Photo: Post Bellum
Some 374 Czechs and 26 Poles were murdered by Nazi soldiers in the village of Český Malín in the Volhynia region of western Ukraine on 13 July, 1943. The reason for the massacre still remains unclear to this day.
Even now as the Russian invasion rages on, Ukraine still has an ethnic Czech-speaking minority, the majority of whom settled in Volhynia, a region of western Ukraine, in the second half of the 19th century. These Volhynian Czechs, as they are known, left Austria-Hungary for the Russian Empire starting in the late 1860s, escaping oppression at home in search of prosperity in Russia. They were welcomed by Tsar Alexander II, who needed skilled agricultural workers to farm and resettle the large amount of unused land in what is now Western Ukraine that had been taken from Polish aristocrats who rebelled against him in the 1863 January Uprising.
The Volhynian Czechs founded prosperous villages and communities with schools, churches, and libraries, some of which were set up near existing Ukrainian villages. Local Czech names for the villages were formed by taking the name of the original Ukrainian village and adding the word “Český” in front of it, as was the case with Český Malín.
See the rest here.
Authors: Anna Fodor, Klára Stejskalová