“Different parts of Ukraine had different experiences,” Per Anders Rudling, a historian at the University of Lund in Sweden and an authority on midcentury nationalist movements in Ukraine, said in a telephone interview. “In Lviv, they remember the Soviet atrocities much stronger than the Nazi atrocities.”

These were lands annexed by the Soviet Union in 1939 under the Molotov-Ribbentrop agreement between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, which divided Eastern Europe. Harsh repressions followed, leaving behind one set of mass graves, from the years 1939 to 1941, filled with the bodies of Ukrainian political prisoners executed by Stalin’s police.

Given that history, when Hitler broke the nonaggression pact with Stalin and invaded Ukraine, his troops were greeted by some in western Ukraine as liberators, while others fought them, and one another, in Polish, Ukrainian and Communist insurgent organizations, leaving more bones.

The overlapping Soviet and Nazi atrocities in western Ukraine left a good deal of bitterness, a local narrative of World War II far less clearly defined as a battle between good and evil than in the east of the country, and a long-term problem of finding and clearing out mass graves.

On a recent sunny afternoon, the men in Dolya donned work clothes and boots, grabbed shovels from the trunk of a car and headed out to inspect a new discovery in the area where the 11 mass graves had been found.

The site, at the end of a rutted dirt road through a shadowy forest, seemed isolated and mournful, even today. Some bones lay only inches below the surface. An inspector gently scraped at the pine needles on the forest floor to reveal a human skull.

“It’s a beautiful place, wonderful nature, and people want to come here with their children to look for mushrooms, not bones,” Mr. Sheremeta of Dolya said.