Thirty years before the Lemko Ethnocide and the Decades of Silence, a different horrific era in Rusyn history befell Lemkovyna. It began in 1914 and only ended in 1918 with the destruction of Austria-Hungary itself. Lemkos were assigned blame for things they never did, and punished with little care or thought to how it would affect them. Peasants, educators, activists, and members of the Lemko intelligentsia would be subjected to some of the worst actions ever committed by Austrian authorities due to this.

The era I am referring to is known as The Austrian Terror, and it is marked by the destruction of Lemko life in the years between 1914 and 1918. For decades leading up to 1914 there had been a pervasive skeptical view of the Lemkos in Lemkovyna and the Ruthenians in Eastern Galicia amongst Austrian officials. One can even go back as far as 1882, when Adolf Dobriansky, his daughter, and Ivan Naumovych were put on trial for treason in Lviv for their views. To those in power in Vienna, our people were a potential fifth column with the capability of aiding their Russian enemy. In the months leading up to the war, plans were set out to “contain” the Lemko population. And in 1914 as the war was going horribly for the Austrians, these feelings of paranoia would only begin to grow.

What were calculated strategic moves in theory turned out to be something of a coordinated mass fury by the army against the Lemko population. Searches of entire villages and the practice of being executed without trial for being a suspected spy or for holding “unpatriotic views” became commonplace. One of the people murdered in this way was the legendary priest Maxim Sandovych, who committed no crime and was murdered in Gorlice in 1914 at the start of the war. These would continue throughout the following years with little regard for legitimacy or rule of law.

Those who survived extrajudicial killings but unlucky enough to be selected by Austrian soldiers were taken to railway stations and put into cattle cars. Eventually, after days in these, people would reach barren fields near the town of Graz in Austria. This would turn into the Thalerhof Concentration Camp, but the first of those who arrived would have to sleep on the ground for months in the cold and rain. Nearly the entirety of the Lemko intelligentsia would pass through this camp at some point in the three years it was open. Two thousand Lemko educators alone would be brought within that time span, with some estimating over 7,500 Rusyns in total. Though being sent to Thalerhof was not a death sentence in itself, a significant percentage of these Rusyns would die during their stay. This camp was a prototype to the Nazi concentration camps of WWII, yet instead of a monument to remember what happened, an airport was built on top of the camp and graves of the victims. Austria has never offered any apology for their crimes.

The camp was eventually shut down by the Austrian Emperor, the mass displacement and destruction of Lemkos communities eventually stopped, and the Lemkos lead by Jaroslav Kacmarcyk would eventually declare their Lemko-Rusyn Republic in 1918, but the wounds left by these events would never fully heal. Not only were thousands of Lemkos unjustly murdered, their children were also left as orphans without the aid they needed. In some ways, even we today have not fully recovered in both mind and spirit. And like all the other times of horror in our history, this terror is another example of unrestrained brutality against the Rusyn people.