Velykyi Khodachkiv (Ukrainian: Великий Ходачків, Polish: Chodaczków Wielki, translit. Velykyi Khodachkiv) - a selo in the Kozivskyi Raion, Ternopil oblast, Ukraine. It lies on the banks of the Rudka river, on the rail line from Ternopil to Rohatyn. The population is 1394 people (2003 census).
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The fist mentions of the village date back to 1758. On April 15, 1944 the Nazis killed 365 villagers, and almost totally razed the village. Of the 710 houses in the village only 30 were left standing.
From 1944-46 210 Ukrainian families from Poland were resettled there.
According to some Polish sources an ethnic cleaning operation called the Chodaczkow Wielki massacre (Chodaczkow Wielki is Polish for Velykyi Khodachkiv) took place there during World War II[1]. According to Polish historian, Grzegorz Hryciuk on April 16, 1944, the village have been destroyed by the Ukrainian 4th SS Police Regiment. The estimates of victims range from 250 to 854. One former Polish resident of Chodaczkow Wielki mentions that the Ukrainians told them to leave but did not mention any Poles being massacred or killed and did not mention the involvement of Ukrainian soldiers.[2] Chodaczkow Wielki massacre is alleged to have been one of the biggest massacres of Poles in the region of Eastern Galicia.[3]
Poles who escaped the massacre buried the dead in a communal grave, in front of the local Roman Catholic church. After the World War II, Polish survivors were forced to leave the village, deported by the Soviet authorities to new communist Poland. They settled as a group around Gogolin and Niemodlin in the Opole Voivodeship.[4]
However, Soviet sources state that the village was the site of heavy fighting between Soviet Army and Wehrmacht precisely on the very same date of the alleged massacre.[5]
