The “mourning train” left Warsaw at 1:00 p.m. On the way to Nowy Sącz, it paused for ten to thirty minutes in each of the seven main cities, allowing their delegations and the crowds who came to see the train to pay homage to the dead minister. So many wreaths were brought to the train on the way to Nowy Sącz that a second carriage had to be added for wreaths. Where the train did not stop, it was greeted with the ringing of church bells and was pelted with flowers. Airplanes escorted the train for a time. In Tarnów, crowds with torches gathered on both sides of the train, and peasant girls genuflected and prayed with outstretched hands.[430]
After three and a half days of collective mourning, the funeral itself took on a very ceremonial shape, as promised by the Wódz, Marshal Piłsudski, the most revered person in the state. Enchanted by nationalism and patriotism, Polish society did not notice the ideological nature of the process that transformed Pieracki into a hero and martyr. At the mourning service in Nowy Sącz, Bishop Lisowski delivered a sermon that made members of the government, and “old, battle-hardened soldiers” who had fought for the independence of Poland, weep.[431] Mounted on a gun carriage, Pieracki’s coffin was then transported to the cemetery. During the funeral, Stanisław Car, deputy marshal of the Sejm, like many speakers before him, characterized Pieracki as a faithful servant of Piłsudski—the “genius and Leader of the Nation”—and expressed the hope that the hand of justice would finally catch the murderer.[432]
Newspapers, radio stations, and the educational ministry participated in these political mourning carnivals. Even if they did not all politicize the mourning rituals as extensively as Gazeta Polska, the semi-official paper of the Sanacja government, they did help to initiate the new political myth of the brave Pieracki who fell for his country. Polish radio (Radjofonja Polska), for example, canceled many scheduled programs in order to broadcast mourning services from churches in Warsaw and Nowy Sącz, and speeches from various other ceremonies. It also reported the journey of the “mourning train” in detail and broadcast programs that discussed the assassination and its repercussions.[433] The education minister ordered that every class in every school devote one hour to a discussion of Pieracki’s passing.[434] Gazeta Lwowska transformed the whole first page of its issue for 19 June into a huge obituary (Fig. 7).[435]
The collective ideological work on the new political myth of Pieracki culminated in a book entitled Bronisław Pieracki: Brigadier General, Interior Minister, Deputy of Sejm, Soldier, Statesman, Human Being, published by the Creative State Propaganda Institute in late 1934.[436] The aim of the publication was to characterize Pieracki as a faithful servant of his fatherland and “his Leader [Piłsudski], who liberated Poland from enslavement.” The publication placed Pieracki in the pantheon of Polish heroes, martyrs, and statesmen.[437] For this purpose, the captivating and harrowing information about the assassination, the escape of the assassin, the death of Pieracki in hospital, his mother’s fainting on hearing the news, the condolences from around the world, the mourning ceremonies in all Polish cities, the funeral, and the funeral orations by various politicians were ordered in a hagiographical narrative.[438]
The two main Ukrainian newspapers that appeared in the Second Polish Republic, Dilo and Novyi chas, were much more restrained about the highly stylized mourning of the Polish interior minister and did not participate in the collective elaboration of the Pieracki myth. Dilo limited itself to publishing factual information about the assassination and the mourning ceremonies, together with reports on the reactions of other newspapers.[439] It also published the condolences of the Ukrainian Parliamentary Representation, and reported the mass arrests of the OUN, which diverted the attention of its readers from the mourning ceremonies.[440]
At the same time, Dilo kept its readers informed about local trials of OUN members. During the mourning period and the following months, three such trials occurred. They were understood as political and were depicted as such by the press. At a trial in Ternopil’, four OUN members were prosecuted for killing a policemen and for belonging to the OUN. The article in Dilo on the subject was entitled “Huge Political Trial in Ternopil’ for Belonging to OUN and Murdering Police Officer.”[441] In this trial, two of the OUN members were sentenced to death, one received a life sentence, and one was released.[442]
Novyi chas was even more reluctant than Dilo to comment on Pieracki’s assassination. On 16 June 1934, the first day after the assassination, Novyi chas preferred to use the front page for information about one of the local trials of OUN members, rather than information about the assassination.[443] It kept to this policy in the following two issues, devoting the front and many other pages to reports about trials of OUN members in Stanyslaviv and Sambir (Sambór) and omitting any information about Pieracki’s death.[444] Indeed, Novyi chas did not announce the assassination until 20 June 1934, the day after Pieracki’s funeral, when it started the announcement with the government’s decision to establish a detention camp for people endangering the state.[445]
On 10 July 1934, almost a month after the assassination, Gazeta Polska published an interview with Justice Minister Czesław Michałkowski. The minister explained that investigators had determined that the OUN had planned and conducted the assassination, and that three people involved in the assassination had been arrested. The assassin himself was not arrested. He had escaped from Poland, although the Polish authorities had tried diligently to capture him. The names of the assassin and the people under arrest were not revealed.[446] But the interview had left no doubt as to which organization was responsible for the assassination of the exemplary Polish patriot, statesman, hero, and martyr. Polish society was outraged at that time by the assassination, and exhausted by the exaggerated and politicized mourning rituals.
After the justice minister’s announcement of the results of the investigation, the UNDO, in a short resolution released on 13 July 1934 condemned the OUN, its terrorist nature, and its pernicious influence on Ukrainian youth.[447] Novyi shliakh, a Ukrainian newspaper published in Canada, reacted with a condemnation of UNDO and characterized its leaders as people who “signed a document that means to declare war on Ukrainian revolutionary nationalism and the OUN.”[448]
Ukrainian newspapers changed their method of reporting on and judging the OUN and its terrorist acts only on 25 July 1934 when the OUN killed Ivan Babii, the director of and a teacher at a Ukrainian high school in Lviv. Before he was shot to death, Babii had already been beaten up on two occasions by OUN operatives, once on 11 November and again on 23 November 1932.[449] Having killed Babii and realizing that he could not escape, the young assassin and OUN member Mykhailo Tsar shot himself in the head and died some hours later in hospital. The assassination of Ivan Babii provoked a completely different reaction from the editors of Novyi chas, who had been reluctant a few days earlier to inform their readers about Pieracki’s assassination but now printed an article entitled “Horrible Assassination” on the front page. A number of other articles devoted to this topic followed.[450]
Dilo also reported feverishly about the murder of Babii and the desperate assassin’s suicide.[451] The assassination provoked Dilo to take a critical position toward the OUN and to condemn its politics again. Shortly after the assassination, an anonymous journalist for Dilo pointed out: “This latest murder is the result of a tragic misunderstanding. Because of a tragic misunderstanding, members of the same nation kill each other.”[452] On 5 August, ten days after the murder of Babii, Metropolitan Andrei Sheptyts’kyi, the head of the Greek Catholic Church, also condemned the deed in Dilo. He called Babii’s assassins “Ukrainian terrorists” and “enemies of the [Ukrainian] nation.”[453] According to another source, Sheptyts’kyi stated in reaction to Babii’s assassination: “If you want to treacherously kill all those who oppose your work, you will have to kill all teachers and professors who work for the Ukrainian youth, all fathers and mothers of Ukrainian children.”[454] The assassination of Pieracki, on the other hand, had not provoked a similar reaction on the part of Sheptyts’kyi.
More than a year later, in the second half of October 1935, the first commemorative celebration of Pieracki’s death took place in Nowy Sącz. Delegations from various social, political, and cultural organizations, together with military and police units from around the country arranged to participate. According to the schedule of events, Pieracki’s coffin was carried at 7 p.m. on 19 October from the new cemetery to a chapel in the old cemetery. On the morning of Sunday 20 October, Franciszek Lisowski, a bishop from Ternopil’, conducted a memorial service in the chapel. During the service, members of Pieracki’s family were accompanied by the First Regiment of the Riflemen from Podhale, representatives of the Polish government, of organizations from different parts of Poland, and of the local population. After the memorial service Pieracki’s coffin was located in a simple military-style mausoleum. The placing of Pieracki’s coffin in the mausoleum was accompanied by the military song “We, the First Brigade” (My, Pierwsza Brygada) performed by the riflemen. Following this ceremony, a cornerstone was set for a future riflemen’s house (dom strzelecki) in Nowy Sącz, which was named after Pieracki. Bishop Lisowski blessed the cornerstone, and Prime Minister Marian Zyndram-Kościałkowski delivered a speech.[455] A month later, the long trial of the OUN members, who had organized Pieracki’s assassination, began.
In a trial lasting from 18 November 1935 to 13 January 1936, twelve OUN members—Stepan Bandera, Daria Hnatkivs’ka, Iaroslav Karpynets’, Ievhen Kachmars’kyi, Mykola Klymyshyn, Mykola Lebed’, Ivan Maliutsa, Bohdan Pidhainyi, Roman Myhal’, Iaroslav Rak, Iakiv Chornii, and Kateryna Zaryts’ka—were accused either of organizing and conducting the assassination of Pieracki, or of helping the assassin to escape. In addition, all of them were accused of “being active in the OUN, which tried to separate from the Polish state its south-eastern voivodeships.” Especially the latter accusation made the trial a political one. The authorities used it to “show justice,” but they did not intend to stage a show trial. On the one hand, the prosecutors investigated the crime in depth and scrupulously presented their results to the public. On the other hand, the trial was used to demonstrate how the authorities would proceed against individuals or groups who attacked or harmed the Polish state, questioned its existence or tried to separate any of its territory.[456]