Kamianytsia Sich Camp

Why the Sich came to Slovakia

The Carpathian Sich had become the national army of Carpatho-Ukraine when the territory proclaimed independence on the break-up of Czechoslovakia. It had about 2,000 men under arms in March 1939, and several hundred died fighting the Czechs on 13 March and the Hungarians between 14 and 18 March. Overwhelmed, the remainder retreated into Romania and Slovakia or hid in the mountains. Those who reached Romania fared badly: the Romanian authorities handed many over to Hungary, which passed Galician volunteers on to Poland and held the rest as prisoners, some of whom were executed without trial.

Slovakia, which had declared its own independence on 14 March, treated the arrivals differently. A Czech military-history summary drawing on Stanislav Auský records that the Sich units which withdrew westwards were interned at Kamenica nad Cirochou, released after several weeks and granted asylum by the Slovak government. Klymenko’s own account gives a week at Kamianytsia before the transfer to Bratislava. The two statements are not necessarily in conflict, since one describes the move between camps and the other the end of internment, but the precise dates remain unverified.

The contrast with the other escape routes was stark. The Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance records that the Hungarian occupation imposed martial law and set up prisons and camps at Kryva, Khust, Tiachiv, Velykyi Bychkiv, Rakhiv, Svaliava, Volove and Velykyi Bereznyi, that many prisoners were shot in the forests and up to a thousand people from Transcarpathia were held in a Hungarian camp near Nyíregyháza, and that Sich members from Galicia were handed to the Polish side and shot in groups at the Veretskyi, Yablunytskyi and Uzhotskyi passes in the spring of 1939.

The village the army chose

Kamenica nad Cirochou lies about seven kilometres from Humenné in eastern Slovakia, at the confluence of the Cirocha and the Kamenica, and is the largest village in the Humenné district. It was first recorded in 1317. Its manor house, a classicist building of the late eighteenth century, burned in the village fire of September 1932 and was repaired between 1933 and 1935, after which the administration of the Military Forests enterprise moved into it. The Military Forests had taken over the woods and estates of Count Gejza Andrássy in 1933 and built an electrically powered sawmill served by a narrow-gauge railway. A military airfield had been under construction on the edge of the village since 1932 and was finished in 1941.

This is why the village is plausible as a place for the army to put several hundred interned men, but none of these buildings can be claimed as the camp. The village’s own history says nothing about 1939, the Sich or any internment, and it records that the manor was under private lease for much of the war, until 1945.

The frontier behind them

The men had barely been moved west when the border they had crossed became a battlefield. At five in the morning on 23 March 1939 the Hungarian army invaded the Snina and Sobrance districts of Slovakia in three columns, one of them advancing along the line from Malé Berezné through Ubľa to Stakčín, the same frontier village where the Sich had laid down their arms a week earlier. Stakčín and Sobrance were taken that day. The fighting ended with a protocol signed in Budapest on 4 April 1939 which, in the Slovak Nation’s Memory Institute’s words, legalised the forcible annexation of 1,168 square kilometres inhabited by about 40,100 people recorded in 1930 as Slovaks or Ruthenians.

No source consulted says whether the interned Ukrainians were moved because of that threat or on an administrative timetable decided earlier.

What is known about the camp

No source consulted describes the buildings, the guard arrangements or daily life at Kamianytsia, and none locates the camp within the village. The only figures are Klymenko’s, given in an undated appeal for material help written after 12 July 1939 and preserved among his papers at the Immigration History Research Center Archives, University of Minnesota. His report treats the camp as a military unit that kept its officers and its structure through the move to Bratislava, where within a fortnight the first four labour transports to Germany were formed and the student members of the Svaliava State Commercial Academy left for a separate hostel.