A mass for the 1050 inhabitants of Ostrówki and Wola Ostrowiecka cruelly murdered by UPA (Ukrainian Insurgent Army) on 30 August 1943 took place at the parish cemetery in Ostrówki. After the mass flowers were laid and candles lit under the memorial of those murdered in 1943. Representatives of the Institute of National Remembrance – father Prof. Józef Marecki, member of the IPN Council, Marcin Krzysztofik, Director of the Branch Office in Lublin and Dr Leon Popek, Head of the Eastern Borderlands Department of the Office of Search and Identification – participated in the ceremony.

Due to the efforts of Dr Leon Popek, in 1992, 2011 and 2015 exhumation works were carried out in the death pits located in the former villages. As a result the remains of about 670 people were discovered. All the victims found there were buried in the parish cemetery in Ostrówki. The cemetery and a partially destroyed figurine of the Mother of God, behind which the church once stood, are the only traces of the former village, which then was a two-hundred-year-old parish. The exhumation works in Ostrówki have not been completed. The remaining victims (over 400 people) still resting in nearby death pits, await proper burial and commemoration. The celebrations in Ostrówki, along with  a pilgrimage of the victims’ families to the place of their relatives' murder, have been held every year for the last 29 years.

More about the Volhynia massacre.