Seventy-three years ago, a visitor to the village of Huta Pieniacka in the icy backwoods of western Ukraine would find a wide clearing dotted with the tracks of deer and hare, ringed by trees tipped with frost, a quiet landscape steeped in blood.

Nazi German troops had driven back the Red Army in the region, but still battled Soviet and Polish militias, who, in turn, clashed with Ukrainian guerrillas seeking to carve out an independent state. Amid that struggle, on February 28, 1944, Huta Pieniacka was attacked, razed to the ground and about a thousand ethnic Polish residents were slaughtered. Survivors said villagers were locked inside their own homes and barns and burned alive, and those caught trying to flee were gunned down or hacked to death.

Two stone slabs engraved with the names of the victims still stand in the clearing, but chunks of rubble lying in the snow are all that remains of a large stone cross that was the centerpiece of a memorial to the people of Huta Pieniacka.

It was blown to bits in January by unknown assailants, who also daubed the slabs with the blue-and-yellow colors of Ukraine, the red-and-black flag used by the country’s nationalists, and the symbol of Nazi Germany’s SS paramilitaries.