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On Sunday July 11, 1943, the OUN-UPA death squads aided by the local Ukrainian peasants simultaneously attacked at least 99 Polish settlements within the Wołyń Voivodeship of the prewar Second Polish Republic under the German occupation. It was a well-orchestrated attack on people gathered for a Sunday mass at Catholic churches.The towns affected included Kisielin (Kisielin massacre), Poryck (Poryck Massacre), Chrynów (Chrynów massacre), Zabłoćce, Krymn, with dozens of other towns attacked at different dates with tens of churches and chapels burned to the ground. The Volhynian massacres spread over four prewar voivodeships including Wołyń with 60,000 victims, as well as Lwów, Stanisławów and Tarnopol in Lesser Poland with 70,000 Poles murdered for the total of 130,000 Polish victims of UPA terror. The Bloody Sunday of July 11, 1943, is not to be confused with the Stanisławów Ghetto Bloody Sunday massacre of 10,000 to 12,000 Polish Jews on October 12, 1941, before the Stanisławów Ghetto announcement.
The month of July 1943 proved particularly tragic, with the Sunday of July 11, 1943 being especially bloody. At the crack of dawn that day UPA detachments (often actively supported by local Ukrainians) simultaneously surrounded and attacked 99 Polish villages in the Kowel, Włodzimierz Wołyński, and Horochów counties, as well as in a part of Łuck county. Ukrainians ruthlessly slaughtered Polish civilians and destroyed their homes. Villages were burned to the ground and property was looted. Researchers estimate that on that day alone the number of Polish victims may have amounted to some 8,000 people — mostly women, children, and the elderly. The perpetrators used bullets, axes, pitchforks, knives, and other weapons. Many Poles were killed in churches. — IPN
Selected locations of the Volhynian Bloody Sunday massacres
Below is the list of selected locations of the OUN-UPA mass killing raids of July 11, 1943, targeting Polish Catholics with the confirmed number of victims exceeding one dozen men, women and children, according to compendium of Massacres of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia written by Władysław Siemaszko and Ewa Siemaszko. Existing settlements which have been attacked, but whose number of Polish victims remained undetermined at the time when the information was collected, are not listed.