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Ryszard Torzecki is an historian of the modern era. His research on PolishUkrainian relations focuses on the period from the last quarter of the nineteenth century, when modern political thought was emerging in Ukraine, to the end of the first half of the twentieth century, when the bilateral relationship was strained by tragic conflicts during the second World War and the immediate postwar years. Torzecki's interests, however, also reach to the contemporary era. He engages in academic discussions and political discourses that seek to improve local Polish-Ukrainian relations and the ties between Poland and Ukraine, and he is active in the official and social institutions that promote this goal. When health permits, he extends his work abroad.
Torzecki's academic background is not typical for an historian. He majored in economics in 1949 at the University of Lodz and until 1970 worked in various central economic institutions. He then undertook historical research, which culminated in his doctoral thesis "Kwestia ukrainska w polityce III Rzeszy (1933-1945)." He wrote this thesis on the basis of German sources available in Polish archives. Torzecki then continued this line of research and studied German occupation policies in Ukraine, in particular addressing the subject of collaboration.1 He contributed to the scholarship of this subject by determining the scope of competence and the role of the special police unit Sonderkommando zur besonderen Verwendung, which was created in the Generalgouvernement in preparation for the German-Soviet war and led by Eberhard Schongarth. This unit collaborated in crimes against civilians in the western part of Ukraine, including the extermination of Polish professors in Lviv in July 1941.
When in 1970 Torzecki was employed by the Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences (Warsaw) and joined my research team, he was given the difficult task of researching Polish-Ukrainian-German relations from the beginning of the interwar period to the 1947 Operation Vistula (Akcja Wisla) in the aftermath of the war. Together we planned a three-volume publication as the outcome of this research.2 Unfortunately, Torzecki's deteriorating health allowed him to complete only two volumes: one on the 1920s (Kwestia ukrainska w Polsce w latach 1923-1929)3 and another on the period of the second World War (Polacy i Ukraincy w czasie II Wojny Swiatowej na terenie II...