After his arrest on 14 June 1934, Bandera remained in Polish prisons until 13 September 1939. According to his autobiography, he conducted three hunger strikes during this period. One lasted nine days; another, thirteen days; the third one, sixteen days.[648] According to Klymyshyn, after Bandera’s arrest on the morning of 14 June 1934 he was transported together with Stets’ko and some other OUN activists to a prison in Cracow, in which Klymyshyn was already detained since the same morning. After ten days, Klymyshyn and Karpynets’ were taken to the Warsaw prison at 7 Daniłowiczowska Street. In his memoirs, Klymyshyn did not say whether Bandera was also taken to this penal institution.[649] Wojciech Żygała, warden in the Lviv Brygdiki prison, testified in the Warsaw trial that Bandera was kept in this penitentiary, but he did not specify exactly when.[650] In April 1935, Klymyshyn was taken to another Warsaw prison, the Mokotów Prison at 37 Rakowiecka Street, where he and other OUN prisoners, among them Bandera, Lebed’, and Pidhainyi, were held in more comfortable one-person cells, which had running water and flush toilets. They could also use the prison library, which had over 12,000 books, and some of them did so extensively. Klymyshyn could not establish contact with Bandera, who was in a cell in the opposite corner of the prison until the Warsaw trial. When Klymshyn saw Bandera once in the corridor, he was wearing ordinary clothes but was handcuffed.[651]
After the announcement of the verdict in the Warsaw trial, Bandera was also kept in the Mokotów Prison for a few weeks. It is not known whether he had been in the same prison during the Warsaw trial, or in the prison at 24 Dzielna Street.[652] After the trial finished, Bandera was allowed to meet and talk with other OUN prisoners who were in the Mokotów Prison. On a “beautiful winter day” a few weeks after the end of the Warsaw trial, Bandera was taken, together with Pidhainyi, Karpynets’, Kachmars’kyi, Lebed’, and Klymyshyn, to the Święty Krzyż prison near Kielce, one of the most harsh and uncomfortable prisons in the Second Republic.[653] The Święty Krzyż prison was located in a former monastery and possessed only thirty-five cells for between 600 and 1,000 prisoners. The outlying location made it inconvenient for visitors. Most prisoners in this penal institution were recognized as dangerous.[654]
After their arrival in the Święty Krzyż prison, the Providnyk and other OUN inmates were given a haircut. They received cumbersome wooden shoes, and prison clothes full of holes. According to Klymyshyn, Bandera in particular looked horrible after this procedure:
Bandera suffered the most. He came to the cell the last. He waited the longest in order to be “accommodated” and froze while waiting for his turn. He got broad trousers and very big blouse, and everything so horrible, ragged and holey, that it was difficult to look at him. And they also cut his hair! Since I remember him, he always has had nice light brown hair, combed to the side. And now they poured scorn on him. They horribly disfigured him. It was the look of a horrible, humiliated person. But we took it easy, with humor.[655]
The new five OUN prisoners exchanged their new clothes among each other, so that they fitted better. They first stayed in a quarantine cell without beds. They were promised that, once they learned the rules of the prison, they would be moved to the actual prison cells and provided with beds and better clothes. However, they received better clothes and blankets much sooner, from a Ukrainian guard who was asked to do so by a Ukrainian who had been imprisoned there since the end of the First World War. Due to the lack of running water and items such as toilet paper, sanitary circumstances in the prison were horrible. In addition to an extremely malodorous toilet in the corridor, every cell had a container for feces and urine, which was emptied in the morning by two inmates. Outside the cell, the prisoners always had to walk with their hands behind their back and to look down in front of their feet, which they perceived as inconvenient and humiliating. The prisoners were woken by the religious song “When the Morning Lights Arise” (Pol. Kiedy ranne wstają zorze) written by the Polish poet Franciszek Karpiński and performed in Święty Krzyż by other prisoners. Bandera’s OUN co-prisoner Knysh remembered that it was “very sad to listen to this slavery singing.”[656]
On the prisoners’ tenth day in the quarantine cell, the chief officer of the prison entered, together with a hunting dog and a few guards. Knysh remembered him saying, “The student period and the times when we played ‘heroes’ are finished once and forever. Now we have to stay until death in his lockup. Everything depends how we will behave. If we will be proper prisoners he will treat us as intelligent people and not like ordinary thieves, and if not, then our faces will be smashed in, smashed in again, and we will be put in quarantine.”[657]
After hearing this speech, Bandera was moved to a cell in which he stayed with Lebed’ and a number of other prisoners, but not the rest of the OUN group. The usual cells held about fifteen to twenty prisoners with different backgrounds, characters, and interests. These differences and the narrow living-space led to conflicts, and sometimes even fights.[658] On 25 or 26 April 1936, Bandera was transported to Warsaw for the appeal. He stayed together with Lebed’ and Klymyshyn in the Pawiak Prison at 24‒26 Dzielna Street. After the appeal, which finished on 30 April, it is not known whether Bandera was taken back to Święty Krzyż, or held in the Pawiak Prison, or immediately taken to the prison in Kazimierza Wielkiego Street in Lviv, where he was held during the Lviv trial, from 24 May until 2 July 1936.[659] On 2 July, after the Lviv trial, the chief officer of the Lviv prison ordered that Bandera be taken to the Mokotów Prison in Warsaw again, because he feared that Bandera and other prisoners might be rescued. On the next day, they were moved again to the Święty Krzyż prison where, since April, the chief officer had been instructed to improve security measures and to transfer a number of Ukrainian prisoners, who might be connected with the OUN, to other prisons.[660]
After Bandera’s return to the Święty Krzyż, he, Pidhainyi, Karpynets’, Kachmars’kyi, Lebed’, and Klymyshyn were, on Bandera’s initiative, placed in the same cell, number 21, in which they stayed with three other OUN members: Hryhorii Perehiniak, Iurii Batih, and Lutsyniak. They could read their own books—three volumes of the General Ukrainian Encyclopedia belonging to Bandera, and Ukrainian newspapers subscribed to by Bandera and Lebed’. In the cell there were also two illiterate Ukrainians and another two with only rudimentary education. The OUN prisoners taught them and the other OUN members to read and write, and otherwise educated them. Klymyshyn offered courses in grammar and literature, Pidhainyi in mathematics, physics, and chemistry, and Bandera in history and ideology. The most talented Ukrainian—taught by Klymyshyn, Pidhainyi and Bandera—was Hryhorii Perehiniak, a blacksmith born in Staryi Uhryniv, where in March 1935 he killed Vasyl’ Ilkiv, for which he was sentenced to life imprisonment, six months later. In prison he became especially close to the leader of the homeland executive. Bandera’s courses in history and ideology must have significantly influenced Perehiniak, who would play an important role in the process of establishing the UPA in Volhynia during the Second World War, and in initiating the ethnic cleansing against the Polish population.[661]
In the same cell there were also prisoners who did not belong to the OUN, among them some Poles. One of them, Wójcicki, was an informer. Although everyone in the cell knew it, nobody mentioned or discussed it. Once a week the prisoners ate kapuśniak, a soup from sauerkraut or cabbage, popular in Poland, Ukraine, and some other East Central European countries. Once, while waiting in line for the soup, Bandera stood behind Wójcicki. There was silence in the cell, which Bandera interrupted with the word “kapuś” (Pol. snitch) to which he soon added “niaczek.”[662]
Before Christmas 1937, Osyp Kladochnyi, chaplain of the Ukrainian political prisoners, visited Bandera and other OUN prisoners. After three years imprisonment, this was their first opportunity to make confession. Knysh wrote in his memoirs that the confessions took a long time, which suggests that the prisoners did not live without sin in the prison, or that they discussed other subjects with the chaplain. Afterwards, Kladochnyi conducted a service. The OUN prisoners were also allowed choir practice for Christmas. The choir was conducted by Bandera, the most talented vocalist among the OUN prisoners. Klymyshyn remembered Christmas 1937 as “extraordinarily spiritual.”[663]
After Christmas, however, the OUN inmates were again distributed among different cells. Bandera was very likely moved with Lebed’ to the same cell as before, where he tried to establish contact with other OUN prisoners. He succeeded in doing so by leaving a scrap of paper under the toilet bowl, which he informed a prisoner from Klymyshyn’s cell about. Using this method of exchanging information, the OUN prisoners organized a hunger strike. It lasted for fifteen days, but from the eighth day they were force-fed with mash, through a tube in the nose. Toward the end of the hunger strike, Bandera became very thin and weak; he leaned against the walls as he walked. After the hunger strike, the OUN members were moved to the same cell again and stayed there for about three months. They were then moved to other cells, and finally other prisons.[664]
Although Święty Krzyż had high security standards, the administration feared attempts to free Bandera. They invested a substantial amount of money in safety measures to prevent a potential escape. The chief officer, in particular, was very much afraid of such an attempt. He even supposed that the prison might be besieged and that if the telephone line were cut, they would not be able to summon help. For this reason he decided to build four watchtowers, which were intended to prevent Ukrainian nationalists and other armed groups from liberating Bandera. A group of about twenty OUN activists indeed planned to free Bandera from Święty Krzyż. They communicated with Bandera with the help of his former lawyer Horbovyi, and in letters which were, however, read by the prison officers. The chaplain Kladochnyi, who confessed Bandera “an hour and longer,” might also have been involved in the attempt to release the Providnyk. The OUN planned to send two members disguised as monks to the monastery located next to the prison. The disguised OUN members planned to extricate Bandera through the monastery and escape with him into the forest. However, the prison guards and police, with the help of their informers, uncovered the plan and adopted the measures necessary to stop the rescue operation at an early stage, without drawing public attention to the incident. Nevertheless, the chief officer did not feel comfortable with the Providnyk in his prison. Bandera was relocated, in late 1937 or early 1938, from Święty Krzyż to the prison in Wronki, in western Poland.[665]
Shortly after Bandera’s relocation, the OUN leader Konovalets’ was assassinated on 23 May 1938, in Rotterdam. We do not know how Bandera reacted to this news. His close friend Klymyshyn was deeply moved and wrote a poem.[666] The Wronki prison had higher security measures and was further away from the usual area of OUN activities than the Święty Krzyż prison. This did not, however, thwart the OUN from planning another attempt to liberate Bandera in August and September 1938. The second attempt to rescue Bandera may have been related to the Konovalets’ assassination, after which a number of younger OUN members wanted Bandera to become the leader of the OUN leadership in exile, or of the PUN. After rescue, Bandera was to be transported to Germany, the border of which was only ten kilometers from the prison. The PUN did not object to the idea of Bandera’s escape but was reluctant to support the attempt. Nor did the homeland executive support it, and it remained a more or less private initiative of a group of OUN fighters. The initiators were Ivan Ravlyk, Roman Shukhevych, and Mykhailo Kuspis’, a former prisoner of Wronki. Zenon Kossak, another former prisoner of Wronki, helped them. For this operation the OUN allegedly received a substantial amount of money from the Ukrainian diaspora in order to bribe the prison guards.[667]
Kuspis’ bribed a former guard by the name of Piotr Zaborowski to help him approach a current prison guard, who agreed to release Bandera for money. Another person agreed to help Bandera and Kuspis’ cross the German-Polish border.[668] The escape was prepared for 7 September 1938 but it is not clear why the operation was not carried out. According to Kuspis’, the OUN decided, at the very last moment, that it should not be.[669] One reason might be that the OUN did not trust the bribed guards and feared a trap, in which Bandera would be killed. It might also be that the OUN did not receive enough money to pay their helpers or were afraid that Bandera’s escape would worsen the situation of other Ukrainian prisoners in Polish prisons.[670] In September, the police arrested eleven persons, because Zaborowski entrusted the details of the proposed attempt to a friend, who reported them to the police.[671] One of the arrested persons, Maria Bielecka, committed suicide in a prison cell. As with the first release operation, the police proceeded very carefully to avoid attracting public attention and to protect the police informers within the OUN. Kuspis’ was sentenced to eight years, Zaborowski to three. From the prison in Wronki, Bandera was taken in early 1939 to a penal institution in Brest (Brześć), in eastern Poland. According to his brief autobiography, he escaped on 13 September 1939, during the turmoil of the Second World War, with the help of Ukrainian prisoners.[672]
The assassination of the Polish Interior Minister Bronisław Pieracki was the most important terrorist act that the OUN performed during the interwar period. This assassination and the two subsequent trials in Warsaw and Lviv significantly contributed to the formation of the Bandera cult. The Warsaw trial drew international attention to the situation of Ukrainians in Poland. At both trials the OUN presented itself as a fascist movement which attempted to liberate Ukraine. The defendants performed fascist salutes and treated Bandera as their Providnyk. In doing so they implied that for them Bandera was the leader of the Ukrainian people and that he should become the leader of the Ukrainian state. Even Polish intellectuals began to romanticize the behavior of the young revolutionary idealists who were ready to die for their country. From the day of his arrest on 14 June 1936, Bandera remained in custody until the beginning of the Second World War. The attempt to rescue him demonstrated that, after Konovalets’ assassination, a faction of the OUN wanted to make him the leader of the movement.