to appear in the period 1945-90 was written by Petro Mirchuk and published in 1968. Mirchuk had been a member of OUN since secondary school and was being entrusted with important assignments in the OUN propaganda apparatus by his early twenties (the mid-1930s). Like many in the nationalist underground, he was no stranger to Polish prisons. When war broke out in September 1939, he was in jail, but was released with all the other prisoners when the Polish forces in Lviv capitulated to the Germans. The insider knowledge he acquired in the movement contributed to a well-informed book. In addition, while writing his history, Mirchuk was able to consult a large number of original OUN documents as well as the interwar press, and his book reproduced many important texts of the era. He wrote from a thoroughly nationalist perspective.

Though rich in information, his book had its biases. One was that it sanitized OUN’s record regarding its statements and actions against Jews in the 1930s as well as its relations with Nazi Germany. Mirchuk achieved this sanitization by avoiding these themes entirely. His omissions undoubtedly reflected OUN’s postwar sensitivity about accusations of collaboration with the Nazis, especially with regard to participating in the Holocaust. But to be fair to Mirchuk, he had had a different experience with these issues than did most other OUN members. He only spent one month on Ukrainian ethnic territory during the entire war, namely mid-August to mid-September 1941. Then, at a low ebb of German-OUN relations, he was arrested by the Germans and spent the rest of the war in prisons and concentrations camps, mainly Auschwitz. He was only released when the Americans liberated the concentration camp at Ebensee on 6 May 1945.26 Thus Mirchuk was not present to participate in the anti-Jewish violence of July 1941 and the ethnic cleansing campaign of 1943-44, and he had no love for the Germans. Another notable bias was that Mirchuk was a Bandera loyalist. When OUN split in 1940, he sided with Stepan Bandera against Andrii Melnyk; and when the Bandera faction split again after World War II, he remained with Bandera. His book, thus, presented the history of OUN from a partisan perspective. His depiction of the succession struggle after the assassination of OUN leader Yevhen Konovalets in 1938 was constructed so as to make the Bandera group’s split from the emigré leadership seem reasonable and necessary. He also blamed Melnyk and his allies for turning OUN policy around and “betting on the German Hitlerite card.” Until Melnyk assumed leadership, according to Mirchuk, there were “some contacts” with Wehrmacht circles, who like OUN wanted a revision of the Versailles settlement, but OUN had had reservations about Hitlerite ideology and politics, which viewed Eastern Europe as a territory for colonization.27

Nowhere near as well researched, but even more partisan was Polikarp Herasymenko’s short book on “the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists during the Second World War.” Herasymenko was neither a historian nor politically active for long; instead he was a metallurgist who made a good career in the United Kingdom and the United States after 1948. Born in Odessa, he fled Soviet Ukraine to avoid arrest in 1921, living mainly in Prague until the end of World War II. He was a member of the Melnyk faction of OUN during the war years and for a short time thereafter.28 Herasymenko’s history was first published as a mimeographed text in 1947 and went through several editions over the following years. The work made use of the interwar and wartime periodical press as well as documents of both the united OUN and the Melnyk faction. But overall, it was marred by one-sidedness. A major target of its criticism was the Bandera faction. Herasymenko attributed its split from the rest of OUN to foreign intrigue. Fearful of the power of OUN, both the Germans and the Soviets had engineered the rift, preying on the Bandera group’s “political blindness, ambition, primitiveness, moral indifference.”29 He condemned the rebellion they led: “provoked by the enemy, they pushed the masses on the path of a negative, in every respect unprepared, and therefore needlessly bloody ‘insurgency.’“30 Herasymenko quoted many OUN documents critical of Nazi Germany and made no mention of pro-German attitudes or cooperation with Nazi Germany on the part of OUN. He made an exception, of course, for the Banderites, who, he wrote, were both ignorant of Germany’s plans for Ukraine and ready to help the Germans by supplying them with hundreds of interpreters. The many interpreters from the Melnyk faction working for the Germans were passed over in silence. There was also no mention at all of the Melnykites’ support for the Waffen-SS Division Galizien. The Ukrainian police in German service, with whom both factions of OUN were deeply involved, were almost completely absent from Herasymenko’s account; there was a single passing mention in a wartime document calling upon Ukrainians in all stations of life to remember that they were members of the “Ukrainian Nation, once free, glorious, and powerful, but today enslaved and marked by blood and ruin.”31 Jews and the Holocaust were completely missing from Herasymenko’s book.

Another veteran of the movement who wrote about OUN during World War II was Lev Shankovsky. Shankovsky had, as an adolescent, served in the armed forces fighting for an independent Ukraine during the revolutionary period that followed World War I. His military experience later proved useful both for his activity in OUN and UPA during World War II and for his postwar work as a military historian of Ukraine. He was associated with the Bandera wing of OUN during the war, but after the war he joined a faction that broke with Bandera, the UHVR group32 or so-called dviikari. Led by Mykola Lebed and Lev Rebet, the dviikari adopted a more democratic program than either the Banderites or Melnykites and benefited from generous funding by the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency.33 Shankovsky’s book on OUN-B’s expeditionary groups (pokhidni hrupy) in southern Ukraine34 and Romanian-occuped Transnistria created a picture of the past that fit well with the postwar ideology of the UHVR. Shankovsky had fine narrative skills and wrote with some verve, although his prose was not free of jargon. I will spend more time analyzing this work, since it presented a narrative that has been very influential in the postwar Ukrainian diaspora, especially among historians and other intellectuals. It also offered a full enough account to serve here as a prominent example of a more general trend in OUN and UPA historiography.

The expeditionary groups were small OUN units that fanned out from Kraków and then across Ukraine, following the German advance. They were instrumental in establishing local civil administrations and militias wherever they went. In his account of them, Shankovsky emphasized that they fought against two enemies, both the Soviets and the Germans. He also described fierce persecution of members of OUN, especially OUN-B (the Bandera faction), by the Germans. While writing at length about the conflict between OUN and the Germans, Shankovsky completely omitted to mention moments of cooperation.

The main point of Shankovsky’s book was to show that the more tolerant and democratic position adopted by the UHVR had its basis in the encounter between the Western Ukrainian nationalists and the population of Soviet Ukraine in its pre-1939 borders. His story is that the Western Ukrainian activists came into the rest of the Ukraine and discovered that the ideological baggage they had brought with them was unacceptable to the population there. The inhabitants of central, southern, and eastern Ukraine rejected the OUN’s Führerprinzip and its intended single-party rule and wanted a democratic parliamentary system instead. They did not like OUN’s voluntarism, amorality, exclusivity, and hunger for power, preferring ethical politics, toleration, and humaneness. They were not satisfied with the slogan of an independent Ukraine: they wanted to know the content of the envisaged state, its political structure and social policies. They were against imperialism and exploitation and wanted national minorities to have the rights of other citizens of the Ukrainian state. They did not accept OUN’s slogan of “Ukraine above all.” The Western Ukrainian activists, challenged by this encounter with the majority of Ukrainians, had to rethink their program, resulting in the more liberal OUN program of August 1943 and the establishment of the UHVR.35 Here is how Shankovsky put it in his conclusions:

...I set myself a clearly defined goal that my work was supposed to achieve. I wanted—as extensively as possible—to present the ideological and political evolution that the pro-independence OUN underwent as a result of the direct encounter of the mass of its membership with the Ukrainian mainland and Ukrainian population in the Central Eastern Ukrainian Lands and Eastern Ukrainian Lands. The epic tale of the expeditionary groups in central and eastern Ukraine, the discussion of ideas conducted by the members of the expeditionary groups with the Ukrainian people of the Central Ukrainian Lands and Eastern Ukrainian Lands, and the integration (usobornennia) of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists through the mass entrance into it of Ukrainians from the Central Ukrainian Lands and the Eastern Ukrainian Lands were the reasons that much was thrown out from the political-programmatic decisions and directives of OUN, [the elimination of] which had been considered taboo in the conditions of Polish occupation. In particular, very decisively thrown out were all sorts of “isms” introduced onto Ukrainian soil from a foreign field: authoritarianism, elitism, totalitarianism, dogmatism, exclusivism, voluntaristic nationalism, and so on. Socioeconomic and political issues decisively took precedence over issues of worldview and philosophy; mysticism had to make way for a realistic strategy and tactics of liberation, and the despised leader system capitulated before democracy and parliamentarism, with its accompanying human freedoms.36

In addition to arguing for a fundamental shift in perspective within the OUN expeditionary groups as a result of the encounter with the east and south, Shankovsky also contended that under the impact of the encounter OUN began to shed its ethnocentrism and to develop a new openness to the national minority populations in Ukraine. He stated that the national minorities of southern Ukraine—“Russians, Greeks, Moldavians, and Tatars”37—warmed to the idea of an independent Ukraine, with equal rights for the minorities.38 “The broad masses of the Central and Eastern Ukrainian Lands most decisively rejected any possibility of an exterminatory or even discriminatory policy with regard to any national minority in Ukraine. Non-Ukrainians who live in Ukraine and are Ukrainian citizens should enjoy all the rights of Ukrainian citizens. It has to be recognized and emphasized that the leaders of the frontline expeditionary groups quickly oriented themselves in the situation and were able to conduct their propaganda in the direction of winning over non-Ukrainians for the Ukrainian liberation movement.”39 In Shankovsky’s narrative, OUN in the Donbas reached out to Russians as full-fledged Ukrainian citizens.40

As to OUN’s relations with the national minority with which this monograph is particularly concerned, i.e., the Jews, Shankovsky explained: “In this place we wish to underline that neither the Ukrainian population nor the members of the Ukrainian underground who came to the Central and Eastern Ukrainian Lands were in any way involved in anti-Jewish actions.”41 By contrast, Shankovsky wrote that the White Russian emigrés, who also came to Transnistria, were rabid antisemites who killed Jews on their own initiative, without prodding from the Romanian authorities.42 Shankovsky also noted that the Jews in Transnistria were pro-Bolshevik.43

The heroic tale of OUN’s transformation under the impact of this encounter could well contain some grains of truth, but to determine how many requires new and in-depth research. For the purposes of this monograph, though, it is necessary to point out some dubious claims, half-truths, and falsehoods in Shankovsky’s narrative.

To begin with, I wonder how true is the claim that the young workers of the Donbas and indeed the general population of the south were insisting on parliamentary democracy. Where would their knowledge of this political system have originated? Surely not from any personal experience, nor from anything they read in Soviet publications. And many years later, after parliamentary democracy was finally introduced in independent Ukraine, the Donbas stood out as the region of origin and the primary political base of the most authoritarian president and politicians in Ukraine’s post-Soviet history (President Viktor Yanukovych and the Party of Regions). Thus I am skeptical of the assertion that a population molded by tsarism and Stalinism and later subject to Nazi occupation would have had a clear enough picture of representative democracy to summon it up as an ideal with which to challenge OUN. Much recent research in the history of Stalinism has shown that it was exceedingly difficult for Soviet citizens to think outside the communist box.44 This is borne out by some of the original slogans the Donbas workers came up with during the German occupation, such as “Ukrainian Soviet power without the Bolsheviks” and “Soviet Ukraine without the Bolsheviks and without the dictatorship of the Communist party.”45

And the picture of OUN being so open to non-Ukrainians, particularly Russians, is—at best—overdrawn. This is clear from a volume of documents published much later, in 2013, on OUN in the Donbas. The collection is decidedly pro-OUN; in fact, its editor conceived it as literature first and foremost for “radical youth and participants of Ukrainian paramilitary organizations.”46 The documents do show that some ethnic Russians participated in the nationalist movement, particularly a woman from Kramatorsk, Donetsk oblast, by the name of Serafima Petrovna Kutieva, who also figured in Shankovsky’s book.47 By Kutieva’s own account to her NKGB interrogator in 1944, at first her Russian nationality did cause her OUN recruiter a moment’s hesitation, but then she was accepted into the movement. It turned out that her Russian nationality worked out well for the OUN underground; her home could more effectively serve as a safe house for the movement. “...My apartment for them was above all suspicions since I am a Russian....”48 In the course of her recruitment she discovered that not all OUN members were open to Russian ethnicity. One of her former husbands was her first recruiter, and he described the goal of the nationalist movement as the establishment of “an independent Ukrainian state which would be run exclusively by Ukrainians.”49 She described a fellow OUN activist from Vinnytsia as “stridently chauvinistically...inclined.”50 OUN members in the civil administration in Kostiantynivka, Donetsk oblast, advocated the replacement of ethnic Russians by ethnic Ukrainians.51 OUN also promoted restrictions on the use of the Russian language in administration, the courts, signage, and education.52

The documentary collection also shows that OUN in the Donbas consistently propagated antisemitism while the Holocaust was proceeding. Several OUN proclamations are included as photoreproductions at the back of the book. The newspaper Ukrains’kyi Donbas, which was under OUN control, wrote in a front-page editorial on 18 December 1941:

Under the powerful blows of the victorious German and Allied armies the bonds with which for twenty-three years day and night the Jewish-Bolshevik henchmen bound the freedom-loving Ukrainian people have burst asunder....[As the German and Italian forces approached,] for fifteen whole days Jewish commissars, Asiatic barbarians...destroyed the national property built by the sweat and blood of the Ukrainian people....We must accept the slogan “Ukraine for Ukrainians” as the fundamental principle in the work of a newly constructed state apparatus and take it as the starting point for orientation in solving all problems which every day of work on the construction of a new life brings.53

On the next page of the same issue appeared a proclamation to Ukrainian youth issued by OUN:

The Jews forced us to call our dearest people enemies. They forced us to love alien Moscow and not our native Ukraine. In our country those who married Jewesses, and thereby contributed to the degeneration of the Ukrainian nation, were held in esteem. Jewboys were called Ukrainian musicians—all those Buses, Goldsteins, Davids, Oistrakhs. They gave them prizes, titled them Stalin laureates, but the truly talented Ukrainian youth was trampled and then withered on the vine. The institutes and schools swarmed with Jews because they had money....In the Komsomol and Pioneers the Jewish-Muscovite politicians tried to raise janissaries, champions of Red Moscow, haters of the Ukrainian people....Ukraine for Ukrainians!54

And on the next page was yet another OUN proclamation, this one addressed to teachers:

They forced us to poison the minds of children with Jewish internationalism....Jews wrote the grammar of the Ukrainian language....In the theaters and cinema they showed us performances and films directed by Jews, in which the best sons of the Ukrainian land were reviled and ridiculed....Schools for Ukrainians! Down with lying Jewish-communist education. In a Ukrainian school—Ukrainian children....Let us welcome the German army, the most cultured army in the world, which is driving from our lands the Jewish-communist scum. Let us help the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists under the leadership of Stepan Bandera build a great Independent Ukrainian State. Ukraine for Ukrainians!55

OUN members in the civil administration also promoted antisemitism. OUN member Anton Yastremsky was raion head in Olhynka, Donetsk oblast. On 17 September 1942 he issued an order to introduce the OUN greeting “Glory to Ukraine” in his raion. This was intended to restore polite and respectful behavior after years of “hostile Jewish-Bolshevik” interpersonal relations, of “Bolshevik-Jewish barbarity.”56 The OUN-controlled city administration of Mariupol in Donetsk oblast ordered that civil servants take Ukrainian language courses since “as a consequence of Muscovite-Jewish rule in Ukraine our people lost their language, customs, and so on.”57

The works on the history of OUN and UPA produced by veterans of the movement, such as those by Mirchuk, Herasymenko, and Shankovsky, but also by others (e.g., Mykola Lebed, Borys Lewytzkyj58), were marked by partisan perspectives. Their writings not only defended the positions of OUN but of their particular faction of OUN. They emphasized OUN’s persecution at the hands of the German occupiers but downplayed the extent to which OUN collaborated with Germany. All of them avoided disclosure about the extent to which OUN and UPA were involved in ethnic cleansing, including participation in the Holocaust. Already in 1946, a prominent Ukrainian émigré from eastern Ukraine, Ivan Bahriany, accurately diagnosed the problem with the self-presentation of the emigrés associated with OUN: the nationalist camp, he wrote, was trying to repudiate its heritage of xenophobia, antisemitism, voluntarism, leaderism [vozhdyzm], and antidemocratism, but “not by overcoming these things, but by assuring us that they had not existed.”59

In addition to the veterans’ writings, a scholarly study of OUN and UPA appeared already in 1955 and went through three editions, the last appearing in 1990. John Armstrong’s Ukrainian Nationalism relied primarily on three kinds of sources: German documentation, the wartime Ukrainian press, and interviews. The interviews were conducted almost exclusively with prominent Ukrainian activists and politicians, and not just from the OUN camp. He had great sympathy for these men, although he was not uncritical in his admiration.60 He did not interview Polish or Jewish survivors of OUN-UPA violence nor consult their testimonies and memoirs. The only book on the Holocaust listed in the bibliography of the 1990 edition is Hilberg’s classic, in which, as we have seen, there was no room for a discussion of OUN. No works in Polish were cited. The result was a study that had very little to say about OUN operations against Poles and Jews.61 The ethnic cleansing of the Poles was given cursory treatment, based entirely on German sources, on a few pages.62 The question of OUN involvement in the pogroms of 1941 was discussed in one paragraph.63 Like most scholars at that time, Armstrong did not understand the distinction between the militias organized by OUN and the later Ukrainian Auxiliary Police. He did, however, make mention of some anti-Jewish rhetoric employed by OUN.64

Armstrong wrote a rather sympathetic narrative of the nationalists, emphasizing their valor in fighting against two such powerful enemies as the Germans and the Soviets. He did not go far enough to please all the nationalist veterans, who felt, particularly, that he underestimated their success outside Western Ukrainian lands. Yevhen Stakhiv, a leading figure in the OUN-B expeditionary movement in the south and one of the major proponents of the UHVR, made this objection,65 as did Shankovsky in his history of the expeditionary groups. In fact, Shankovsky decided to write his history in the first place as a corrective to Armstrong’s narrative.66

Another noteworthy study of Ukrainian nationalism from this period was Alexander J. Motyl’s The Turn to the Right. It only covered the story up through the founding of OUN in 1929, so it was more of a prehistory than a history in relation to the theme of my own book. But it was important for its exploration of the ideological sources of Ukrainian nationalism and its interpretation of where Ukrainian nationalism stood in relation to the fascist movements emerging in Europe at that time. Turn to the Right was based on wide-ranging consultation of contemporary Ukrainian-language press and brochures as well as scholarly works on Ukrainian history and on right-wing and fascist ideology outside Ukraine. Its appearance in 1980, at a time when academic Ukrainian studies were just taking off in North America, meant that it gained considerable attention. Although later in life Motyl became an apologist for OUN, this first work was quite balanced.

Polish scholars contributed well informed works on OUN in wartime. In 1972 Ryszard Torzecki wrote a monograph on the Ukrainian policy of the Third Reich which, of course, devoted considerable attention to Ukrainian nationalism. Antoni Szcześniak and Wiesław Szota’s Droga do nikąd (The Road to Nowhere) of 1973, which covered OUN and UPA from the 1920s into the postwar period, had an interesting, and rather sad, history. It was primarily based on Szcześniak’s doctoral dissertation, but Szota wrote the introductory section on the interwar period. The text tried to work within the constraints of what could be said and what could not be said when Poland was a communist country within the Soviet orbit.67 The reason this was tricky is that parts of what used to be Poland were now in the Ukrainian SSR, and the text had to avoid any suggestion that these territories were in some sense Polish. Thus, the events of 1939 were presented from a Soviet perspective: the alliance between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union was glossed over and the population of western Ukraine was depicted as fervently desiring to be joined with Soviet Ukraine. But try as they did, the authors were unable to construct a narrative of OUN and UPA that the Soviets found acceptable. After the direct intervention of the Soviet embassy, the book was withdrawn from circulation as “harmful for current party propaganda”; the Soviets feared that “the book can be used propagandistically by the Ukrainian emigration in its fight against the Soviet system.” The authors suffered for their mistakes, being pushed to the margins of the Polish scholarly establishment.68 (Not many years later I heard that Szota committed suicide, but I cannot confirm this.) Aside from its ideological contortions, which of course included a less than even-handed and objective treatment of OUN and UPA, the work had value. It made use of abundant materials in Polish archives, materials that at that time Western scholars had no access to. The Ukrainian journalist and memoirist Ivan Kedryn Rudnytsky characterized the volume thus: “Although the tendency of this book is bad because—as the authors themselves declare in the introduction—they examined the problem ‘through the prism of Marxism-Leninism,’ nonetheless in it was gathered a mass of factual documentary-informational material—more than can be found in all the nationalist literature.”69 Kedryn did not explicitly mention it, but Szcześniak and Szota were very well aware of how Poles and Jews suffered at the hands of the Ukrainian nationalists and wrote about these matters in some detail.

As is clear from the case of Droga do nikąd, the Soviets had many sensitivities around the history of OUN and UPA, and it is not surprising that no real scholarship on the nationalists appeared in the Soviet Union. Aside from other considerations, the Soviets did not want to disturb the myth of a united Soviet people in struggle against the fascist occupiers by writing about collaboration with the Germans and about a powerful anti-Soviet movement. The Soviets cloaked OUN and UPA under the term “Ukrainian-German fascists” and were silent about their influence on the Ukrainian population during the war. And in addition, the Soviet authorities did not permit scholarship on the Holocaust. In fact, the subject of the Holocaust made them uncomfortable.70 It singled out the suffering of the Jews instead of the whole Soviet people, and this particular narrative of suffering could feed into Jewish nationalism, i.e., Zionism. In the postwar period Soviet anti-Zionism could be quite shrill and antisemitic.

But there was an exception to the Soviet reticence on our topic. Beginning in the 1970s, the Soviets published tracts on Ukrainian nationalist participation in the Holocaust and other war crimes. Several were published under the name Valerii Styrkul in the 1980s, after the airing of the influential television miniseries, Holocaust (NBC, 1978), which heightened American interest in Nazi atrocities.71 Styrkul concentrated on the Waffen-SS Division Galizien rather than on OUN. But the earliest and most influential of these tracts was Lest We Forget, signed by the Ukrainian-American communist Michael Hanusiak (first edition 1973).72 Lest We Forget did publish documentary evidence of OUN antisemitism, notably extracts from the autobiography of OUN leader Yaroslav Stetsko from July 1941, in which Stetsko endorsed German methods of annihilating Jews.73 The book also contained documents and testimony on crimes committed by both OUN and Ukrainian police units in German service with OUN connections. However, these documents were unverifiable by scholars, since the archives they were housed in were closed to researchers. And the presentation was so heavy-handed and one-sided that scholars treated his revelations with scepticism or outright rejection.74

In fact, the brochure Lest We Forget was the product of a KGB operation. The head of the Ukrainian KGB, Vitalii Fedorchuk, wrote about it to the first secretary of the Ukrainian party, Volodymyr Shcherbytsky, in a memorandum dated 27 December 1973. It is worth quoting in extenso:

Earlier the KGB of the Council of Ministers of the Ukrainian SSR reported that in order to incite enmity between Ukrainian nationalists and Zionists in the USA the brochure Lest We Forget was published in English; the publication exposes, on the basis of documents, the participation of OUNites during the Second World War in the mass destruction of the peaceful population, including in so-called “Jewish actions”....

As “author” and publisher of the brochure figured one of the leaders of the progressive Ukrainian organizations, the League of American Ukrainians.75 In recent years he has visited Ukraine and can thus explain how he obtained the materials utilized in the brochure.

In order to popularize the brochure, the “author,” at our recommendation, engaged one of the progressive Jewish activists of New York in the capacity of “copublisher.”76 The joint action of progressive Ukrainian and Jewish organizations in the USA against the OUNites as war criminals has had a certain political effect....

Since the demand for the brochure has exceeded the number printed, the Ukrainian and Jewish progressive organizations are preparing a second edition....

Given the interest in the brochure shown in the USA and Canada, measures are being taken by us to collect additional materials on the participation of nationalists in the eradication of the Jewish population for publication abroad.77

As the letter indicates, propaganda publications of this sort were intended for export and were published in the English language.

After surveying the state of the historiography before the 1990s, it should become apparent that it was very difficult at that time to arrive at a clear understanding of the behavior of OUN and UPA during the Holocaust. The Jewish scholars who came from the Western Ukrainian territories were aware of the nationalists’ violence against the Jewish population, but they had too little knowledge of the nationalist movement to flesh out what had happened. They could not rely on the histories written by nationalist veterans, since the latter completely denied any responsibility for the persecution and murder of the Jewish population. Nor was Armstrong’s scholarly study any help in this regard. Mainstream Holocaust history, as exemplified by Hilberg, did not have the conceptual framework and an inclusive enough source base to even consider investigating the role of OUN and UPA. Publications emanating from or inspired by the communist bloc were discounted by Western scholars; and in addition, the best informed of them, Szcześniak and Szota’s Droga do nikąd, was very difficult to obtain.78