Bandera, Vasily Andreevich

Early years. Activities at OUN

Vasily Andreyevich Bandera was born on February 12, 1915 in the village of Stary Ugrinov , located on the territory of Austrian Galicia , in the family of the Greek Catholic priest Andrei Mikhailovich Bandera and his wife Miroslava Vladimirovna , nee Glodzinsky. Vasily was the fifth child in the family: at the time of his birth, the daughter of Marta Maria , Vladimir (1913-2001), sons Stepan and Alexander were growing up in the family ^[4] . Vasily, along with his brother Alexander, studied at the Stryi Ukrainian gymnasium. Subsequently, he graduated from the agronomic courses of the Lviv Polytechnic and the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Lviv ^{[5] [6]} .

In 1937, Vasily Bandera was arrested by the Polish authorities for nationalist activities and was held in Strya prison, but was soon released ^[7] . In the spring of 1938, at a student meeting in Lviv, he delivered a speech criticizing the chauvinistic policies of the Polish authorities, for which he was again arrested and until the fall of 1939 was held in the famous concentration camp Beryoza-Kartuzskaya , where many members of the OUN were at that time ^[8] . After the defeat of Poland, Vasily left the concentration camp and returned to Lviv, but did not stay there for long: already in the second half of October, together with his brother Stepan and several other members of the OUN, he went to Krakow ^[5] . “[We] crossed the Soviet-German demarcation line by ring roads; partly on foot, partly by train [we] arrived in Krakow, ” Stepan Bandera will write later in an autobiography ^[9] . Here the brothers settled in a house on Strachevsky Street, in an apartment left by the former owners after the outbreak of war. At the end of August 1940, in the only Greek Catholic church in Krakow, Vasily got married to Maria Evgenievna Wozniak ^[10] . His wife was born in 1913 in the family of a Uniate priest ^[7] . She was the elder sister of Lyubov Wozniak, who became the wife of another nationalist figure, Nikolai Lemik ^[11] .

In Krakow, Bandera carried out various assignments of the OUN (b), took part in the Second Great Collection "The OUN (b), which took place from May 1 to May 3, 1940 ^[10] , worked in the so-called" German labor government. " In addition to the above, through the OUN (b) Bandera was a referent of the organization’s security service ^[12] . According to the testimony of her husband Vladimir Bandera, Fyodor Davidyuk, as well as some Julia Lutskaya and Vasily Dyachuk-Chizhevsky, Vasily remained in Krakow until the very start of World War II , and arrived in Western Ukraine shortly after its occupation by German troops. His wife, being pregnant, was forced to stay in Krakow ^{[13] [14]} .

On the instructions of the main wire of the OUN (b) Vasily Bandera began to work in the propaganda department of the OUN (b) in Stanislav . Then the brother of the leader of the organization headed the security service (SB; in fact, intelligence) of the OUN in the Stanislav region . There is an assumption that it was he who read out at the rally before the inhabitants of Stanislav “ The Act of the Proclamation of the Ukrainian State ”, published in Lviv by the Ukrainian state government headed by Yaroslav Stetsko ^[12] . Working closely with the regional government, headed by engineer I. Semyanchuk, Bandera sought to strengthen Ukrainian power in the region. On July 25, 1941, together with Bogdan Rybchuk and Vasily Yashan, he visited Lviv on a business trip, where the leadership of the OUN (b) was located. September 15, 1941 in Stanislav Bandera and his pregnant wife, who eventually moved to her husband, the Germans arrested. Roman Malashchuk, at that time - the regional conductor of the OUN (b), recalled the arrest of Bandera as follows ^[15] :

At first, there were Hungarian troops in Stanislavov who did not arrange any hindrance in the organization of the Ukrainian administration. Only when the Germans arrived in September 1941 did they invite E. Lozinsky, Dr. B. Rybchuk, Dr. R. Malashchuk, V. Bandera and V. Deichakovsky to the Beshprehung (discussion of the situation). When they arrived at the designated institution, the Gestapo squandered them, sent machine guns at them, and their chief Krueger shouted: “Hands up!”

In custody. Doom

After the arrest of the above-mentioned figures, the OUN (b) was immediately tied up and taken to prison on Belinsky Street, and a few days later they were taken to Lviv for detention in the prison on Lontsky Street. The latter was crowded with arrested Ukrainians from different cities of Galicia : Lviv, Stanislav, Ternopol , Stryi. A few weeks later, part of the Ukrainian prisoners of the Lviv prison was transferred to Krakow, to the famous Montelupih prison, where they spent another year, and on July 20, 1942, they were sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp (Auschwitz) ^[16] , which was subsequently confirmed in the testimonies of Davidyuk and Dyachuk- Chizhevsky ^{[17] [14]} .

Upon the arrival of Vasily Bandera to Auschwitz, he was assigned identification number 49721 - the brother of the head of the OUN (b) became the first in the list of prisoners called in the camp “Bandera Gruppe” or “Bandera Bewegung” ( German: “Bandera Group”, “Bandera Movement” ) . Together with his brother Alexander, he immediately became the object of bullying by Polish collaborators - former political and criminal prisoners, who made up a significant part of the camp administration and staff, as well as “ capo ” prisoners. These included Volksdeutsche Jozef (Josef) Krall, a construction technician by profession, who performed the duties of Oberkappo in the Neubau construction team; Emil Bednarek, as well as Unter-Capo Franciszek Podkulsky. The Ukrainian prisoners of Auschwitz recalled that these people "from the first day focused their attention on Vasily Bandera." Pyotr Mirchuk wrote about the bullying of the Poles over the brother of the leader of the OUN (b) in his memoirs . According to his testimony, one of the Poles, Gronsky, during the check of the list called Vasily out of order and, mistaking Stepan for Bandera, called him “the murderer of our minister Peratsky.” “We will do such a good for you,” said Gronsky, addressing all Ukrainian prisoners, “that in a few days not one of you will survive . ” After this phrase, according to Mirchuk, the Pole began to beat Bandera. “It was a terribly painful sight for us,” recalled another witness to the beating of Vasily, Boris Vitoshinsky, “and most of all because none of us was able to help Vasily . ” For an hour, the Polish camp workers mocked Bandera: they broke several ribs for him, knocked out his teeth, as a result of which he almost lost his human appearance. Severely crippled, Vasily admitted to his compatriots that he was sure that he would be killed. On the second day of his stay in the camp during work, one of the prisoners dealt Bandera such a strong blow that he lost the ability to move independently. According to one version, it was Jozef Kral, pushing Vasily from a three-meter height along with an iron wheelbarrow, but Kral himself categorically rejected all charges ^[1] .

A statement regarding the causes of the death of Vasily Bandera was made by Zygmunt Gaudasinsky, who in the summer of 1942 worked in the Neubau team as an assistant clerk ^[1] :

After arriving at block 16 of the capo, Edward Radomsky pointed out to us a small prisoner who was delivering mortar to the plasterers on the stage, stating that he was the Ukrainian criminal Bandera, responsible for the death of many Poles. Then he noticed that the forerbeiter Felix Maruta (later one of the capos of the team) was cruel to Bandera, claiming that this was a retribution for the crimes that he committed in relation to his family and other Poles

As a result of the above events, on August 5, 1942, Vasily Bandera again ended up in a camp hospital, where he later died. Jerzy Tabeau, who was in the camp under the name Veselovsky and worked as a medical orderly, witnessed the death of Vasily. Subsequently, he testified that Bandera’s brother died of diarrhea in hospital block No. 28. In his testimony, Tabeau also reported that many Ukrainians came to the room where Bandera was detained, asking that the orderlies take good care of Vasily ^[1] .

The date of death of Vasily Bandera is reliably unknown. Ukrainian sources indicate that he died on July 21 or 22 . In his book The Phenomenon of Stepan Bandera, historian Yevgeny Perepichka wrote that on July 21, after receiving a serious injury, Bandera was taken to a camp hospital, whose workers gave the prisoner a lethal injection of toxic substance ^[18] . However, archival documents, including a list of transports along with the names of Ukrainians transported to Auschwitz, indicate that Bandera died on September 5, 1942 ^[1] . According to a common version, Vasily Bandera, like his brother Alexander, was nevertheless beaten to death by the Poles, who did it in revenge for the murder by Ukrainian nationalists of the Minister of the Interior of Poland Bronislaw Peratsky in 1934 ^{[19] [5]} .

As a result of the investigation carried out by the Gestapo camp regarding the death of Bandera’s brother, Franciszek Podkulsky was put in the punishment cell of Block No. 11, and later, on January 25, 1943, he was shot at the “wall of executions”. At the same time, Felix Suligovsky, the clerk of the Neubau construction team, who was formerly a city employee, was executed; the capo “Neubau” by Wilhelm Shimu, the prisoner of this team Józef Lichtenberg, as well as the captain of the Casimir Kolodynsky. The Gestapo camp suspected of involvement in the death of the brothers Stepan Bandera, and Jozef Kral, who performed the functions of "obercapo" in the team "Neubau". Despite arrest and prolonged torture, he managed to avoid being shot ^[1] . Many years later, in 1965 , when a trial of a group of former employees of the Auschwitz concentration camp took place in Germany , the country's authorities turned to the leadership of the Polish People’s Republic with a request to extradite Kral to Germany, but that refused. The further fate of this man remains unknown ^[18] .

On August 17, 1944, one of the agents of the NKGB of the Ukrainian SSR, reporting to his superiors about the arrival on the territory of the Ivano-Frankivsk region of a group of OUN members from Germany, mistakenly named Vasily Bandera among them ^[20] . In the same year, the wife of the deceased, Maria Bandera, tried to change her last name in order to settle with her three-year-old daughter Daria in Lviv - for this purpose she turned to her friend Yaroslav Merkul, who worked in one of the Lviv passport offices. “I express dissatisfaction with the UPA leadership that I, as Bandera’s wife, were left without any help ,” complained Maria ^[21] . During interrogations, the widow of Bandera’s brother testified that her husband had initiated her into the political affairs of the OUN and admitted that she “wants to evade the revolutionary movement” , which, in her opinion, has no prospects for its continued existence ^[22] . In 1947, the head of the UMGB of the Lviv region authorized the arrest and search of Maria Bandera ^[23] .

According to the memoirs of contemporaries, Vasily Bandera was modest from an early age, was religious and patriotic, devoted to the idea of ​​Ukrainian independence and independence ^[6] . Vasily Yashan, who worked with him at OUN (b) in 1941, characterized Bandera as “a person of a handsome, frank and extremely kind and sincere soul” ^[16] .

In the first issue of the OUN (b) propaganda magazine “Idea and Rank” dated February 1, 1942, an article by P. Duma “Heroes of Our Day” was published listing a number of prominent OUN figures repressed by the Germans. Among them were the names of Alexander and Vasily Bander, "who gave their lives in German prisons and concentration camps" (at that time both brothers were in prison, and their fate was not reliably known) ^{[24] [7]} .

On October 14, 2008, a memorial plaque with a bas-relief of Vasily Bandera was erected and inaugurated in Ivano-Frankivsk, on the house on Independence Street , 15, where in 1941 the headquarters of the OUN (b) operated. The board was consecrated by the clergy of the Greek Catholic and Orthodox faiths. The inscription on it reads: “In this house in 1941, the regional OUN (b) wire operated. On September 14-15, members of the Wire were arrested by the Gestapo, among them - Vasily Bandera, brother of Stepan Bandera ” ^[25] .

• Stepan Bandera at the documents of the happy bodies of the sovereign bespeka (1939-1959) / 3a by the editorial staff of Professor Volodimir Sergiychuk. - K .: PP Sergіychuk M. І., 2009 .-- T. 1. - 680 p. - ISBN 978-966-2911-25-1 .
• Stepan Bandera at the documents of the happy bodies of the sovereign bespeka (1939-1959) / 3a by the editorial staff of Professor Volodimir Sergiychuk. - K .: PP Sergіychuk M. І., 2009 .-- T. 2 .-- 640 p. - ISBN 978-966-2911-25-1 .
• Perepichka, Evgen. The phenomenon of Stepan Bandera. - Vidannya 2nd, updated. - Lviv: Spolom, 2008 .-- 736 p. - ISBN 978-966-665-339-7 .

• Cira, Adam. Bandera in the Auschwitz concentration camp (Russian) // Freedom of Speech: Newspaper. - March 12 - 18, 2010. - No. 10 (501) . Archived January 3, 2014.