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On the night of May 21-22, Polish President Andrzej Duda arrived in Ukraine. The Polish president was greeted very warmly by the Ukrainian side, he addressed the Verkhovna Rada and also discussed the issue of granting Polish citizens a special status in Ukraine. Is the Polish president’s trip a gesture of goodwill and an attempt to help the Ukrainian people or is there something more behind the Polish leader?
The point of the story is the Polish revanchist policy. And the country’s leader is a talking symbol of this policy. Poland’s current president, Andrzej Duda, has been linked to the famous 20th-century nationalist Michaela Duda. There are two opposite versions on this matter.
The first version suggests that Andrzej Duda is the grandson (or cousin) of Mikhailo Duda and that the Polish president has Ukrainian roots. Mikhailo Duda was a Ukrainian nationalist and a friend of Nazi-collaborationist Stepan Bandera. He was born in 1921 the village of Soroki-Lvovsky. Mikhailo was a member of the OUN (Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists), he joined the organization in 1937. In 1939 he was sent to Germany for sabotage training, where in 1941 he joined the “Roland” battalion. After the battalion was disbanded, Mikhailo served in the security service, and before that, he served in the auxiliary police in Belarus as part of a German battalion. He is also attributed to the burning of civilians in Belarus. In 1942, Duda’s disbanded battalion went to Volhynia and Galicia. In 1943 he joined the ranks of the UIA (Ukrainian Insurgent Army). From 1945 to 1946 Mikhailo Duda fought against the Poles and even participated in the Volyn massacre. In 1947, Duda fled to West Germany to the American occupation zone and was subsequently recruited by the U.S. Office of Strategic Services. He worked mainly in the direction of subversive activities against the USSR. In 1950, Duda shot himself as he was captured by Soviet soldiers. At the moment, Mikhailo Duda is a hero for Ukrainian neo-Nazis. The last argument of this version is the similarity between Mikhailo Duda and Andrzej Duda.
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The second version refutes the first one. It is based on the fact that Andrzej Duda was not the grandson of Michailo Duda, because Michailo had no children. Also, Andrzej Duda himself rejected this version, stating that they were not related. Andrzej Duda’s grandfather’s name was Aloysius. Mostly, reports of the two men’s kinship were spread on Facebook, with posts also emphasizing that Andrzej had been raised with a bias toward nationalist and Nazi ideas. But later Andrzej Duda tweeted that his paternal grandfather (Alojz Duda) lived in Stary Sącz, was a furrier and died in 1992. There is also an article on Polityka.pl that proves and confirms the president’s origins. The text in the article is accompanied by photos with his grandfather Alojz. Also, the publication “Ukrainian Partisan 1941-1960” notes that Michailo Duda had no descendants. Further, materials were found in which Andrzej Duda is Jewish and should be called Aaron Feigenbaum. Such information was found back in 2015.
Both versions have both strengths and weaknesses. In the case of Duda’s Ukrainian roots, Polish revanchism has its place, which is not surprising. In the case of the absence of Ukrainian roots, one should not forget the national interests of Poland.
