Český Malín, Volhynia

In the mid-19th century, a hectare of agricultural land in the territory of today's Ukraine cost less than a goat. The land was sold by the tsar, who wanted to attract foreign farmers to this abandoned region. On Easter 1870, approximately twenty families from Bohemia – specifically from the region of Lounsko, Žatecko and Rakovnicko – set out on a journey. They journeyed for about a month through the Carpathian Mountains to Rovno in Volhynia, where the local middlemen offered them for sale land belonging to a Polish landowner, Kazimir Slivinski, in Malín in the Ostroh district. The price that the Czech settlers paid was twenty rubles for one Morg (less than one hectare). Václav Cibulka from Pnětluky, Ferdinand Re from Domoušice, Jan Janďourek and other farmers started to toil the land and so Český Malín was born, a village with everything that goes with it – a school, shops, craftsmen or a fire-fighting corps. For over sixty years, the dwellers of Malín were building (and renewing) their farmsteads while they had – as we use to say today – good relationships with their Ukrainian and Polish neighbors. They survived the First World War, when they were exiled for several years from their village and the village itself nearly destroyed and they survived the misery of the Soviet and German occupation. Then came the morning of July 13, 1943. The farmers were just about to leave for work on their fields after two days of holidays, when a unit of soldiers in German uniforms marched into the village. Within a few hours, the troops burned, shot and beat to death over four hundred villagers, including women and children. As if by a miracle, a few people managed to escape and live to tell the story. They were the fortunate few who had left the village early on in the morning to do some shopping or those who managed to flee from the group created for the purpose of taking away the booty of the murderers. In 2006, the last nine witnesses of the Malín massacre – an enormous wartime mass-murder of Czechs – were alive. The pretext for this operation of the German military was an alleged assault of the Ukrainian nationalist militia on German troops.