Operation Vistula (Polish: Akcja Wisła) was the codename for the 1947 forced resettlement of post-war Poland's Ukrainian minority (including Boykos and Lemkos) to the Recovered Territories, carried out by the Polish Communist authorities in order to remove the support base for the Ukrainian Insurgent Army in the aftermath of the 1943-1944 ethnic cleansing in Galicia and Volhynia by Poles and Ukrainians. About 200,000 civilians residing in around Bieszczady and Low Beskids were forcibly resettled to formerly German territories ceded to Poland at the Yalta Conference at the end of World War II. The operation was named after the Vistula River, Wisła in Polish.
Following the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, the operation was condemned by some Polish and Ukrainian politicians and historians. It has been described as ethnic cleansing by selected Western and Polish sources, as well as by Ukrainians.
Read more about Operation Vistula: Background, Deportations and Repressions, Event, Situation of Lemkos in Poland, Legacy
Famous quotes containing the word operation:
“An absolute can only be given in an intuition, while all the rest has to do with analysis. We call intuition here the sympathy by which one is transported into the interior of an object in order to coincide with what there is unique and consequently inexpressible in it. Analysis, on the contrary, is the operation which reduces the object to elements already known.”
—Henri Bergson (1859–1941)