The Poles were obsessed with the idea that there might develop a strong movement for joining their brothers in the Ukrainian Soviet Republic. It is true that during the period of Ukrainization there did spring up a certain amount of reciprocity but this remained purely on an intellectual plane. Bad as conditions were in Poland, the Ukrainians showed no desire, except in the case of isolated Communists, to join their brothers and become their companions in misery. Communists were conspicuously absent in the Ukrainian organizations, for the iron veil which grew up around the boundaries of the Soviet Union had separated families and villages, and the few refugees who succeeded in crossing into Poland did not give encouraging pictures of life under the Soviets. The Poles were even more suspicious of the Ukrainian Orthodox than they were of the Greek Catholics. They endeavored to form a Polish Orthodox Church but this remained either Russian or Ukrainian speaking and never was coordinated into an efficient whole, for it reflected the differences of the Orthodox in the different provinces. However, in 1938, in a tactless move the Poles seized over a hundred Orthodox Churches and closed them on the pretext that they had once been Uniat and that therefore they were not properly in Orthodox hands. Such an act, which drew the protest of Metropolitan Sheptitsky, only succeeded in antagonizing both the Uniats and the Orthodox against the Poles and in bringing the two religious groups closer together. It was another of the many mistakes that were made in the handling of the problem. It goes without saying that the policy of avoiding a clearcut settlement of the Ukrainian question reacted badly on the general position of Poland, for it created the tendency among the Ukrainians to seek for foreign support. At first they found this in Czechoslovakia, which gave refuge to the anti-Polish forces among the Ukrainians. Later some factions tended to look toward Germany for refuge and help. In 1934 some of the conservative Ukrainians made an attempt to “normalize” their relations with the Poles and to take a more active part in the life of the country. Again these attempts really came to nothing, for the Polish government used them as a sign of Ukrainian weakening and felt that they did not require mutual concession. As a result the Ukrainians received little actual relief and this in turn only called out renewed terrorist attacks, renewed attempts at pacification and the closing of Ukrainian institutions.