THE PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC 419the Lublin and Bialystok regions; and it was compromised by links to British
Intelligence. Its end came after February 1947, when 40,000 men took advan-
tage of the proffered Amnesty, and laid down their arms in public.^13 The third,
the Ukrainian Insurrectionary Army (UPA), was forced to fight on. Formed in
1943 with the aim of founding an independent Ukrainian state, free from all
forms of oppression and patronage, it had fought with equal ferocity against
Hitler and Stalin and to some extent against the Poles. In Volhynia, where it
had commanded wide stretches of countryside, it came into conflict with both
Polish and Soviet partisans. Its vicious attacks against uncooperative Polish
villagers at this time were subsequently to deprive it of sympathy in Poland. By
1945, the remnants of the UPA were politically isolated, and physically sur-
rounded. Hemmed in on three sides by the armies of the USSR, Poland, and
Czechoslovakia, they took refuge in the remote fastnesses of the Bieszczady
Mountains. After numerous inconclusive encounters with the Polish forces,
they scored a sensational success on 28 March 1947 by ambushing and killing
the Vice-Minister of Defence, General Karol Swierczewski (1897-1947).
Thereafter, their days were numbered. Swierczewski, a veteran communist
and former commander of the 14th International Brigade of the Spanish
Republican Army, was one of the few experienced soldiers which the Polish
communist movement possessed; and his death spurred the Party to a final
reckoning. In the summer of 1947, the Ukrainian villages of the Bieszczady
region were systematically razed to the ground. The entire population of
the highland Lemko and c clans was dispersed through the 'Recovered
Territories'. Deprived of all support, the remaining fighters were starved
and strafed into submission. Their bunkers were bombed; their shelters and
stores dynamited. A solitary band of survivors fought their way over the
Carpathian ridge into Czechoslovakia, and thence, across five hundred
miles of hostile territory to refuge in West Germany. Thus ended what official
sources are pleased to call 'the struggle with the reactionary underground'.^14
In isolated districts, small bands of diehards continued to resist throughout
the 1950s.
Post-war Resettlement programmes affected millions of people. For three
years, Polish roads and railways were crammed with endless processions of
refugees, deportees, repatriates, transients, expellees, and internal migrants.
The refugees consisted of numberless families who had left their homes in
Poland during the war, and who now took to the road to regain them of their
own accord. The deportees were made up of people forcibly removed from
Poland by the occupying powers, and now permitted to return. They included
over 520,000 returning from forced labour in Germany, and a smaller number
returning from the Soviet Union. (The Soviet Union held the greater part of its
Polish deportees until 1956.) The repatriates consisted largely of Poles from the
Eastern territories of the former Second Republic who were given the option of
moving westwards within the new frontiers, and of those who voluntarily
returned from Western Europe. The transients consisted largely of displaced