My Friend the Enemy

Neighbours, enemies, saviours: a forgotten wartime massacre revisited.

For centuries, Poles and Ukrainians lived side by side in what is now western Ukraine. Children attended the same schools, families intermarried, and daily life was shaped by generations of shared rural culture. In 1943, in the chaos following successive occupations by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, an extremist group of Ukrainian nationalists brought this coexistence to a brutal end, massacring the Polish population of Volhynia on a vast scale.

My Friend the Enemy follows a group of elderly Polish survivors who, in the summer of 2013, return to Volhynia seventy years after those events. Directed and produced by Wanda Koscia, the film accompanies them as they revisit villages that are now mostly empty fields, travelling the quiet countryside by horse and cart. There they meet former Ukrainian neighbours and recount memories of extraordinary violence alongside stories of courage and moral complexity.

Both Poles and Ukrainians speak openly about the slaughter, but also about the deep and moving relationships that persisted between communities who had shared the same land for generations. The film's central focus is on those Ukrainians who hid and protected Polish families at great personal risk. These testimonies of rescue stand in sharp contrast to the horror of the wider events, and are set against a timeless, pastoral landscape that lends the film a lyrical, elegiac quality.