Kingdom of Barracks: Polish Displaced Persons in Allied-Occupied Germany and Austria 9780228018377

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kingdom of barracks

mcgill-Queen’s refugee and forced migration studies Series editors: Megan Bradley and James Milner Forced migration is a local, national, regional, and global challenge with profound political and social implications. Understanding the causes and consequences of, and possible responses to, forced migration requires careful analysis from a range of disciplinary perspectives, as well as interdisciplinary dialogue. The purpose of the McGill-Queen’s Refugee and Forced Migration Studies  series is to advance in-depth examination of diverse forms, dimensions, and experiences of displacement, including in the context of conflict and violence, repression and persecution, and disasters and environmental change. The series will explore responses to refugees, internal displacement, and other forms of forced migration to illuminate the dynamics surrounding forced migration in global, national, and local contexts, including Canada, the perspectives of displaced individuals and communities, and the connections to broader patterns of human mobility. Featuring research from fields including politics, international relations, law, anthropology, sociology, geography, and history, the series highlights new and critical areas of enquiry within the field, especially conversations across disciplines and from the perspective of researchers in the global South, where the majority of forced migration unfolds. The series benefits from an international advisory board made up of leading scholars in refugee and forced migration studies.

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The Urbanization of Forced Displacement unhcr , Urban Refugees, and the Dynamics of Policy Change Neil James Wilson Crawford

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Finding Safe Harbour Supporting the Integration of Refugee Youth Emily Pelley

8 Documenting Displacement Questioning Methodological Boundaries in Forced Migration Research Edited by Katarzyna Grabska and Christina R. Clark-Kazak 9

Voluntary and Forced Migration in Latin America Law and Policy Reforms Edited by Natalia Caicedo Camacho and Luisa Feline Freier

10 The Right to Research Historical Narratives by Refugee and Global South Researchers Edited by Kate Reed and Marcia C. Schenck 11 Kingdom of Barracks Polish Displaced Persons in Allied-Occupied Germany and Austria Katarzyna Nowak

Kingdom of

Barracks Polish Displaced Persons in Allied-Occupied Germany and Austria

kat arzyn a n o w a k

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2023 isb n 978-0-2280-1730-1 (cloth) isb n 978-0-2280-1837-7 (ePdf) Legal deposit third quarter 2023 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: Kingdom of barracks : Polish displaced persons in allied-occupied Germany and Austria / Katarzyna Nowak. Names: Nowak, Katarzyna (Researcher), author. Series: McGill-Queen’s refugee and forced migration studies ; 11. Description: Series statement: McGill-Queen’s refugee and forced migration studies ; 11 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20230195334 | Canadiana (ebook) 20230195431 | isb n 9780228017301 (cloth) | is bn 9780228018377 (eP d f) Subjects: lc s h: World War, 1939-1945—Refugees—Germany. | l c sh : World War, 1939–1945—Refugees—Austria. | l cs h: Polish people—Germany—Social conditions—20th century. | l cs h: Polish people—Austria—Social conditions— 20th century. | l cs h: Refugees—Germany—History—20th century. | l c sh : Refugees—Austria—History—20th century. | l c sh : Germany—History— 1945–1955. | l cs h: Austria—History—Allied occupation, 1945–1955. | lc sh: Reconstruction (1939–1951) Classification: l cc d 809.g3 n 69 2023 | ddc 940.53/1450943—dc23

This book was typeset in 10.5/13 Sabon.

In loving memory of Davide Porzio

Contents

Acknowledgments | ix Abbreviations | xi

Introduction | 3 1 “We, the Polish Wartime Refugeedom”: Poles and Polishness at the End of World War II | 19 2 “Care and Control”: Peace in the Ruins of the Third Reich | 43 3 “The Common Fate of the Exiled”: Voices of the Polish Refugeedom | 75 4 In the “Kingdom of Barracks”: Refugees’ Counternarratives and Resistance Strategies | 108 5 “Poles Are a Phoenix among the Nations”: Revival of a Human, Rebirth of the Nation | 133 6 “Changing Human Rags into a Rightful Man and a Citizen”: The Civilizing Mission in the Archipelago of Refugee Camps | 161

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7 “Where Should We Go?”: Propaganda, Emotions, and Debates around Repatriation | 198 8 “Slave Market in the Heart of Europe”: Resettlement and Remaking of the Polish Diaspora | 223 Conclusion | 254

Figures | 263 Notes | 267 Bibliography | 315 Index | 339

Acknowledgments

This book is the fruit of seven years of research and reflection. There are more people than I could possibly mention who have supported me in conducting this work. First and foremost, I would like to thank my intellectual guides Professor Peter Gatrell and Professor Bertrand Taithe, who supervised my doctoral thesis and supported me through my postdoctoral work, providing me with invaluable suggestions and guidance. I am especially grateful for the inspiring discussions as well as their patience in reading the endless drafts of this work. I would also like to express my gratitude to my academic advisor Dr Ewa Ochman for her detailed feedback and helpful recommendations. I gratefully acknowledge the Economic and Social Research Council, which provided the funding that made this project possible, as well as the Royal Historical Society for the additional travel and fellowship grants that allowed me to disseminate my research. I owe a great debt of gratitude to all who shared with me their personal stories of displacement, enhancing my understanding of the history of displaced persons. Moreover, I would like to thank Gilles Lapres for generously sharing with me his collection of documents and pictures of Maczków and Dr Łukasz Wolak for the materials he so kindly provided. Special thanks go also to Dr Jochen Lingelbach for his insightful comments and help with translation of German sources, especially handwritten letters that I would never have been able to decipher myself. I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Samantha Knapton for her support. As well as offering her counsel and sympathetic ear, she also read through the whole manuscript and spent hours talking with me about Polish dPs – dziękuję!

x

Acknowledgments

Special thanks must go to my Mamunia who managed to dig out and copy forgotten and obscure materials from Polish libraries. The long months spent in the dusty and dim archives would have been much more tedious without the extremely helpful and friendly staff I encountered in the Piłsudski Archives of America, Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum, Immigration History Research Center, Arolsen Archives, Polish Museum of America, and Imperial War Museum. I am grateful to Dr Katarzyna Person from the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, Professor Paweł Sękowski from the Jagiellonian University, and Professor Marek Wierzbicki from the Catholic University of Lublin for their close reading and page-by-page feedback on my manuscript as a part of the conference “Recovering Forgotten History: The Image of East-Central Europe in English-Language Academic Textbooks and Monographs.” I would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers whose perceptive remarks and enthusiastic feedback helped me to make this book better. Working with my editor Richard Ratzlaff at McGill-Queen’s University Press has been a great pleasure, and I am indebted to him for all the encouragement and guidance. In my daily work, I have been blessed with a friendly and cheerful group of friends and fellow colleagues. I am indebted to all of them for keeping me company in my academic journey and helping me uphold high spirits. For attentively reading and commenting on the fragments of my manuscript and helping me to refine my arguments I must send my thanks to Eva, Alessia, Kathleen, Elena, Becky, Dominika, Nikki, Iza, Piotr, Jan, and Julie. Shortly after submitting this manuscript, I lost Davide. Everything I am and everything I achieved I owe to him.

Abbreviations

acrPdP – American Committee for the Resettlement of Polish Displaced Persons ak – Armia Krajowa (Home Army) dP/dPs – displaced person/displaced persons iro – International Refugee Organization its – International Tracing Service, Bad Arolsen Pac – Polish American Congress Pism – Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum, London Pma – Polish Museum of America, Chicago Prm – Polska Misja Repatriacyjna (Polish Repatriation Mission) Pow/Pows – prisoner of war/prisoners of war Pu – Polish Union in Germany Pur – Państwowy Urząd Repatriacyjny (State Repatriation Office) Pwr – Polish War Relief shaef – Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces unhcr – Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees unrra – United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration zPa – Związek Polaków w Austrii (Association of Poles in Austria) zPt – Związek Polaków w Tyrolu (Association of Poles in Tyrol)

kingdom of barracks

Introduction

In the mounting shadow of the Cold War, a “kingdom of barracks” grew on the rubble of old Europe. In the mid-twentieth century in the heart of the continent, hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children lived for months and years in the temporary shelter of barracks and other hastily arranged quarters. The war displaced them, and then postwar uncertainties and intensifying East–West conflict caught them in limbo before they could repatriate or resettle. Was it a nightmare, some wondered, a grotesque copy of Nazi Europe with people still crowded behind barbed wire? A weird dream in which one walked through the Polish-named streets and heard Polish songs on German soil? The chance for a new life and to rebuild the individual, the family, and the nation? The “antlike barracks” became a space for coming to terms with their experiences of war and displacement.1 They opened up opportunities for personal and collective revival, enabling the victims of Nazi persecution to live in postwar societies. At the same time, they served as militarized spaces of intervention to turn refugees into productive citizens. The metaphor “kingdom of barracks,” as drawn up by one of the Polish displaced persons (dP s), for the system of refugee camps proves powerful.2 It points to a society in miniature, striving to be modern and disciplined but torn by internal conflicts and pressures from the outside. It presents a view of the refugee camps as a space of reinventing Polishness in exile by challenging old hierarchies and constructing new ones. Intended as a critique, this metaphor is meant to ridicule and expose the oppressive and militaristic structure of the camps. It encapsulates a popular feeling among exile groups and the wider international conversation that the camps formed a community that grew out of the wreckage of the world, attempting to instil rules and structure to mediate the chaos of the postwar power vacuum. The conviction that Europe

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had sunk into barbarity, that it had become a savage continent, awakened visions of fallen civilization and generated colonial and imperialist vocabulary.3 Observers did not shy away from words such as “tribes,” “castes,” “the wilds” when talking about the newly forming communities and hierarchies in the ruins of the Third Reich.4 For some, the kingdom of barracks was a new Poland in miniature. For others, it was a place of relative safety from the whirlwinds of the postwar period and the gathering Cold War, and for others yet a grim necessity or a waiting point before their next destination. The Western Allies and Polish social elites, both repatriation- and resettlement-oriented, envisaged it as a space for rehabilitating and recivilizing refugees to prepare them for the reconstruction of war-torn countries and the renewal of the nation’s depleted forces. It was the primary terrain of dP s’ encounters with aid workers and experts, with doctors and educators, and at times with politicians and military leaders. Above all, it was the space where they lived in close proximity to each other, sharing bug-infested barracks and beds with people from other regions and social classes, and of other wartime records. There they set about interpreting those experiences in the light of life in independent pre-war Poland and during the wartime period, and what this meant for their personal and collective future. Drawing on extensive archival material, this book examines the experiences of Polish displaced persons from a bottom-up perspective and explores the formation of cultural identity in exile. Through a focus on the voices of refugees of various social origins, it demonstrates how the culture of uchodźstwo, or refugeedom, was constructed as a result of the negotiation between Polish anti-communist social elites and Polish peasants and workers concentrated in the archipelago of refugee camps. It argues that staying in the camps stimulated a personal and collective revival, understood in natural, religious, and national terms, which was capitalized for a rebirth of the nation in exile. While most of the scholarship on dP s is based on official documents, including the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (unrra ) and the International Refugee Organization (iro ) records, and assumes an institutional perspective, this book follows the grass-roots understandings of dP s’ displacement and refugees’ efforts at rebuilding their lives in the early postwar period. As a result of World War II, more than three million Polish citizens were displaced. Poland changed radically with respect to the situation before September 1939. The borders shifted to the west and the social structure was profoundly transformed in terms of ethnicity and class. Jews were murdered, Germans brutally expelled, Polish landowners

Introduction

5

were liquidated as a class, members of the intelligentsia were decimated, many ethnic groups such as Masurians were earmarked to be Polonized, Ukrainians were deported or dispersed. The population had never been so uniform regarding its ethnicity and class. Warsaw lay in ruins. Hospitals and schools did not function. Farmers did not plough the fields; workers could not operate. A black market flourished. Brick by brick, the country had to be rebuilt.5 The communist government installed in Lublin and subsequently in Warsaw at the end of the war competed with the government-in-exile residing in London for power over the Poles abroad. dP s in Alliedoccupied Germany and Austria found themselves at the epicentre of this ideological struggle. While the communists needed them to repopulate the war-torn country, Polish elites in the West saw the dP s as a social base for creating opposition abroad capable of restoring a “free” Poland. The Allied military gathered the dP s in refugee camps with the aim of prompt repatriation, to be conducted by unrra . When the iro took over the responsibility for the remaining dP s, the mass repatriation period was largely over and the remaining “hard core” turned their eyes toward resettlement countries. The majority of dP s tried to navigate the system of care and control to their benefit and decide whether they should repatriate or resettle. After being liberated by the Allies in the spring of 1945, dP s were directed to assembly centres to await repatriation to Poland in its new borders. The military and unrra provided the dP s with food, shelter, and medical attention.6 Some dP s petitioned to be allowed on the repatriation trains as soon as possible. Others made extensive efforts to avoid returning to communist Poland. Many remained undecided for months and years. Other groups of dP s, increasingly separated by their nationality – Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Russians, Belarusians, Jews, Yugoslavs, Czechs, and others – lived side by side with Polish dP s.7 Eventually, the usa , Canada, Australia, Argentina, the uk , Belgium, and several other countries announced a set of policies which stipulated the type and number of refugees that they were willing to accept, opening their borders mainly to those who were young and able-bodied. While the Allies crammed dP s into the “antlike barracks” in Germany and Austria, the whole continent was on the move. People sought their lost relatives and friends. The Allies sent Soviet citizens eastward. French, Belgian, Italian, and other forced labourers and Pow s jumped on trains and trekked to get home. Millions of ethnic Germans expelled from Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary moved into the territory of defeated Germany, with no aid from international organizations.

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Escapees from Eastern Europe, including Jews fleeing pogroms, followed the same routes.8 Istrian and Dalmatian Italians fled to Italy. Soon, in a counter-exodus, hundreds of Italian communist sympathizers travelled to Yugoslavia.9 Population transfers became a commonly used tool for “the unmixing of peoples,” as Rogers Brubaker calls the process of shaping nation-states.10 Poland and the Soviet Union agreed upon population exchanges, sending thousands of Ukrainians eastward and thousands of Poles into the newly acquired territories. Whole institutions were transplanted from Lwów to Breslau, a city in the territories annexed in accordance with the Potsdam Agreement now renamed Wrocław, and the Lwów dialect and cabbage rolls became a part of the cultural landscape of the city. Poland, crossed from west to east and from east to west by forced migrants, now expected a “flood of people” repatriating from the West.11 Europe emerged shattered by the war. It was a bitter defeat for the Axis powers but also a bitter victory for the Allies. The legacy of death and destruction was to haunt the continent for decades to come. Desperate and exhausted people trekking through the smouldering ruins of cities in search of food, shelter, and loved ones became the symbol of material and moral devastation.12 The violence of the war bled into the postwar period. The Allies and the international community viewed the dP s not just as a humanitarian problem but as a threat to global peace. As one official put it, “I feel that if the people of the United Nations do not undertake to solve the dP problem in some satisfactory manner, we have the seeds of World War III now in our care and under the protection of the American, British and French Armies.”13 On a global scale, World War II displaced an estimated sixty million people, nearly half of whom were displaced within Europe.14 Cold War politics opened people’s eyes and wallets to European displaced persons.15 Zooming in on the case of Polish dP s allows us to examine in detail what was lost from a macro-level or organizational approach. This book not only adds nuance to the history of post–World War II migration and humanitarian aid but, by recentring dP perspectives, it also provides insight into the struggles for reconstruction and rehabilitation on the ground. It sheds new light on how individuals and groups mobilized their networks of belonging and cultural identities, in this case the dynamic concept of Polishness, to navigate the emerging postwar international order. It is a story of the formation of a cultural identity in exile, of refugee encounters with humanitarian expertise, of grassroot responses and resistance, and of diaspora mobilization. The lives of dP s illuminate the painfully long process of reckoning with war and building global peace.

Introduction

7

The case of a Polish post-1945 refugeedom reveals the anxieties about the feasibility of postwar reconstruction and the nascent tensions of the early Cold War era as they manifested in dP treatment and policy. The Polish case provides a unique example of Cold War tensions playing out on the bodies of refugees. Their refusal to go home was a harbinger of a newly divided world. Trapped between the goals of the Western Allies, the government-in-exile, and the new communist government, they had one of the longest refugee experiences in the postwar, being stuck in the camps for many years. This experience shaped them as a cultural and political community. In the aftermath of the war, at least 1.4 million Polish citizens found themselves in the Western zones of Germany and Austria when the hostilities ceased.16 According to the official statistics, unrra was responsible for 840,000 Poles in September 1945, while a number of Poles continued to live and work on their own, especially with local farmers.17 Initially, this category included also Polish Jews who in due time became recognized as a separate category and managed to negotiate better conditions – largely thanks to the Harrison Report detailing the dramatic conditions under which liberated Jews were continuing to live.18 With the rise of erupting conflicts and antisemitic incidents, the two groups started to split, and in time the Polish Catholic community viewed the concept of anti-communism as a binder, while for Jews it was antisemitism and Zionism.19 Allied-managed displacement and rising ethnic separatism spurred the unmixing of people: ethnic and cultural groups became separated in the camps, though this process was never complete as people living next to each other claimed various identities. dP camps functioned as spaces where a new, largely transnational, Jewish identity was being built, and that, in the minds of nationalizing leaders, required separating Jews from Poles. Language is a poignant example of how these identity battles unfolded in the camps and how the tendencies to separate intensified. Jewish leaders pushed for making the camps a Hebrew language community that would connect Jews from various countries and prepare them for living in Palestine. They adamantly countered the use of the Polish language, promoting the use Hebrew or at least Yiddish, often transliterated. Yet, Jewish dP s, including those who did not know Hebrew or Yiddish, eagerly read the press in Polish, even those journals with a national or Catholic tinge, and took part in some aspects of Polish cultural life. This was particularly so for Jews who had been among the Polish elite before the war and for whom the Polish language was a strong element of their identity. The transition from Polish to Hebrew and Yiddish can then illustrate the

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increasing social, cultural, and political separation of Jews and Poles in the dP camps.20 At the same time, the Polish national project was picking up pace, more aggressively excluding those considered “the others” and assimilating those deemed culturally close. Antisemitic violence and conflicts erupting over scarce resources in the camps exacerbated the physical and ideological separation of these two groups. As time went by, although many Jews had seen themselves as Polish before the war, they were no longer viewed as sharing the same cultural space as Polish Roman Catholics.21 The Polish dP group consisted mostly of former forced labourers, inmates of Nazi concentration camps and prisons, children who had been sent for Germanization and adoption, and escapees heading west at the end of the war and in the years that followed. Most were of peasant or working-class origin. There were more men than women, especially given that most former Pow s and soldiers (who acquired dP status in 1946) were male. For example, in Emsland (the territory under control of the First Armoured Division), 45 per cent of men, 40 per cent of women, and 15 per cent of children had dP status and 91 per cent of men and 9 per cent of women had Pow status.22 Imagine them crowded into one barrack: most of the cubicles made of blankets would be occupied by peasants and agricultural workers deported for forced labour, many of the women holding newborns in their arms; some would be occupied by urban factory workers, gymnasium-educated young women, many of who had made ammunition or shoes in Nazi factories, while living next to them are two escapees from Poland, and another cubicle taken by a teacher, a priest, and a writer who spent the war in concentration camps. To refer to the main subjects of this study, throughout the book I use “dP s,” which was the official Allied categorization, interchangeably with “refugees,” “dipisi,” or “exiles” to honour the ways in which they self-identified.23 As Yasmin Khan points out, “The label ‘refugee’ can obfuscate as well as illuminate.”24 The term and the definition accompanying it were coined by the Allies during the war to ensure that aid was provided only to the eligible segment of the population. It embraced civilians who found themselves outside their country by reason of the war and desirous but unable to return home without assistance.25 In practice, it quickly became inadequate.26 The term dP encompassed people of different wartime experiences, social positions, ages, and nationalities. It made it possible for the Allies to gather all these people in the camps in order to impose control and discipline and to offer support. When in 1947 the iro took over unrra ’s responsibility for the care of the refugees, now being primarily charged with

Introduction

9

their resettlement, the eligibility was expanded to include “bona fide refugees” and defined the refugee as a person who was “outside of his country of nationality or former habitual residence, and who, as a result of events subsequent to the outbreak of World War II, is unable or unwilling to avail himself of the protection of the Government of his country of nationality or former nationality.”27 As we shall see, the Poles struggled with this imposed identity and tried to familiarize, contest, exploit, and even ridicule it. To problematize and challenge the era’s legal distinction, this label is treated here as the starting point for a discussion of the Polish refugee community in Germany, Austria, and beyond. This community had its own distinctions, hierarchy, and internal mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, manifested in regulations concerning gender, body, class, and race. Tracing the bottom-up categorizations and practices of labelling will help to problematize the category of Polish dP . This necessarily interlinks with debates around nationality and belonging. While the focus of this book is on ethnic Poles, it acknowledges that ethnicity is constructed and in constant flux in times of crisis, and thus it includes those who considered themselves Polish at this period of their lives or were considered Polish by others, functioning under the umbrella identity of Polishness to various ends.28 Some considered Polishness the core of their identity and valued patriotism over everything else; others pledged allegiance to Polishness for practical reasons. While the cultural model of the ethnic Catholic Pole was widely promoted in exile, the diversity of self-identification was far greater. Polish Jews acquired special status after the publication of the Harrison Report in August 1945 and unique recognition as persecutees.29 Many of the people mentioned on these pages were bi- or multilingual, nationally indifferent, of mixed origins, and from various regions and various paths of life.30 Polishness was a complex and ever-changing identity. Viewing culture this way, to recall Orlando Figes, is “to challenge the idea of a pure, organic or essential core.”31 By taking this approach, this study includes stories that speak to diverse understandings and performances of Polishness within the context of displacement, such as: a girl of Roma parentage who spent her childhood in Auschwitz, a woman born in Łódź who grew up on the border of Germany and Belgium, a man who converted from Buddhism to Catholicism in 1944 and was deported to Germany after the Warsaw Uprising, a Polish Jewish couple who could not agree where to go next and separated, a Ukrainian doctor who married a Sovietborn Pole and resettled on the Polish quota in the usa , a Polish Jewish essayist, a Muslim forced labourer of Tatar origin who became a Polish

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employee of the unrra , and a Polish-speaking Orthodox Christian peasant who worked in a French factory for more than a decade. Their paths crossed in the dP camps where a Polish community developed as a mode of existing and building solidarity in exile. The starting point for this book is May 1945. The war had just ended and the dP s began to be gathered in the camps. The closing date is 1952 when the mass resettlement schemes ceased. However, the narrative stretches further back to sketch the genealogies of displacement and occasionally leaps forward to provide closure to some threads. To gauge the bigger picture, it reaches well into the nineteenth century to show cultural continuities and ruptures, and how those translated into the politics and experience of post–World War II exile. The Yalta conference in February 1945 and the extension of Soviet power in the new regions were watershed moments in the history of Poland, Eastern Europe, and the world. Displaced Poles, observing the gathering clouds of the Cold War from their barracks, found themselves on the geographical and ideological borders of the world’s new divisions. This coincided with the moment when Western humanitarianism turned towards Americanization, professionalization, and individualism. The intersection of Cold War politics and the expansion of humanitarianism prompted the exodus of poor and impoverished people of various social backgrounds from Central–Eastern Europe as anti-communists to the West or West-dominated territories, allowing for the emergence of the Second Great Emigration.32 The fate of Polish dP s was entangled in global connections and transnational affairs playing out in the Polish social circles of London and Rome, the unrra headquarters in New York, ethnic diaspora groups in Chicago and São Paulo, Polish military tents in Trani and Barletta, the seat of the communist government in Warsaw, and the parliamentary chambers of many countries. But the main stage of this drama was Germany and Austria under Allied occupation. In the ruins of the Third Reich, an archipelago of dP camps emerged, spreading out from Kiel and Lübeck in northern Germany, through Haren in Emsland and Wildflecken in Bavaria, to Villach and Graz in the Austrian Alps. The Allied armies created a system of dP camps, while Polish military units and liaison officers loyal to the exiled government (but still under the command of the Western Allies) tried to assume control wherever there was a power vacuum. In former military barracks or magazines, in half-collapsed schools, in tent cities arranged hastily overnight, even in a deserted castle – wherever there was space – the displaced were housed. Many Poles congregated around the armies to receive help and information from the Polish government-in-exile which resided in London.

Introduction

11

The First Armoured Division under the command of General Stanisław Maczek organized a “Polish occupation zone” in Lower Saxony with the main centres in Papenburg, Meppen, and Lingen. Germans were evicted from their houses to make space for the refugees. Haren, soon renamed Maczków, played the role of unofficial capital of the “Little Poland” in exile. Poles in Austria and southern Germany found themselves under the strong influence of the Second Polish Corps, led by the charismatic General Władysław Anders. Through the army, they received letters, journals, and books from Polish refugees scattered around the world who originated from the deportees to the Soviet Union. Polish refugee settlements in Iran, India, British East Africa, Mexico, and other places created a wider refugee network.33 dP s were also supported through the help and influence of three branches of the Polish Red Cross, the Polish War Relief (a Polish American agency), local authorities, grassroots organizations, and voluntary agencies. Concentration in the camps allowed Poles in Germany and Austria, who had previously been scattered across multiple farms and camps, to communicate, debate, and develop their culture. What processes shaped this group? How did dP s understand and conceptualize their experience of displacement? How did the upheaval of war and displacement shape their understanding of uchodźstwo, or refugeedom, as a group identity capable of generating socio-political impact? Adopting Peter Gatrell’s understanding of refugeedom as “a matrix involving administrative practices, legal norms, social relations and refugees’ experiences, and how these have been represented in cultural terms,” this book looks at refugeedom from the standpoint of refugees.34 Does it differ from the vision of the postwar transition from war to peace as portrayed by officials and aid workers? How did encounters between various groups of refugees, the members of exiled elites, the communist emissaries, and Western social workers unfold? If the refugee camps are to be treated as sites for the formation of new cross-category identifications and of producing “otherness” due to their isolating functions, what was the result of the prolonged encampment under conflicting propaganda?35 Confined to these “waiting zones outside the society,” how did dP s respond to interventionist practices of Western actors and nationalising elites?36 This book has grown on the historiographical foundations established by the shift from military and political history to the cultural history of modern war and displacement in examining the impact of World War II and Cold War rivalries. It engages with and contributes to several historiographical debates: on institutional histories, diaspora mobilization

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and refugee communities, transcultural encounters, postwar reconstruction and refugee studies in general, and the historiography on Polish dP s specifically. The history of postwar crisis and displaced persons is a rapidly expanding field.37 Institutional histories create a robust foundation for further study. The histories of the unrra and iro , alongside early studies on European displacement, sprang up in the first decade after the end of the war. Mirroring meticulous bureaucracy, they have provided an overview of the population’s movements and institutionalized care.38 In recent years, scholars have detailed how dP s were embraced by transnational policies and aid organizations’ agendas. Jessica Reinisch has examined the contentious issue of unrra ’s internationalism, outlining its limits and Anglo-American inflection.39 Daniel Cohen has demonstrated how the question of dP s shaped postwar humanitarian aid and the proceeding “human rights revolution,” affecting the outbreak of the Cold War.40 By taking the history from below approach, this book complements this perspective by focusing on what dP s as aid recipients thought, felt, and did. Historians have examined diaspora mobilization and elite refugees for their role in creating and curating refugee cultural communities.41 Refugee politics and how they defined and represented themselves, shaping the political explanation against repatriation, has attracted considerable scholarly attention. Anna Holian has investigated how elite dPs – Poles, Ukrainians, Russians, and Jews – built their identities in exile along anti-Nazi and anti-Soviet attitudes. She demonstrates the role that the “martyrological idiom,” stressing national heroism and sacrifice, played in shaping dP political activity, organizations, and modes of self-representation.42 As Anna Jaroszyńska-Kirchmann has established, Polish dP s adopted the discourse of the “exile mission” or “an unwritten set of beliefs, goals, and responsibilities of Polish emigrants which placed patriotic work for Poland at the centre of their duties toward the homeland.” This concept drew on the experiences of the nineteenth-century political émigrés who left partitioned Poland after the failed uprisings and claimed spiritual leadership over the Polish nation. A vision that cemented this movement, called the Great Emigration (in Polish, Wielka Emigracja), originated from the Romantic traditions, especially from the writing of Adam Mickiewicz who construed exiles as “Polish pilgrims.”43 Jaroszyńska-Kirchmann has shown how Polish dP s were construed as the free voice of the Polish nation and the heirs of the nineteenth-century Romantic tradition of the Great Emigration. Focusing on national struggle and the processes of creating diaspora, she has demonstrated that dP s understood their displacement

Introduction

13

as an anti-communist, anti-Soviet, Catholic, and patriotic endeavour.44 Building on their work, this book writes the peasants, workers, and the rural and urban poor into the cultural history of postwar displacement, bringing the class issue to the existing debate. It demonstrates how dP s of diverse social origins negotiated the meaning of refugeedom and how the political language of nineteenth-century elite exiles became adapted to post–World War II conditions and then populated with the imageries of lower classes. In doing so, it shows that this symbolical shift broadened the social boundaries of the exile community.45 Recently the encounters between dP s and other historical actors have gained scholarly attention, exposing the fragile construction of the social tissue in Allied-occupied countries.46 In particular, Atina Grossmann has masterfully depicted the intricate nets of interdependencies present between Jewish dP s, Allies, and local Germans, showing how contrasting and overlapping gendered experiences shaped their interactions.47 Laure Humbert has detailed the history of Franco-dP s’ close encounters, exploring the meanings that social workers attached to the notion and effects of rehabilitation, simultaneously shedding light on the French occupation zone of Germany.48 Relations between aid workers and Polish dP s in the British zone of occupied Germany has also been illuminated in Samantha Knapton’s work.49 Adam Seipp has examined the interactions between dP s, German expellees from the East, and American occupation officials in Wildflecken in northern Bavaria, a camp with a predominantly Catholic Polish population.50 Similarly, Silvia Salvatici has looked at the practices that unrra ’s relief workers employed in their attempts at rehabilitating the dP s. To address this, she dissects the tensions between the aid agency and military authorities and unearths the power relations between the dP s and relief workers.51 As Tara Zahra has also shown, humanitarian workers began defining their mission of rehabilitating victims of war in psychological terms, bringing to Europe “the Psychological Marshall Plan.”52 This book looks at the interactions inside the refugee group and with welfare providers in the dP camp system understood as a space of intervention. It sheds light on the new element of this debate, accentuating how nationalizing elites and aid workers cooperated and clashed in rehabilitating dP s and how dP s responded to these practices. In the Polish context, the change in the political system and geopolitical situation in 1989 cleared the way for historians to explore the topic of postwar repatriates and emigrants from anti-communist and nation-orientated ideological positions and with the use of Western archives. Polish historians provided an encyclopaedic overview of the

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organization of Polish life in the dP camps, supplying detailed information on efforts to self-organize and cultivate national and religious life, as well as repatriation and resettlement dilemmas. Pastoral activities, publishing achievements, and the system of schooling were covered in detail, too.53 Jan Rydel has scrutinized the “Polish occupation” in northwest Germany, describing how the Polish Armed Forces exercised power over the Emsland region and created a Polish community around the town of Haren.54 In discussing Polishness as a cultural identity in exile, this study builds on the newest research on nationalism and national identity, especially Brubaker’s concept of nation as a category of practice, Zahra’s and Kulczycki’s studies on national indifference and overlapping identities, and Karch’s work on instrumental nationalism.55 To bring the case of Polish dP s back to the bigger picture, this book inscribes it into the debates on postwar reconstruction and links it with the emerging field of refugee history.56 Historians have detailed the impact wartime destruction had on civilians, revealing how societies tried to rebuild their systems of values in an atmosphere of perceived social and moral chaos.57 The conceptualization of Eastern Europe as “warlands” has emphasized the continuum of violence, social crises, and radical state interventions in which dP s were entangled.58 Registering the presence and the absence of refugees on the historiographical radar, Peter Gatrell has proposed integrating a history from below approach with other domains of refugee history and inscribing displacement into the broader processes of historical change.59 Following other studies which historicize refugee experience, this book responds to that appeal.60 This book is a cultural history and a history from below, meaning it focuses on the mental worlds not of the important few but of the important many. It looks at children, women, and men who lived in the kingdom of barracks, asking the how and the why more often than asking how many and according to what policies. This approach means reading refugee poems and jokes, especially the bad ones, through a magnifying glass, excavating details from obscure novels published in a dozen copies only, and reading the grievances of the poorest of the poor along with the essays of artists and journalists, thus undoing the hierarchies perpetuated in top-down narratives.61 This methodological angle challenges the institution-oriented approach to the study of population displacement. While Western officials and social workers are present in this narrative, where possible, I give voice to refugees and focus on their worldviews and life stories. In other words, this is not a history of unrra or iro , nor a history of Polish refugee organizations, nor of policies of two competing Polish

Introduction

15

governments, nor of the Polish State Repatriation Office; it is a history of people who spent a period of their life living as refugees and seeking to find a place for themselves within the postwar world. Navigating through the archives which hold materials on Polish dP s to write a cultural history is a process of collecting traces and scraps left by people entangled in the logics of various institutions and networks of belonging. The gaze of a historian of culture is tantalized by details, margins, and oddities. Why did some dP s crave pineapples? What posters were glued to the walls of their barracks? Why do the complaints that dP s did not know how to use toilet paper and kept their latrines filthy matter? What did the widely distributed and hastily drafted handbooks and lectures hope to teach them and how did these issues permeate the jokes repeated during the long winter evenings spent in poorly heated rooms? Migration and displacement – defined by movement – leave mere footprints of evidence in the institutionalized archives which strive to be fixed and immobile. While records produced by the bureaucracies of occupying armies, unrra , and iro found safe harbour in the state-owned and organizational archives, dP s’ makeshift documents were moved and transplanted between various repositories.62 They became an element of Polish diasporic consciousness and identity, playing a role in maintaining national culture in exile.63 The Polish government-in-exile and the Polish communist government preserved records on their activities in dP camps in their respective archives in London and in Warsaw, simultaneously safeguarding two competing ideological perspectives. Thus, practices of collecting and preserving records within the institution of the archive, “driven by its internal logic of selection, classification, and organization,” suggest desirable readings of the materials gathered that this book often tries to circumvent and supplement.64 Archives hold a wealth of previously unpublished, and often even unread, voices of members of displaced populations. For the purpose of this study, I have searched wide and dug deep into the archives from New York to Warsaw and from London to Bad Arolsen, scrutinising official guidelines, field reports, and top-secret telegrams alongside stained letters and crumpled notes. Hand-made dolls, cooking recipes and songs scribbled in notebooks, drawings, and photographs, tell stories of displacement as importantly as the state documents. A broad overview of the dP and exile press is helpful in mapping the spread of ideas throughout the camps and beyond. Letters, diaries, and scribbles from prisoners held in the archival vaults bear witness to anxieties of the immediate postwar period. Memoirs and oral history testimonies add further texture and colour to this picture.65

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Aid institutions and armies produced tons of reports, statistics, and guidelines. When analyzing this material, I paid particular attention to the encounters between aid providers and dP s, especially the ideas on rehabilitating and “recivilizing.” Attempts at cataloguing and documenting the refugees, especially with the view of resettlement, made the dP s recount their life stories to interviewers. In this way, the narratives of the illiterate and children were also penned by the officers in charge and preserved in their files.66 When refugees came into conflict with the law, the court records captured fragments of their voices and their life stories. As the dedication in a photo album gifted to Major Lawson by the Polish dP leaders put it, “There are always two sides to everything: the sunny one and the shadowy one. The pictures in this book are the sunny side of Wentorf Camp.” This “sunny side” prevails in the majority of memory books, unrra and iro photos, and official material, helping to maintain an image of success and stability within the camps. In that album, the pictures show staff and displaced persons at work and celebrations in an ordered and well-run camp.67 To get to the less sunny side of things, and to show all the shades of grey of living in the dP camps, the liaison reports, complaints, plans of improvement, satire, and court records prove invaluable. Examining the voices coming from the archives and beyond as polyphony helps to avoid the trap of homogenizing refugee experiences.68 The polyphonic conception of language and culture encourages the rejection of a singular view to make space for multiple voices to be heard, including those that have been marginalized and hidden.69 Voices are always in relation to one another, unveiling the power relations of the social world from which they emerged. Refugees spoke, in various forms and in various situations, but to hear these voices as a polyphony, an active effort is needed. The dialogic nature of polyphony makes some voices privileged and hearable while others are marginalized; it merges and divides them, creating hierarchies and exclusions.70 The historical search for “a polyphonic intersection of different languages, registers and discourses” should be based on diversified sources in order to combine the “equally valid voices” of various historical actors.71 Refugee voices connect us to their embodied experiences and their embeddedness in the real world: barracks and ruins, makeshift shelters and flats in unknown towns, trains taking them home and ships taking them to new homes. Three main themes constitute the backbone of this book. The first theme focuses on the process of creating the cultural community in exile by reconciling Polishness with class issues, which eventually led to the formation of a new layer of Polish diaspora. The second examines

Introduction

17

the agency of refugees in the system of modernizing care and control, centering around the body. The third looks at spaces of cultural hegemony and cultural negotiation in exile.72 Chapters 1 and 2 outline how a cultural community began taking shape while the institutional grip on the displaced tightened. The first chapter explores the cultural legacies which contributed to the emerging self-understanding of Poles at the end of the War. The second chapter examines the position of Polish dP s in the defeated Third Reich. It details their wartime migration patterns and describes the system of international aid created by the Allies and by the Polish government-in-exile. To understand how the main idea of refugeedom emerged, in the third chapter, internal divisions and debates are discussed in the context of power relations. In doing so, the three initial chapters ground the ideas of nation and class which are crucial for understanding the formation of Polish refugeedom against the backdrop of rising Cold War tensions. Chapter 4 shows how these issues played out on the ground and discusses the bottom-up resistance to the refugee regime and power of the social elites. Examining everyday life in the kingdom of barracks reveals that dP s produced a grassroots critique of the humanitarian help they received and the new international order. They drew caricatures, wrote stories, made up jokes, and tried to voice their protest and raise concerns in various ways but in most cases their appeals fell on deaf ears. Chapters 5 and 6 argue that dP camps became spaces for personal recovery projects as well as sites of reforming and disciplining the national body. The elites made efforts to re-civilize their inhabitants, using middle- and upper-class norms while integrating some of the professional and cultural aspirations of refugees from rural backgrounds into their vision. Chapter 5 explores how personal and collective revival was capitalized on for the rebirth of the nation in exile, whereas Chapter 6 looks at the camps as spaces of intervention and civilizing efforts of the Allies and Polish elites. In doing so, it points out the links between nationalizing efforts and civilizing projects, especially in the agendas of welfare workers and camp leaders. The last two chapters focus on the impact that the repatriation–resettlement debates had on dP s. Chapter 7 examines the influence that various types of propaganda and the pressures to repatriate had on life in the camps. It details how the challenges of postwar reconstruction stirred dP s’ anxieties about the return. The last chapter discusses the approaches of dP s towards resettlement schemes. It shows how the bottom-up critique of market-oriented resettlement rules, especially those excluding the most vulnerable refugees, prompted dPs to come up with ideas for improving the system. Furthermore, it

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demonstrates that the Polish refugee community and diaspora groups tried to conduct what can be termed “moral screening,” promoting the best individuals and providing an additional net to stop the “unworthy element” from emigrating. The clergy, military men, and other elite refugees, guided by the values of the exile mission, took part in mediating the resettlement. Finally, this book claims that post–World War II uchodźstwo marked a new moment in the history of Polish migration. In the discourse that emerged from postwar debates, immigration “for bread” and immigration “for freedom” became inseparable. Displaced persons resettled in the aftermath of World War II created a new layer of the Polish diaspora.

1 “We, the Polish Wartime Refugeedom”: Poles and Polishness at the End of World War II

In November 1946, representatives of the Polish refugee organizations met in Brussels and issued a declaration, which started with the following words: “We, the Polish Wartime Refugeedom – a million of Poles, left outside our Country’s borders because of the duty to serve the Fatherland or because of the enemy’s violence, now remaining here as a result of violence committed on our Commonwealth – we unwaveringly believe in the righteousness of the Polish cause and in its ultimate victory and we come together to unify all our social forces in exile in the fight for the integrity, independence, and freedom of Poland.”1 This ideological stance, formulated by representatives of Poles dispersed in Germany, Austria, France, Italy, the uk , the Middle East, and other places, encapsulated the crux of the dominant narrative that leaders of Polish dP s wanted to convey to the world. They did not form an exile mission to begin with; rather that trope was adopted with time as a justification of their stay in exile and as a tactic to unify the group. They wanted the Polish refugees to be perceived as a moral force, representing “the civilised Christian West.” By doing so, they revived the nineteenth-century concept of Poland as a “Christ of nations,” capable of redeeming humanity after the disastrous war.2 “The Polish refugeedom exists,” they continued, “because harm has been done to Polish State and Nation, because the Soviet Union upholds this harm, it realises it and deepens it.”3 This strong anti-Soviet and anti-communist disposition was a cornerstone of their political agenda. Branding themselves as victims and heroes who made “immense sacrifices” in World War II, they promised to build a better state than the one Poland had prior to the war: one based on equality, democratic principles, and social solidarity.

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This common position came out of long months of fierce debate. It took endless conversations over a bowl of soup in dP camp canteens, talks in London government’s headquarters and in London’s streets, quarrels in the overcrowded barracks, dialogues on the camps’ theatre stage, sermons in the makeshift chapels, encounters between refugees and aid workers, and litres of ink spilt on the columns of the exile press. The first attempts to organize Polish refugees in Western Europe in the supraterritorial associations came from refugees in Belgium and France right after the cessation of hostilities. They created an organization which, claiming to be apolitical, was supposed to have wide social and political representation. Aspiring to be an umbrella organization, it was backed by the exiled government which intensely supported and tried to direct the groups of Poles displaced in Western Europe. However, the Poles in Germany, opposing the supremacy of refugees in France and Belgium, quickly became the forefront of the refugee movement.4 Formulating the main idea of Polish refugeedom (uchodźstwo) in this way was a response to a political situation and the form of the refugee regime of the early postwar period. At the same time, it served as a mode of self-understanding and a means of representing the groups of people thrown by the forces of history outside their country of origin to those who had power over them: aid organizations, the Allies, the Polish diaspora, and the international community. Concurrently, this mission of displaced Poles, or “the exile mission” as Anna Jaroszyńska-Kirchmann calls it, was a product of intense political debate dominated by Catholic and nationalist factors, a legacy of class conflict, and struggles over the meaning of Polishness.5 It worked as an attempt to redefine the nation under the conditions of exile. The idea that Poles who remained in the West formed the Second Great Emigration (Druga Wielka Emigracja), by reference to the nineteenth-century elite exile tradition, lingered in the minds of Polish elites in exile and was endorsed by contemporary Polish historians to understand the phenomenon of the post-1939 Polish emigration.6 Tracing the roots of this ideological construct leads us into intricacies of the history of migration from Eastern Europe, Polish social and cultural legacies, and World War II upheaval. This chapter situates the exiled community within wider cultural processes and helps to explain its cultural embeddedness in the various networks functioning in the postwar order. It explores the cultural, political, and economic currents that underwrote this particular self-understanding of the post–World War II Polish displacement. It sketches the context in which this community emerged, signalling the importance of categories such as nation, class, and gender for understanding its making. It explains the processes

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that underpinned the experiences of Polish dP s and the creation of the postwar refugee community, even if only an imagined one. Furthermore, it inscribes them in the wider history of debates and practices centred around the body, society, and the nation. Finally, it points to a plethora of trajectories and markers of belonging bounding a group classified by the Allies as Polish dP s. Who were the Polish-speaking dP s who entered the camps in spring 1945? What memories, hopes, and fears did they carry? A refugee at the age of forty-five would have been born in the Habsburg, Russian, or German empire and survived World War I as an imperial subject. He would have seen the emergence of the independent Polish state as he reached adulthood, then have lived with the uncertainty of the borders at least for the next three years, before his own children celebrated their eighteenth birthday just in time to see the outbreak of a new war. He most likely spoke in a dialect rather than in standard Polish, possibly had finished two or three classes of village school, and likely he or his children were forced to seek employment in town. He welcomed the liberation as a forced labourer rather than a concentration camp inmate. With this cultural legacy, he embarked on the journey of the Second Great Emigration.

t he s e c o n d Po l is h r eP u b li c and the cultural l e g a c ie s o f P a r t it io ns and emi grati on The outbreak of war in 1939 marked the end of the Second Polish Republic. The independent Polish state had been established in 1918 as a successor to the First Polish Republic that had been partitioned between Russia, Prussia, and Austria in the late eighteenth century. The political rebirth of Poland took place in the shadow of the Polish–Soviet war and armed conflicts on the borders with Lithuania, West Ukraine, Czechoslovakia, and Germany. Millions of prisoners of war (Pow s), exiles, and refugees of the Great War returned over the subsequent decades, some with the support of state-funded committees for repatriation and others on their own initiative.7 Officials saw these migrants as a force that could colonize and Polonize the new territory, especially in the borderlands. Diasporic nationalistic organizations in the usa encouraged people to re-emigrate, often framing the return as a patriotic duty.8 The Second Polish Republic was a multinational and multi-confessional state dominated by Polish-speaking Roman Catholics, described as ethnic Poles, who formed around two-thirds of the population. Contrary to the claims of Polish nationalists, the Polish community was a fresh and

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fragile construction whose members struggled to define it after 1918 on the ruins of the three empires. Warmia, Masuria and Powiśle plebiscites and the Silesian Civil Wars painfully exposed the difficulties of drawing states along national lines. Interwar censuses, “the new grammar of nation-states,” reflected attempts at nationalist mobilization.9 Fairly neat categories listed the citizens of Poland as Poles, Ruthenians, Ukrainians, Jews, and Belarusians – the most numerically significant groups – and Germans, Lithuanians, Russians, and Czechs.10 The necessity to add categories such as “local,” “other,” and “unknown” highlights the limitations of the system. Romani, Tatars, Karaims, Armenians, Kashubians, Silesians, Poleshuks, Gorals, and some other smaller cultural groups were not listed. The statistics based on censuses conducted in the interwar period clearly overshadow and simplify rich modes of self-identification and overlapping identities, as well as a plethora of linguistic and religious diversity.11 In the twentieth century, people increasingly pledged their loyalty to a nation, even if often only as one of their nested identities. Still, many inhabitants of these lands were altogether aloof to national politics. While the example of “tutejsi,” or people who declared they were local or “from here” when encountering census officials, is commonly used to illustrate national indifference in the territories of Poland, disinterest in nationalizing projects was much more widespread.12 Local identity also derived from the intersection of urban and class attachments, such as in the case of the Lodzermenschen from the industrial city of Łódź or citizens of the Free City of Danzig. During wars and upheavals identities were often a resource to be drawn upon rather than entrenched positions. Non-national institutions, from religious communities to state entities such as the Habsburg Monarchy, played an important role in the life of East Central Europeans.13 People were eager to believe that these institutions and communities would be more capable of protecting their interests, especially in the “zones of mixed, fluid, and ambivalent national identification” to use Rogers Brubaker’s expression, than national communities.14 Also, in such territories pledging loyalty to the nation could be risky. In many borderland regions, people saw themselves as neither Germans nor Poles, in moments of conflict and political change often exhibiting regional or frontier identification.15 Germanization, Russification, and Polonization often turned invasive and violent. People living in the lands between the Oder, Neman, and Dniester rivers, from the sands of the Baltic coast to the peaks of the Carpathian Mountains, evinced enormous cultural diversity and richness. Their

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various and abundant modes of self-identification were not dominated by the national categorization. The nation-state was a new construction, a political form that had existed in that part of Europe for just slightly more than twenty years, and there existed fears that Poland was a “temporary state,” as anti-Polish German propaganda had it. The imagined community of Poles was constantly in the making, creating a space of clashing concepts of the nation, various markers of belonging, and growing national, religious, and class conflicts. The main social division, a cultural and economic legacy of serfdom, ran between the elite and non-elite populations: peasants and workers (comprising 80 per cent of the population) on one side and urban petty bourgeoisie, intelligentsia, bourgeoisie, and landed gentry on the other.16 Organic intellectuals (coming from the lower classes and rejecting elitism), rural elites, and reform-oriented members of the traditional intelligentsia and upper-classes undertook limited interaction and debate.17 After more than a century of partitions, new Poland was dramatically different from the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth that had collapsed in 1795, divided by Russia, Prussia, and Austria. The institutions changed, the people inhabiting it changed. The heterogeneous construct of Polishness that emerged in the nineteenth century consisted of various ideologies, myths, features, models, and norms of behaviour. The idea of a Polish nation as a noble political and civilizational community, embracing members of the elite of various faiths and ethnicities, inherited from the Commonwealth, coexisted with the modern concept of the nation which began taking shape in the nineteenth century.18 With time, language and ethnicity became increasingly important in defining the nation and Polishness started to denote more than a political community. During the period of the partitions, Polish nationhood was redefined in ethnolinguistic terms by “social deepening” and “ethnic narrowing,” to repeat after Brubaker.19 Attempts at the inclusion of all social strata, typical for the development of nationalisms in the nineteenth century, were to a great extent motivated by the need for support in the elite’s struggle for independence. It was only after the 1890s when, as Patrice Dabrowski points out, “Polishness become a quality applied to the masses: villagers, workers, even women patriots dressed in confederate hats.” As she showed, the change, driven by the intelligentsia, “reinvented Poland” with the end of the nineteenth century marking a turning point in the reshaping of Polish national identity, in part influenced by German attempts at self-definition. In constructing the common past, the commemorations fostered integration by shaping the symbolic vocabulary of the nation.20

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When trying to define Polishness, people often referred to tropes of Pole–Catholic, Mother–Pole, “The Language is the Homeland,” the Roman Catholic Church as a bastion of Polishness, Noble Ethos, “the Piast Concept” or a concept of the exemplary peasant of ancient ethnic Polish origin, and Poland as a Christ of the Nations or the idea of national messianism.21 These ideological and cultural forms, promoted mostly by the progressive intelligentsia, established the vision of a nation thriving without the nation-state thanks to the sacrifices and dedication of its people, bonded together by the Polish language and the Catholic religion. Brian Porter argues that this alliance of religious morality and national messianism was a product of the late nineteenth century when the nation and the Catholic Church adopted similar goals. This national imagery grew out of the struggle for independence, social reformism, and debates on modernity.22 Needless to say, this never became a social reality with, for instance, large numbers of Polish-speaking Protestants in Cieszyn, Silesia, and Masuria, making it impossible to equal Polish Catholicism with national identity.23 The transformations of the concept of nation led to attempts to rebuild the Polish community by encompassing wider groups of people and gradually excluding those considered ethnic minorities. Attempts to include peasants in the national and cultural community were visible in the intellectual trend of ethnography and peasant-mania (in Polish, chłopomania) resulting in the idea that the best solution for achieving national and political revival was to unite the forces of the peasants and the intelligentsia.24 However, the ostensible fascination with the peasantry did not generate deeper mutual understanding and cooperation. Crafting national narratives, thus, was an exercise in selectivity. For example, the history of the peasant rebellions against the nobility did not make it into the national narrative.25 One way of strengthening the Polish nation was through organic work, or an ideology of Polish positivists who promoted labour and a strong work ethic, including education and modernization.26 Thus, the former political concept of nation gave space to growing ethnic nationalism. The discourse in which all people who spoke Polish were considered Poles gained momentum. Timothy Snyder argues that the idea of the modern ethnic nation was not hegemonic even after the establishment of the Polish state in 1918. He claims that only the deportations, genocide, ethnic cleansings, mass murder, and displacement of elites during World War II was a foundation for the domination of ethnic nationalism in Eastern Europe.27 The concept of nation and other nineteenth-century cultural constructs were negotiated and contested

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during the interwar period only to be powerfully revived and translated into the new ideologies placed up against the Nazi and Soviet threat during and after World War II. Thinking about the nation and community was permeated with the ingrained collective memory of the emigration culture. The Great Emigration of the nineteenth century, which embraced thousands of noblemen and members of the intelligentsia who fought the partitioning powers to regain independence, became a national myth. The exiles, who settled in France, Great Britain, and Belgium created, what started to be considered, a canon of Polish culture.28 Emigration to the usa , on the other hand, was predominantly economic in character. Nearly three million Polish peasants, driven by extreme poverty and social marginalization, had moved there by 1914. Some of them embraced the idea of the nationalist struggle for a free Poland, endorsed by the elites.29 Emigration from the impoverished rural areas was also directed to Brazil and Argentina, where approximately 110,000 Poles settled. Tens of thousands also migrated to European countries, especially Germany, France, and Belgium.30 In the popular and national culture, this movement has been called an emigration “for bread” (in Polish, za chlebem). The hardships immigrants had to endure were multiplied by the lack of state protection and strong diaspora organizations, as well as by the abuses suffered during the journey and in the hosting countries.31 Additionally, emigration from the Russian-dominated part of Poland was illegal, adding to migrants’ financial burdens and making them more vulnerable to intermediaries.32 To protect their interests, at times migrants tried to forge alliances based on their common origins. For example, as Kulczycki demonstrates, migrants coming to the Ruhr in the early twentieth century developed a strong sense of Polish national identity only once they had arrived abroad, as before they “had not yet developed a consciousness of their national identity.” The Polish nationalism in the Ruhr had a strong working-class character, equating “working-class interests with the interests of the Polish nation.”33 World War I on the Eastern Front instigated forced population displacement that culminated in the 1915 refugee movement of Bieżeństwo or the flight and evacuation of civilians following the retreating Russian troops. More than three million people, predominantly peasants speaking in a mix of Polish, Ruthenian, and local dialects, left their homes in the eastern parts of the Russian Empire. Contemporaries noticed both the scale of this refugee movement and its class distinctness, suggesting that it differed from the Great Emigration where “the folk [lud] was only 1% of the emigration” while now the “peasant masses” constituted “the

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core of the emigration.”34 Relief organizations, headed predominantly by the aristocracy and the intelligentsia, couched the aid along national lines “to preserve the refugee’s soul for Poland.”35 In the post–World War II period, the authorities once again tried to nationalize refugees for the Polish cause. In 1918, when Poland regained independence, more than four million Poles lived abroad, excluding the refugees and Pow s who repatriated shortly after World War I. Refugees, exiles, and deportees returned throughout the entire interwar period. In the early 1920s, more than 100,000 Poles returned from the Americas. Simultaneously, the social and economic problems of the Second Polish Republic drove nearly two million people to emigrate to other European countries and, to a lesser extent, to the usa . Once again, this wave of migration consisted mostly of people from rural areas, predominantly farmers, although the poorest ones were excluded as the costs of immigration increased. Workers migrated mostly to France to find employment in the mining industry on the basis of the Polish–French agreement of 1919. The Polish government held ambivalent attitudes towards emigration, instead trying to keep people at home to act as the state’s biological reserve (as we might call it) with medium results but also understanding that emigration could aid the problems of land hunger and unemployment. At the same time, new immigration quotas in the usa and growing concerns around migration additionally hindered the movement of populations from Eastern Europe.36 Burning social and economic problems persisted throughout the entire period of the Second Polish Republic. Land reforms that envisaged the parcelling off of large church and private estates to alleviate poverty among the peasants was widely discussed and partially introduced to counter the Bolshevik threat, but the land question remained unsolved. It wasn’t until 1944 that land reform was radically implemented by the Polish Committee of National Liberation, the provisional government of Poland, installed and controlled by the Soviet Union with the support of the Polish communists.37 The calls for reform and social solidarity came from some members of the intelligentsia, the socialist circles, and the peasant parties that emerged at the turn of the century. In the former Russian and Prussian-dominated lands, the peasant movement was weaker than under Habsburg rule.38 The elite’s interest in the lives of non-elite Poles from peasant and worker backgrounds grew with the deepening political and economic crisis of the 1930s when activists and academics tried to surpass literary

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tropes and statistics in their understanding of the lower classes.39 The Institute for Social Economy announced a series of competitions for memoirs, including Memoirs of the Unemployed, Memoirs of Workers, and Memoirs of Peasants, and in doing so brought the voices of the “ordinary people” to public attention. Maria Dąbrowska, a prominent Polish writer, commented that “Today the Great Unknown has spoken to all who have ears to hear him: the peasant.”40 Stories of inequality, poverty, disease, and a lack of educational and professional opportunities gained a human face. Yet still, the “Great Unknown” was usually a literate or semi-literate Polish adult male who could afford paper and a postage stamp. The memoirs only scratched the surface of other problems that agitated the public. Poland struggled with deep gender inequalities, voiced and tackled by the “women’s movement.”41 Child labour and child poverty became a focus of mushrooming charities. “The minority question” grew more and more complicated, particularly in terms of antisemitism and class-based conflicts with Ukrainians and Belarusians.42 As Katherine Lebow shows, the discourse on social rights in interwar Poland can be explored by examining social memoirs where sociological knowledge and policy debates intertwined. One contemporary academic proposed that political ethics should be based on the principle that “freedom is as important as bread, and bread is as important as freedom.”43 This may be read as a call for social solidarity and for building a community that encompasses all social strata. Too little was achieved in this field in the interwar period. The practice of competition memoirs was also part of the gathering of knowledge needed to reform the national body, a project that had started in the nineteenth century and redefined ways of thinking about the Polish community. Polish elites tried to integrate the lower classes, especially the urban poor who were considered to be under the threat of “degeneration,” into the nation by offering a range of cultural, economic, and social activities. Plans to expand political suffrage and modernize Poland in the fields of education, urban planning, agriculture, and industry extended to reforming and controlling the bodies of the poor, especially the female body around which fears of disease, contamination, and moral degeneracy concentrated. In the absence of a centralized Polish state apparatus, as Keely Stauter-Halsted argues, there emerged a “shadow state” or a net of competing institutions of social control and reform – moral, religious, medical, legal, administrative, pedagogical, and others – that experimented with the social transformation agenda.44

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Upper classes started to link the need for social reform with the insurgencies and patriotic efforts. These traditions resurfaced under the conditions of post–World War II exile in the absence of a recognized and legitimate government. Schooling, literary canons, service in the army, and elections had unifying power vehemently employed by interwar Poland as a “nationalizing state,” as Brubaker calls it, referring to a state in which elites acted “to promote the language, culture, demographic preponderance, economic flourishing, or political hegemony of the core ethnocultural nation.” Enthusiastic work at “raising national awareness” mixed with opportunistic declarations of nationality.45 Young Belarusians, Ukrainians, Jews, and Balts, especially those from the middle class, became increasingly Polonized through their everyday contact with the Polish culture at school and elsewhere. Local affiliations often trumped belonging to a national community, as John Kulczycki shows building on work of Brubaker and Zahra, concluding that “national indifference continued to exist in the mid-twentieth century.” Calls for loyalty to a nation in regions such as Silesia or Mazuria often fell on deaf ears and Polish and German nationality practices did not produce lasting national affinities.46 The concept of instrumental nationalism, applied by Brendan Karch to the case of Upper Silesia, explains how people weighed national loyalty against the personal consequences of belonging and against their loyalty to family, church, region, or village.47 Many elements of the nineteenth-century patriotic agenda remained an important part of building a strong nation in the Second Polish Republic. Patriotic sports associations, health campaigns, combatting prostitution and child labour, and programs of a more inclusive educational system were all part of constructing a biologically and morally strong nation after more than a century-long partition. State interventions and the work of charities intertwined and supplemented each other. The work of the professional class of doctors, demographers, economists, and health care workers, educated at German, Austrian, and Russian universities, informed these actions. The Polish eugenics movement advocated the elimination of “social problems” such as alcoholism, diseases, prostitution, and disabilities, which would allow for the emergence of a harmonious and advanced society. Community work, including taking care of orphans and neglected children, promoting birth control and sexual education, and fighting alcoholism, promiscuity, and venereal disease was supposed to “create generations strong in spirit and in body,” as one supporter of Polish eugenics put it in reference to the perfect marriage.48 Polish eugenics, even when drawing on race theories, was still

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Figure 1.1 | Map of Poland’s changed borders after World War II.

more class-orientated, targeting the poorest and the underclass who were believed to be a burden on state institutions and a possible source of contamination. However, eugenics was not accepted as the state’s ideology, which remained a mix of everyday practice and “utopian social engineering,” the latter fiercely opposed by some politicians and the Catholic clergy.49 The echoes of these debates and interventions reverberated in the postwar exile community, informing dP s’ thinking on revival and rehabilitation (see chapters 5 and 6). These discussions should be viewed against the backdrop of the approaches to the body and its place in social policy and racialized discourses on the nation in interwar Europe. Theories of degeneracy and eugenics were almost commonly accepted ways of thinking about nation, community, and family. Eugenics and nationalism were intertwined in public health campaigns, in attempts to improve working class living conditions, and in the promotion of the pro-natalist ideology of motherhood. According to this logic, physical degeneracy would lead to moral degeneracy, which would weaken the forces of the nation. Doctors, politicians, and activists promoted positive measures, such as

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good nutrition, sport, and fresh air alongside negative measures, such as sterilization, separation in asylums and prisons, and invasive control. In other words, the health of the national community was often believed to depend on, as Mark Mazower phrases it, “suppressing [nation’s] internal biological enemies” – ill, degenerate, and immoral bodies and what they carried. The interwar state increasingly intervened in people’s personal lives in an attempt to mould a new man. The shape, scale, and ethics of these interventions varied in different countries and were widely discussed by scientists, policymakers, charity social workers, doctors, and journalists. Concerns about “decline, degeneration, and reinvigoration of the nation and the race” continued to influence thinking on relations between individuals and communities long after the collapse of the Third Reich, the regime that introduced the most repressive and efficient social policies that culminated in the extermination of millions of people. Echoes of interwar practices and ways of thinking informed the postwar debates on international and local levels, in which the German and Italian models were condemned in favour of an idealized welfare state.50 Humanitarian organizations and refugee communities were permeated with this mentality, adopting its vocabulary and methods.

wart i m e b a c k g r o u n d a n d mi grati ons . terror, f l ig h t , d eP o r tati ons A spectrum of wartime experiences bound Polish dP s, who originated from various strands of the post-1939 migrations. The Nazi and Soviet invasions of September 1939 engendered the first wave of refugees who fled together along with the government through Romania and Hungary to France and other Western countries. The new administrative order divided the country. The Western parts of Poland became annexed by the Third Reich as the Reichsgau Wartheland, the central territory was placed under German administration as the General Government (gg ), the eastern territories became annexed by the Soviet Union to be included in the Ukrainian ssr and the Byelorussian ssr , and the Vilnius region was transferred to Lithuania. After Operation Barbarossa or the Nazi invasion of the ussr , Germany assumed control of the entire territory of pre-war Poland.51 Under the Nazi occupation, the system of terror was all-encompassing, almost exclusively privileging people considered to be ethnic Germans and, to some extent, collaborators, such as segments of the Goral highlander population (called Goralenvolk) and radicalized Ukrainian nationalist groups. The Nazi Generalplan Ost, which envisaged the ethnic cleansing and colonization of Eastern Europe, provided

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the ideological justification for the treatment of the conquered population. However, the emerging net of policies and changeable grassroots solutions created a system that was, to some extent, arbitrary in its details and modes of implementation.52 Nazi policy towards the population of Poland was that of extermination, slave-like subordination, and Germanization. Jews and Romani were subjected to arbitrary imprisonment, forced labour, and mass murder. The Nazis aimed to remove the members of Polish intelligentsia and the upper classes, as well as resistance fighters from the intellectual and cultural leadership through all available means, including direct extermination (the infamous ab -Aktion can serve as an example here). Persecution of persons with mental and physical disabilities escalated from forced sterilization to mass murder. People branded as homosexuals or “asocials” also faced acute discrimination and persecution. Rights of the majority of the population in political, economic, social, and cultural life became gravely reduced. The Nazi sent many men, women, and children to the Third Reich as forced labour and also expropriated and deported 1,709,000 people, mostly from the annexed territories, Pomerania, and Zamojszczyzna, to make space for German settlers.53 Those believed to have German origins could, and at times were compelled to, sign the German People’s List and enjoyed a privileged status. Approximately 200,000 ethnically Polish children selected by the Nazis for their “Aryan features” such as blond hair and fair eyes were given to Lebensborn for adoption by German parents.54 Polish citizens living under the Nazi occupation faced acute economic, social, and cultural discrimination and oppression. Jews and Romani, stripped of most of their rights, were confined to ghettos where conditions deteriorated rapidly. The population, especially in the cities, became progressively pauperized due to food rationing, control of production and employment, requisitions, and contributions. The new legislation prefigured harsh punishment, including the death penalty, for an array of behaviours. Detailed discriminatory regulations followed curfews and rules regulating access to public transport and public institutions. Schools and universities were closed, with exceptions made for trade courses and elementary schools where the number of children declined. Many orphans turned to street begging and prostitution. The occupants reduced cultural and religious activities. The control of the Office of Propaganda hampered publishing and cultural spectacles. In the whole gg, authorities forbade dancing parties and balls. In Warsaw, after the closing of parks and gardens for Poles, came a ban on swimming in the Vistula River and sunbathing on the beach.55 Up against discrimination

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and terror, the underground press widely discussed the issues of ethics and morality. “The notions of good and evil have commingled,” wrote a group of education activists in a clandestine brochure.56 One of the effects of these discussions was the Codex of citizen morality, circulated in occupied Poland, which presented the desirable form of “civilian resistance” and forbade certain behaviours, often under the threat of the death penalty. This brochure, most likely authored by the Polish government-in-exile, condemned behaviour such as keeping close or romantic contact with the enemy, eschewing Polishness, weakening the spirit of resistance, cooperating with the enemy, alcoholism, inappropriate conduct in public, and actions or lack of actions resulting in the harm of the Polish state and the Polish nation.57 These problems surfaced in postwar debates, especially in reckoning with the war, and influenced the shape of the exiled community, as is shown in chapter 3. In the territories annexed by the Soviets, violent subjugation was directed primarily at selected groups of the population. The occupied territories went through rapid Sovietization and collectivization. Attempts at controlling the population included neutralizing or liquidating leaders who were thought to be capable of encouraging resistance against the new order. The culture of the Polish elite found itself under attack. Arrests, mass killings, and deportations followed. The nkvd (People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs) executed about 22,000 Polish prisoners of war, captured by the Red Army, in the Katyń massacre. Intending to eliminate people who were potentially politically dangerous, the Soviet authorities carried out mass deportations to the interior of the ussr.58 These forced resettlements affected more than 350,000 people, the majority of whom were women and children.59 The Soviets incarcerated and deported as prisoners to labour camps and prisons a number of individuals.60 The Polish–Soviet Agreement, signed in 1941 after the Nazi attack on the ussr , allowed some of the deportees to join the newly created army under the command of General Władysław Anders. With Soviet and British support, Anders’s Army and its dependants were able to travel through the Caspian Sea to Iran. From there, most of the women, children, and men unable to carry weapons moved to refugee camps in India, Palestine, Lebanon, British East Africa, and Mexico. The soldiers of Anders’s Army, which reached Italy through Egypt to partake in the Italian Campaign, remained in touch with their dependants, who created a lively refugee community.61 The Poles who became classified as dP s in Germany and Austria in 1945 went through various wartime experiences. Focusing on categories of experience, rather than on categories of people – a strategy used in

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the postwar classification of refugees – helps to underline the notion that most of these people underwent various experiences and confronted them in different, sometimes unique, ways. Almost all of the dP s lived under Nazi or Soviet occupation; some engaged in resistance while all employed various survival strategies; most of them experienced flight, deportations, and forced labour; many were imprisoned in concentration camps and prisons; some engaged in combat and suffered incarceration in Pow camps. The advance of the Wehrmacht impelled some civilians to flee eastward, while others escaped abroad after the Soviet invasion of 17 September 1939. The Polish government, along with part of the army and some civilian refugees, moved to Romania, Hungary, Lithuania, and Latvia. Under the pressure of German diplomacy, the Polish authorities were interned in Romania and only some politicians, mostly from the opposition, managed to move to France where the Polish government-in-exile was formed as a continuation of legal political power.62 Some of the soldiers and civilians who managed to flee to France joined the Polish Armed Forces in the West under British command and, in 1945, took part in the liberation and occupation of Germany where in the aftermath of the war they organized help for Polish dP s and managed dP camps in the region of Emsland. They played an important role in maintaining ideological links with the government-in-exile which, after the Nazi invasion of France, operated from London. Simultaneously, the government maintained close links with the country, supervising the structures of the Polish Underground State and the Home Army (Armia Krajowa). In occupied Poland, during the early stages of the war, while the terror rapidly unfolded with street executions, collective reprisals, hangings, mass shootings, arrests, deportations, and the confinement of Jews and Roma to ghettos where dramatic conditions prevailed, more people tried to escape.63 From the Soviet-occupied regions, the authorities deported groups of Poles, Jews, Belarusians, and Ukrainians eastward, as mentioned above, and placed them in remote settlements and labour camps. The victims conceptualized the extreme hardship and violence they suffered at the hands of local Soviet authorities and the nkvd as a form of national suffering in line with the martyrological conception of Poland as Christ of the nations. Drawing on the testimonies of women deported to the Soviet Union, Katherine Jolluck has convincingly demonstrated that gender-specific violence, especially rape and forced prostitution, did not fit into the narrative of national suffering, making women experience shame and forcing them to maintain silence about their sufferings or excluding them from the national community.64 Some of the refugees

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who were evacuated from the Soviet Union with Anders’s Army ended up in dP camps in Italy and, after the war, made contact with the dP s in Germany and Austria.65 Another experience shared by a number of Poles was combat and incarceration in Pow camps. The Nazis sent 400,000 Polish soldiers captured during the September campaign to camps in the Third Reich.66 They suffered deprivation, a sense of social degradation and helplessness, boredom, feelings of emasculation, and repressed sexuality. Officers remained incarcerated in the camps until the end of the war, while most of the other Pow s were sent to work in the forced labour program. In 1944, the Nazis deported the soldiers of the Warsaw Uprising, including many minors and women, to Pow camps, in particular to Oberlagen, Murnau, and Sandbostel. After the liberation, many of the Pow s assumed leadership positions in the dP camps, supporting the First Armoured Division in managing the camps.67 To supply the economy of the Third Reich with manpower, German employment offices recruited Poles for labour in agriculture and industry in Germany and Austria. Although the German employment offices agitated for voluntary recruitment, in reality most of the 2.83 million Poles, including many women and older children, were enlisted through violent coercion, including raids, round-ups (łapanki), repressions, and compulsory drafts.68 The transports in locked wagons started in October 1939 and lasted, with varying intensity, until the end of 1944, with the last mass transport of civilians occurring after the fall of the Warsaw Uprising.69 At least 5 per cent volunteered to work in the Third Reich, mostly, however, under social and economic coercion.70 Upon arrival in the Reich, doctors and potential employers assessed the deportees in a sort of market, evoking connotations with a cattle or slave market, which would be grotesquely repeated in the postwar period during the recruitment for resettlement schemes (see chapter 8). In the vast pool of foreign workers in the Reich, Poles, along with other Slavs, were at the bottom of the racial hierarchy and received harsh treatment. In some respects, the program of forced labour, based on a “brutal mixture of racist ideology and economic efficiency,” as Cord Pagenstecher puts it, resembled slavery. More significantly, some forced labourers experienced their fate as slavery. Poles often used the terms “slave” and “slavery” in their letters and testimonies, referring to coercion and violence, dreadful conditions, and being assessed, selected, and bought.71 This system, described by Ulrich Herbert as “the largest use of foreign forced labor since the end of slavery in the nineteenth century,” was underpinned by racial inequality.72 Poles were excluded from cultural,

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religious, and social life, faced high penalties for any transgression, and received inadequate alimentation, housing, and medical care.73 The Nazis imposed a series of special regulations, called “Polish decrees,” to protect the purity of the Volk when Germans and their racial “inferiors” lived in close proximity on farms and in the cities. However, those did not prevent sexual abuse or romantic contact. Poles faced penalties, including the death penalty, for having personal and sexual relations with Germans. Many became victims of sexual violence and forced abortions. In many instances, women who gave birth were separated from their babies and forced to return to work shortly after labour.74 Those who ended up on a family-run farm, rather than an industrial site with its usual camp-like living arrangements, indicated that their fate depended heavily on the character and attitude of the owner of the farm. Germans who did not support Nazi policies often made the lives of “their” foreign workers better or at least bearable.75 In their postwar testimonies, forced labourers indicated that their worst experiences were foremost humiliation and degradation, loss of security, fear of the unknown, shock of separation from family and friends, feelings of helplessness and having no rights, and feelings of having lost a period of their lives.76 Many underlined that Germans treated them like “nonpersons” and like slaves.77 Concentration camps and prisons played a pivotal role in breaking Polish resistance and facilitating the further exploitation and extermination of the population. The aim of eliminating the Polish upper classes and the intelligentsia began to be realized in the first months of the war through the mass killings and imprisonment of politicians, artists, priests, scientists, doctors, teachers, and other members of the Polish elites.78 The fate of other Polish victims, those considered “life unworthy of living” (Lebensunwertes Leben) within the Nazi logic of racial hygiene, remains insufficiently researched.79 Hundreds of thousands of Poles, including resistance fighters, communists and social democrats, prostitutes, criminals, and “wandering” children were imprisoned in concentration camps in occupied Poland and in the Reich. For instance, the Nazis deported 140,000 ethnic Poles to Auschwitz, where at least half perished. Until 1941, when the Final Solution was introduced in all its brutality and the site transformed into a death camp, the majority of inmates were Polish Catholics.80 In prison, many victims endured brutal investigations and torture to extort information. Officers and functionaries subjected the inmates of concentration camps to forced nudity, humiliation, starvation, sexual abuse and prostitution, torture, medical experiments, and forced labour. Various hierarchies and networks

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emerged among the prisoners and resulted in uneven treatment and access to extremely scarce resources, as well as tensions between “politicals,” “asocials,” and “criminals.”81 Considering this spectrum of experiences, the common element in all of the above was physical and mental suffering connected with the feeling of being treated in a degrading, humiliating, and inhuman way. Nazi racial ideologies and policies reduced Poles to “subhumans” (Untermenschen) occupying subordinate social positions. The ideological dehumanisation was followed by discrimination and violence, often on a very personal and intimate level.82 The Nazis considered Poles as racially inferior and subjected them to systemic discrimination, random and targeted violence, exploitation, expulsion, and extermination. Entering dP camps, the Poles carried memories of these brutal interventions on the body and psyche.

t r a j e c t o r ie s , l ife s tori es, and im P e r f e c t c a t e g o ri es. bui ldi ng t h e s e c o n d g r e a t emi grati on Out of nearly three million Polish citizens dispersed throughout Europe in the aftermath of the war, 1.4 million found themselves in the Western zones of Germany and Austria.83 The Allies repatriated most of the 700,000 Poles in the Soviet zones, while some people moved to the Western zones, Italy, and elsewhere. According to official statistics, 840,000 Poles received unrra care in September 1945, making up nearly 70 per cent of the total dP population.84 For the next few years, the number of dP s fluctuated, decreasing due to repatriation and increasing with escapees from Poland, newborns, and dP s coming from Italy and outside Europe. In 1946, the Allies decided to transfer Pow s to dP status. This change, however, was not as profound as it may seem. Many Pow s who performed forced labour had dP status from the very beginning. Most of the ex-Pow camps functioned analogously to the dP camps. In 1945, a Polish liaison officer reported that “Pow s escaped from their camps and mingled with dP s … There is no distinction [between them] at all.”85 It quickly became obvious that categorizations created in the planning stage differed from reality. People of various backgrounds, moving in many directions and creating ad hoc groups and alliances, undermined the neat classifications of Allied planners. The national categories imposed by the Allies and unrra soon turned out to be inadequate. Officials had trouble categorizing the displaced by nationality, trying to

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interpret various markers of identity, such as place of birth, language, ethnic origin, or religion.86 As Ruth Balint points out, national identity became a fluid and flexible concept as dP s tried to reinvent their ethnicities in the game with the officials: “Hiding and changing national identities were common practices.”87 Soviet dP s hid in the camps under various assumed identities. Ukrainians, including those from Eastern Ukraine, often identified themselves as Polish Ukrainians. The bureaucracy of armies and humanitarian organizations attempted to simplify and standardize their life stories and separate them into neat categories to effectively provide care and exercise control. An analysis of memoirs, letters, and questionnaires reveals more complicated trajectories that led to their displacement. Many cases defied simple categorization. For example, the Child Search Branch, entrusted by the International Tracing Service with tracing missing children, considered Janusz B.88 to be an unaccompanied child, as his brother was in an Allied-controlled prison.89 The boy took part in the Warsaw Uprising when he was fourteen years old and was then deported to the prison camp at Fallingbostel, where he spent one month before being sent to work on a farm. Three months later, Janusz was moved to dig the ramparts near Aachen, from where he found refuge with British soldiers. He was then locked in the Pow camp in Wittbek. Subsequently, he spent time on leave with a friend in Hamburg, before heading to Wesuwe and being directed to Niederlangen. In August 1945, he arrived at the dP camp in Maczków and began attending school there.90 Another dP , by the name of Edward D., wrote about himself, “I am a war refugee. I left my home in 1939 and I was deported to Soviet Russia to Siberia. From there through Iran, Iraq and Palestine I reached Germany. My life presents itself as tragic, one could say just unbearable. There is no work, food is very miserable. So I would like to earn for bread with my own hands.”91 Bruno G. narrated his story in a letter when searching for work and resettlement (the original spelling is retained): “I have lost my home and all my things because the Nazis have imprisoned me in kz Stutthof and others [camps] … Then Russian compelled me to serve them as an interpreter. But 1945 I flew into the English Zone of Germany and got patient in a hospital.”92 The story of Kazimierz J., described in his letter to the American Committee for Resettlement of Polish Displaced Persons (acrPdP ), ran along different lines. In September 1939, he crossed the Polish border with the government and was interned in Hungary, where he engaged in “secret work for the Allies.” As a result, he and a group of colleagues were arrested

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Figure 1.2 | Young Polish women in Maczków dP camp in the British zone of occupied Germany, 1945.

by the Gestapo in December 1944 and he was sent to Mauthausen under sentence of death. He was liberated by the American army at the very last moment.93 Yet, in this plethora of experiences and trajectories, most dPs shared the common experience of having lived under Nazi occupation or escaping it, suffering in prisons and concentration camps, and most commonly of working as forced labourers in the fields, mines, and factories of the Third Reich. The gender composition of the Polish population in Germany and Austria was uneven, with more men than women, considering that most of the former Pow s and soldiers were male plus there were slightly more male forced labourers than female. For example, in Emsland (the territory under the control of the First Armoured Division), 45 per cent were men, 40 per cent women, 15 per cent were children with dP status, and 91 per cent of men and 9 per cent of women had Pow status.94 For the whole of western Germany and Austria we can assume the following numbers: in mid-1946: 47 per cent were men, 37 per cent were women, and 16 per cent were children.95 Younger people made up the largest proportion, as 69 per cent were between eighteen and forty-five years old.96

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Regarding class structure, the Polish dP population consisted mostly of people from peasant and working-class backgrounds. “Most displaced persons did not belong to traditional social elites,” as Anna Holian emphasizes; the majority of them “had worked in agriculture, industry, crafts, and trade.” Forced labourers were mostly “young women and men from peasant and working-class backgrounds with little formal education.”97 The data of summer 1949, quoted by Jaroszyńska-Kirchmann, indicates the following occupational breakdown among Polish dPs: 68 per cent farmers, 12 per cent workers, 15 per cent craftsmen and artisans, 5 per cent professional middle class or the intelligentsia.98 Łuczak suggests that 80 per cent could be categorized as workers, including agricultural workers, 8.2 per cent as craftsmen, 1.2 per cent as teachers.99 As war and displacement undermined the hegemony of Polish elites and reduced class differences which were acute in pre-war Poland, many of the lower-class refugees saw the possibility of economic and social advancement in exile and resettlement.100 Most pre-war elites (including politicians, generals, and artists) were concentrated in London. At the end of the war, there were around 90,000–95,000 Poles, including 21,744 civilians, in Great Britain. The demobilization of Polish armies brought another 200,000 there from 1945 to 1947, and only half of them returned to Poland.101 dP s resettling from continental Europe made the number rise to 160,000 in the late 1940s. The majority, or 80 per cent, were men. While this group of emigrants concentrated in London, they aspired to extend their power over all Poles abroad in the form of an exiled quasi-state. It attempted not only to build political and economic power but also to regulate the political and moral attitudes of the people.102 After the Yalta agreements and General Anders becoming commander-in-chief of the Polish Armed Forces in the West, some Polish refugees outside Europe sent declarations of loyalty.103 The Polish upper classes and intelligentsia went through the process of declassing, unable to keep their previous material status and in many instances even their profession. This was particularly visible among the Poles in Great Britain and was exacerbated with every passing month. To uphold the last reserves of their social status, those hit the hardest by this process often tried living a “double life,” to use General Stanisław Sosabowski’s term. This war hero, commander of the Polish 1st Independent Parachute Brigade, who escaped after the end of the war to London and took a job as a warehouseman, continued to participate in national celebrations and the social life of a Polish

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exile. Similar was the fate of many Polish generals who undertook manual labour to keep afloat.104 Anti-communist political and social elites were desperate to exercise power over the masses of displaced Poles. Adam Pragier, acting as the minister of information in the exiled government, pronounced the emigration to be political, not economic. Poland was under foreign occupation, he claimed in his lecture reprinted in the exiled press, and the aim of the emigration was to fight for freedom and independence. Poles in exile were the only element connecting Poland to the West, he insisted, linking the contemporary refugeedom with the political exiles of 1831 and 1863. He believed that in 1945 Polish exiles were better prepared to fulfil their role than their counterparts in the nineteenth century had because they represented not only elites but the whole of society: “Numerical strength and broad social composition of this environment, close to a cross-section of society, make it resemble the nation in the country so closely that it has the right to consider itself a Polish Nation in Exile (Naród Polski na Wygnaniu).” Class became a crucial factor in shaping the new Polish emigration.105 With time, more dPs of various social backgrounds embraced the idea of the nation in exile. “In our village called Lutter, a Poland is being built because our Polish nation is getting mobilized,” one camp inhabitant wrote in the dP school chronicle.106 The concept of the “exile mission,” described by Jaroszyńska-Kirchmann, explains how the idea was accepted by the vast mass of immigrants who framed their endeavours as patriotic and anti-Soviet. National mythologies came to aid in forging unity.107 Post-Yalta emigration was to function as the antithesis and an alternative to the People’s Poland Republic, and a continuation of the political and cultural traditions of the Second Polish Republic (1918–39).108 The Second Great Emigration provided a narrative structure mythologizing their refugee experience. In an article for the 1949 issue of Kultura, Maria Czapska, an essayist and historian of aristocratic origins who fled to France in 1945, linked contemporary emigration with nineteenth century emigrations, claiming they all had a common cause – the Polish–Russian conflict.109 History was repeating itself, she insisted. Just as in 1831, the year of the unsuccessful November uprising, had not crushed hopes for independence, so 1945 was not the end of the Polish cause. Then and now, she wrote, refugees rightly believed that a new conflict would arise to upturn the existing order. “That generation left us in their testament their experience and in this experience an order,” she

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asserted.110 Aleksander Grobicki, a journalist by profession and a soldier in the Polish Armed Forces in the West during the war, adopted a similar tone when talking about a group of political exiles deported to the usa after the November Uprising. “We are the heirs of these deported refugees” – he emphasized, mentioning the huge numbers of Polish migrants who fled to America in the late nineteenth century, and specified that contemporary emigrants were the heirs of the political refugees from the November Uprising of 1831.111 Prolonged encampment politicized dP s. A Polish unrra employee reported, “During the six years of war the mass of dP s living in camps here has become deeply politically minded, and they are greatly interested in world events, particularly those affecting Poland. Listening to broadcasts, papers and political discussions being the main topic of interest in camps.”112 The messianic tradition of Polish Romanticism fuelled the ideological construction of the Second Great Emigration.113 Polishness in exile functioned as a cultural and political identity. Stanisław Rola-Arciszewski postulated that “Polish refugees should be treated as a separate national group with their clear and characteristic features of mental structure, such as attitudes, customs, traditions, aptitudes, and interests.”114 Reconsidering and reconstructing ethnic divisions allowed for a wider alliance, bringing the Warsaw and Lwów intelligentsia, Silesian miners, peasants from Volhynia, Podolia, and Ruthenia, and the urban poor closer. In a new order of the nationstate, identifying as Poles appeared as the most effective way to represent group interests. The Allies shaped divisions between dP s through policies of categorization. Refugees had to speak in national terms if they wanted to get assistance. Creating a strong common narrative furthered their cause in the international area and at the same time equipped individuals with tools for pursuing their case and claiming their rights. Still, regional, professional and other identity groups in dP camps created circles and associations, such as Lwowians, Kresowiacy, Kaszubians, journalists, etc. However, a group of Lwowians or journalists would have had little chance of obtaining aid for emigration, whereas Polishness acted as an umbrella identity capable of securing help and recognition. The idea of inscribing Polish postwar refugeedom in the long traditions of the patriotic struggle for independence came from the top and was supported by the mass of dP s. Debates over the meaning of Polishness and the process of forming a cultural community in exile – the Second Great Emigration – shaped the new layer of the global Polish diaspora.

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c o n c l u s ion The Poles entering the dP camps were bound and divided along the spectrum of wartime experiences. The racial logic that underpinned social and economic policies ideologically degraded them to the status of Slavic “subhumans,” destined for subordination or annihilation. The Poles experienced brutal occupation, flights, deportations, forced labour, and incarceration as violent and dehumanizing. The elites predominantly framed these experiences as ruinous for the individual and for the collective, or as attacks on Polishness, national honour and dignity, and the biological and cultural essence of the nation. The cultural legacies of debates over the meaning of Polishness, migration, and war influenced the shape of postwar Polish refugeedom. Nineteenth-century and interwar debates on the nation, the body, and the community informed Polish exiled elites’ approaches and practices towards displaced Poles and their mission in the post-Yalta order. The ideological basis for constructing the archipelago of dP camps as “a miniature Poland” – a space in which Catholic Polish speakers would be integrated into a disciplined, strong, and pure exile nation – rested on the traditions of social intervention, organic work, and practices of reforming the national body. Drawing on pre-1918 traditions of social intervention without the state apparatus, the Polish exiled elites provided the displaced Poles with care and control in terms of their material, emotional, and spiritual needs, as will be shown in the next chapter.

2 “Care and Control”: Peace in the Ruins of the Third Reich

“Today our task is to mobilize all opportunities in the field of broadcasting so our voice – true and unadulterated – can reach not only the Country but also the Poles scattered in the world. They should find in it comfort and encouragement to persevere in the struggle for the most crucial right of the Polish Nation,” read the Polish government-in-exile’s plan to use radio broadcasting to unite Poles abroad against the Soviet power in Poland and to prevent them from returning to the Communist-ruled territories.1 “The battle for Poland,” as General Anders put it, had begun.2 In Germany in May 1945, two months after these words were written, a group of liberated forced labourers gathered around a radio receiver. Wanda, a young nurse deported to work in a factory after the Warsaw Uprising, noted they got a signal from London. But her friend Ola turned the knobs and caught the one from Warsaw. Instead of listening to the Polish government-in-exile broadcast from London or to a Western station, the words from a station in Warsaw where the communist government entrenched its power reached them. Wanda hastily scribbled in her worn-out journal, “Thousands of memories, Poland, Warsaw, Cracow, family home, everything appears in my mind’s eye – another world, the world of good people, of countrymen, of brothers, oh, to already be there, among our own, with them. To hear the Polish language, to see friendly faces. Enough of this wandering – home! Home!”3 The journal she kept during the period of forced labour and during the liberation reveals that she missed her homeland dearly and, pondering what was happening in the country, considered returning to be her best option: “I don’t believe that Bolsheviks do any repressions against Poles. And to think that in a week or two I will already be in Poland. Apparently Poles have a choice to go to the West or to the country. The West allures me, to get to know France, maybe

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Figure 2.1 | Wanda Ciecierska with her future husband in a dP camp.

Switzerland, to learn languages, but at the same time the thought about my family, about those who stayed in Poland haunts me … No, I am coming back to them.”4 However, she never returned. The Allies prevented her from immediate repatriation and the months she spent in the dP camps in occupied Germany changed her thinking to such an extent that she decided to seek resettlement abroad. She worked in a hospital, learned English, and picked up new songs and cooking recipes she meticulously copied into her notebooks. She got married to a fellow dP of Russian origin and resettled in the United States, boarding the ship with her diaries, photos, and cookbooks. This chapter discusses how the contours of refugee assistance, shaped by wartime planning for postwar reconstruction, influenced the fate of people liberated in the territory of the Third Reich. While the expectation was to act according to coordinated planning and policies, the approaches of the Allies and the Polish government-in-exile diverged

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after the decisions of the Yalta conference. Peace planning and relief operations became a field of ideological struggle, eventually trapping liberated Poles in the repatriation versus emigration conundrum of early Cold War tensions. In the war’s wake, politicians and military men were rethinking the world order while refugees tried to navigate the new rules governing migration. The war and its aftermath was also a time for reimagining the Polish state, community, and nation, and for drawing up plans for the future state which clashed with the reality of new communist power. This chapter shows how these sentiments and plans were translated into refugee assistance in the “rubble time” or the first years of postwar physical, legal, and moral reconstruction. By pinpointing the actors, networks, and sites of the post-1945 displacement, it describes the position of Polish dP s in the new order governed by rules stipulated by the Allies at Yalta and Potsdam. The emergence and functioning of dP camps in divided Germany and Austria are seen here as a product of clashes and cooperation between Allied military authorities and international aid organizations on one side and the Polish armies, Anders’s community, and the Polish government-in-exile (London) on the other. Emissaries of the new Polish communist government (Warsaw) entered this landscape when the camps were already established, undermining and eventually superseding the anti-repatriation liaison officers and social workers. By sketching the policies of three occupying powers (the usa , the uk , and France) and indicating how conditions in zones, regions, and camps varied, this chapter situates Polish dP s in the context of postwar displacement and within the networks of refugee aid.

Pl a n n in g t he Peace: u n r r a ’ s m is s io n a n d t he role of the i ro Early on in the war, Allied planners anticipated a large-scale humanitarian crisis and made plans accordingly. As early as in 1939, American president Franklin D. Roosevelt had talked about “the problem of the human refugee” that would follow the war. Explaining the rationale of humanitarian intervention, he called for the founding of an organization that could provide relief and help for victims of the war and “German barbarism.” In Washington, dc , in 1943, representatives of forty-four countries signed an agreement creating the unrra . Three-quarters of the nearly $4 billion budget came from the usa , a big share came from the uk , and the rest from the other countries. This specialized agency preceded the founding of the United Nations. unrra aimed to provide

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immediate relief in terms of food, accommodation, and medicine. Their second, equally important goal was to help rehabilitate people who would be sent home, wherever that might be, and to take part in the economic reconstruction of the continent.5 Dean Acheson, US secretary of state, pointed out that humanitarian intervention was strictly connected to military operations and was a necessary component of victory. “They have suffered unbearably,” he stated, referring to the masses of people enslaved by the Nazis, explaining that their miserable and unclear situation made them “the most combustible material in the world,” which could transform frustration into civil war.6 The term displaced persons had been coined during the war as their presence in a war-torn Europe was long expected. unrra saw itself as much more than just a “soup kitchen charity” and was intended to assist dP s on their passage to normality. Relief workers, psychologists, and medical experts drafted manuals and brochures that assessed the physical and mental state of dP s. Policy makers categorized people entitled to receive help, dividing them according to nationality and wartime record. Humanitarian planning became intertwined with military and political goals.7 In Germany and Austria, unrra operated under the authority of the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Forces (shaef ) and, after July 1945, the Allied Military Government. The division of responsibilities between the military and humanitarian workers was meticulously specified on paper, but, in practice, it remained unclear in matters concerning the dP s’ basic needs. In the first months, military men and relief workers prepared housing, handed out cans and packages, sprayed people with ddt , registered them, and tried to convince them to stay put in the assembly centres to prevent them from clogging up the roads and enhancing the chaos.8 The general advice to the liberated was to stay put when the Allied armies arrived. Drawing on experiences from the previous wars, the Allies anticipated that “the unauthorised mass trekking of displaced persons is a problem fraught with the gravest dangers. These movements, when they occur, become a disturbing element to the Military ... The mass trekking of persons without adequate means of support is a very serious factor in causing the outbreak and spread of epidemics and disease.”9 Toward the goal of providing shelter, they directed that “scattered dP s will be brought into collecting centres to speed up and facilitate the repatriation operations.” The military sent flying squads to gather people, using food as one of the means of control by handing it to “trekkers on roads whilst collecting them and directing them to camps.”10

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Figure 2.2 | A Polish family makes a home out of a large room in the captured Wehrmacht post of Gneisenau Kaserne. Displaced persons were housed in a variety of accommodations.

The fear that displaced persons posed a threat to local populations and would spread vermin and unsanitary conditions informed the first efforts to control the liberated territories. This was coupled with a desire to act quickly to mould and civilize refugees (see chapter 6). Experts anticipated a rapid deterioration “in their psyche and morale,” predicting this would exacerbate the problem of their orderly repatriation. Apart from strict policing, experts also suggested preventative measures of control and methods based on persuasion: “The supply of simple emergency food and assistance gives evidence of understanding and goodwill devoid of political or other discrimination and the people may thereby be persuaded to accept guidance and control through the promise of more elaborate information, food, shelter, clothing and medical aid, and of transport, to be obtained at the organised camps set up for this purpose.”11 The creation of unrra marked the beginning of a new era in Western humanitarianism with its increasing Americanization, medicalization, and professionalization.12 Drawing on previous experiences in the field of relief and benevolence, the agency consciously shifted from the

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“charitable phase” of assistance. As “a product of Anglo-American post-conflict planning,” unrra exported Western ideas of peace, citizenship, society, family, health, and wellbeing.13 Bearing the ideological legacies of the Depression and New Deal social policies, it promoted active welfare and self-help.14 The slogan “help dP s help themselves” supported idealistic social workers in implementing a program of activities that comprised vocational and language courses, schooling, appointing dP representatives, artistic activities, and cultural events. Malcolm Proudfoot, a US army officer who assisted dP s in postwar Germany, stated in his study on population displacement that it aimed to help them to “make a new start as happy, well-adjusted human beings.”15 However, approaches to the mission of relief and rehabilitation and in-field practices varied in the three occupation zones, with each occupier drawing on their specific cultural heritage. All three occupiers agreed that dP s must be rehabilitated not “by bread alone.”16 Americans promoted a secular approach to humanitarianism, permeated by influences of psychotherapy and a belief in the power of “self-help,” underpinned by traditional approaches to charity. The British, while trying to limit expenditures, focused on cultivating civic and democratic values, echoing missionary and colonial traditions, as well as the legacies of Victorian charity.17 The French, preoccupied with reconstruction at home and re-asserting their position as one of the great powers, drew on colonial experiences and republican traditions in providing aid and rehabilitation. However, as Laure Humbert argues, approaches to rehabilitation were not confined to individual zones; rather, they were characterized by the inter-zonal transfer of expertise, the circulation of ideas, the processes of imitation, and the re-interpretation of various methods and traditions.18 unrra hastily recruited people from around the world, bringing to Germany and Austria very few experienced relief workers, many well-meaning individuals with different levels of preparation for this kind of work, and some, as William Hitchcock puts it, “do-gooders, zealots, proselytizers, church folk, amateur doctors, adventure seekers, retired majors from the British colonies, New Dealers, wheeler-dealers, and other people who perhaps wanted a piece of the ‘good war.’”19 unrra workers often considered themselves agents of postwar democratization and enforcers of human rights, as G. Daniel Cohen notes.20 Their approaches carried echoes of the “civilizing mission” and a new mission of teaching liberal democracy and rebuilding civilization in wartorn Europe. unrra staff members had little or no training but quite a lot of liberty in interpreting the organization’s mandate, based on their own experiences and positionality.21 The army and unrra ’s mission and

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regulations, formulated in a paternalistic style mostly by eminent men, were often implemented with self-sacrificing maternalism by female relief workers and with militaristic inclination by male military personnel and Polish ex-Pow s on the ground. As unrra workers rarely spoke any Polish or German, they could effectively communicate only with the elite Polish refugees who spoke some English or French. The training for British social workers focused mainly on management and infrastructure while the implications of foreign language communication, language preparation in general, and issues of cultural understanding were absent.22 Thus, most contact between foreign unrra employees and Poles required intermediaries. Members of the intelligentsia and the upper classes, officers from the Polish armies, and young people who had picked up some language during the war served as interpreters and translators, mediating between languages and cultures. Another class of unrra personnel was recruited in Germany and Austria from disbanded soldiers, exiles, and dP s themselves. Linguistic expertise, indeed any expertise, was not required. unrra and its social workers’ ideas for the rehabilitation of dPs intertwined and clashed with refugees’ own ideas of recovery and with the agenda of voluntary organizations, anti-communist Polish factions, and representatives of the Warsaw government. unrra ceased to exist in 1947 in the thickening mist of the Cold War. The problem of the remaining dP s was handed over to the newly created iro . As it became clear that repatriation was not an option for everyone, this new body focused primarily on resettlement over repatriation. The establishment of iro was part of a new logic arising from the emerging Cold War and the rivalry between the usa and the ussr . Thus, iro ’s activities were indicative of the new logic of care and protection towards refugees that was coming from the international community. Resettlement was iro ’s most important and most remarkable policy. The resettlement program – a new instrument of the international community – was heavily criticized by the ussr and the governments of communist-dominated countries, including the Polish People’s Republic.23 The iro stated in its constitution that it aimed to assist “genuine refugees and displaced persons” and to protect their “rights and legitimate interests.” It had already been specified in the preamble that dP s “should be put to useful employment in order to avoid the evil and anti-social consequences of continued idleness.”24 This was a clear reference to previous experiences with dP s around which narratives of their apathy, idleness, and passiveness grew. iro staff members were recruited overwhelmingly from the unrra and, to a smaller extent,

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from voluntary organizations already operating in assembly centres. Their focus shifted towards vocational training, language courses, assessing eligibility, and organizing screenings that included health checks.25 When the iro ceased to exist in 1951, responsibility for the remaining dPs, whose status then changed to Heimatloser Ausländer (homeless foreigners), was transferred to the state and the local authorities.26 Some dPs began or continued to work in the German and Austrian economy, obtaining low-paid jobs or receiving social benefits, while other refugees stayed in isolated self-run camps and settlements. In 1951, the newly created Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (unhcr ) provided limited assistance for the remaining “hard core.”27 This is one side of the story of the aid for Europe’s displaced, quite well-known in anglophone literature. In parallel, the Polish government-in-exile prepared to extend care for the Poles abroad and made plans for rebuilding Poland and the Polish nation after the devastating war. Those plans translated into networks of refugee assistance that were entwined in the Allies’ infrastructure and practices, undermining its overarching aim of a quick resolution to the refugee problem.

“ m a t e r ia l a n d m o ral helP ”: P ol i s h g o v e r n m e n t - in - e xi le P eace Planni ng The Allied plans were communicated to the Polish government-in-exile in 1944. shaef , unrra , and national governments were supposed to coordinate efforts and divide responsibilities to effectively police and control the liberated people in the ruins of the Third Reich.28 Coordinated planning focused on “care and control” leading towards repatriation and reconstruction. The Polish government-in-exile planned in advance, starting as early as 1941, to provide relief to Poles abroad and take them under its wing. It assisted Polish refugees throughout the war, especially evacuees from the ussr , during their stay in settlements around the world. It tried to monitor the situation of Polish citizens deported or imprisoned in the territories occupied by the Nazis, planning for wide-ranging aid action leading to repatriation at the war’s end. The aims of the Allies and the Polish government-in-exile diverged after the Yalta decision to alter Poland’s borders, with a highpoint reached in the decision to withdraw support for the government in July 1945. The ideological shift to depicting dP s as anti-communist warriors instead of a nuisance and unwilling repatriates came later with the intensifying Cold War. The restoration of order in Europe would “require some reasonable care and control of displaced persons and refugees after the termination

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of enemy authority over them,” wrote Kazimierz Schally, chief of the Polish Military Mission, to General A.W. Gullion from shaef in September 1944. He continued, “their return to suitable homes in their own countries should be effected expeditiously as military necessities and political and economic considerations will permit.” His suggestion was to “limit the movement of displaced persons and refugees to a minimum, through ‘standstill’ instructions, regulations of frontiers, and other appropriate measures, until their repatriation, settlement, or other disposition has been authorized”; “provide the necessary care and control of such persons, including medical supervision to prevent epidemics, pending their repatriation or other disposition.” To achieve this, they planned to register dP s, establish processing centres, and appoint liaison or consular officers. At that time, they anticipated supporting mass repatriation, which entailed “admit[ing] into Poland Polish nationals displaced by the war into other countries without discrimination on account of race, religion or political belief.”29 Already in 1944, the Polish government in London anticipated difficulties with repatriation, estimating there were 2.4 million Polish citizens in Germany alone. They understood that the matter of repatriation was complicated since part of Poland might be “under foreign occupation or control” resulting in a number of Polish citizens refusing repatriation. “Polish territory in general, having been fought over twice in recent years, will have suffered so much devastation that the replacement of displaced population may not be possible until some measure of re-establishment of the country’s economic life has taken place,” they warned.30 Winning these people’s minds while they were still abroad became a pressing matter. Józef Lipski, the head of the Political Division of the General Staff, emphasized that the Poles in Germany who belonged to the category of dP s were one of the government’s “principal problems,” fearing they would be moved to the Soviet zone.31 The chief of the General Staff, General Stanisław Kopański, urged the prime minister “to come with immediate material and moral help to the Polish population deported by Germans from the Country who are now in horrible living conditions … in Germany, Belgium, Holland, and France.”32 In a coded telegram dated 24 April 1945, he ordered the coordinated self-organization of Poles “by all available means” through Polish liaison officers in accordance with shaef instructions: “Representatives of the Polish organised group have to assert that their state authority is the Polish government in London and that they expect and demand to be put in contact with their military representatives. They must avoid being forcibly moved to the East and possibly being put at the disposal

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of Soviet authorities.” Kopański strongly opposed forced repatriation, invoking humanitarian considerations and respect to human rights.33 Postponing and later hindering repatriation was a planned strategy as the government attempted to keep the highest possible number of Poles outside of communist Poland. To keep masses of Poles abroad as a social base supporting the legal authorities, they focused on convincing those who were undecided to remain in exile.34 “Today only the refugees (uchodźstwo) can represent the Polish independent thought. This group consists of the army and the civilians,” noted Doctor Władysław Józef Zaleski, lawyer and diplomat, one of the prominent emigration activists, in the letter to Adam Tarnowski, the minister of foreign affairs.35 The elites increasingly saw Poles abroad as the guardians of Polish tradition and the core of true Polishness. While the Polish government initially anticipated the immense task of providing for and repatriating millions of citizens and the subsequent reconstruction of the war-torn country, they did not expect to have to organize life in exile in the long term. From February 1945, plans for repatriation were dwarfed by attempts to figure out the next step and to organize the community in exile in the shadow of looming military conflict with the Soviet Union. The plan was to unite and influence this new group of emigrants and use them as a reservoir of soldiers – first to fight the Nazis, then in a potential confrontation with the ussr . But, the genealogy of this idea predated 1945. In 1943, in a top-secret document, Władysław Sikorski, the prime minister of the Polish government-in-exile and the commander-in-chief of the Polish Armed Forces, indicated that Polish emigrants were an important factor in Polish politics and military efforts. They should be united: “the vital forces of emigration” should be preserved and recruitment to the army should be conducted as soon as possible.36 In a memorandum to Anthony Eden, Count Edward Raczyński, at that time the Polish ambassador to the uk , proposed delaying repatriation and enlisting into the Polish Armed Forces all Polish citizens then in captivity in Germany who were of military age.37 The First Armoured Division under General Stanisław Maczek, assembled in 1942 in Scotland, administered one of the regions in occupied Germany, the so-called Polish occupation zone. They aimed to bring Polish citizens into the camps they ran and compiled a list of those who could be “absorbed into the military”; one of its main aims.38 After the Yalta conference, General Anders, acting as commander-in-chief, turned to the officers during the briefing, claiming that Poland, “as a

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state and as a nation,” found itself in a tragic situation and was being forcibly deprived of its national identity. “We are the armed forces of the independent Commonwealth,” he asserted, underlining that the emigrants, and especially the soldiers, were the Polish military fighting for their country’s independence and continuing the war started in 1939. Seeing emigration as the basis of “the military forces of the Polish nation” fighting in the “Battle for Poland,” he emphasized that “there will not be world peace without the Poland we carry in our hearts.” This struggle, he believed, connected Poles in Poland and Poles abroad, enjoying a wide social support: “Today in the country, even though the blood flows like rivers and people are being deported in hundreds of wagons, from every house, from every peasant hut – our brothers turn their thoughts towards us and only towards us.”39 The undertone of messianism present in his speech played on the nineteenth century topos of Poland as a Christ of nations. The Polish refugeedom through its sacrifice and struggle was to save Poles in the country, whose suffering united them in spite of their various social origins. This move of turning to the masses for support does not come as a surprise. The shocking devastation of the war kindled attempts to reimagine the Polish state and Polish community, and to rethink values that underwrote the interwar Polish republic. Both in the country and in exile, radicalizing intelligentsia, looking critically at interwar Poland and the period of occupation, envisaged social and political reform. During Nazi occupation, as historian Tomasz Szarota writes, there emerged a “vision of the social justice, equality and brotherhood – the idea of socialist humanism.”40 The social inequalities of the Second Polish Republic were increasingly seen not only as injustice but as mistakes undermining the stability of the state. This reflection and the readiness to act came too late. The late efforts to envisage a more just Polish community did not manage to save the upper classes, the government, or the former system of governance. However, the reform-oriented thinking shaped the emerging community in exile. Conflicting opinions, intensified by personal rivalry, became more acute in the postwar period with political parties fighting over the direction of Polish exile politics.41 The remaining Sanation politicians in the government continued to hold strong positions after the war, intensifying internal conflicts with nationalist, socialist, and peasant politicians.42 Two prime ministers in exile – Stanisław Mikołajczyk and his successor Tomasz Arciszewski – represented the reformist camp. This was reflected in the actions of the government toward the displaced population.

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re i m a g in in g f u t u r e P o land and uni ti ng P e as a n t s a n d w o r k e r s a gai nst communi sm Social reform was already envisaged by the leaders of the underground structures in occupied Poland. Stefan Grot-Rowecki, leader of the Polish underground army, later renamed the Home Army, wrote about his vision of the future reborn Poland in an order to his soldiers in December 1941: As the government [in exile] repeatedly announced and in accordance with the prevailing opinion of the country, future Poland will be a democratic country … The marginalisation of the popular masses and their lack of influence on the way of ruling them will not happen again. There will be social justice, public morality, and honesty in the public life; people will be judged according to their real social and professional value. In Poland, improving the standards of living of the broad masses of people will be a constant object of the government’s efforts. Poland will be a country where internal conflicts will be dealt with only in accordance with the constitution. This is the Poland we will be fighting for. Grot-Rowecki saw the realization of this goal in the effort of society as a whole, embracing “all spheres and classes.” He wanted to fight for the “full, independent Commonwealth” with borders and living standards that would ensure that the catastrophe of September 1939 would not be repeated. He mentioned that the members of the anti-fascist resistance were the heirs to the traditions of struggle for independence.43 The idea of uniting the inhabitants of the so-called Polish lands of different social classes in the struggle for independence dates back to the nineteenth century when the peasantry’s lack of support for the upper-class uprising was blamed for its failure. The new meaning this idea gained in post1945 exile contained residues of those hopes and fears. To reconstruct independent Poland, socially and politically, required a broad cross-class alliance. In late 1943, Tadeusz Bór-Komorowski, the subsequent leader of the Home Army, wrote to government delegate Jan Stanisław Jankowski about the urge “to tie wider strata of the nation with the insurrection action.” To achieve it, the authorities needed to “link the social aspirations of the worker and peasant masses with the idea of struggle for independence of Poland as a democratic state that guarantees social justice.” Creating the right socio-political atmosphere was the first step toward restructuring Poland after the end of the

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war. Bór-Komorowski warned that if the government would not issue a strong-worded address promising changes in social legislation, the agrarian system, and self-government, it would lose the rest of the social support. “In Polish society, the anti-Soviet attitude is weakening and a mood that views the Soviets as saviours has awakened,” he insisted, warning that under current conditions the ussr would be seen as an attractive alternative because of it is social system. He reported that the propaganda of the Polish Workers’ Party (PPr ) and other radical left groups opposed to the Polish government-in-exile was quite successful among some “politically inexperienced” groups.44 In 1944, the Polish Underground published a socio-political manifesto, O co walczy Naród Polski? (What is the Polish nation fighting for?), that envisaged a series of reforms to eradicate class inequalities by means of planned economy, agrarian reform, free schooling and access to culture, and other radical changes. Emphasis was on the revival of the nation through elevating the peasants: “In the millions of peasant masses we can see the inexhaustible force of the future and the source of national energy.”45 This approach reflected wider fears that without the promise of social and political reforms Polish people would turn to communism. Obviously, this was part of a longer and wider intellectual and political movement growing stronger across Europe in the pre-war years. As historian Anne Applebaum explains in relation to the rising number of communist sympathizers in the interwar period, the popularity of the far left grew out of a disillusionment with national politics and national traditions, as well as out of fear of rising right-wing attitudes in 1930s Europe and the failures of capitalism.46 During and after the war these sentiments were at times reforged into reformist attempts to rebuild Poland in an effort to save it from becoming Sovietized, culturally and politically. The idea of social and political reform reached the government in London where it was debated, creating clashes between conservative factors and more reform-oriented politicians and officials. A bill of the rural reform – one of the most burning issues of interwar Poland – had been discussed and drafted in 1943. The controversy surrounding the bill can be illustrated with the words of right-wing former minister of justice Marian Seyda. He commented that work on the reform was taking time away from the war effort and did not serve national unity. While he maintained he was not against the “rational rural reform,” he considered working on the project in the current situation as a distraction from the aims of the war.47 This stance characterized more conservative and right-wing factors which prevailed in the government at that time.

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Still, Polish politicians in London understood the need to reform the Polish political system and declared it a necessity to work on the new constitution right after the catastrophe of the lost September campaign of 1939. In 1941, the government-in-exile established the Commission for Political Reform (Komisja Spraw Ustrojowych) under the guidance of Professor Stanisław Grabowski.48 To ensure the reconstruction of the country, the project proposed a strong executive with the role of the president strengthened and a planned economy directed by state authorities. Envisaging the democratization of public life, it emphasized the role of peasants and workers in shaping the future of the country: “The Polish state must rest on the patriotism of wide masses of its citizens, on their participation in the public life and the sense of responsibility for the fate of the state, developed and strengthen through such participation.” Asserting that “people’s masses will be increasingly deciding about the fate of Poland,” it acknowledged the entrance of the hitherto marginalized citizens in the realm of politics. “Peasant and worker stratum,” it contended, would need “political refinement.”49 Church dignitaries speculated about the new order in Poland as well. August Hlond, the primate of Poland, wrote while in exile in France about a new reborn Poland, one to emerge from the war as the “spiritual ownership of all citizens.” He believed that “the people (lud) must be transformed into a nation,” and everyone must be gathered around one idea but underlined that “the power cannot be executed by the masses but by a small group of competent people; there must be hierarchy and elite.” Claiming that government by the people or by councils was harmful and chaotic, he called for a loosely defined “people’s monarchy,” with the king in a strong position, in which he saw the rebirth of the state and consolidation of the nation.50 These dreams were crushed when the communists gained power in Poland in 1945. What remained was the understanding that only a wide social alliance would give the government-in-exile a chance to retain its legitimacy. While its representatives publicly asserted that the Polish population both in the country and as emigrants wholeheartedly supported the government, secret correspondence and intelligence reports reveal deeper concerns. The officials tried to estimate the scale of support and to monitor anti-government and pro-communist moods. In the information material for military leaders and education officers, the authorities tried to emphasize the unity of Polish society, reporting positively on the situation in Poland: “The vast majority of Polish society took a negative stance on the new invader, however, mentally and economically exhausted by six years of contending with poverty, the

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tormented population is beginning to come forward to cooperate and to take up positions in the search of a way out.”51 After the Yalta conference, the Polish political elites in London started to prepare a strategy to unify Poles in an anti-communist struggle. In a top-secret document sent to minister of national defence Major Gorgolewski, the head of the Defence Intelligent Service expressed fears about a split among the officers in face of the government’s calls to take a negative stance on the Lublin government and repatriation. He claimed that although the mood among the soldiers was good, their faith in the liaison officers was limited. He also mentioned some negative remarks circulating about the government that accused the elites of “scaremongering, weakening efforts at work, looking out for opportunities to be provided for, political wavering.” He called for “creating consciousness” in the military.52 “All of our people want to come back to the country as soon as possible, regardless of the political situation in Poland” – reported one of the liaison officers operating in the Ardennes region (which encompasses Germany, France, and Belgium). The vast majority of dP s in that region were peasant families deported from Łódź Voivodship in 1943–44 and sent to work on French collective farms during the war. The officer complained of the intense campaigning by representatives of the Warsaw government. As a result, people organized “the Fatherland Defenders Union,” registered for units of land, and signed petitions against the Polish government in London. The agitation, promising the creation of “the Slavic United States” and great prosperity for peasants and workers, fell on fertile ground. “Some of the peasants follow this idea, deluded that extraordinarily good living conditions await them in Poland” – the officer recounted in an alarming tone.53 While atypical, this case shows that among the lower classes there was a strong desire for re-imagining and re-enacting a better, more just state. There existed political imagery which did not position Polishness in the centre and went beyond nationstate and nation-centred thinking. Despite calls for unity, the tension between nation and class identities persisted. Polish secret services reported incidents and organized movements calling for repatriation and in favour of the Lublin government. During a meeting of the Polish Council of Democratic Unity, a Polish communist association in London, Captain Kostecki was reported to have said to the gathered soldiers, “my duty is to return to the country, to my wife and children. I don’t want English breakfast but black bread with my family. All soldiers must return to the country because it is their duty.” His words were met with general applause.54 Leaflets issued by this association, which served as an umbrella organization for several

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smaller Polish communist groups, referred to the Polish government as a “fascist clique,” echoing pre-war anti-Sanation Soviet propaganda.55 General Anders himself complained that he could not understand why some Poles joined the attacks of the communists on “us, Poles who fight for independence.”56 Intelligence reports reveal concerns regarding the influence of Polish sympathizers of communism and sovietism. The activities of Edward Puacz – the organizer of the Polish Progressive Club in London, or “a notoriously left-wing association” as it was branded, were monitored by Polish and British security services.57 To illustrate the approach of the pro-communist activists and the propaganda they spread, we can quote a letter of Puacz to a Polish organization in Canada in which he accused the Polish government-in-exile of an attempt to paralyze Polish–Soviet cooperation and start “a fratricidal war.” Puacz maintained that their responsibility for the failures of pre-war governance made their return to the country impossible. He claimed that they wanted “to impose fascist governance on Poland under the cover of various Moraczewskis and Arciszewskis.”58 This last remark referred to filling the position of prime minister with Tomasz Arciszewski, this “old socialist champion,” which was widely understood as a sign of the government’s willingness to undertake social reforms.59 However, the critique of the political elites cut much deeper. The intelligence services reported that articles in Dziennik Żołnierza i Dziennik Polski (The Polish Daily & Soldier’s Daily) cast the situation in Pow and civilian camps in Germany in a very negative light, while also complaining about the attitudes of the English and Americans. It caused a strong reaction among the military that escalated into a critique of the government in London and the military authorities. The authors accused both of internal quarrels, looking after their own interests, and lacking any interest in camp conditions. As a result, many members of the military showed their support for the new communist government.60 The elites were susceptible to criticism within their own ranks, too. When one high-level Polish official allegedly commented that although he came from “the Polish nobility (szlachta)” himself he believed that “if in London there were 3,000 Polish peasants instead of a huge number of people of aristocratic origins and representatives of the Polish reactionary forces, then the agreement with Russia would be already reached,” he was accused of stirring opinions harmful to the Polish cause.61 These anxieties around class and legitimacy informed their work among the dP s. Polish elites in London and beyond undertook organizing work to build a community abroad. They strove for a common front against

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communist authorities in Poland and tried to retain Polish citizens abroad through various means, including intense propaganda. This goal was never realized and Polish refugeedom was not the product of a unified stance. Instead, it grew out of debates and clashes of opinions. These cracks were visible from the top to the bottom, and it turned out that many Poles, including members of the political elite like Mikołajczyk and many social activists and artists, decided to return to the country. Quickly reaching the dispersed Poles was crucial to ensure that pro-communist sentiments would not spread and to secure support for the exiled government. The role of the Polish military in the liberation of Belgium and Holland facilitated extending care over dP s in Western Germany. In summer 1945, Major Czarnecki reported that the number of Poles in the US zone of occupation was higher than previously assumed. Many of them avoided camps and registration because they sought better living conditions, feared compulsory repatriation, desired to remain in Germany to work, were married to Germans, or feared reprisals for having collaborated during the war. Czarnecki noted that the Second Polish Corps took care of Poles in Italy and the Carinthia– Styria region of Austria, underlining that the outreach of their activities was much bigger and covered parts of Bavaria, Salzburg, Linz, Tyrol, and Vorarlberg as well. The British initially accepted this state of affairs. The military planned to move ten to twelve thousand Poles from Austria to the enlarged camps in Barletta and Trani in Italy. The idea of sending several hundred young people to Polish schools in the Middle East emphasized links within the wider refugee community around Anders’s Army. Rising tensions with the Allies hampered some of these plans. Czarnecki mentioned that Americans aimed to isolate Poles in Germany from the external influences and contacts, especially those from London. He complained about bad treatment at the hands of Americans and strong pressures to repatriate. As communication was key to keeping the community together, he did not fail to mention that the Polish military had established their own regular network of post couriers.62 To strengthen the anti-repatriation propaganda, the major attached a form to be given to dP s who wanted to repatriate in which they had to confirm they understood they were returning to the “country overtaken by Russians.”63 Most of the reports from liaison officers brought encouraging news of liberated Poles supporting the exiled government. Still, in August 1945, in a secret protocol of the conference of generals with the commandant-in-chief, it was noted that people hesitated about the return, with half of them willing to repatriate.64 dP s, described as unwilling to

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work, undisciplined, and ridden with venereal diseases, were deemed to be in danger of accepting repatriation. The mood among military men raised concerns, too. Their attitude was seen as “depressing,” ranging between “hysterical patriotism” and a will to materially establish themselves. The generals complained of an unstable mood among the soldiers and civilians, by which they meant a rising desire to repatriate to communist Poland. The fact that some of the officers agitated for support of the Warsaw government and a return to Poland brought further concerns. Military leaders particularly worried about those described as “nationally unaware” and saw a remedy in raising their consciousness through educational work. In a typical attitude towards the eastern parts of Poland, Minister Morawski called Ukraine “territories without national consciousness.”65 The leaders complained that the soldiers who had joined in the previous six months required much more work to make them nationally and politically aware. Since it had been impossible to raise their awareness and educate them within such a short time, they were “obsessed with the idea of return” and thus should not be forced to stay, according to General Maczek. Anders reported that 14,000 out of 116,000 soldiers, “unconscious Poles,” signed up to return to Poland. The leaders raised particular concerns over the Poles who were forcibly recruited to the German army: “it is young element, of low level of awareness, sometimes with an aversion against Poland, especially those from the Polish–German borderlands. They should be distinguished from the Poles who are nationally aware who came from the Western parts of Poland.” The military men complained of their weak ties with the Polish military and the influences of German propaganda, also “some of them are agitators of bolshevism, not of the Provisional Warsaw Government.” Still, efforts to convince them against a return to communist Poland often had an impact; for instance, after some time, most of the soldiers who had applied to return withdrew their petitions.66 The prevailing opinion among the military elite was that “in today’s situation the Army is the only expression of the Poland’s independence.” They asserted that “Poland sees a salvation in us. Our moral situation is very strong.” However, they did not univocally agree upon the best course of action. General Kukiel suggested that people could not be asked to stay abroad “endlessly” and that the elections in Poland would bring a breakthrough, while Anders maintained that there could not be free elections in Poland under Soviet rule and that first the borders should be readjusted.67

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Pol i s h dP s in a l l ie d - o c cuPi ed germany and a u s t r ia : s it e s , a c t ors , networks Wanda was on the receiving end of these debates about care and control. Short broken sentences in her diary reveal the volatile atmosphere of the liberation: To go or not to go – it’s so many kilometres … But we have to trudge, look out for the news, try to manage … We decide to go. What’s the most important, I have comfortable shoes … We breathe deeply May spring air. American car – we shout – it goes so fast but they are coming back – they waved at us – white and red pennants flash by. We meet a Pole … thousand questions, what are the news, are there transports to Poland – he curses Americans and says we need to count on our own head and hands, not on Americans … he directed us to a camp for Polish women.68 The end of the war brought liberation to millions of foreigners in the Third Reich. Those wandering around towns and villages could see posters in six languages urging them to “not move out of the district,” “form small groups of your own nationality and choose leaders,” “stay off main roads used by military traffic,” and most importantly “stay where you are, wait for orders.” The military government called for patience and discipline, promising those would hasten their return. Through invoking national honour, they warned that “disorder, looting or sabotage will be punished.”69 The Allies repatriated the French, Belgians, Italians, and other Western Europeans relatively swiftly. After the forcible repatriation of the Soviet and some Yugoslav nationals, ethnic Poles comprised the biggest group of dP s in Western Germany and Austria, next to Ukrainians, Jews, Yugoslavs, Czechs, Slovaks, and others. In the first months, dP s of various nationalities shared shelters and camps, to be separated according to their nationality in due course. However, considering the nationality debates and practical issues, this separation was never fully completed.70 Some Poles managed to return home on foot or by military transport immediately after the end of hostilities. Yet, the Allies directed most of them to dP camps to await repatriation. One Polish liaison officer reported from the Magdeburg region that many dP s tried to cross the Elbe River and were turned back by Soviet soldiers at the border of the Soviet occupation zone, while his people were waiting on the bridge

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and directing them to the dP camp. “I hope we are doing the right thing,” he added bitterly.71 To the frustration of most dP s, the first mass transports didn’t take place until September 1945. By that time, they had all already heard about the Polish elites’ attitudes towards the Yalta-sanctioned territorial adjustments and the communist government in Warsaw. Poland lost the territories east of the Bug River, annexed by the ussr , and gained lands in the west, taken from the defeated Germany. For Poles from Lwów, Wilno, Tarnopol, and other towns and villages in the east, this meant that repatriation in fact amounted to resettlement in Poland in its new borders. Concurrently, new settlement opportunities opened in the west, from where the new authorities brutally expelled Germans, who often left in a rush, leaving behind houses, furniture, clothes, and utensils.72 Poles who had been deported to the Third Reich and had lost their houses during the war but decided to return often joined a “gold rush,” which attracted many impoverished people to “Poland’s Wild West.” These lands, framed in communist propaganda as the “Recovered Territories,” became an element of government propaganda as a land of opportunities for newcomers.73 However, most Polish dP s in the Western zones of Germany and Austria remained trapped in camps until at least autumn.74 In 1945, Germany and Austria were conquered, divided, and occupied. The collapse of authority structures instigated chaos and uncertainty. The first six months after liberation can be described as an interregnum: a time of legal, political, and economic instability.75 In the three Western zones, American, British, and French, armies alongside unrra , working under the control of military governments, tried to gather liberated foreigners in assembly centres. The Soviet Union did not permit unrra to operate in the Soviet zone and framed the problem of refugees as “repatriates” not “displaced persons.” Poles liberated in the east did not receive comprehensive assistance. Some managed to move to the Western zones evading controls, while others returned to Poland quickly. However, the dP s were not the only or the main concern of the military government, which tried to maintain control of the country to prevent epidemics and rebellions and aimed to eliminate Nazism and militarism. To establish their positions as the new rulers, they intended to punish Nazi criminals and, to some extent, all Germans for the lost war.76 One of the measures introduced to achieve the balance of both, namely keeping the population alive, relatively healthy, and docile whilst showing that they were defeated, was the regulation of food and coal.77 Managing these scarce resources was a means of acknowledging the levels of victimization and entitlement, a

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contentious issue among Germans and dP s of various nationalities. In all zones, emergency epidemic control practices and public health remained important elements of the administration, in the context of shortages of food, medicine, and housing.78 The administration of the defeated Third Reich was supposed to be, as stated in the shaef handbook, “firm, but just.”79 To ensure safety, the Allies introduced a number of security measures, such as curfews, confiscations, checkpoints, and documents controls. They tried to operate under the conditions of “complete disintegration” – installing new administration on each level, moving civilians, guarding Pow s, and taking over hospitals and power plants.80 The imposition of control was characterized by, using the words of Richard Bessel, confusion and improvisation.81 Implementing and maintaining the new order took place during the “rubble time” – the three postwar years of physical and emotional recovery from the war’s destruction.82 The borders of occupation zones were readjusted in due course, with the French zone materialising in July 1945. The French hoped that the occupation would enable reconstruction at home and bring prestige to reassure their status as a major power.83 They did not administer any major cities but they did control the Saar region, which gave them access to coal reserves. Having endured German occupation during the war, the French adopted a more punitive approach.84 However, their policy exceeded the goals of military control and economic extraction by embracing a wider, but vague, scope of building a better, democratic Europe. For the British, this was an extremely important goal, as long as democracy was built in the image of their own system. The Americans hoped to reform and decentralize the economic structures, while the French adopted a disciplinary approach to ensure that Nazism and militarism were completely eradicated and would not pose any future threat. In the winter of 1945, the British and Americans started to relax the occupation regime, the most evident sign of which was the fraternization of soldiers with German women, widely commented on among dP s. In 1947, the British and the American zones merged into the Bizone. When the French zone joined in 1948, it became the Trizone, which was transformed into the Federal Republic of Germany, or West Germany, in 1949. Austria, treated more like a liberated than a conquered country, had its own government installed while still remaining under the control of the Allied Council.85 Although divided and occupied, in comparison to Germany it enjoyed a reasonable degree of political freedom and eventually regained full independence after the ratification of the Austrian State Treaty in 1955.86

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Figure 2.3 | Allied-occupied Germany and Austria. Occupation zones, representative dP camps with Polish population, and major cities.

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These arrangements, constituting the contours of the refugee regime, meant that dP s were scattered through six different zones. Each had a different occupier and somewhat different conditions. Within the British zone, there was also a so-called “Polish zone” – a territory under the control of the First Armoured Division, encompassing the Emsland region on the border with the Netherlands. Their extensive aid encompassed organizing camps, providing food, shelter, and clothing, and embracing people with “moral care” in order “to breathe national pride back into the haggard masses, to restore their belief in the value of life.”87 In the British zone emerged the strongest Polish dP association, the Polish Union in Germany (Pu , Zjednoczenie Polskie w Niemczech). In time it became an umbrella organization for most of the Polish organizations in Western Germany and extended its influence into Austria. In 1946, representatives of the Pu , along with members of other refugee organizations, met in Brussels and established the Union of Polish War Refugeedom.88 The French zone had distinctive housing policies with more dP s living in private or small accommodation, while the authorities in the American zone intended to make a clear spatial distinction between the local population and dP s, placing the latter in the camps or in vacated towns.89 The French zone was the only one with a general compulsory work policy.90 In Germany and Austria, there were 250 dP camps at the end of 1945 and more than 700 in 1947, according to the official unrra statistics.91 The number fluctuated over time, as the authorities often combined or relocated camps for logistical reasons, moving people to their great distress and protest. The form of assembly centres and conditions varied greatly. They ranged from castles and little towns to barns, but most of the refugees lived in former barracks and other military and public sites. Malcolm Proudfoot explained that “the fact that an essentially adequate number of such installations was found was a fortunate but unanticipated by-product of Nazi militarism and totalitarian planning.”92 The interiors of the buildings were often inadequate for housing large numbers of civilians. Women, men, and children frequently slept on mattresses, bunk beds, or the bare floor in big shared rooms or cubicles improvised out of blankets. For example, according to a Polish report, the camp in Amberg had “electrical installations destroyed, toilets clogged, pipes and taps in bathrooms partially missing, huge and undivided halls for families to live in, and no outlets for stoves to heat the halls during the coming winter.”93 In the initial period after the liberation, the prisoners of the concentration camps and the forced labourers who had been housed in camp-like structures continued to live in the

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same barracks where they had been housed during the war. This continuity with totalitarian solutions did not escape the attention of the dPs. As Maria Horodyska, a young woman from an intelligentsia family deported for forced labour after the Warsaw Uprising, commented bitterly, “The experiences of five years of war proved that camps are the best solution for everyone. For enemies and for those ‘uncertain,’ for Pows and for the internees, for refugees and for deportees. So they sorted out foreigners into national groups … and hurtled us, Poles, behind the barbed wires in Walzum.”94 The German town of Haren, from which the entire German population was expelled to make space for dP s, played a special role in the Polish enclave within the British zone of Germany. Haren, renamed Lwów and later on Maczków, was managed by the First Armoured Division under the command of General Maczek and became an unofficial capital of camps that comprised “Little Poland.” Maczków had its Polish town council, schools, publishing houses, bookshop, cinema, library, fire station, church, police station, and hospital.95 The town was earmarked for “families of city intelligentsia, white-collar workers, and artisans.”96 The living conditions there were significantly better than in other camps which prompted many people to relocate there. While the community in Maczków flourished, most of the dP s remembered that after all it was just “a huge waiting room where everyone is waiting for their train,” as a program of a satirical spectacle staged there stated.97 In the American zone of Germany, the biggest camp with a Polish population was Wildflecken, a former SS training camp in northern Bavaria, renamed Durzyń by the dP s. This centre, which remained under tighter control by the army and unrra , was a huge camp where vivid political activity took place.98 Institutions based in Munich played a particularly important role in bringing Poles together and representing their interests. The Polish Committee, created in the building of the former Polish consulate, maintained strong ties with the Polish government-in-exile and functioned as a type of unofficial consulate.99 The Polish bishops’ curia, officially recognized and legitimized by the Pope Pius XII, was based in Freimann near Munich, while a Polish bureau of Caritas, its affiliated organization, was situated in Munich itself. The military bishop Józef Gawlina became the head of both institutions, having a very significant impact on the dP camps in all the zones, where more than 900 priests, dPs themselves, secured spiritual leadership.100 In the French zone of Germany, Landstuhl was the biggest dP camp with a significant Polish population of 5,500 people.101 In the southern part of this zone, the military placed the dP s in confiscated private lodgings or in very small

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dP centres, unlike in the northern part where the camps were relatively big, resembling those of the British and American zones.102 In general, most of the big camps housed between 2,000 and 3,000 people, while Maczków grew to more than 5,000 inhabitants, Papenburg to 10,000, and Wildflecken to 20,000.103 In Austria, the main dP centres were situated in Spittal, Villach, Klagenfurt, and St Veit.104 The number of Polish dP s in Austria was significantly lower than in Germany, according to modest estimates reaching slightly more than 100,000 in three Western zones, with the biggest dP population in the American zone.105 The Poles created dynamic dP communities in St Martin, Admont, Villach, Innsbruck, Salzburg, Ebensee, and Hellbrunn.106 The Second Polish Corps, operating from Italy, heavily infiltrated and influenced all of the Polish dP camps in Austria. Polish officers from Murnau Pow camp in Bavaria provided welfare to the dP s in Upper Austria, Salzburg, and Tyrol. Teams of former Polish Pow s helped with registering, housing, and providing food to the dP s, as well as facilitating contact between dP centres and assisting with family searches.107 In June 1945, the American General Schally acknowledged and accepted their activities there and provided financial help. However, this state of affairs never gained official approval from American authorities in Austria. Concurrently, the Allies gladly welcomed officers from the Second Polish Corps who filled positions as dP camp commandants in many centres, as they could often communicate with them in English or in French.108 At times, the rivalry between unrra and Polish factions developed, often over tensions between internationalist and national tendencies, as well as repatriation pressures and anti-repatriation activities. Commenting on the relationship with military authorities and other agencies, a unrra official complained that people from the Second Polish Corps, Polish Red Cross, and Polish Association in Innsbruck “think they had a right to be present at all meetings of Polish representatives and the Director. Administration found it necessary to draw the line.” He mentioned the abundant relations and numerous long visits, “mingling with every matter of camp business, and endeavouring to maintain Polish Group as self-supporting with own schools, driving school, adult classes, motor pool, library, club, store-house Red Cross parcel service, kitchen, cobblers’ and tailors’ shops independent of and apart from general camp life and administration.”109 This drive to Polonize and create “purely” Polish institutions was universal throughout Germany and Austria, coming from the top as an attempt to unify Poles.

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As soon as the Polish Repatriation Mission (Prm ) officers from Warsaw reached Austria, they attempted to eliminate Anders’s officers and affiliated Red Cross outposts. Within a year, the Prm managed to downsize their role to that of “welfare officers” and replaced them with unrra workers in camp management until their removal in August 1946.110 dP s established the Association of Poles in Austria (aPa , Związek Polaków w Austrii) and the Association of Poles in Tyrol (aPt , Zjednoczenie Polaków w Tyrolu), which cooperated with the Polish Union in Germany, sending delegates for visits and conferences through the border between the two American zones. These organizations were linked to the government-in-exile whose liaison officers carried instructions and materials from London to Austria via Paris, Brussels, and Munich.111 Some Polish dP s lived outside the dP camps, voluntarily or involuntarily. As much as one quarter of the overall total of dP s in some regions lived in private accommodations, usually in bigger towns, less often with local farmers.112 Hospitals, asylums, and sanatoria, remaining under military control and unrra care and often staffed by Germans and Austrians, housed a number of dP s. Students attending German universities or the unrra University in Munich commuted from the camps or found lodgings near the university.113 Those Polish Pow s who were not forced into labour, mainly officers, often stayed in the same camps in which they had been incarcerated during the war, for example in Murnau or in Innsbruck. Tadeusz Borowski, a young poet and writer liberated from DachauAllach, managed to secure a fairly comfortable flat in Munich after months of living in dP camps. In January 1946, he wrote to his fiancée, “A post-Hitlerite apartment – three rooms, kitchen with gas, bathroom. So-so furniture in the rooms: a tolerable bedroom for the three of us and a living-room decorated at our own expense. Books and skis, electric stove. Material conditions vary.”114 Overcrowding was a common problem. Józef Betari, a former concentration camp inmate residing in a dP camp near Munich, ironically commented in one of his essays, “[In Freimann camp] eighteen people live in one room. Concentration of people in the non-concentration camp.”115 While the Allies did not officially classify Pow s as dP s until 1946, the boundaries between the two categories were often blurred. Usually, a dP camp for civilians emerged in close proximity to ex-Pow camps and the inhabitants of the latter were supposed to provide assistance and protection, including “moral care.” Some displaced children and adolescents were placed in Children Houses, which became a contentious issue

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between unrra , the Polish exile communities, and the emissaries of the Warsaw government. For example, Imbshausen High School for Polish boys under Area Team 907, opened by a group of Polish officers as a military school, was considered problematic by unrra .116 Relief workers complained that the boys were “morally and spiritually sheaking [sic] under the influence of ‘one sided’ men who are anti-repatriation.”117 Despite the efforts of the Allied authorities to immobilize people, disorganized migration within and across national borders continued. Some dP s managed to move between camps, zones, and countries, as well as interact with the local population. They created connections and networks between camps, strengthening cultural links by organizing travelling performances, attending parties and concerts, and paying visits to friends and relatives in other centres. However, there were camps that functioned more like isolated islands or those which established connections only with nearby camps and sometimes with the local population. This was usually the case for the smaller camps, those situated further from main communication lines, or which did not have strong Polish councils.118 A delegate in Italy reported to the prime minister that “masses of people from German camps are arriving to Rome” and suggested registering them as Poles. He urged the prime minister to form an agreement with the Allies to treat all the citizens born within Poland’s pre-war borders as Poles, as well as those from abroad who served in the Polish army, especially those who “claim Polishness.”119 The migration of people, goods, and ideas along the axis uk – Germany–Austria–Italy was a symptom of the deeper ideological and emotional connections between dP s, the Polish elites in London, the Polish soldiers and Pow s, and the Anders community. The last one, centred around the Second Polish Corps stationed in Italy, saw Polish dP s as a reservoir of Polishness and as potential soldiers for the expected military confrontation with the Soviet Union. They trod various paths between Italy, Austria, and Germany, sending emissaries, food, fresh fruit, books, and letters via legal and illegal channels. Anders’s people infiltrated these territories very early on and participated in the process of creating the dP camps, Polish organizations, and the network of humanitarian help. General Anders visited Polish camps in Germany and Austria in May 1945, spreading propaganda about the alleged situation in Poland: “All Poles know that this is not liberty yet, this is not the victory yet … I have to tell you that the situation in the country is terrible … Already officers are being shot, especially those from the Home Army. Everyone who had contact with the Home Army is sent to Siberia. None of us have access to Poland while Soviets rule there.

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After crossing the border everyone is at best arrested according to the Soviet rules. Who wants to come back – let him come back. It is his right. My duty is to warn you.”120 dPs participated in the circulation of information, this cultural bloodstream, as it might be called, created by the Anders community. During the war, the soldiers and refugees linked to the Second Polish Corps developed the cultural system keeping this community together: newspapers and books, correspondence and exchange of gifts, the educational system, scout teams, cultural and religious activities, and cooperatives. For instance, Kultura, the most important opinion-forming Polish journal in the West, which was first published in Rome and later in Paris under the aegis of the Instytut Literacki (Literary Institute) by soldier-refugees from the Anders community, printed articles on the situation of dPs in Germany and Austria, often written by elite dPs.121 General Anders planned large-scale social and political action in dP centres. To this end, the Evacuation Headquarters was transformed into the Social Department of the Second Polish Corps. Liaison officers were sent to Germany and Austria to implement its programs and to create networks that could be incorporated into the ideological, social, and political community of the refugees and soldiers who were originally evacuees from the ussr . The documents produced by the Social Department provide evidence of the extensive influence of the Anders community in the Polish dP centres of Austria and Germany. Initially, the aim of the Social Department was to care for Polish people in Northern Italy and to extract potential soldiers from the dP camps, especially those who were forcibly enrolled in the Wehrmacht. The situation changed when, in July 1945, the Allies ceased to recognize the Polish government-in-exile in London and accepted the communist authority – the Provisional Government of National Unity – as the legitimate power.122 Anders decided that the Social Department should extend care to all Poles in Germany and Austria, creating a strong social base of anti-communist potential, as well as a reserve of prospective soldiers for the expected confrontation with the Soviet Union.123 Anders’s officials, as well as emissaries of the government-in-exile, actively undertook efforts to transform “Polish armies in exile together with the organised civilian society [into] one entity – ‘the Polish nation in exile.’” They consciously forged spiritual and emotional connections to present themselves as “the only bulwark and leaders of free and independent Poland.” The documents of the Social Department provide abundant evidence of a planned strategy to achieve those goals through cultural impact. Material aid and organizational effort were reinforced

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with gifts in the form of books, maps, gramophone records, portraits of General Anders, Marshall Piłsudski, and the president of Poland to be hung in dP schools, and through soldiers’ letters inserted in packs of sweets. They aimed to “create emotional attitudes” to unite dP s and the exiled elites.124 One of the main actions was the plan to evacuate Polish dP s from Germany and Austria to Italy. This was negotiated with the British military authorities and partially realized without official agreement but with the silent consent from some of the commanders. The Second Polish Corps transported at least 13,500 Polish dP s to Italy in May and June of 1945. Anders’s officers selected approximately 1,200 people from among the German Pow s who were transported by the British army to the Second Polish Corps in Italy. The Allied Military Government soon forbade any further flow of Poles into Italy. This did reduce their number but did not bring migration through the Austrian–Italian border to an end. Some refugee camps in Austria were de facto recruitment points for escapees from Poland who wished to join Anders’s forces.125 The Polish American diaspora developed a keen interest in the refugees in Europe. Polish Americans supported Polish refugees during the war via Polish War Relief (Pwr ) and continued to do so in the aftermath, promoting anti-communist, patriotic, and Catholic values. American Polonia, formed through nineteenth- and twentieth-century immigration, was strengthened by approximately 15,000 Polish citizens who left Poland during the war. These people were predominantly intellectuals, artists, politicians, and members of the intelligentsia, and had a particular interest in placing dP s in their spheres of interest and influence.126 Pwr, under the leadership of Francis X Świetlik, provided material and spiritual help to Poles in war-torn Europe. Its delegate, Florian Piskorski, created an office in Lisbon, which was moved to Geneva in 1945. He claimed that his network embraced 700,000 Poles in Germany.127 From 1944, Pwr worked under the newly created umbrella organization, the Polish American Congress (Pac ) which numbered six million members and followers. The organization was headed by Karol Rozmarek who ardently campaigned in favour of the dP s, filling the press with descriptions and pictures of victimized but heroic Poles. Having visited the dP camps in 1946, he strenuously criticized unrra and lobbied for the liberalization of immigration laws to allow the resettlement of Polish dP s in the usa .128 The announcement of the 1948 Displaced Persons Act that allowed the admission of 200,000 dP s to the country was considered a success and was followed by the creation of the American Committee for Resettlement of Polish Displaced Persons (acrPdP ). This institution

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aimed to facilitate the resettlement of Poles in the usa by putting them in touch with sponsors, issuing affidavits, and providing material and logistical help. In practice, it had a huge influence on selecting the dP s who were admitted to the usa through a kind of unofficial screening. Pac, Pwr, and acrPdP remained in touch with Polish social elites in the camps, especially the Polish clergy, including those working for Caritas. They also exchanged letters with individual dP s who asked for assistance in terms of resettlement and material help.129 Thus, the dP camps did not just develop “organically” but were shaped by various factors and ideological forces. Theatres, parades, publications, schools, and sports teams were the products of ideological and cultural influences, rather than a “natural” expression of Polishness and patriotism, oppressed during the war and flourishing in its aftermath, as the Polish elites wanted to present it. Various people and agencies pushed their agendas to strengthen their influence over the dP s and mobilize them for their own cause, be it repatriation, rehabilitation, or the reconstruction of Polishness for the future non-communist Poland. Negotiating these agendas took place between various actors functioning in the Allied-occupied territories. Poles created communities where dP s, Polish soldiers and officers under British command, members of the pre-war diaspora, former Pows, deserters, priests, exiles, migrants cruising between countries, and escapees from Eastern Europe cohabited and cooperated. Some left the camps to work in the German economy, establish romantic and commercial relationships with local Germans and Austrians and with Allied soldiers, take part in robberies and assaults in villages and towns, and get involved in supranational criminal networks or join smaller criminal bands.130 Two teams of competing liaison officers – one from the exiled government in London and one from communist Poland – circulated between the camps, supporting dP s and mobilizing them for their aims. French, American, and British military officers and officials tried to control and influence the dP s, realizing the politics of the military government. Social workers realized their vision of rehabilitation and cooperated with refugee representatives. Refugees found jobs as social workers with unrra , the iro , and voluntary agencies. The Polish Red Cross (London), partially funded by the Polish government-in-exile, was staffed mostly by anti-Soviet workers, while the International Red Cross and the Polish Red Cross (Warsaw) cooperated more closely with unrra and sympathized with the Polish communist government, employing many pro-repatriation Poles. Another branch of the Polish Red Cross (affiliated with the

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Second Polish Corps) was led by Countess Maria Potocka who entered Austria along with Anders’s soldiers.131 The involvement of Germans and Austrians in the care and supervision of the dP s caused multiple problems and protests. Furthermore, the interventions of the German police in the dP camp, which started in 1946 in agreement with the Allied authorities, elicited fierce protests from the Polish community. unrra began to employ personnel in the field while occupation armies needed experts on the ground. In effect, there were social workers, doctors, psychologists, psychiatrists, cooks, cleaners, and deliverymen recruited from local Germans and Austrians, alongside dP s, disbanded soldiers, and other migrants. dP s cooperated with foreign social workers and the local population in managing the camp, building new hierarchies in the kingdom of barracks.132

c o n c l u si on Upon liberation, millions of displaced people found themselves in the ruins of the Third Reich. Their personal hopes and wishes were entangled with top-down attempts at stabilizing and reconstructing the continent and its inhabitants. The regime of care and control aimed to immobilize, shelter, and feed them to prevent chaos and epidemics, while preparing for organized repatriation to nation-states. Military men and social workers started to implement the new vision of humanitarian aid – modern, professional, Americanized. At the same time, two Polish governments – one in the West, weakening by the minute and one in the East, gathering force – fought over the human assets left in between. The Polish government-in-exile and Polish anti-communist social elites tried to raise consciousness and transform the displaced into the “Polish nation in exile.”133 They wilfully forged spiritual and emotional connections to present themselves as “the only bulwark and leaders of free and independent Poland.”134 The nation-building project relied upon establishing common narratives through painstaking humanitarian work among the refugees. Food, shelter, and media brought material relief and generated cultural impact. It built the narrative of Polish refugeedom informed by wartime visions of the future Poland and reflections over the rigid class divisions and oppression of the interwar period. Nationalizing the masses meant standing a chance in the anti-Soviet struggle or possibly even a third world war against the Soviet Union. The Polish exiled elites filled the framework of humanitarian intervention created by the military and unrra with their own goals, people, networks, and institutions. The First Armoured Division assisting in the

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occupation of Germany and the Second Polish Corps operating from Italy (both loyal the London government-in-exile) supported the politicization of refugees. They often clashed with the representative of the communist government in Warsaw. Relief and aid coming from Polish Americans fostered links with the US among the global diaspora. Several branches of the Red Cross and other voluntary organizations operated on this uneven terrain. The humanitarian and the political intertwined in the everyday life in the kingdom of barracks. These mostly nation-oriented bodies and their agendas were confronted by the relief and rehabilitation plans of the Western Allies as implemented by unrra and, later, the iro . The shape of the camps and the communities, the forms of assistance, and the cultural, religious, and professional activities in the camps were the products of these crossing influences. The Poles established their exile communities in the chaos of the postwar interregnum – the legal, political, economic, and moral instability of occupied Germany and Austria. dP s’ experiences were influenced by varying conditions and policies, as in Western Germany and Austria where they lived in six different zones in a variety of camps and accommodations. Geopolitical configurations allowed networks of humanitarian aid to tighten around displaced persons, moulding their future possibilities. The war was won. Through humanitarian work, governments and international organizations tried to win the peace. Displaced persons tried to survive it, navigating as best they could through the ruins of the world.

3 “The Common Fate of the Exiled”: Voices of the Polish Refugeedom

When Krystyna, a former forced labourer, received a notebook from an American soldier, she used it as a memory book. Her friend Marysia wrote a short entry, expressing how much she missed Poland with its fields, forests, meadows, and the hut with the thatched roof where her mother was waiting for her. Krystyna commented: Marysia was from Warsaw, she had never seen a thatched roof, and her mother had been killed in the Warsaw Uprising.1 Framing the desire to return to Poland as a nostalgic drive to be united with Polish nature served as a vehicle to describe and experience feelings, evoking the national sensorium, to use Geneviève Zubrzycki’s term.2 Shared ways of living and expressing emotions became a matrix for moulding the community in exile that grew in the ruins of the Third Reich. Attempts at community-making by the social and political elites met grassroots approaches to social mobilization across barracks, camps, and regions. Over several years, the Polish communities in postwar Germany and Austria emerged out of conflicts, alliances, and, above all, compromises. Exploring refugees’ voices provides insight into the internal divisions and modes of self-identification, shedding light on identity issues and the processes of building refugee communities. How did they understand and conceptualize their displacement? What values guided them in shaping their community? How did they bring people of various social origins together and whom did they exclude? How was Polishness understood in the early postwar period or, in other words, what did it mean to be Polish? Exile and refugeedom prompted people to redefine their nationality and class. As Laurie Manchester demonstrates, using the example of a group of Russian émigrés from the interwar period, displacement may push refugees to redefine their ethnicity. In the case she analyzed, the

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process of defining members of the Russian diaspora and producing “refined Russian ethnicity” unfolded through the exclusion of various groups for reasons of morality, political belief, social status, divided allegiances, and so on. To see their own group as a purer variant of their ethnicity, the Russian exiles tried to dissociate themselves from Soviet Russians and “would-be Russians.”3 After World War II, displacement allowed for a redrawing of symbolic boundaries on top of the massive socio-economic changes prompted by war and communism. With shrinking social differences and an upturned social order, the boundaries of class divisions changed, too. As it will be shown, in the early Cold War, people of various backgrounds embraced the idea of Polish refugeedom. The previous two chapters challenged the notion that national cultures in the dP camps simply flourished after the war, demonstrating that nationalism in exile was constructed and contingent. While they sketched the contours of debates over Polishness and the shape of the nation in exile, especially at the top, this chapter digs deeper into these debates and shows how they shaped life in the dP camps. Focusing on embodied emotions, this chapter revolves around identity and the process of creating a refugee community. It claims that the making of a cultural identity unfolded through negotiations on the meaning of refugeedom between various groups of refugees, mostly elite and non-elite refugees, and between refugees, aid workers, and officials. This chapter emphasizes the problematic nature of imposed official categories and provides an analysis of attempts at self-identification among the dP s. It shows how the dP camps became sites of shared emotions and values, and how Polish elites and international organizations mobilized the emotions lived and expressed there. Social workers, policymakers, dPs, exiles, and the elites cooperated and fought over the practicalities of living in the kingdom of barracks and over the meaning it carried. Analyzing those power relations, this chapter shows how hegemonic groups – the Polish elites and officials along with aid workers – tried to convince the majority of dP s to accept their values, while adopting some of the interests and worldviews of dP s of the lower classes.4 Firstly, it traces how in the imposed intimacy of the camp space individual emotions were translated into a collective emotional experience, creating the bottom-up foundation of histories of displacement. Secondly, it points to the huge diversity of Polish refugeedom by analyzing grassroots understanding of the internal divisions and alliances. Fleshing out the importance of debates around class and nationality for community-making processes, it shows how Polish refugeedom was

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united by cultural imagery built from various elements by the means of theatre, literature, dance, humour, and other cultural activities. Finally, it provides insight into how people navigated identities to fit into this vision of Polishness and function in the refugee regime.

“ou r r e f u g e e d o m is a li vi ng i nseParable e l e m e n t o f t h e P o l is h nati on”: emoti onal t h r e s h o l d s a n d b o t tom-uP hi stori es Sketching bottom-up thresholds of Polish dP s’ history introduces their chronologies of experiencing displacement. The spring of 1945 brought liberation that was greeted with mixed emotions encompassing grim joy, the will for compensation and revenge, excitement, and hope. Poles roamed through ruined towns and the countryside or stayed put while rebuilding their energy before being directed to assembly centres run by the armies. One liberated individual wrote in a hastily published bulletin, “This thought started to pulsate in our temples … now historical justice and punishment for the crimes will come!!!”5 He could not know that soon his sense of empowerment would turn out to be false and his high hopes would be crushed by the new reality. Poles started gathering in the dP camps and created the first alliances and grassroots initiatives. Local newspapers, chapels, schools, and organizations mushroomed. Their initial feelings of excitement gradually gave way to a sense of being cheated and abandoned by the Allies. Young Zofia recalled conversations overheard in the camp: “There was a great deal of talk among people about what they were going to do, what was happening to Poland, and whether they should go back there or not; people were talking about the chance to go to other countries.”6 The uneasy relationship with unrra , which assumed control of the camps during the summer and autumn, reinforced the dP s’ confusion over their position in the new order. An uncanny feeling of having been victimized again crept into the minds of many Poles, who evoked the Nazi-like “barbed wire”7 and “SS-barracks”8 and commented that “actually nothing changed, only the master changed.”9 The expected swift repatriation did not take place. By the beginning of winter 1945–46, it became clear that those who had not managed to return would have to wait for months or would never go back, as most of them realized that Poland would remain communist in its new borders. Some rushed to benefit from the so-called “Recovered Territories,” emptied of expelled Germans. Yet, most of those whose pre-war homes were behind the Bug River felt that they had nowhere to return to. The narrative of the Second Great

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Emigration bolstered, providing a political justification for remaining in exile. In the preface to the new edition of Mickiewicz’s famous The Books of the Polish People and of the Polish Pilgrimage, printed abroad after the war for an exiled audience, Gustaw Herling-Grudziński praised “the unprecedented mass character of the contemporary pilgrimage” and, hoping it was becoming a “socio-political movement,” saw its core in “those Europeans who, dreaming about the sound of their native rivers in the military camps and unrra barracks, truly know that they shouldn’t return.”10 The reports of Polish liaison officers depict the atmosphere in the camps as being filled with frustration, apathy, hopelessness, despondency, hesitation regarding repatriation, and disorientation.11 Conflicting propaganda, from the Provisional Government in Warsaw on the one side and the Polish government-in-exile supported by the Polish armies on the other, stirred additional anxieties. Some dP s expected the outbreak of a third world war against the Soviet Union, which would break the new order, already solidifying into the Cold War. Hoping that General Anders would lead them back to a free Poland (on a white horse, as the collective fantasy had it) as victorious soldiers, they prefigured this as a way of regaining dignity and agency. Others jumped into a swirl of activity, editing newspapers, opening schools, organizing events, printing posters, producing and selling “moonshine, dear moonshine, the national refugee drink,” enjoying walks and trips, falling in love and having sex, and searching for relatives and friends.12 The majority just waited in the cold barracks in their “shell of stiffen egoism,”13 observing what would happen next in this “aquarium of turbid events.”14 The late months of 1946 and the beginning of 1947 brought two substantial changes to this emotional landscape. First, new hopes arose from enhanced resettlement possibilities. Schemes for recruiting to Belgium and France became an option. The creation of the Polish Resettlement Corps allowed soldiers and their families to emigrate to the uk .15 Second, dPs learned from posters, rumours, and the press that the unrra would cease its operations. The pressure to decide on their next move increased anxieties about the future, causing some individuals to experience either panic or further apathy. Scepticism towards the iro , considered to be the offspring of the “mother-harlot unrra ,” intermingled with dreams of a better life abroad.16 The sealing of the Polish border to migrations in 1948 in the hardening atmosphere of the Cold War marked the end of repatriation. The tension became almost unbearable for some dP s who succumbed to the feeling that the Allies had betrayed them and stripped them of their

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victory. Jan, a dP serving a sentence in an Allied prison, complained to a Polish priest, “I don’t know when all that will finish and when I will be free … I never thought that [the Allies] would treat us this way.”17 One of the most important moments for the Polish dP community was the opening of the immigration scheme to the usa , a country that still figured in the collective imagination as a promised land. It appeared on the majority of the questionnaires as the most-desired destination, more often than Canada, Argentina, Venezuela, and above all Australia,18 often considered the last resort. Still, any option was better than staying in the camps because, as one of the dP s put it, “it is better to die than to remain in Germany.”19 When on 22 October 1951 the iro celebrated the resettlement of the millionth dP 20 and some started to build new lives overseas, those excluded from immigration agreements – the ill, the elderly, the disabled, children, and single mothers – felt trapped without the prospect of a better future. Those included Małgorzata C. who found herself, in her own words, “literally in the situation without exit with two young children and an elderly father.”21 The iro ultimately closed its operation on December 1951, leaving many dP s feeling that they had been left on their own in a hostile land.22 For some Poles, there was no definite closure to this history, whether they kept living in Germany and Austria or tried to rebuild their lives elsewhere carrying what some considered to be the dP stigma. War and displacement engendered new perceptions of time and history. “We have plenty of time. We are carefully watching the broken clock of the world and the mechanism that needs to be replaced” – commented Józef Betari in his essay on life in dP camps, adding, “1945 years have passed. Good God gave us the 1946th year as a gift.”23 dP s counted years by starting from either 1939 or 1945 or the moment of deportation, as if that time belonged to the era that had not yet finished. By doing so, they signalled the continuities of their experiences and the extraordinary character of the ongoing period. “The fifth year of our refugeedom has begun,” wrote the editor of the Hanover camp newspaper in January 1949, underlining that even if “emigration transience,” “uncertainty of fate,” and returning to the “free Fatherland” had lasted a long time they still “kept living, believing, and fighting.”24 Refugeedom was seen as a separate period of their collective fate. dP s indulged in counting the months and years spent far from home as “wanderers.” This was particularly acute during traditional festive periods. They often mentioned the significance of “the sixth Christmas in the foreign land” or “the seventh year in exile.”25

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For some children, the coming of Santa Claus marked the transition from war to peace, the beginning of normality and of belonging to the symbolic universe that their parents had lived in before the war. Zofia Kruk remarked about the years she spent as a teenage girl working on a German farm during the war: “There must have been Christmases, and Easters, and birthdays; I never knew one during these years.”26 Halina, a child living in the Ettlingen dP camp, wrote in a letter printed in the camp newspaper, likely with the aim of soliciting sympathy among adult dPs: “Dear Santa Claus! During the war you didn’t come to Polish children. Probably you were afraid of air raids. Now the war has ended so you can come … I would like very much, but really much, a doll, like the one Zosia has, and candies, and apples, because my mummy can’t buy it because she is in the camp and Poles cannot buy. And before there was Hitler and Poles also weren’t allowed to buy.”27 Yet, the change was not as significant as they believed it should have been. One of the former soldiers wrote, “eight years has passed since the last happy Christmas Eve.”28 The idea of 1945 as “year zero,” crucial for German society, did not work for dP s since they felt they were not offered a new beginning; the most important threshold for them was the moment of displacement. Thus, many dP intellectuals felt that the community needed to understand that they were going through a particularly important period. The editors of the camp weekly in Rheine-Gallendorf saw the task of political emigration as “upholding spiritual connections with the Roman, Catholic, European culture and preparing the young intelligentsia elites guided by Polish and Catholic principles.”29 Members of refugee associations, believing they formed “a political refugee community” and “an ideological movement,” meticulously collected all documents, leaflets, and posters, hoping that “one day historians will decide to write about our exile community here in Germany.”30 An editor of one refugee cultural newspaper (with relatively low circulation) called for monographs to be written about the dP camps, asserting, “Our refugeedom is a living inseparable element of the Polish nation and it has its own history.”31

“ t h e c o m m o n f a t e of the exi led”: s ha P in g t h e P o l is h r e f ugee communi ty The Poles dispersed in the territory of the defeated Third Reich did not simply fall into the Allied-imposed category of dP s. They employed various classifications and identifications that reflected internal divisions, power relations, and exclusion mechanisms. “One can feel these divisions, different worlds met here,” wrote Adam Tomaszewski, deported

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after the fall of the Warsaw Uprising, a former Pow , and finally a dP in the Polish Guards Companies, in his semi-autobiographical novel.32 The war undermined class differences and previous forms of authority, weakening the position of the upper classes, the intelligentsia, and the Catholic Church. The nature of anti-Nazi activity during the war provided the first line of division between the Poles in exile. For example, those who fought in the September campaign were called wrześniowcy (from wrzesień or September), those from the underground Home Army and Warsaw Uprising were known as akowcy and akaczki (from the abbreviation of Armia Krajowa or ak ), those from the First Armoured Division under General Maczek were called maczkowcy, and those from Anders’s Army were andersowcy. As well as creating a supportive environment based on common experiences, these divisions also served the purpose of promoting the merits of each group while demonstrating their role in an emerging hierarchy within the refugee community. Class differences, even if not exactly according to pre-war lines, were also apparent. Jerzy Niemojowski underlined that there was a striking difference between “the top” (Pow s, political prisoners, the intelligentsia, etc.) and “the rabble,” or the rest of the dP s, especially peasants deported for forced labour.33 Former prisoners of the concentration camps swiftly founded their associations, carefully ensuring those were limited only to “political” inmates and excluding those classified by the Nazis as “asocials” (the Roma, the mentally disabled, prostitutes, and others), “green triangles” (convicts and criminals), and “pink triangles” (homosexuals and sexual offenders). Additionally, they tried to maintain the notion that there were only “valuable” members in their ranks: the “living documents of the German crime.”34 In the newsletter of the association for Lower Saxony, the editors pronounced that the organization “must attempt to gather these Poles, former political prisoners, whose moral and national conduct towards the fellow inmates in the camps and prisons was impeccable.”35 They sought recognition and compensation for their suffering. People such as, for example, Bronisława J. could not hope for this. The records on this young Polish woman of “Gypsy parentage” from Będzin, whose father owned a small travelling circus before the war, are preserved in the Allied Military Court documents. Assisted by a counsellor, she wrote about her life: “12 years of age I came to kz Auschwitz with my parents and all my brothers and sisters. From there I was transferred to kz Ravensbrück and at last to Dachau where I had been set free by the Americans. Then I came to dP -Camp Munich … Since my childhood I had to pass through great horror and troubles and

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I did not have anything from my whole life until now.”36 After the war, she had an affair with an American soldier. Her new Polish lover and his friend killed the soldier and his companion, presumably incited by Bronisława. Convicted of murder and sentenced to death by the Military Government Court, she was released on parole after twelve years in prison. Since she lived on the margins of the Polish dP community, even if she wanted to join it, there was no place for her in the association of the former prisoners of the Nazi camps.37 Regarding the position of political prisoners, Adam Kruczkiewicz, a Polish officer assisting in the repatriation, commented that they did not want to stop wearing striped clothes and spent time only in their own group. He mentioned that they considered themselves “a sort of aristocracy” and were “unable to speak about anything else except their horrible experiences.” Kruczkiewicz concluded that, overall, dP s could be divided into three main groups: former political prisoners, civilians evacuated from Poland (for example, after the fall of the Warsaw Uprising), and forced labourers.38 The Poles noticed how these growing internal hierarchies influenced their access to institutional help. “Cracks and edges,” a short satirical column in the Polish Camp News, printed an article entitled “Double Standard.” It tells the story of two dP s. One Pole stayed in “Hotel Polonia” without knowing why or for what. He was dirty and ill. There was nobody there to give him a clean shirt or a piece of bread. Even his fiancée forgot about him and his brother was probably in another “Polonia” or even in Italy. He understood that he was a dP ; they had been writing it on his skin for six years and now they wrote it in the documents. Besides this, anyone could recognize it from his face. He remembered that he had been so happy when the Allies came and had clapped his hands in joy. He then thought about councils and committees, and one “aunt” so determined to help a fellow creature, and another “aunt” who threw “calories” left and right. He thought about these humanitarian actions and he grew increasingly angry. There was also another gentleman, also a dP , who came to the same hotel. He had a big belly, a bowtie, a title, and friends. He presented himself as a martyr of the idea and as a persecuted “political.” Immediately he got petrol (normally very hard to obtain) and a parcel (while there was never enough for the others). Thus, the institution could boast that they had helped a pseudo-political martyr. There was a double standard there, the column concluded.39 The story touches on the issues of privilege, the uneven access to resources, and the abuse of power coming from ideological legitimacy. It bitterly points out that

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the employees of aid agencies did not understand internal divisions between dP s and allowed dP s who were in positions of power to treat “ordinary” dP s unjustly. From the perspective of teenage Zofia Kruk, those who managed to seize power in the camp committees seemed to care only about their own business: “It was a curious place, the Polish office. Who were the men running it? People said they were intellectuals – it was Dr this and Professor that. What did they do for anybody I don’t know: I never met anything but rudeness and being waved away.”40 The Polish refugee community, organized along national, linguistic, and religious lines, controlled and regulated who could belong in their ranks and to what degree he or she could enjoy its benefits. It regulated access to unrra provisions and iro -guided resettlement opportunities. Poles who spoke only Polish or Polish and some German had no option but to rely on the elite intermediaries and were subject to their power. Problems of status and entitlement remained vital for the community, which managed scarce resources. People belonging to borderline categories were at risk of suffering exclusion and a loss of rights. Identity issues surfaced in the processes of creating narratives that drew on a common point of origin. Fear of being uprooted, detached from nature and familiar territory permeated thinking about homeland and community. In his Diary of the Travel in Austria and Germany, Jerzy Stempowski emphasized the sense of belonging built around nature and physical space: “common mystery of the earth, sounds and views of the nature, territorial belonging, localness: not the language and the primer but the connection in the nature.” Like many other Eastern Europeans, he found dividing refugees according to language perplexing, as many “came from the lands where the languages closely coexisted.” He emphasized that there were many human interests bringing them together and making them distant. Talking about Poles, Lithuanians, and Ukrainians brought to Germany by a common fate, he saw a sensitivity to place and land as a factor connecting people, despite artificial national categories used by the Allies. Stempowski brought up the example of a Ukrainian poet he once met who had the same intimate knowledge of the Złota Lipa (Zolota Lypa) river that he had, even though they used different languages.41 Nationalizing elites – Polish, as well as Jewish, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, and others – tried to incite a national sentiment in populations fragmented along religious, cultural, linguistic, and regional lines. Canadian Ukrainian elites who tried to nationalize dP s originating from Ukraine complained that in the dP camps they were at risk of Polonization, with pressures from those who always tried to “make

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them into Poles or into Russians, or into Hungarians or Rumanians.”42 More radical sections of the Belarusian intelligentsia fought for the separation of Belarusian peasants and workers from Polish influences, while other leaders balanced Belarusian and Polish identities. Building a young strong Jewish nation, as was the Zionist aim, meant separating Jews from Poles and underlining their distinct culture. Yet, people juggled overlapping identities, as well as mingled and interacted with other ethnic groups. This was a thorn in the flesh of nationalizing leaders, as when one activist of the Jewish Relief Unit complained that young Jewish women found Polish boyfriends and wanted to bring them to the club meetings that were exclusively for Jews. Since the leaders banned non-Jews from coming, the women stopped attending at all. The activist’s solution to the problem was to curb the unwanted contacts by forcibly moving the women to another camp.43 Similarly, the leaders criticized Jews who spoke in Polish and mocked them for aspiring to be considered members of the Polish intelligentsia. A recurring motif in caricatures published in dP press was the depiction of young Jewish women wearing make-up and behaving like their Polish counterparts, alluding to women who before the war had not received a religious education but attended public schools and hence had adopted Polish urban habits and had integrated into Polish culture.44 Antisemitic incidents further disrupted Polish–Jewish relations. Rafael Olewski, a BergenBelsen survivor who founded the Yiddish newspaper Unzer Sztyme after liberation, bitterly commented that “our comrades from the old days with whom we studied and sang Mickiewicz, with whom we were preparing to fight the western enemy” now turned against them.45 In some camps, however, Poles and Jews maintained “brotherly relations” as an effect of shared experiences. Neustadt dP camp was praised as one such community.46 As the two communities grew apart, there were individuals who decided to join one at the expense of being excluded from the other. Adam, a Polish Catholic man, and Helen, a Polish Jewish woman, who met at the Bergen-Belsen dP camp could marry only after Adam converted to Judaism.47 For various reasons, many Polish Jews decided to live within the Polish Catholic dP community instead of in separate Jewish camps or barracks. The Polish Roma, on the other hand, often functioned within or on the fringes of the Polish community and did not have separate representation. At the same time, they were afforded some degree of flexibility in navigating the refugee regime. In the postwar order reconstructed along national lines, the category “Gypsy” existed beyond the framework of national belonging. Yet, it was used on official forms, and some officials

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even crossed out the preprinted nationality determination – Polish – and wrote “Gypsy” or “Roma” instead. In other cases, they would be labelled “Polish Gypsy” or “Polish of Gypsy parentage” or just “Polish.” For iro administration being recognized as “Gypsy” guaranteed some level of support and the Romani identity was usually used in favour of the applicant.48 Other identity groups did not receive any level of recognition and some individuals preferred to function within an identity category that gave them better options in navigating the postwar regime. For instance, Tamara Szechidewicz, a Tatar woman of aristocratic roots who consciously embraced her Tatar heritage and before the war had published an article on the situation of Muslim women, functioned within the Polish group, cited this category in all official forms, and emigrated to the usa as a Pole.49 Wartime refugeedom redrew the borders between the cultural groups of the old Polish state. It sharpened them in some cases while softening them in others, allowing more individuals to use Polishness as a multi-ethnic umbrella identity. Officials and social workers from the West found these identity issues perplexing. Trying to make sense of it, they referred to concepts of “citizenship” and “nationality.” Louis Stephens from unrra pointed out there was confusion in the usage of these terms, as they varied considerably: “I think it is unfruitful to try to determine their meaning by reference to any general concepts. I think it is clear in this particular case [of repatriation of Polish Ukrainians], however, that by ‘citizenship’ the Polish Government means the formal political relationship between the person and the Government and by ‘nationality,’ the ethnic and cultural affinity of persons so designated.” As a result, liaison officers were supposed to advise on decisions regarding entitlement to aid and repatriation: “While it is certainly difficult to determine in practice who is a ‘Polish national’ by these definitions and who is a ‘Ukrainian national,’ it is clear that unrra is not called upon to make decisions on this, but merely refers them to the appropriate Liaison Officer.”50 When discussing this matter with the organization’s legal advisor, Edward Reich, the chief of dP Care, referred to the issue of “varying interpretations of words like ‘citizenship’ and ‘nationality’” as “this troublesome business.” In his opinion, it particularly impacted the work of child search and welfare employees, hampering the repatriation of unaccompanied children.51 Debates on nationality and belonging flared up in the camps. The assembly centres were organized according to nationality in order to facilitate repatriation to nation-states but the war made people rethink the meaning of Polishness, pondering many variants of organic and voluntarist approaches to nationality. For instance, Wacław Sterner, a

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former Pow and a dP camp commandant, asked in his memoir, “Who is a Pole, actually? Who has the right to be here, the right to English support ?”52 He considered various criteria, including language (but some Volksdeutsche spoke Polish while some Silesians did not), pre-war citizenship (but this included Germans, Ukrainians, and others), and ethnicity (but the situation of the Polish Jews was unclear). Unable to find a valid and clear distinction, he seemed to opt for the criterion of attitudes toward the Nazis and the occupation alongside behaviour during the war. In other words, those who did not act for the benefit of Poland were not real Poles. Karol H. pondered who was a Pole and what was Polishness in his letter to Repatriant: “Who is considered a Pole today? Is Slavic origin the main thing in determining that?,” “does the behaviour during the war influence the definition of the term ‘Pole’?,” “if somebody comes from a place that is outside the border of today’s Poland will he be returned not to Poland but let’s say to Siberia?”53 Krystyna Vetulani, deported to work in a tobacco factory as an eighteen-year-old, when asked for her nationality during a screening to be admitted to a dP camp, challenged an army official. When expected to produce a badge with the letter “P” to prove she was a forced labourer during the war, she supposedly answered, “What do you mean by asking where is my ‘P’? … It’s in my heart. Where could the ‘P’ be for a Pole?”54 Polishness appeared as an unclear concept, which needed to be redefined. Thus, people employed various modes of identification, including those based on emotions, intuition, and irrational criteria. Those who, according to local decision-makers and the camp community, did not fit in were likely to be persecuted and excluded. For example, when Edward C. claimed that a fellow inhabitant of Wildflecken dP camp, Paweł S., “did not behave as a Pole while being in the kz Dachau” because he had considered signing the Volksliste, the latter brought him to court for defamation. Paweł explained why he decided to escalate the argument: “This kind of spiteful news … aims at my national ambition – I am a Pole – and becomes harmful for me, because I live in a Polish community, and for the future of mine and my son.”55 Lambert G. filed a formal complaint to the unrra Legal Section and the International Court of Justice when he was expelled from the dP camp upon the suspicion that he had left Poland of his own free will: “As a native Pole of Sanok, Wojewodship Krakau – Small Poland, I was staying with my family under protection of the unrra in the Polish camp of Schweinfurt. By order of the Polish Camp Committee’s meeting, which took place on 13-3-1946, I was expelled from the camp after a stay of 8-and-a-half

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months and I was put to the street with my family.”56 Additionally, the Polish armies and camp authorities aimed to isolate troublesome and criminal “elements” in the special camps. In Emsland, disciplinary camps for Polish dP s, which remained mostly under the management of the Polish armies, were created in Wawelsburg, Dahlhausen, and Sheun.57 People of “mixed blood” or those who maintained sexual and other undesirable relations with foreigners, were increasingly considered to be a threat. The plot of a novel by Tadeusz Nowakowski, a dP teacher in the Maczków camp, concentrated on a dP ’s dilemma regarding his romantic entanglement with a German woman by the name of Ursula, while “there are enough Polish women in exile.”58 The camp community had no mercy for those who had sexual relationships with the enemy, excluding them and depriving them of food rations. The main character witnessed a scene where a crowd of women was humiliating a Pole who had slept with a German man in exchange for food, calling her “dog’s blood,” “German whore,” “folksdojczka,” “Kraut’s bitch,” “bastard,” “traitor.”59 When he decided to marry Ursula, he became a “blood traitor” who mocked Polish suffering, bringing shame to the exiled community, making it weaker, and providing “grist to the mill” of the Warsaw propaganda.60 A statement from Echo Polskie (Polish Echo) in Schwäbisch Gmünd provides another example. Writing about Polish–German marriages, the editors underlined that “There are no excuses for this conduct and these people must know that their actions are illegal and against the national honour while their marriages are invalid.”61 Those who worked for the “enemy” were also often declined help. For example, a Polish dP in Germany felt persecuted in a dP camp (claiming that other inmates stole his things) so he left and returned to the German farm where he had worked during the war. He wrote a letter to the Polish Union, asking for help after iro refused to accept him for a US immigration scheme, explaining that he had lost his dP status. They answered him, in quite a rough tone, that it was his fault because he decided to work for the German economy and therefore had lost his right to assistance.62 Poles who lived far from the main dP centres, especially in German, Austrian, and Allied-controlled institutions, frequently suffered disadvantages. For example, some of the Polish patients in German mental hospitals were never given dP status, even if they were clearly entitled to it. A Polish psychiatrist who visited them complained that they did not get dP food rations and that often a “simple antagonism toward

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a member of a D.P. camp could bring him to a mental hospital as a patient.”63 Józef K., a Polish patient in a German psychiatric hospital near Munich, wrote to a Polish priest requesting for help for himself and nineteen other dP s: Dear Priests of Bishop Curia, I deeply apologise for approaching dear Curia but the hunger I suffer here forces me to do so. I am here for two years and during the first year from time to time someone from Munich turned up and at least brought some bread and something to smoke. The last time I’ve had a visit in January this year we received 2 kg of bread, cans, cigarettes, and newspapers, that’s all, and to this day nobody else showed up. Dear Curia! We are Poles and Catholics too and not some criminals but the ill and so unhappy because they made lunatics of us. We are locked here and cannot go anywhere, we are sentenced to hunger and poverty because there is very little food. German patients are visited by their families who always bring them something, we don’t have anyone who would bring us even a piece of bread.64 Many Poles protested being under the supervision of German and Austrian personnel. For example, at the Goisern dP Tuberculosis Hospital (under military control), which housed 294 patients, there were complaints that dP s would not “follow orders of the Austrian medical staff and refer[red] to them as Nazi and scream[ed] ‘SS’ at them when they attempt[ed] to enforce hospital routine or even medical treatment.”65 Reportedly, patients refused to stay out of the kitchen and insisted on supervising the food preparation and asked to receive only unopened tins.66 In the camps, dP s who feared exclusion from the community had to comply with strict rules. Stefan Czyżewski, a dP from Wildflecken camp, mentioned in an oral history interview that there were barracks that accommodated a couple of hundred former prostitutes who were kept “under control.” “Mrs Captain” was put in charge of them and ensured that they adjusted to military discipline: “She had trained them, she had uniformed them and she dared them, ‘Any of you to [ply] your trade, you are going to be brained.’”67 The Poles struggled with being treated as one homogenous group and tried to rework and rethink their new identity. The dP label appeared to be an imposed identity, often degrading, patronizing, and unclear but also one bringing benefits and opening up new possibilities. They

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engaged with this category, playing and struggling with the name’s phonetics (dipisi, dipi, depiści, dipiści, dipiseria, dipisiątka) to understand their new position, contest it, and exploit its boundaries. For example, Tadeusz Nowakowski, who was imprisoned in several German camps and prisons for publishing a Polish newspaper and who lived in the Maczków camp after the liberation, wrote ironically in his autobiographical novel that two new linguistic neoplasms, namely dipisi for dP and pewuiksi for Pow , described the “newly discovered tribes of European Indians.”68 He also mentioned the expression “homo dipisiensis,” which referred to superficial “subhumans” who had lost their previous moral and social values and became brutal, apathetic, demanding, and focused on fulfilling their basic physiological needs at any expense.69 Others would define themselves as exiles (wygnańcy), refugees (uchodźcy, wychodźcy), expellees (wysiedleńcy), and wanderers (tułacze). On some occasions, refugees used these labels instrumentally to achieve particular aims, for example to get to America as part of an anti-communist forefront or to obtain food rations while living outside the camps. Jerzy Zagórski, a poet and essayist, after visiting Germany which he called “India in the middle of Europe,” ironically suggested that people living there after the war belonged to “five castes,” each consisting of subcastes, comparing “half-civilised” Bavaria to India in finely veiled racist discourse. The first caste – “the knight caste” – consisted of American military and auxiliary units with their own cars and hotels. The second caste was made up of the local German population, forced to change from industrial to agricultural production. The third caste – “the merchant caste” – included dP s under unrra care, or former prisoners and forced workers, who focused on selling and buying. The fourth caste was made of workers clearing the streets and cities of rubble, former nsdaP members and SS men. The last caste, “the real pariahs,” were the Germans expelled from the East and wandering the country without adequate provision.70 For many dP s, especially those from the intelligentsia and upper classes, the condition of being a refugee appeared degrading. Krystyna Vetulani mentioned that even though she was able to work for unrra , wear a uniform, and help people she could still not forget about the refugee degradation. She complained that refugees, who were concentrated according to their nationality or religion, again lived in a closed world, condemned to fight between themselves. She called them fugitives: from those who claimed the right to rule them, from those who did not want to leave them in the West, and from the West imposing the opinion that they should be forced to repatriate.71

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Understanding the internal divisions within the forming community, dPs started to fight for unity to better represent their interests. Editors of Świt (Dawn), published in Hülchrath, wrote, “Now we are one huge Polish family and we should always feel like a family. We, in our camps, are a miniature state and organizing life and work in the camp brings difficulties just like in a newly created state, just with the difference of a smaller scale.”72 The Polish council in Maczków dP town published the following statement: “We firmly ascertain that all Poles regardless of their temporary status, that is to say members of Polish Armed Forces in the West, dP s, former Pow s from September and from the Home Army, make up one Polish family which cannot be artificially pigeon-holed and divided.”73 The class difference posed another problem. Members of the Association of Polish Women stated in a wishful tone, “There are no class or economic differences among us. We are all equal. We are united by the immensity of our suffering and the irrevocable loss of our loved ones. We are tied together by the common fate of the exiled.”74 The dP camps, where people of various and complicated backgrounds were gathered under an ethnonationality principle, made the inhabitants function together in close proximity, often unwanted, which led to clashes, new personal and professional alliances, and, most of all, somehow a new quality of social interactions. In a way, the situation mirrored the wartime camps and prisons where petty thieves shared cells with university professors, prostitutes with gymnasium-educated scout girls, and nationalists with communists. Even if the new displaced community formed internal hierarchies and power relations, drawing on pre-war Poland’s structure and calling for the separation of the “unwanted elements,” the new model allowed for wider social flexibility and brought more uncertainty. To illustrate this point, we can examine the process of choosing dP camp leaders and council members. On the one hand, the First Armoured Division under the influence of the government-in-exile attempted to assign officers, mostly recruited from among Pow s, as camp commandants.75 On the other hand, elections, supported by unrra that called for self-representation as a form of rehabilitation, also brought to power the workers and peasants. For example, in the camp in Haltern the list of candidates for the camp council consisted almost entirely of people classified before the war as being part of the lower classes. Amongst the thirty-six candidates, there was only one office worker and one lab technician, while the rest was comprised of farmers (ten candidates), workers (five candidates), shoemakers, a butler, a gardener, a baker, a locksmith, a blacksmith, a mechanic, and other skilled workers.76 In this case, as in

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almost all the dP camps, gender structures remained intact as no woman obtained a place on the candidate list. dP self-representation was created along the lines of democratization, with limited self-governance, and a gendered rehabilitation promoted by unrra .77 However, pre-war officers, teachers, priests, and other members of the intelligentsia and the upper-classes still occupied the majority of the positions of power. unrra workers commented that dPs were “getting their first taste of peacetime existence in many years and an initial introduction into democratic ways.” H.L. Ogden, director of the Polish camp at Hockenheim, described the elections in the following way: On our arrival here it soon became evident that the Polish leader in the camp was not the right man for the job, and after trying another without success, it was decided to hold a secret ballot of the whole population. Six candidates were chosen and on election day paraded the camp each with a large placard with a number hung round his neck, asking for the votes of the people. Then all the camp gathered in the courtyard and all men and women over 21 filed past the election officers, each writing a number on a ballot slip and dropping it into the ballot box … Three cheers for the new leader were called for and given and he was thrown into the air [Polish fashion] a full dozen times. The team director was then treated likewise and the proceedings closed with Polish national anthem.78 The elections also illustrate the tensions between unrra and the Polish elites in mobilizing the dP s for their purposes, as these groups competed in exerting power over the camps and controlling their inhabitants. The dP communities gave more opportunities for masses of people to engage in cultural, social, and political activities than had most prewar Polish communities. The weekly Polonia published in Augsburg dP camp regularly encouraged “all inhabitants of the camp to send their articles and opinions, and to start collaboration with the editorial office.”79 Farmers, students, workers, and priests could publish and distribute bulletins and newspapers, create organizations and circles, and attend language and sewing courses. For example, Władysław Murawski, who had completed six years of primary education and worked as a driver before the war, became a motor car instructor and lecturer and published several booklets on car mechanics and driving theory in the dP camp.80 He made 220 rm as a motor car lecturer, 160 as an instructor, and 180 as an editor. Many felt degraded by the status of refugee, but for all those who lost their place in the social hierarchy, there were many

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others who were eager to aspire to it. The void left after the annihilation of a large part of the Polish intelligentsia and Polish Jewry slowly started to fill with new people, often educated in exile schools. For many non-elite Poles, staying in the dP camps was the first opportunity they had to engage with the culture of the elites through theatres, concerts, and lectures. Unlike before the war, events were free or affordable and people had a lot of free time. Class attributes such as clothing, hair style, and accessories were not essential anymore. Pre-war actors and directors, who once performed in front of society’s upper crust in Warsaw or Lwów, in the camps might have an illiterate peasant from Volhynian village or an unskilled worker from Łódź in their audience. For instance, Mieczysław Pianowski, a famous pre-war director of the National Opera ballet section, founded Blue Mask Theatre in Wildflecken dP camp. Jadwiga Kuryluk, an actress from the National Theatre in Warsaw, toured dP camps in Germany with a group organized by Leon Schiller, one of Poland’s greatest theatre directors and playwrights.81 The People’s Theatre (Teatr Ludowy), founded by Schiller, staged both elite national plays and more low-brow spectacles catering to various tastes. In an October 1945 letter to his sister, he wrote, “Our audience are countless civilian and military camps, thousands of people, extremely sad, mostly without any care, without books and newspapers … Many of these people never saw theatre in their life. And we give them both theatre and Poland. It is needless to say that every spectacle is met with emotions and enthusiasm.”82 Strengthening Polishness among the least educated strata of society through art was one of the ways of “uplifting” the camps’ population. Although the 1st Armoured Division endorsed his artistic activities, when Schiller started using leftist vocabulary a conflict erupted. It was eventually resolved in spite of Schiller’s decision to return to Poland rather than to London or Paris.

“t h e c o n t e mP o r a r y P o li s h P i lgri m”: n e g ot ia t in g t h e m e a n in g of refugeedom i n t h e a r c h iP e l a g o of d P cam Ps These growing communities sought ideological roots. The history of Poles, rich in refugee, exile, and immigration traditions, provided a prolific matrix for this process. dP s framed their postwar experiences by the Great Emigration of the nineteenth century, anti-Russian resistance, and the exiled communities of the Siberia deportees. The heritage of the group consisting predominantly of political and cultural elites was

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explored as a background for contemporary “Polish pilgrimage.” Traditions of peasant migrations did not fully enter into the collective imagery surrounding post–World War II displacement, even though most Polish dPs were of peasant and worker origin. Most of their families and ancestors, as well as some of them themselves, had experiences of migration, especially in terms of socio-economic immigration to the West and the massive refugee movement of the 1915 bieżeństwo. The latter could be present only through traces of oral traditions and coping strategies but never became an element of the collective postwar imagery that revolved around political, middle, and upper-class migrations. However, the Polish elites did not simply force their ideology on the masses. The participation of dPs in the ideology of the anti-communist “exile mission” was a result of cultural negotiations on many levels. This emerging idea absorbed some of the cultural elements of the lower classes, mostly that of the peasants and workers who became politicized in the camps. It played on the elements of cultural and ideological consensus already worked out during the partitions, in interwar Poland, and during the Nazi occupation when social differences shrank.83 In the nineteenth century, in the Austrian partition, some peasants joined local public organizations that interacted with national Polish-speaking groups in cultural and political arenas, and the “negotiation of national agendas took place in the realm of popular culture” as well.84 However, there still existed many circles of cultural and social affiliation: “Identification with the Austrian state, the Catholic Church, the native region, and with ‘peasantness’ itself remained strong, even as a sense of national consciousness was honed in the village.”85 To illustrate the process of cultural negotiation with an example from the period of the Second Polish Republic, it can be mentioned that, for instance, to gain peasants’ support, the newly established Polish government introduced some elements of agrarian reform (but it remained an unresolved issue through the entire period of the Second Polish Republic) under the threat of the Bolsheviks in 1920.86 The internalization of Polish upper classes culture had been well under way by the turn of the twentieth century. Conceptualizing post–World War II refugeedom as a form of political emigration was neither obvious nor the only choice. It worked out due to many factors, such as the effective amalgamation of various cultural elements and the emergence of a particular emotional community in exile. Displacement fuelled social and cultural aspirations, awoke hopes of social advancement, and allowed people to reinvent themselves. Accepting the heritage of the middle and upper classes was one of the

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most important elements in this process. Barbara Głogowska commented on dP s who came from Europe to Canada: “In those times everybody grew. A private became an officer, a singer – an artist of Warsaw Opera House, a Pow from a camp – a hero, a servant had her own villa, a simpleton from the village school became at least a professor. Every other one lost the fortune in the war, the women lost family’s jewellery. Who would check that? Who can prove that it wasn’t this way? Papers, diplomas, coats of arms and signets got lost in the fire and in the hands of enemies.”87 In a situation where relief was tailored for national and religious groups, appealing to class, gender, and other affiliations could prove less effective. In their letters to the American Committee of Resettlement of Polish dPs, people brought up elements that could help them gain sympathy and support. On the other side, Polish elites used the figures of “peasant” and “worker” in their propaganda, especially in building an image of the “hard-working immigrant.” When iro and the governments of various countries recruited people for resettlement, they advertised Poles as being “naturally” anti-communist, used to manual work in fields and factories, and as a people of religious virtue. Thus, desires for social advancement burgeoned in the largely anonymous environment of dP camps. Józef Betari ridiculed this phenomenon in his satiric column “Licentia Fantastica,” published in the Schwäbisch Hall camp paper: Everyone was rich before the war. Every peasant had 20 units of land, every townsman two townhouses. In summer, one went to Biaritz and Viaregio, in winter, one would go to pyramids, playing tag or palant with Cheops. Half of the population had a car, one third – a mine, the rest led a modest life of ministers, directors, and heads of departments. All finished officer cadet school, everyone has a diploma, a title, and medals. An uncle was a general, an aunt got a Noble prize … Everybody was a prisoner of Dachau or defended Warsaw on its barricades. Nobody hid at home behind the tile stove and nobody worked in Germany for a bauer. They frequented At Crooked Lantern, used to drink wine at Fikier’s and eat oysters, caviar, and eels for the second breakfast at Hirszefeld’s.88 Reinventing the past was the first step up the ladder of social advancement. For numerous farmers, workers, and unemployed people, being a refugee meant having a clean slate and the possibility to start anew – in the camp, in the usa or Argentina, or back in Poland in the “Recovered Territories.” While there is a widely held association between dis-

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placement and downward social mobility, it must be mentioned that the personal testimonies used in researching displacement tend to originate from vocal middle and upper-class refugees.89 For many Polish-speaking migrants, displacement opened possibilities unavailable to them in their pre-war traditional communities in class-divided Poland. The unsettling of the class order stirred cultural anxieties in some sections of the intelligentsia. They often commented with mockery, surprise, or concern on the material and social position of the displaced in the countries of resettlement. “Nobody can tell apart wives or daughters of workers from those of clerks or merchants,” commented Zbigniew Abdank on dP s resettled in Canada. “On Saturday or Sunday, a worker wears an outfit as expensive as his boss’s. He attends the same pubs and coffee shops as the local bourgeoisie, has identical style and almost identical standard of living. He greets his boss or lawyer with the same ‘hello’ he greets his friend or aunt, he doesn’t tip his hat to anybody.”90 Class anxieties permeated thinking about the exiled community. In his 1949 article for Parisian Kultura, Melchior Wańkowicz, a writer representing the progressive intelligentsia, commented on the social changes brought about by the war and communist takeover. As Poland had never before experienced such violent class reshufflings and revolutions, he believed, this kind of change released forces able to reform society: “Now even too many planes – of battles, of flags, of Katyń, of Auschwitz, of emigration, of displacement, and of discrimination – cut through Poland. Landed gentry, aristocracy, plutocracy, and Jews vanished. The intelligentsia become pulled out from the cultural form of the former life. For most of its members, it meant a death sentence and being cut away from the surface of the Polish life.” He observed how members of the upper classes made mocking comments about the newly minted factory bosses with only a primary school education, jeering at “the rabble” (chamstwo). Meanwhile, in Poland, he underlined, “the readership is increasing, theatres are full, sanatoria are packed with workers, and the peasant classes are taking the place of the Jews, creating an urban middle class Poland lacked.” The differences between the Polish “top and bottom” (góra polska i dół polski) were particularly visible in exile. Criticizing the London elites for their hypocrisy, Wańkowicz referred to the relation between the elites and the masses of dP s, calling the dP s “rag doll[s]” that the elites could play with: “Expectations towards a political refugee was lowered down to the capabilities of the crowd that cannot return and seeks asylum, and that often doesn’t feel like returning and is seeking support, and is flattered that it is told to be fulfilling a [historical] mission.”91 The elites, he believed, expected from the masses

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nothing but subordination. Many farmers knew how valuable they were for the Second Great Emigration, entangled in labour-orientated immigration schemes. Thus, they picked up the discourse of nineteenth-century democratic intellectuals and ethnographers, claiming that the pure and healthy essence needed to regenerate the nation came from its peasantry. A letter of Bronisław C. sent from the Marx dP Camp to the acrPdP illustrates this rhetoric: Dare I say, as a young Pole turning to the first Pole of the United States with a request to help me escape from the hated German territory, still under the threat of the East, to get to the lands of freedom, lands which are now the core of the Polish nation. Maybe I’ll be useful as a rationally thinking and young Pole, coming from the peasant sphere which loves Poland with its impeccable heart. I’ll boldly join the ranks of the organization which your Majesty represents, and I ensure that as my forefathers respected and worshipped the honour of a Pole so won’t I let [you] down and I’ll be faithful to the imbued values, having imbued from the cradle the love for my Fatherland. I am, as I mentioned, young and completely healthy. I want to work and I know how to work. I am sure that I won’t be a burden to anyone in America but in contrary – I’ll become a useful citizen of the United States. If the Esquire Chairman cares about a pure Polish soul, you will not reject my request, I hope.92 Bronisław envisaged the union of elites and peasants in the Polish exile nation. Drawing the image of the healthy, hard-working, patriotic, and loyal Polish-peasant of a pure heart, he inspirited the nineteenth-century “Piast concept.” The ideology of the exile mission, rich in martyrological and nationalistic themes, capitalized on the fears of the East to kindle anti-communist sentiment. Images and slogans dredged up from the 1919–20 war with the Bolsheviks mixed with the collective memory of the persecutions and deportations of World War II that touched predominantly the intelligentsia. This does not mean, however, that non-elite Poles did not nurture a personal hatred for the Soviets. For instance, a Polish priest who wrote a biographical note for an orphan boy, Roman W., to support his resettlement, forwarded his story as the reason why the boy would “never come back to the country while this state persists.” Roman, a son of an

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“ordinary worker” who remarried after the death of her husband, was sent to Germany in 1940 for forced labour. When he managed to return in 1945, he learnt that his step-father had died and his mother was on her deathbed as a result of being raped by Soviet soldiers. Having buried his mother, Roman ran away to the American zone of Germany and joined the Polish Guards Companies, as he “cannot keep calm when thinking about Russians.”93 Another dP , Maria J., a forty-four-year-old widow, wrote in her letter from a dP camp, “All my family was murdered by Bolsheviks.”94 However, the majority of Polish-speaking peasants had neither personal motives nor deep anti-communist sentiment. Only a small part of the dP population experienced Soviet occupation. Even if we assume that the Soviet system was foreign to the traditional methods of local politics, it was not necessarily considered by the peasants and agricultural workers to be any worse than the poverty and abuse of the system present in the Second Polish Republic.95 Furthermore, many dP s had had pre-war homes outside the new borders of Poland and would have had to return to unknown cities and villages, sometimes in post-German territories. Thus, they did not face the dilemma of whether or not to return but rather the issue of deciding where to go next. Whatever location they chose it would, to some extent, be new and unknown. Western countries promised higher standards of living, the possibility of social mobility, and new beginnings. Yet people feared a repeat of the experiences of the poor migrants of the nineteenth century and the interwar period: abuse, hardship, lack of reliable information, and exploitation. dP farmers and workers needed networks and institutions to protect them and to provide legitimacy for their emigration. The exile mission, with its political explanation, played the role of an ideological shield, providing a basis for social and cultural advancement and introducing them to a web of people and institutions that were able to provide them with assistance. However, the promises of land and equality coming from the propaganda machine of the new communist government in Warsaw must have been tempting at least to those who remembered the burning social and agrarian issues that the pre-war Polish elites had not managed to solve. It was in equal parts patriotism and fear, fuelled by propaganda, convenience, and sociocultural aspirations, that made them embrace anti-communist rhetoric in their endeavours in exile. In his request to be allowed into the usa , farmer Edward H. wrote to the acrPdP about “the power of the East,” while Maksymilian J., a farmer who worked as a butler for Count Tyszkiewicz before the war, stated, “so I can as a Pole join the ranks of Polonia there and keep fighting for the Fatherland.”96

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Figure 3.1 | Polish soldiers visiting schoolchildren in Maczków in 1946. Maintaining close contact between civilians and exiled military elites was a part of nation building in exile.

The government-in-exile sent liaison officers to control and unite the Poles living in the archipelago of dP camps in Germany and Austria. When complaining about the anti-repatriation activities, T.R. Bruskin, chief of unrra ’s Office of Public Information, mentioned that “anti-Warsaw Government liaison officers … frequently read the newspapers for the illiterate Poles of whom there are a vast number in the dP Camps.”97 The First Armoured Division created a Polish enclave around Maczków. Topographical and symbolical reconfiguration was the first step in creating the new community. The inhabitants named the camps Lechów, Wawel, Lwów, Durzyń; the streets Mickiewicza, Armii Krajowej, Jagiellońska, Wileńska, Kopernika. Francis X Świetlik, the president of the American Relief of Poland, having visited Polish dP camps in Germany in the summer of 1945, referred to Maczków in the following words: “Here, hundreds of miles from Poland, one has the strange experience of finding a town that is completely Polish in every respect. The Polish language alone is heard on the streets, Polish

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signs are on all of the stores, the Polish flag flies over the town, and every official, from mayor to the policeman, is Polish.”98 This was not a remedy for nostalgia but rather a way to create new emotions, to forge belongingness to the Little Poland in exile and to the exile nation. Soldiers and refugees connected to the Second Polish Corps, now stationed in Italy, considered the archipelago of dP camps in Germany and Austria as an important part of their exiled community, as well as a source of future soldiers for a possible third world war and anti-communist supporters in exile. The imagery of this community was drawn from the Polish national reservoir, especially from nineteenth-century émigré literature. The Second Polish Corps and small refugee-run publishing companies (usually dependent on one printing press or even just a typewriter that had been confiscated or stolen from Germans or Austrians) published poems and novels by Mickiewicz, Norwid, Słowacki, and Sienkiewicz.99 The 1945 edition of Pan Tadeusz by Adam Mickiewicz was introduced with these words: “The publishing activity of our Association [of the Polish Refugees in Germany] should begin with this book, the national epic, created in emigration, permeated with nostalgia for ‘these fields painted with wheat’ which we also long for. Only now we can share this book like the Host of the national bread of love for the land, which is ‘like health,’ with the contemporary Polish pilgrim, who also moves his eyes to the East. Along with this book, Poland will come in under every roof.”100 To illustrate how deeply these values filtered down, we can examine the personal memory book of a schoolboy, twelve-year-old Edward Błaszkiewicz, from the dP Camp Niederlahnstein. Children who made entries into his book wished him luck in “the further exile’s fate” and gave him advice for the future: “work hard for your family,” “guard the honour of a Pole,” “be ready to spill blood.” One of them wrote, “Who can guess where you will settle, through which water you will sail to the world, where you will keep fighting, and from whose weapon you will die.” The themes of the entries oscillate around God, honour, and the Fatherland. The children drew religious, patriotic, and martyrological motifs with colourful flowers, bells, and stars.101 Cultural events brought people closer together. In Lutter dP camp in December 1945, a Christmas celebration with Santa Claus and angels was organized by the school director, English authorities, unrra , the Polish Red Cross, and the 1st Armoured Division. unrra gifted fabric from which Polish women sewed dresses and packed them as Christmas presents. One of the children’s parents highlighted the importance of upbringing children in Catholic faith. During the Christmas Eve supper,

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children sang Polish carols. The cooperation between various aid providers did not always go so smoothly.102 The dP camps became sites of national and religious propaganda, stimulated inter alia by the American Polonia and their agencies. One of the posters, printed in one thousand copies, presented the “Decalogue of a Pole.” It started with the words “I am Poland, your Fatherland, the land of your father from which you grew. You owe me, after God, everything you are.” Commandments connecting nationalism and religion with even tighter ties read, “You won’t hesitate to give your possessions, personal happiness and life to Poland” and “Fight the enemies of Poland to your last breath.”103 Concentrating refugees in camps divided along national lines helped in politicizing them for the exile cause. As Liisa Malkki demonstrates, the spatial and social isolation of the refugee camp figures significantly in the processes of building “otherness”: “the camp had become a central means of asserting separateness from ‘other’ categories.”104 For Eastern European refugees, dP camps provided conditions for creating a “nation in a nutshell,” as Jan-Hinnerk Antons describes it. Scrutinizing the case of Ukrainian dP s, he convincingly shows how dP camps and the particularity of the postwar historical moment facilitated nation-building and made dP camps exceptionally fertile for nation-building activities.105 In the uncertainty of postwar times, people navigated between identities and increasingly started to define themselves in national terms. Camps worked as nationalizing spaces. Officials often complained about dP s trying to manipulate or falsify their identity, especially Soviet dP s trying to pass as Poles to avoid forcible repatriation. As Janco explains, “in order to escape from forced repatriation, approximately 100,000 Soviet dP s used alternative identities or were misidentified by Allied officials.”106 Navigating multiple identities, downplaying some and overplaying others, helped refugees survive the chaos of the postwar period, as it often had helped them survive the war. People often struggled with imposed identities, reinvented themselves, and instrumentalized elements of their heritage to various ends. Officials typically classified women accepted for resettlement schemes according to their husbands’ nationality and occupation. As Katarzyna Kwapisz-Williams points out, “one in every seven women [emigrating to Australia] had a non-Polish background and yet claimed Polish nationality on the basis of being married to a Polish man.”107 One family from Lwów were identified as Polish, Ukrainian, and Austrian on their registration card.108 Maria C. and her husband Shao, who was originally from China but had acquired the Polish name Stanisław and had converted to Catholicism after spending several years

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in Poland, turned to Polish diaspora organizations to seek resettlement in the usa .109 When a man by the name of Józef was caught by the Allied military as a member of a gang robbing shops in Munich, they described his nationality as “doubtful.” Born in 1917 in Thorn, he spoke both Polish and German, served in the Polish Red Cross, was incarcerated in a labour camp during the war and then drafted into the Wehrmacht. Having deserted, he joined the Polish army in Palestine and after the war ended married a girl he met there. In fear of the Arab–Israeli war, they fled together to Germany where they acquired dP status. A psychiatrist analyzing Józef’s case indicated that the source of his problems with law laid in the “split in his personality” caused by balancing two identities – being Polish and German – that destabilied his social relations. But in the account given by Józef none of this is evident; he mentioned that “his childhood and both his mental and physical development were normal.” He seemed to draw from both or one or the other identity when it was convenient for him.110 When Arnold D., writing from the camp in Bochum, introduced himself as a “Pole from Latvia, agronomist-farmer” who had fled in 1944, asked the Polish committee in the usa for help with resettlement, his application was denied.111 To bring forward another case of navigating nationality policy: Zofia, a woman with two young sons from Lwów, signed the Volksliste during the war, a decision that excluded her from the Polish community in postwar Austria. She turned for help to Maria Swoboda, secretary of the Association of Poles in Austria, and entered into quite a personal correspondence with her. Maria sent food parcels and books to the family and received long letters from Antek, the older boy. She advised Zofia to try to get dP status: “It is very important that you and Antoś receive dP status, the one Poles have. Otherwise you will be knocked about among strangers and your children will spend all their life in a foreign land. Today I went to the authorities regarding your case. You need to make a petition to the iro authorities to be assigned to the Polish group.” She ensured, “We will try to take care of the boy so he could become a healthy and strong man who could, having returned to Poland, work diligently in the future.”112 Zofia pondered and hesitated and finally refused: “It doesn’t make sense for me to remain German, along with my second child, while Antek would be raised as a Pole. Either we are all Germans or all Poles.”113 While some people claimed false identities to avoid punishment for collaboration or war crimes, others were accused of doing so when juggling identities to their benefit. To tell one from the other was often impossible. Twenty-six-year-old Anna W., accompanied by her fifty-seven-year-old

Figure 3.2 | Cloth doll in traditional Polish costume made as a Christmas present in 1945 by a Polish dP . Craft exhibitions eagerly featured objects which embodied national mythology.

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mother, Bronisława, declared the citizenship of the Free City of Danzig, or Wolne Miasto Gdańsk, or Freie Stadt Danzig, where she was born and raised. In her interview regarding resettlement – she wished to join her sister in the usa – this young Catholic woman underscored that she had a Polish background, came from a Polish family, and spoke Polish at home. At first, the officials granted her full assistance but revoked it a month later, annotating in her card: “Subject is a Danzig German – a party member since 1943 and clearly ineligible.”114 People from Belarus were often classified not as Belerusians but as Poles and self-identified as such. This generated protests from the Belarusian intelligentsia who insisted they be moved to separate blocks or camps. They called for agitation among “intimidated and unconscious brothers” to make them join Belarusian groups. This caused tensions with the Polish administration who wanted to treat the Belarusians as Poles without national consciousness.115 The conflict awoke resentments formed during the Second Polish Republic when authorities undertook Polonization attempts directed at peasant populations in the eastern borderlands. The Belarusian national movement was generally weak and not very influential among the peasants who comprised the overwhelming majority of the population. The formation of the Belarusian national identity accelerated during World War II but was still in its initial stages.116 Archival material provides countless examples of people navigating imposed and voluntarily adopted identities. The category of national indifference, discussed in more detail in the previous chapter, comes to aid here. It is not to suggest people were passive but rather that they started actively defining themselves in national terms to certain aims. The postwar conditions – Allied-imposed categories and pressures from the Polish exile government – left little space for being completely aloof to nationality politics. Fitting into a recognized category would help them survive in the postwar world. The situation of exile and refugeedom pushed people to redefine their ethnicity, nationality, and class. There appeared a tension between an ethnic narrowing of Polishness, resulting in exclusion and violence in the camps, and a broadening of the concept to be more wide ranging in social and ethnic terms. Polish administrators and liaison officers undertook the task of rekindling Polishness and ensuring it took a desirable shape. They delivered national literature around the camps, making sure that books such as Henryk Sienkiewicz’s Trylogia, a cycle of novels written in the late nineteenth century with the aim of igniting national consciousness, reach as many exiled Polish-speakers as possible.117 The interest must

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Figure 3.3 | Polish displaced persons folk dancing in the school yard of the Rottweil dP camp in Germany. Folk culture, mobilized for national aims, was widely drawn upon in cultural activities among dP s.

have been quite big, since one dP serving a sentence in an Allied prison begged a Polish priest to send him the last volume of The Deluge, complaining that they had only two out of three volumes. In his ungrammatical short letter, he declared he would send money for the purchase and added he would also like to have By Fire and by Sword, the first part of Sienkiewicz’s collection, necessarily all three volumes.118 Another prisoner scribbled, “Books and newspapers I am receiving here are for me

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difficult to read and to be completely honest I don’t understand everything I read. Sometimes a man reads just to pass the time … But thanks to that I am able to read prayers.”119 Pan Tadeusz, the Polish national epic recounting the story of two noble families, was reprinted as a whole, as mentioned above, and in fragments in dP journals, for example, in Polonia, and was made available to wide readership.120 In this national epic, quite well-known to Polish speakers, the narrator asks the Fatherland to “bear my griefstricken soul to those wooded hills, to those green meadows stretched far and wide along the blue Neman.”121 Similarly, a peasant girl in one of the dP novels “saw not barracks but a remote field in her native village, saw those dear mallows in front of her hut.”122 In this way, noble and peasant imagery in exile interlaced. Embodying national mythology in material objects and cultural practices, as Zubrzycki claims, links “affectively national subject to the nation as well as to each other.”123 Folk culture, mobilized for national aims, was widely drawn upon in the cultural activities of dP s. In the Schwaben Hall camp, the theatre group made up of the inhabitants staged Cracowians and Gorals on Polish traditional dances, “so meaningful for us here in exile, refreshing the mind with the atmosphere of our country at least for a moment.”124 dP craft exhibitions eagerly featured artifacts which inscribed peasant culture in the national narrative, such as dolls in traditional village dresses, so admired by the Western social workers.125 Humour and satire, too, had community-making undertones. A humorous column “What would they do if they were here,” printed in a camp paper, focused on famous people and literary characters, imagining them in the current, postwar reality. A long list of what would happen to the Trylogia’s characters reimagined them in the dP camp archipelago. Zagłoba would be the head of the Repatriation Mission, but he would not have any intention of returning to Poland. Kmicic and his companions would take care of Poles’ good name abroad. Rzędzian would rightly fear a police search. Azja Tuchaj-Bejowicz would be the head of ub or the infamous secret police in Poland. Podbipięta would comment on all the radio programs with his famous “słuchać hadko” or “it’s a shame listening to that.” Then from Pan Tadeusz: Gerwazy would be in jail imprisoned by British military for owning scyzoryk, his huge sword, and many suspicious keys. Wojski would be cooking for displaced persons. Jankiel would have escaped from the territories behind the Bug River and be playing cimbalom for the Americans. Podkomorzy would teach refugee children how to dance the polonaise. The Count would not live in a camp but in a nearby

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town in a private flat.126 These humorous stories reflect a subtle mental shift; they encouraged all the displaced to imagine themselves as knights and nobles, to see the literary tradition and history of the upper classes as their own heritage to be drawn upon for a hearty laughter in times of crisis. By stretching and adapting the collective imagery, dP s came to symbolically inhabit the space of the noble manor house of Pan Tadeusz and live knightly adventures of With Fire and Sword, The Deluge, and Sir Michael. Anti-communist undertones and a critique of the existing order juxtaposed with the refugees’ cultural resilience made this practice of joke telling an exercise in community-building and raising national consciousness in exile.

c o n c l u s ion Listening to the voices of Polish refugees, those vocal and privileged and those silenced and marginalized, brings us closer to their perspectives of the postwar period and to their conceptions of refugeedom. “Homo dipisiensis,” a bitterly ironic conceptualization of the outcome of humanitarian practices, speaks with a voice embodied in emaciated flesh, calling for calories and dignity, for revival on her own terms, for a possibility to tell his story, for their rights and recognition. The Poles in exile conceptualized their refugeedom by drawing on long-standing debates and as an answer to the practicalities of the postwar refugee regime. The narrative of the exile mission of anti-communists or the Second Great Emigration remaining abroad due to persecutions that represented them grew out of uneasy cultural negotiations. The community started to emerge from a variety of standpoints, revealing ferment and clashes in the making of the nation in exile. Built on a network of cultural institutions and individuals, the refugee community provided a common space for living and expressing feelings. Redrawing the boundaries of nationality and class established the foundations of nation-building in exile, allowing various types of heritage to contribute to the idea of Polish refugeedom. Cultural hegemony, on the part of the Polish exiled elites and unrra /iro , worked to a great extent by managing, mobilizing, and politicizing these emotions. Polish elites influenced and politicized emotional experiences in the camps. This displaced community seethed with fear, confusion, false empowerment, a sense of betrayal, feelings of uprootedness, nostalgia, and uncertainty. Belief in being part of a special mission and seeing some sense in remaining in limbo eased the painful waiting in-between and provided an ideological matrix where these emotions could settle.

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Displaced Poles, concentrated in the imposed spaces of the camps, negotiated cultural values and political aims from positions of power and from positions of dependency. The Polish elites claimed spiritual, moral, and political leadership over the refugees. To achieve this, they negotiated with the refugees of various backgrounds, accepting some of their values and claims. Imageries of the upper-classes and the intelligentsia intertwined with those of the peasantry and workers in drawing symbolics of refugeedom. This led to the formulation of refugeedom as an anti-communist, patriotic, nationalistic, and Catholic exile mission. Desperate attempts at building a nation in exile, against all odds, was the last accord in the more than a century-long efforts in bringing Polishspeakers of all classes into one political body.

4 In the “Kingdom of Barracks”: Refugees’ Counternarratives and Resistance Strategies

“The life of a creature called dP is unhappy.” These are the opening words of a booklet published by dP s and written for dP s in Solingen dP camp in 1947. “It is hard to even place him in any category of creatures,” the author continued. “He doesn’t fit into any of them and even though he has only begun the third year of his life, he has already become such a nuisance to everyone, they would all gladly drown him in a spoonful of water.1 But a dP , despite his young age, is tough and nothing can grind him down. Neither cold, nor hunger, nor unrra , nor Germans, nor relocations, nor moonshine. A dP has an effective weapon against all these plagues. And this weapon is humour.” The frustrations of living in the kingdom of barracks is evident in this passage from a joke book entitled Laugh, Di-pi! One Hundred Pages of Humour.2 Beneath the surface of the two main narratives of post–World War II Polish refugeedom – the successful humanitarian mission and the Second Great Emigration – multiple stories of displacement circulated in the camps, sparking discussions on survival strategies, recognition, and rights. Through extensive propaganda supported by a legion of professional photographers and journalists, unrra created the narrative of a successful humanitarian mission that transformed victims of war into rehabilitated citizens.3 The official discourse of rehabilitation, calories and vitamins, freedom, and democracy dominated the public sphere and imposed upon dP s a vision of a humanitarian success. As Atina Grossmann demonstrates, dP s picked up this “novel language of grams of fat and total daily calories, vitamins, or cigarettes and coffee” to underline their victimization. By talking about food in terms of grams and calories, dP s underscored how they perceived their material and social entitlements and equated them with their core human rights.4 In claiming rights, refugees needed to learn, to use Ruth Balint’s term,

Figure 4.1 | Overcrowding was common in dP camps.

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“the correct dP script” which was largely composed of “the language of Cold War persecution.”5 Humour and satire give insights into bottom-up views and narratives that did not conform to any of these dominant discourses but subverted or ridiculed or just ignored them, their audiences often being not those in power but other refugees. How did Polish dP s negotiate their displacement with the authorities and what resistance strategies did they use? How did they fight for their individual and collective rights? In what ways did they engage with the authorities? This chapter traces various refugee counternarratives and expressions of bottom-up resistance, from whispered jokes through satire to petitioning. Looking at what people complained, laughed, and chatted about is one of the ways of exploring what daily life was like in the kingdom of barracks. Analyzing the dP s’ critique of the refugee regime unearths the power relations which underwired the negotiation of displacement. Firstly, this chapter looks at the ways in which dPs engaged in critiques of the system and entered negotiations with those in power. Secondly, it explores the role of humour in Polish dP communities, discussing its subversive and normalizing potential. Employing an example of a refugee satire, it shows how they produced alternative bottom-up narratives of their displacement which served as social vents and as a form of passive resistance. Furthermore, this chapter maps out various expressions of humour in drawings, stories, and jokes, demonstrating how they exposed the bitter reality of life in refugee camps, as well as anxieties about the perceived “topsy-turvy world” of postwar values and social hierarchies. Thirdly, it explores dPs’ attempts at claiming rights, including the right to dP status, and at suggesting practical solutions to improve the refugee regime, as well as more comprehensive visions of a more just postwar order. In doing so, it shows how the archipelago of refugee camps was a space of negotiation between dP s and aid workers, traditional elites, and hierarchies emerging on the ground.

“i ro- Q uo is ” a n d “ dP in s e cts” i n the “ki ngdom of barr a c k s ” : c r it iQu e o f the refugee regi me On multiple occasions, dP s criticized and contested the existing refugee regime. This critique focused especially on the strict regulations of all spheres of life that made them feel that their existence was rationed, medicalized, and controlled. These issues recurred in jokes, articles, short stories, drawings, and letters. The oppressive and brutal Nazi rule became superseded by a rather subtle but almost all-encompassing

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Figure 4.2 | A list and photo of the exact amounts of food items dP s received created to point out inadequate provisions. Some dP s adopted the language of grams, vitamins, and calories, using it to fight for their rights.

control and assistance. Their forms and distribution, designed by Allied planners, doctors, psychologists, social workers, and military men, often evoked not gratitude but disappointment and anger among the Poles. Aid delivered in the military style of barracks, soup queues, and compulsory health exams (including invasive checks for lice and venereal diseases) did not feel like the rightful compensation for wartime suffering but more like a method of keeping the displaced in check or “a mercy of a dubious value,” as the refugees phrased it. Some viewed it as painfully limiting, patronizing, and disempowering because a refugee “cannot pay for the flat he would like to live in according to his choice, cannot eat what he has an appetite for, cannot wear what he likes.”6

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“Americans declared Victory and divided it into calories,” wrote Tadeusz Borowski sarcastically in one of his poems.7 The Allies carefully rationed food and clothes according to tables and classifications prepared by planners and officials. dP s realized that their needs were described in the language of vitamins, calories, grams, watts, square metres, cigarettes, and chocolate bars. They did not feel privileged but instead felt cheated and limited, as they usually considered the amounts as being scarce and inadequate. As one of the dP s commented, “1500 calories is absolutely too little to live [but] too much to die.”8 On the one hand, dP s tried to point out the inadequacies of this system and suggested better distribution and measurements to improve their situation. Requests to get more fats, sugar, milk, and fresh fruit instead of more calories were usually unsuccessful. The editors of Biuletyn Prasowy (Press Bulletin) complained that the allowance of electricity was unfair because each family could use only 500 watts per day.9 In another article, they meticulously explained that only in theory did they receive 2,000 calories per day; in reality, it did not even reach 1,500 calories. According to them, the food was of low quality and included meat that contained 45 per cent bone while the weight of potatoes was measured incorrectly, as it included the peel and waste, which were especially high in the spring season.10 In a camp where dP s worked to obtain higher rations, they counted how much the food provided by iro was worth and made a list of their weekly provisions in grams and pfennigs, attaching a photo of all the products (see figure 4.2). They indicated that the situation was clearly unfair and that the money that iro had for every dP plus the value of their own work significantly exceeded the costs of maintenance, including the cost of electricity and accommodation.11 On the other hand, dP s opposed and ridiculed the very idea of this approach. Doctor Helena Fedukowicz, a formed forced labourer, criticized the lack of nuance in humanitarian assistance and coarse monitoring criteria. She complained that “everything is coming down to ‘normal’ number of calories, good appearance, high birth rate, and the lack of epidemics.” Standardization compromised the standards of care and failed to acknowledge the complexity of wellbeing.12 In the satirical essay “Vitamins, goulash, and unrra ,” Józef Betari depicted how, under the guise of protection, refugees’ freedom was limited, their lives were controlled even in absurd detail, and they themselves were treated in a patronizing and disempowering way. He wrote, “Multiplelettered institutions were founded to take care of all our needs. It has been counted how many calories there should be to make us feel well and on how many slices bread must be cut to make us feel full. It has

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been prefigured what amount of vitamins would make our physical condition improve.”13 Sarcastically, he mentioned how, under the pretext of their own benefit, dP s were deprived of fresh fruit (danger of dysentery), American cigarettes (too strong for their weak lungs), and soap (dermatologists wanted to protect their skin, but “nobody would like to be in [their] skin”). In a similar tone, he added that they had ceased to be prisoners, and, to underline their freedom, they were given SS uniforms (due to a shortage of civilian clothing) and a right to walk in the corridors and squares of the camp, a small space enclosed by walls.14 The system of defining needs by a number of calories and vitamins was particularly bothersome, and at the same time easy to ridicule. “A kilogram of hard coal has 4700 calories, but it is doubtful that a normal and healthy person will be full after eating this portion,” Betari commented mockingly in another publication. “[T]wo oranges equal 1600 [sic] calories but still, before the war you would eat them only after a tasty and lavish dinner.” The importance of food was obviously much more than to provide the body with “the letters of the Latin alphabet,” or vitamins, and impacted refugees’ wellbeing by reflecting the issues of dignity, safety, and self-sufficiency.15 Atina Grossmann has observed that “food and feeding could not be disconnected from the symbolic and emotional; they were intensely political and personal. Food remained a key issue well after the initial problems of severe hunger and malnutrition had long been solved.”16 Betari continued, reducing this approach to an absurdity: “At this point wouldn’t it be easier and better to give once a week colourful tablets with a specific number of calories and ergs [units of energy] and another kind of pills with vitamins?” All the “stupid complaints” by the dP s would cease then, he remarked ironically, and unrra could employ a magician for distributing the pills. Providing aid in such a top-down manner generated frustration at the lack of dP s’ participation in decision making. At the same time, Betari remarked, “They [dP s] don’t want to understand the noble intentions of American philanthropists who want to help them in the most rational and appropriate way.”17 At times, criticism was expressed more directly and focused squarely on unrra and the iro. A Polish-language article entitled “Tribe of the iroquois” detailed and amplified the complaints many refugees repeated in the wooden walls of their barracks. Signed by “Prof. Chrząszczykiewicz, dP” and published in 1951 in Gazeta Niedzielna (Sunday Newspaper), a weekly publication of the Polish Catholic Mission that claimed spiritual leadership over the displaced Poles, it was then reprinted in the dP press in Germany.18 To demonstrate its impact, one can mention that it was

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at the centre of the discussion in the correspondence between Tadeusz de Julien, who claimed to be its author, and the Polish dP Resettlement Committee, focusing on the practical implications of the iro ’s perceived incompetence.19 This bitter and ironic “iro obituary,” formulated in a sharp and accusing tone, articulated the complaints that the dP s had expressed against the refugee regime. dPs should not be accused of being ungrateful, the author stated, as the iro only administered the funds collected by “the countries of the free world” and did not act out of its own mercy. Thus, it was not undertaking charity but simply fulfilling its duties in exchange for lavish payments. Functioning in the shadows of unrra , whose “sins” included “romancing with Bolsheviks,” persecuting anti-repatriation activists, and closing Polish schools, it inherited some of these problems and employed the same people. Utilizing a racist and imperialist discourse (which was fairly commonplace among the exiled Poles, including many intellectuals), the author called iro workers the “iro -quois” and distinguished many layers of this “tribe”: “Herrenvolk” [master race] sitting in the capitals of Western Europe, elegant officers pitying dP s from bars in the casinos, an army of well-perfumed stenographers and secretaries, good-hearted but dumb field-workers, and finally “white negros” recruited from the “dipiseria.”20 The degradation, dehumanization, and disempowerment of dP s is the central motif of the article. The author underlined that wasting money on multiple pamphlets and “an army of officials” inflated the bureaucracy to immense dimensions: “The mortal sin of the iro , a humanitarian organization, is that this bureaucratized international machine did not notice the Human in its activities. The iro became an end in itself, a god for dP insects, a merciless master of creation.” The discrepancy between ambitious plans and reality proved acute and “in the thicket of projects, programs, plans, circulars, statistics, reports, and briefings, the Human got lost, this miserable ‘Homo Dipisiensis.’” Officials turned into “heartless and firm masters” who treated dP s as “rabble, subhumans, impure masses, human junk.”21 The abuse of power and arbitrary decisions on issues closely related to the body and private life induced further criticism. Some of the “Germaniae adscripti [slaves of Germany], people-numbers, spectres without definite nationality and legal personality” who had lived in this atmosphere for six years did not speak out anymore and were not surprised by anything, as they “stiffened in pain like the antic Niobe.” The fear of being crossed out of a resettlement list paralyzed the dP s. In the kingdom of the barracks power was in the hands of “camp

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caciques.” According to the author, even a complaint about camp food or their child having a high temperature (measured by “camp quacks by touching the forehead with their palm”) could result in being removed from a transport list. He concluded dramatically, “The iro -quois have never been interested in dP psychology. dP has no soul. It is an object, not a human.”22 To emphasize how abnormal and unjust this situation was, the author evoked human dignity, the principle of individualism, and psychology inscribed into the universe of Christian values. He indicated how the abusive treatment would become a mental legacy of the iro for the dP s, “the homeless people will remember [iro ] until their death. Perhaps in some Guatemalas and Patagonias dipi-mothers will scare their dipi-children with this name.” Even if there were many noble and committed workers there, the tribe of the iro -quois as a whole appeared “alike hostile occupants.” He wished that “after their death the iro -quois as a punishment will go to a refugee camp and will become dipisi.”23 This fantasy about switching places between the perceived oppressors and the oppressed echoed the transgressions of the immediate postwar period. This blistering criticism was particularly vocal but by no means confined to an isolated case. Zbigniew Małecki, an exile and soldier who moved from Switzerland to Germany to use the iro services for resettling in Canada, wrote in Kultura about “iro -Nazis” and “iro -Nazism,” giving this common trope among dP s a striking name.24 He described queues, lists, checks, and abusive treatment in the transitory camps managed by unrra and the iro , the “bastards of totalitarianism,” that dPs had to go through to leave Europe. This “Adolfian Festung Europa [fortress Europe] that changed into one huge camp” brought to his mind dystopian visions and the conviction that Europe had become saturated with war and totalitarianism.25 dP teachers from Blomberg despised the “omnipotence of unrra ,” calling it “pseudo-relief authorities,” and complained that the “Anglo-Saxon world gave countless millions to unrra but the organization didn’t publish even one book for Polish children in Germany.”26 A delegate of the Second Polish Corps wrote in his report that the majority of unrra workers saw only utilitarian aspects, mostly for their own benefits, rather than the human in despair and that unrra policy was based on blackmail.27 In his letter to the Pac, Jerzy V., a forester deported to Germany for forced labour, wrote about iro , “we trusted that this organization, guided by Christian and universal human ideals, would create for us conditions for existence. The iro did not fulfil the hope we have put in it.”28 Karol Rozmarek,

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the president of the Pac , “launched an extensive and vocal campaign against unrra ” and helped to create a lobby for special immigration laws for dP s.29 One unrra official noted that Poles in camps spent “a great deal of time listening to radios and comparing broadcasts.” The team from the Paderborn dP camp reported to him that in one of the broadcasts, coming from Warsaw, the breakdown of the unrra initials was given as “Urząd Nieuczciwego Rozdziału Rupieci Amerykańskich or Department for the Dishonest Distribution of Unnecessary American Junk.”30 This kind of propaganda exacerbated dP s’ critique and provided them with rhetorical tools to describe their own experience. Expressing discontent, however, did not always take the form of sophisticated jokes or complex satire. Young Zofia recalled a conversation overheard on a train taking disoriented dP s “nobody exactly knew where” (to a new camp or maybe straight to Poland, as they wondered): “Every now and then I would hear somebody say ‘the wind always blows in a poor man’s eyes, and laugh; or somebody would ask what life had been like for somebody else, and the reply would be ‘life has just been all shit and splinters’ and people around would laugh again.”31

“g hos t t r a in w it h w il d r eP atri ates derai ls i n P ot s d a m ” : r e f u g e e s ’ c o unternarrati ves This critique contributed to the forming of a Polish dP counterdiscourse or the ways of thinking and acting that opposed the official unrra and iro discourse of rehabilitation, calories and vitamins, freedom, and democracy. dP s did not accept the official institutional discourse at face value but engaged with it, ignored it, fought against it, and finally ridiculed it. In this way, they tried to rewrite and re-present the existing order.32 From their position of disempowerment, they often turned to satire and other humorous texts, such as columns, jokes, and satirical drawings that were printed in bulletins and newspapers published mostly by refugees for refugees. These forms of media provided ways of commenting and contesting the new transitory order and its social consequences. Across various dP camps, humorous articles and publications were not uncommon. Nasz głos (Our Voice) in Ettlingen and Nasze życie (Our Life) in Hall, to name just two, had regular humour columns, and the latter published satirical illustrations commenting on camp life at the end of each issue. Józef Betari, living in a dP camp near Munich, published two collections of satirical essays – Repatriacja na Księżyc (Repatriation

Figure 4.3 | The cover of the collection of satirical essays Repatriation to the Moon expresses the absurdity many dP s felt in regard to their position in the postwar order. In the picture, Mr Twardowski, a character from Polish folklore famous for having been tricked by the devil, observes a prisoner of Dachau who looks at the globe while a rocket marked “unrra ” flies to the moon.

Figure 4.4 | Through satire, dP s critically engaged with the discourse of Western democracy. On the cover of this book, a dP is depicted as a dog over a bowl of “vitamins,” listening to the radio saying “freedom, equality, and fraternity.”

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to the Moon) and Pieskie roważania (Dog’s Reflections) – issued by the Polish Committee of Former Political Prisoners of Concentration Camps and Słowo Polskie (Polish Word) publishing house. In the same camp, a joke book, Śmieszny Anatol (Funny Anatol), entertained refugees with one hundred and one anecdotes and jokes.33 The darkly humorous caricatures Hitleriada Furiosa and Hitleriada Macabra by Stanisław Toegel gained fame after being published in Celle in 1946.34 The publishing team in Köln-Mülheim was particularly prolific. They printed two titles dedicated specifically to humour and satire, Mucha (The Fly) and Pokrzywy w obozie: humor i satyra (Nettles in the Camp: Humour and Satire). Under the same publishing address, in nearby Solingen, a booklet, Laugh, Di-pi! One Hundred Pages of Humour, mentioned above, treated refugees to jokes and funny illustrations. In the introduction, the editor emphasized the bitter life of the dP s, beset by cold, hunger, persecutions, and alcohol abuse. The author’s aim was made plain: “If a dP reading this book forgets at least for a moment the worries of the everyday life and gives a loud laugh, heartfelt and cordial, then the goal of this little booklet will be achieved.”35 A humorous story entitled “Year 1995,” published in Jutro Pracy (Working Tomorrow), a newspaper of the Köln-Mülheim dP camp in 1945, ridiculed the issues troubling the dP s and offered an original bottom-up critique of the early postwar period. Depicting a satirical vision of a dystopian future, it takes the reader fifty years into the future and narrates a fictional course of events in the camp’s history. The weekly where it was published provided the camp’s inhabitants with news, articles on cultural events, camp chronicles, religious texts, riddles and crosswords, as well as practical information.36 The story begins with the mayor of the camp giving a speech on the fiftieth anniversary of its foundation, i.e. in 1995. Everyone is present at the ceremony, except for those busy producing moonshine. The mayor recalls the story of how the community has developed since 1945. In the beginning, the camp was growing very well, even if repatriation caused some temporary problems. One year after the opening of the site, some men volunteered to serve in the occupying forces in Japan because they were promised high stipends and suspenders for their trousers. Later on, important technical developments were introduced to the camp. Special pipes connected the kitchen with the bedrooms and pumped coffee and pea-soup straight into people’s mouths. Canned food and loaves of bread rolled through gutter pipes straight there and the third set of pipes led from under the beds to the toilet. Thanks to this, the inhabitants did not need to get out of their beds anymore. The cinema was

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also improved – films were projected onto the ceiling in such a way that viewers did not even need to move their heads. During the celebration of the centenary of the January Uprising (1863), an honorary salute from the atomic bomb was fired. The third world war then broke out. The evil empire of Monte-Negro almost won when the Martians came and saved humanity from tyranny and annihilation. During this war, the brave nation of Nabi Togobwu Telke gained fame. They were the neighbours of Monte-Negro and took the first impetus of the aggression, before fighting on all fronts of the war. The world appreciated their efforts: they gained a Burdon line and a volume of Nietzsche, the German philosopher (in Polish phonetics, pronounced as “a volume of nothing”). In 1979, the deported Nabi Togobwu Telke were sent home and the Poles remembered that they should also return. Political agitation started with maps and posters hanging around the camp. Eventually, a ghost train with unlisted repatriates went towards Poland but was derailed in Potsdam. Later on, the camp’s dogcatcher, Adolf Reltih, died and it was discovered that he was Hitler, who had just changed his name and hid among the dP s. As the story goes, Mülheim’s Poles visited many places but always returned to the camp, creating the saying “East or West, Mülheim’s best.” Those who volunteered to guard the worst souls in hell started coming back. The work there was so hard that no other nation wanted to do it but, as everybody knows, the Poles could stand almost anything. However, their hearts were too tender and could not stand the moans of the convicts. They told the stories of other Poles who were sentenced for murder and robberies but also for blasphemy, scouting, false prophecies, and for being honourable. The guards felt sorry for these souls and brought them American toothbrushes and various pastes to “clean the teeth of their hearts.” When the devil’s golden watch was stolen, he kicked all the Poles out of hell. The next war, now between Earth and Saturn, then started. Earthlings bombed Saturn with special rays and used a mirror called “Papatriacja,” which destroyed all animal and vegetal life. Large terrains on Saturn became depopulated. As a result, the Polish dP s were allowed to sign up for resettlement there. The mayor finishes his speech and declares his wish that everybody can meet again in fifty years.37 The most general message that this story conveyed, through its structure, tropes and codes, and chosen themes, was that the dP population was trapped inside an absurd system. The story provided a subversive critique of this system, dissecting and ridiculing its elements. The victims of Nazi persecution and the Polish soldiers had expected to be the

Figure 4.5 | “Project of a friend from ‘Society of Moonshine Friends.’” dP s engaged with the discourse of scientific aid, contesting and ridiculing it. In this humorous drawing, the author suggested an improvement to the organization of dP camps in the form of pipes pumping moonshine straight to people’s mouths.

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winners of the war, return to their independent country, and receive compensation for their moral and material suffering. Instead, decisions made at the conferences in Yalta and Potsdam (where the train derails in the story) shattered those dreams. The story, woven from daily experiences, drawing on conversations, propaganda, jokes, and slogans, and using tropes from pre-war Polish sci-fi literature, creates an impression of utter absurdity and chaos. The world created there is ruled by madness and coincidence. The dP s, entangled in this absurdity, flow through these events as in a drunken trance, trying to follow crazy rules and eventually failing at everything. The critique is also directed at the refugee community itself, ridiculing the attitudes and behaviours the Poles adopted during life under the unrra and Allies. The dPs are here portrayed as idle, dependent on institutional care, and naïve. Their involvement in the black market, criminal activities, extensive drinking, and pointless undertakings makes their situation even worse. The story shows how their dreams and hopes became less and less ambitious. dP s’ demands for better food provisioning and material conditions lead to the industrialization of idleness through the system of pipes and “a ceiling cinema.” The encounter with American (and Western in general) material culture seemed tempting and the author suggested that the dP s charmed by canned food, chocolate, nylons, and toothbrushes had abandoned higher aims. Obviously, this self-critique is a double-edged sword, as it indicated that the system of humanitarian aid created and reinforced these behaviours. The trope of industrialized and modernized aid recurred in refugee commentaries on the regime. dP s engaged with the discourse of scientific aid, contesting and ridiculing it. In another camp paper, in a humorous drawing labelled as a project of the “Society of Moonshine Friends,” the author suggested an improvement to the organization of dP camps in the form of pipes pumping moonshine straight to people’s mouths, allowing them to stay in their beds all day long.38 Poles trapped in dP camps did not feel strong enough to break the system that started to transform into the Cold War but tried to criticize it from within, showing their discontent and indicating that it was one of the worst versions of the postwar period that they could ever imagine. This irreverent and subversive counterdiscourse ridiculed and re-worked popular sayings and slogans, exposing a vision of the postwar period, rehabilitation, and refugee life that differed from the optimistic linear vision of the humanitarian help proposed by the unrra and Allies. The Polish dP s saw themselves as being in a crazy loop rather than marching towards a great future in the democratic world. Wartime horrors were

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not overcome but kept returning in various forms in the new absurd reality. dPs turned to satire, the “weapon of the weak,” to use James Scott’s term, which allowed a symbolic confrontation and followed the traditions of satire as a form of social protest. This cultural resistance situates itself in a more than 200-year-long Polish tradition of mocking, resisting, and criticizing consecutive occupiers, partitioners, and dubious rulers. As James Scott explains, the subordinated “have rarely been afforded the luxury of open, organized, political activity,” thus they employed different methods for forming a cultural resistance.39 dP s entertained themselves with jokes, humorous stories, and satire published in camp papers, financed by the unrra, the very organization being critiqued. For example, the editors of Nasz Głos (Our Voice) from Ettling prepared a list of “peaks,” indicating the things that particularly bothered the Polish dP s: The peak of insolence: When a Pole in Germany demands equal rights with Germans. The peak of goodwill: To believe a German is anti-Nazi. The peak of meticulosity: For the sake of the world food situation, to revoke unrra ’s parcels. The peak of imagination: To consider oneself a winner of the last war. The peak of capitalism: Giving many services and suffering for the Fatherland, thinking that there is no need to do anything else for it and live only out of interests of the previous services. The peak of lack of scruples: When a German seeks benefits for victims of Nazism.40 Power relations are exposed here, showing how dP s resented being placed on the side of the defeated, dependent on humanitarian help, and bitter about the supposed privileged position of some Germans. Its form also suggests how the chaotic situation in the postwar period influenced emotions and imaginations, causing confusion, false hopes, and the sense of being subordinated.

“ t h e t h e r aP e u t ic v irtue of work”: r e h a b il it a t io n o n r efugees ’ terms Visions of rehabilitation and relief, one promoted by the Allies and international organizations and one by the Polish refugee community, interlocked at times, whilst diverging or even clashing at others. unrra promoted a medicalized and secular approach to rehabilitation, based

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on the newest developments in Western psychology and psychiatry, including psychoanalysis. Polish dP s, on a personal and a collective level, saw their transition from war to peace rather as a revival, taking a sort of organic holistic approach, understood in natural and religious terms, as this book aims to establish in chapter 5. Both sides agreed that idleness would bring further damage. However, how and on what terms the dP s were to work and encouraged to be active remained a contentious matter. While dP s’ compulsory work was standard only in the French zone, where the “belief in the therapeutic virtue of work” was widespread, as Laure Humbert has noted, practices of making dP s work, sometimes against their will, appeared at times in all of the zones.41 Some of the camp authorities introduced regulations and ad hoc policies regarding work, often in the form of shifts to support the running of the camps. This was done not only by the American and British authorities along with social workers but also by the Polish councils, as in Wildflecken (renamed Durzyń by its inhabitants) where dP s aged between sixteen and fifty had to perform some type of work for the camp one day per week and were punished if they opposed.42 The leaders often expected women to work in the kitchen, clean the camp, and provide other services. One of the Polish military men in charge of the camp in Ingolstadt complained in the bulletin, “Staying on a foreign land fills us with hatred but it is only a temporary thing; we need to survive it with honour and victoriously. The camp is a huge family in which we need a division of work. The woman has a special role here – the role similar to the role of the mother in every family.”43 He noted that more women should join the camp workshops that produced clothes for children. He considered avoiding this work to be shameful while fulfilling it would elevate a woman’s dignity. This gendered concept of rehabilitation was common among social workers, as Tara Zahra has established, as well as among the Polish refugee elites.44 The projects that entailed producing goods for the Polish community met with a good deal of understanding and cooperation. Under unrra ’s supervision, the dPs manufactured toys from material such as plywood from smashed German planes and tattered Wehrmacht uniforms. Sets of doll furniture and wooden animals were gifted to refugee children for “their first post-Hitler Christmas.” The handicraft shops, set up by unrra welfare officers, encouraged dP s to produce folk-inspired objects. They made dolls dressed in native costumes from hoarded scraps of silk and satin and ensured they were “correct down to the last frill.”45 The leaders viewed occupational therapy and employment programs as “the best cure for lethargy and inertia produced by years of malnutrition

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Figure 4.6 | Polish women spinning wool for making socks and mittens in Hohenfels dP camp. The issue of working in the camps spurred conflicting visions of rehabilitation.

and slave labor.” The officials expected that before finding resettlement, the dP s would contribute to the German economy. They planned “to train them in definite lines, to restore their self-respect and independence and thus divert them from idleness or worse.”46 The dP s fiercely opposed the obligation to work for the benefit of the Germans and Austrians and those countries’ economies. They claimed that they wanted to work and treated work as the highest value but would do that only on their own terms. For example, two dP teachers from Maczków wrote to the acrPdP , complaining that “the British government wants to force us into the German economy through using compulsory work of Poles in favour of Germans. In other words, we had started a strenuous fight with the enemy and now they want to make us an instrument in the hand of the hated adversary, even if defeated one.”47

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Some dP s demanded that the Germans become servants of the Poles, cooking, cleaning, and performing other jobs for them. The rhetoric and the practices of unrra and the military government engendered dissent and protest. Some dP s rejected them and called for rehabilitation and relief on their own terms. dP s associated with the Polish Union wrote that “the word rehabilitation (listed on the unrra banner) sounded just as [false as] the word democracy in the East.”48 Rejecting unrra ’s propaganda, they called for more freedom in proceeding with their own forms of rehabilitation through support for Polish schools, family life, and cultural and religious activities, guided by priests, teachers, and intellectuals.49

“my g o o d r ig h t t o g iv e t o my li [f]e the form i wi s h ” : s e e k in g a id a n d asserti ng ri ghts The dP s not only critiqued and contested the refugee regime but also tried to assert their rights and proposed solutions to improve or change the system. To obtain aid, complain, or claim their rights they turned to petitions and letter writing, circulated posters and bulletins, or simply showed up in person at a camp leader’s or international organization’s office. Individual requests for material help and for aid in securing a job or accommodation and to hasten resettlement tended to be formulated in beseeching and deferential tones. Aleksandra G., turning to the acrPdP for help to go to the usa , wrote, “I beg you Gentlemen to show your mercy and generosity and to make it possible for me to finish with this horror of everyday life, with this insecurity and poverty, to bring me back my normal, stabilised, family life.”50 In a similar tone, Stanisław F. wrote, “Just to leave this hostile Germany to live like a Christian man because I got sick of staying in these lagers … I am asking and begging you that maybe our God would give you this idea that maybe you would help us, poor orphans pushed away from our parents and relatives, taken for the wandering to this unhappy and indecent Germany. Be praised Jesus Hrist [sic] forever and ever Amen.”51 Letters received by a Caritas priest from hospital patients and prison inmates had a similarly pleading and thankful tone. The letter from Stanisław W., imprisoned in Straubing, in which he threatened the priest for allegedly not providing him a parcel for the 5 marks he sent to him, was an exception: “What is that supposed to mean? I sent you these marks and I asked you to buy me tobacco and bread … But you are poking fun at me … I will tell you that you might regret it very soon, something bad can happen to you.”52 Stanisław threatened that if he did not receive a parcel, he would write to a Polish newspaper to publicly

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humiliate the priest. Having received a response (not preserved in the documentation), in the next letter he begged for forgiveness, claiming that he was “sitting all alone, abandoned by everyone, and nobody told me I am doing the wrong thing.”53 Petitions and complaints, especially those from educated refugees or groups of dP s to the authorities, were at times formulated in more demanding ways. “For the right of the citizens of Europe” and “We demand freedom from fear” ran the titles of the articles and petitions of a group of dP s mistreated at the border when returning to Germany from working in Belgian mines. In this case, the press articles and petitions sent to the iro resulted in a quick intervention and with assurances that the border officials were cautioned and the situation would not reoccur.54 Dr Michał Szkelnik, acting as a legal adviser and defender for dP s in Wasserburg and Ebersberg districts, turned to the unrra deputy chief security officer to demand clarification of regulations around the legal issues concerning dP s. He posed several questions designed to expose the punitive and exaggerated measures used by the authorities of various levels (original spelling is retained): “Is it possible at all that a dP can be stripped off his rights he has as a dP ? In this case what authority is competent to act this and for what reason can it be done? Is it possible at all that a dP can be removed to another camp or that he can be taken out of the camp at all? ... Is the dP Camp Police authorized to punish dP s and if it is the came [sic], what means of punishment can be employed?”55 As is often the case, it is hard to estimate to what extent, and if at all, this kind of intervention changed the situation of dP s. “Action has been taken to correct situation reflected by questions asked in the letter,” assured Eldon Marple, the director of unrra Team 161.56 What is certain is that the international aid organizations and military staff acknowledged and discussed some of the petitions and requests made by the dP s and their representatives. Cooperation between dP s in leadership positions and unrra , the iro, and military authorities was often challenging. A Polish camp leader complained about unexpected transfers to a new camp: “Seeing that unrra couldn’t help me in organization of the camp I worked myself to arrange this camp nicely and with many efforts I was successful. Now when the camp had been well organized with the money and efforts of the dP s they were thrown out without any reason and in their place came other people.”57 As no explanation of the transfer was given, which was usually the case, the frustration prompted the leader to engage with the authorities.

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One of the grassroots initiatives, the project of the Refugee Rights Charter, expressed the dP s’ wish for self-determination. It grew out of the conviction that the authorities did not represent and protect the dP s’ interests. The author, Witold Zadźwiński, signed it with the words “in the name of a group of refugees and in my own” and included a call to copy and share the charter by hand or by typewriter. The charter itself stated that refugees should enjoy four rights: 1. The refugees cannot be deprived of the right to individually decide what is their attitude towards the government in Poland. Attention: This right is limited by the ban of spreading political propaganda and creating underground organizations acting against any of the governments of the Allied countries. 2. The refugee has a right to decide about his future and to assess himself if there are sufficient reasons for not coming back to the country. 3. Exerting pressure on refugees to make them come back to the country or to stay abroad is condemnable violence, even if done in a mild form. 4. The refugees staying in Germany have the right to create their own self-help associations and have their own press according to the same regulations as Germans. Depriving the refugees of any of these four rights would be a crime against democratic rules and against the rights of man, citizens, and nations.58 This charter not only opposed forced repatriation and the pressures related to it but also advocated the freedom of self-determination for individuals and reflected the specific situation of Polish refugees in Germany and Austria. The fourth point related to the closing of refugee organizations (for example the Association of the Former Prisoners of the Concentration Camps) and refugee newspapers (especially in the American zone) by the unrra and occupational authorities. It was a call for freedom of opinion and speech, as well as a protest against deciding what was best for the refugees without consulting them or leaving space for their individual decisions. In other instances, dPs demanded to be treated with more respect. During the exhibition of Polish books and press in exile that took place in Hanover in 1946, one of the posters read in Polish and English, “But for the right of political asylum the world would not have known Dante, Kalvin, Mazzini, Bakunin, Kosciuszko, Marx, Lenin, Komenski.”59

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Claiming their rights as a group and as individuals, the Poles noted that the situation imposed upon them had negatively influenced their lives, limited them, and violated their perceived rights. On some occasions, individuals requested their rights to be respected in an official way. For example, Helen B. wrote to the Legal Section of the Chief Office of unrra to request help in obtaining a divorce (original spelling is retained): “After all steps for the divorse, undertaken untill now by me, were in vain, please allow me to apply to you as the last resort in my difficult situation in order to get a definit information. I am a polish citizen and dP . As my return to Poland in out of question at the present time and no permission is given in this moment to enter an other country, I am forcet to remain in Bavaria.”60 Helen claimed that she reached a mutual agreement with her husband, whom she had not lived with for several years. Therefore, her marriage was only a legal matter but, in her current situation, it seriously complicated her life. She seemed to feel trapped by her status as a dP and was deprived of the right to decide about her own life, including with regard to personal matters. Her letter continued: “on one hand I can’t change my living place, and on the other hand I am not able to arrange my private life as I would like to and to give a legal end to my for many years not any more existing matrimony.” She turned to a lawyer in Munich but reportedly was unable to obtain a divorce through a German court because the “German authorities don’t want at all to occupy themselves with divorcing of foreign matrimonies.” Her lawyer suggested that she try to obtain the divorce according to Polish law. She continued in her letter (original spelling is retained): “Am I not living in XX-th century and in the democratic epoch, where the life of every individuel humain beeing is said to have a specific value? And nevertheless, there is not one authority which will respect my good right to give to my live the form I wish.”61 Helen embraced the discourse of individualism, democracy, and human rights, pointing out that she was denied the right to decide about her life and was unable to access any institution for help and protection. Officials of unrra , the organization that operated under the slogans she invoked, were unable to provide any solution or advice: “Foreign nationals within the United States zone are at the present unable to prosecute or be prosecuted against for civil actions. In view of the fact that such nationals are only temporarily resident here, any actions for divorce will have to wait until such time as these individuals return to their home countries or are resettled. This organization has no power or authority to grant divorce.”62 This situation not only meant that Helen

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was stuck in legal and personal limbo but that she would also most likely encounter difficulties in resettlement, as dP s, especially women, met with discrimination based on their marital status. Some dP s, especially those from educated backgrounds, also engaged with the new rhetoric of human rights. They appealed to refugee organizations and complained when they felt their rights were being violated. They invoked values promoted by the Allies and unrra and the traditional values of their communities, negotiating between them to achieve their practical goals and to express their wider concerns. A legal bureaucratic way to exert their rights almost always turned out to be tedious and slow, having a long-lasting impact on their lives. Loss of their dP status prompted some Poles to engage with the authorities. When Wanda’s dP status was questioned during the screening, she was ordered to leave the dP camp and lost her right to assistance. She wrote a long letter in English to the screening commission, provided supporting documents, and named witnesses ready to confirm she was indeed a deportee and a victim of Nazi persecution. In her letter, she detailed her wartime record, including her service as a nurse during the Warsaw Uprising and for the Home Army, arrest by the Nazis, imprisonment in transient camps, and forced labour in a metalwork factory in Saxony. “The Commission refused to acknowledge me as dP . I cannot understand the grounds for such a refusal. I am Pole, was brought compulsorily to Germany, went through all sufferings and I am sure that no commission in the world is able to deny this stubborn fact,” she insisted. While such arbitrary decisions were fairly common, many dP s lacked the resources to defy them. “I only beg the Commission to do justice to me,” Wanda concluded. She managed to have her dP status reinstated.63 dPs’ perceptions of justice and entitlement can be explored by looking at the particular case of Edward O., who, similarly to Wanda, was stripped of his dP rights. For several years Edward battled with the iro , sending what officials called “lengthy, incoherent letters,” to confirm his eligibility for assistance after being accused during the screening of “voluntary assistance to Germans” and having “German ethnic origin.” He decided to escalate the case to the iro office in Geneva and to the United Nations. He wrote to the latter (original spelling is retained): “Being under false accusation I ask for advise where dP can find justice, for in vain I applied to iro Organization. I am bereft of every possibility to earn for living, even occasional work is forbidden me. Living the fifth year on dP rations I lost my health, in consequence of that I am consciently driven into death. Being in poor health I have not much hope

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for immigration … In despair I turn to the League on Human Rights for protection, for I lost faith in justice and right.”64 Eventually, the iro reviewed his case and declared that he was within the organization’s mandate and was entitled to full assistance. He claimed that he had lost any resettlement possibilities due to the delay and had become trapped in “the antlike barracks.” The fact that he became recognized as a “confirmed mental case” after a psychologist assessed him in a dP camp during “psychological exploration” makes the story even more nuanced. Doctors evaluated him as being “paranoid” and “delusional,” while Edward himself stated, “I am the fifth year in dP camp without any hope for the future, with shattered nerves and ruined health. I live in constant fear and nervous tension.”65 One of the reasons as to why it was pronounced that Edward had a psychiatric problem was the fact that officials could not follow his story regarding his wartime and postwar fate. He was a soldier who had been deported to Germany. Then he escaped and worked as a geologist while supporting the Polish underground. He returned to Germany to negotiate the revindication of scientific specimens and then went to a dP camp and worked for the Polish Repatriation Mission. His story was indeed complicated and unusual, and he did not wish to make it simpler for the sake of the iro ’s bureaucracy. Officials had little patience to investigate the evidence that he provided; they considered his story incoherent and pronounced him illegible. Only when Edward started persistently sending letters and informed the office in Geneva did the case gather pace. He collected documents from individuals and organizations, including the prominent director of the Institute of Geology, which verified his account. He believed that the procedure was unjust; he invoked passages from the iro ’s constitution and complained about the behaviour of iro officials, which he considered to be offensive. When, in one of the petitions, he asked who decided about his ineligibility, he received the answer that an eligibility officer “consider[s] the case as a whole and make[s] judgment in the same way as an independent judge.”66 Edward, whose further fate remains unknown, recapitulated in one of the letters, “I have done everything and neglected nothing to prove the truth and the rights I am entitled to, as dP .”67 His case highlights how officials expected dP s to prove they were victims of persecution, yet dP s were also discriminated against if the consequences of that persecution manifested in physical or mental ill health. In their claims, informal and formal, dP s mixed elements of the dominant discourses and exposed their contradictions.

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c o n c l u s ion dPs, individually and as part of the refugee community, tried to negotiate their position in the postwar order with unrra and the iro and with the members of traditional and newly emerging social elites. Claiming rights, appealing, petitioning, protesting, and contributing to changes or improvements of the system proved challenging, as hierarchies stiffened in the postwar period. The strong hegemonic position of international aid organizations as a feeding and disciplining arm of the Allies forced the refugees to speak from weak positions. To make their voices count, they engaged in the discourses of rehabilitation, individualism, democracy, human rights, and anti-communism. Embracing and fighting these discourses, they also turned to counterhegemonic practices such as jokes, satire, and passive resistance, providing a bottom up-critique of postwar humanitarian practices and their own community as entangled in this world. Drawing on various lexicons and discourses, they subverted the language of vitamins, freedom, and democracy and thus proposed alternatives to the unrra ’s vision of the kingdom of barracks as a humanitarian success and to the Polish elite’s narrative of the heroic exiles. Humour, at times sliding into satire, was one of the bottom-up strategies which enabled disempowered dP s to engage in the critique of this vision and provide an alternative reading of the postwar reality. Conceptualizing dPs’ humour as a weapon of the weak, this chapter showed how it simultaneously functioned as a coping strategy, or as survival laughter, as well as a showcasing dP s’ continual struggle to have their voices heard. The laughter in the kingdom of barracks, even if often bitter, provided a tool of resistance against practices of “care and control” and seemed to have the power of distancing dP s from the oppression of the refugee regime. Tormented by postwar uncertainties, the displaced likely saw the world the way Józef Betari put it in one of his essays, as a circus with themselves as trapeze artists balancing on the wire, always one step away from the fall.68

5 “Poles Are a Phoenix among the Nations”: Revival of a Human, Rebirth of the Nation Let’s go sunbathing again I am so bored here in the camp So we are walking somewhere forward Because in the whole quiet sky I like to search for something dear to me, Something ours, something Polish Because this sky, this sky exactly Bears me, deep in reverie, To the bosom of our country … And the rays of sunshine say That life will change.1

Shortly after the war finished, young Zofia Kruk had her hair cut. She was fifteen when she became liberated from forced labour. In the German town of Tangermünde, where she lived in a dP camp organized in a school building, she paid a visit to a hairdresser. She was glad “to be finished with the everlasting plaits” and left her hair as payment. Now, she was free and wanted to regain control over her body, marking a new era in her life, which meant not only freedom but also entering adulthood. Consumed by the sudden joy of freedom, she washed her rags and sewed beautiful clothes from a parachute. After that she managed to change her wooden clogs for neat shoes and at the first opportunity joined in a dance with other dP s. She went with other camp inmates to have her photograph taken for which she posed in a borrowed coat. Leaving for the next camp made her realize the changes she had undergone: “I was sorry to leave Tangermünde, but anyway I was better off than when I came, with my photo, and

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my hair cut, and my wonderful almost-new shoes.”2 For Zofia, as for many other liberated people, a process of healing began. Painstakingly rediscovering happiness, refugees cried and laughed, spent futile hours on their bunkbeds and enjoyed communal life, went for walks in nature, swam in rivers, sunbathed, prayed and argued, and fell in love, reconstructing their lives from pieces of what was thought to be irreparably broken. War wrought havoc on people’s bodies and minds. dP s were liberated in extremely poor physical and mental shape. The struggle for survival and life limited to a biological minimum was a daily reality for many. During their recovery in the camps, the relative safety kindled debates on the nature of the wartime “decline” and possible remedies. Liberation marked the beginning of a new life and allowed for reflection on the bodily, mental, and moral consequences of war and displacement. dP camps provided a space for fulfilling basic needs and reassuring people that their lives were not in immediate danger anymore. This brought about a strong focus on the body, around which Poles sought to rebuild their integrity and identity. This chapter explores concepts of the body, recovery, and identity among Polish dP s. It shows how individual and group revival was capitalized on for the rebirth of the nation in exile. By investigating dP s’ testimonies and grassroots discussions on reshaping war-damaged individuals and nations, it aims to explore their understanding of the idea of being human, a citizen, and a member of a nation. As we shall see, the approaches to revival and renewal that sprang up in the Polish refugee community overshadowed unrra ’s attempts to rehabilitate dP s through medicalized assistance. Thus, it shows how personal and collective transitions from war to peace were another site of cultural negotiation. The chapter begins by introducing the figures of the Muselmann and the Untermensch as points of reference for discussion around war-inflicted damage on the individual and the community. This leads to a discussion of the idea of “revival,” arguing that it was understood in natural and religious terms. The final section shows how this emancipatory process of rebuilding dP s’ lives started on an individual level and tracks personal and collective responses to perceived “demoralization” to demonstrate how it emerged from concerns about the bodies, minds, and souls of refugees. Finally, it shows that leaders of the Polish dP community believed that the revival of a human was to bring about the rebirth of the Polish nation in exile.

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“ t h e r e s u r r e c t io n s of the dead”: l iv in g in t h e s h a dow of war The spectre of the Muselmann hovered over the inhabitants of the refugee camps. Coined in Auschwitz to refer to prisoners who were extremely debilitated due to starvation and were awaiting death, the term Muselmann (in Polish, muzułman) describes a liminal state of corporeality in which the human is deprived of everything except the bare minimum to maintain life, situating the subject on the very border of existence.3 The same concept functioned in other concentration camps – as Krypel in Stutthof, Gamel in Majdanek, Schmuckstück in Ravensbrück. The origins of the term Muselmann are not clear. One explanation suggests that it came from the position of the body with folded legs and the rigid face resembling a mask.4 The term referred to people no matter what their gender, nationality, and religion.5 The Muselmann was the ultimate figure of suffering and dehumanization. Wanda, a young nurse who anticipated liberation listening to a radio broadcast, observed with shock in her diary: “A train with the inmates from the concentration camps stopped … in the striped clothes – oh, what a sight, what faces, it is impossible to describe – living corpses – God, God, how much these poor people suffer – many Poles, Home Army soldiers … so many of them are dying.”6 Czesław Grądzki, author of the memoir Muselmann Returns Home, described them as looking “like walking skeletons, dressed in rags, with no hope in their eyes but stubbornly clinging to life up to the last moment. They lived only for this one day – to survive this one day. If they survived, their desire was to survive the next day. And they waited for some miracle, for freedom. Who believed in this miracle could endure it longer, who lost the faith – died quickly, mentally broken.”7 Adolf Gawalewicz used expressions such as a “crawling or laying human quadruped” and “a human beast led by the instinct of survival” to describe the “typical fate of a human of the lager [camp]” in his memoir, Reflections in the Gas Chamber’s Waiting Room: From the Memoirs of a Muselmann (1968).8 The idea presented there – that due to starvation and extreme hardship a person could be considered a biological substance without individual identity – echoed Hannah Arendt’s “the animal-species man” or “the living corpse.”9 The subhuman (in Polish, podczłowiek), another figure of liminal corporality with which the displaced engaged, was considered by the Nazis as those who were the “masses from the East” or Slavs, Jews, Romani, and others. It denoted their inferiority and became an important element of Nazi racial ideology.10 One Nazi directive stated, “It must be made

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clear even to the German milkmaid that Polishness equals subhumanity. Poles, Jews, and gypsies are on the same inferior level.” The aim presented there was to make everyone in Germany “subconsciously” see any Pole “whether farm worker or intellectual, as vermin.”11 The displaced Poles often bitterly engaged with this term and the rhetoric attached to it in their accounts, indicating the Nazis’ cruelty and sense of superiority, as well as distancing themselves from it and attempting to evade its symbolic power. Many victims of Nazi persecution assumed that their wartime experiences had damaged the cultural sphere of their life and limited some of them to being Untermenschen and Muselmänner, living a bare life to use Agamben’s term, or otherwise in danger of slipping back into that mindset.12 They often felt like hungry, ill, broken creatures that needed uplifting and regeneration. The “revival of a human,” as dP s often phrased it, was an emancipatory process of physical, mental, and cultural regeneration influenced and regulated by external agencies. Jerzy Niemojowski entitled his dP novel, or “a confession” as another émigré commented in the introduction, The Resurrections of the Dead.13 The main character, wandering around dP camps in a quest for “a deeper current of life,” cannot regain his lost sense of life and eventually finds solace in death, feeling unable to survive after the war has killed the man in him.14 The rhetoric of resurrection was plentiful. “My Fatherland, my beloved who has just risen from the grave,” wrote a young student in the dP school memory book.15 Adapting to a new life brought multiple challenges. For instance, Tomaszewski wrote after coming to the Polish enclave in Maczków, “I am afraid that ‘we, the fighting Warsaw’ are not suitable for a normal life, it is different to die on the barricades and different to subject oneself to orders and regulations.”16 Tomaszewski expressed a state of mind common for dP s: “I must pull myself together. Maybe I could travel somewhere again? Maybe change the camp?”17 The desire for change and for organizing their life better was rife. The kernels of revival were to be found in the explosion of joy and hope found in liberation and early postwar days, which brought about an atmosphere of carnivalesque chaos and transgression.18 Once freed, people ate, drank, smoked, rested, danced, had sex, and once again ate, if possible, to the point of indulgence. They sought compensation and empowerment, compulsively dealing with their war traumas. In his honest account, Bronisław Szneliński, a Pole who volunteered for labour in the Third Reich, described the first days of freedom in the following way: “Then came the day for Germans to pay. Our people went from house to house and destroyed, tore, cracked, smashed, and chopped

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everything. There were eight days of absolute freedom. Everybody did what he wanted, one took revenge on the other, everyone tried to get even.”19 Tomaszewski called it a “bacchanalia” and “revue of the absurd”; Nowakowski a “dissolute interregnum.”20 Maria Horodyska detailed in her memoir how Polish women working in Krupp factories formed romantic and sexual liaisons with French and Italian Pow s during the first days of freedom.21 One peasant recalled “the pure heresies” happening when men and women freed from forced labour were housed in the same camp during one of the first nights after the liberation.22 Jan Michalski, a Pow who became a dP camp commandant, captured this atmosphere of regaining forces by reconnecting with nature and the collective in his memoir: “People were lying at ease in the riverside of Elbe, bathing in the river … going for further or closer walks, visiting each other in different camps, going to see friends in Hamburg and Lübeck, and sometimes even further, playing cards … but above all, they were making love acrimoniously to overcompensate for the years of forced abstinence.”23 From factories and farms, slaves of the Third Reich went out into the bright spring of 1945.

“ y o u r l if e is a young P lant”: u n de r s t a n d in g r e h a b il itati on and revi val unrra put the word “rehabilitation” on their banners and championed their preparedness to help dP s. They had a ready supply of medical and psychological expertise, along with an army of social workers with varying levels of experience, ready to implement it. The organization placed pictures of Polish churches, schools, music and dancing lessons, the press, hospitals, councils, and happy children in their brochures, in self-congratulation for completion of their mission. However, even the most committed foreign social workers were very limited in their ability to communicate efficiently with the dP s, as they rarely spoke any Polish or even German.24 Translation problems were common. H.C. Givan, deputy director of the camp in Braunau in Austria, reported, “Polish Welfare Officer or interpreter is badly needed. Contact with residents Committee and camp in general is dependent on two interpreters whose knowledge of English is very limited.”25 Kathryn Hulme, a social worker renowned for her memoir of Wildflecken dP camp, relied on an interpreter, a Polish woman of aristocratic background in her sixties. Hulme referred to her as “the Countess” and described her as tall and handsome with “the cornflower-blue eyes of the Slav and the lean race face of the Polish nobility, but with all native hauteur beaten out of it by suffer-

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ing so that every emotion showed instantly.” The Countess was an intermediary between Hulme and dP s of various origins: “I quickly learned to know in advance, by watching her face, something of the shape of the problem being unfolded to her in halting Polish, Russian, German or Ukrainian before she recited it back to me in flawless Warsaw-society French.”26 In regard to contact with the head of the Polish camp committee, Hulme noted that “nobody on the team could pronounce his Polish name so we called him by the habitual sounds he made Tak Tak Schon.”27 Iris Murdoch, famous Irish writer and philosopher-to-be, working for a unrra team in the French zone of Austria, wrote in a private letter, “The unrra office is bilingual, with French as basic, then German & English – and our Displaced Persons speak only Russian or Polish – so the atmosphere is divinely polyglot.”28 For many of the non-elite dP s, foreign social workers remained anonymous hands giving injections, making lists, and distributing food. Yet, they implemented the refugee regime and designed activities and regulations in the field. The most active social workers negotiated with the elite dP s on a daily basis, using the camp space to realize their visions of reforming individuals and communities after the war. Polish elites often acted through unrra structures (as class II and class III personnel or staff locally recruited and loaned from voluntary agencies) and used its infrastructure.29 After a period of time living in a dP camp, Tamara Szechidewicz, a young woman from a noble family of Tatar origin who was deported to forced labour, took a job as a unrra (and later on iro) welfare officer in Wildflecken and Aschaffenburg. Born in Rovno and educated in Wilno, she was a lawyer by training and spoke six languages. She organized a plethora of cultural activities for dP s, supervized camp elections, and established camp courts.30 Doctors, activists, and other members of the intelligentsia mediated between the agendas of the humanitarian organizations and the Polish elites, as will be explored in detail in the next chapter. On paper, the division of responsibilities between unrra staff and the national staff was fairly clear. In practice, it was often blurred. It is noteworthy that even in theory the national staff was expected to provide a wide spectrum of services, including non-material welfare, religious assistance, information service, and the organization of return convoys. In due course, their activities were much more extensive, encroaching on unrra duties to provide shelter, supplies, and health services.31 While the unrra promoted medicalized rehabilitation and its employees endorsed private and religious agendas, Poles often talked about revival (in Polish, odrodzenie). They understood it on their own terms

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as the re-growing and remoulding of the human, society, and the nation after the war. This revival, or “being born anew,” was seen as a holistic, organic, and spiritual process that would allow men and women to start a new and better life after the war. The process of healing bodies and souls could be helped and directed but ultimately it lay with a higher power, that of nature and God. Some dP s, fed by the press with the stories of atomic bombs and technological progress, adopted the language of scientific enquiry, blending it into Polish spirituality. “Our Polish sun was looking at us, waking up to life the cells of our little bodies,” wrote a dP school student in a poem.32 The editors of Defilada (The Parade) saw the forces of nature acting just as national bonds did: “As a living cell may thrive only thanks to mysterious connections with the higher energy and in the same way every man and every nation can truly live and grow only thanks to the connection with the forces which are the essence of life.”33 “Spring” became a powerful metaphor characterizing a return to life; a cyclical process that was supposed to involve humans as a part of nature. The images of the earth awakening to live and grow after winter interlocked with those of humans starting anew. “And a human is reviving in spring,” wrote an anonymous author in the dP periodical Polonia. “[W]ith spring, life is reviving and so our hearts could revive … Let’s reflect on ourselves, specify our desires and plans through the prism of the awakening spring. The sense of the existence of the world is not war and suffering, we are not living to kill and hate.”34 The author believed that human souls must be healed as the world moved forward. The healing of war wounds was like the earth’s healing after winter; with time it just had to happen, and all that was left to do was to believe in it. Eryk Zieliński’s vision of postwar regeneration, presented in a didactic booklet he published while living in a dP camp near Hamburg, also revolved around natural processes: “Life is changeable and flows like water in the Vistula, constantly forward … As the night comes after the day, summer after winter, ease must come after the misery. This is the truth of life, the law of life.”35 Often, this kind of rhetoric was followed by a call for all Poles to move forward and take part in renewing social life. The editors of Dziennik Polski (The Polish Daily) in Watenstedt employed similar imagery: “It was not a coincidence that the long-awaited liberation happened during spring. As nature awakens to life … a new, different, and full life has started for us. When the signs of winter have disappeared and the glaze ice and windstorm became a memory, we should also try to put into oblivion this that can be called by one word only – a nightmare . The marks, thousands of which this period left on

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our soul, should be rubbed away, destroyed to leave nothing from this period of degradation.”36 Frequently, dP s interpreted their return to life as a result of leaving hospitals, camps, and other institutions and returning to nature. Maria Horodyska recounted in her memoir how she relished the garden view seen from the hospital window: “For hours I was laying down staring at the miracle of nature awakening to life from winter’s deadness that unfolded in front of my eyes and at the same time I was feeling how the blood in my veins was starting to pulsate with the returning health.”37 When released from the hospital and placed in a dP camp, she sneaked out from the camp with her female friend to spend whole days lying on the grass under trees and eating apples.38 After years of living in fear and privation, in the spring and summer months of 1945 and 1946 dP s savoured nature. They spent time outside and went for trips to the waterfronts and forests to sunbathe and play sports. Józef Betari depicted the first postwar spring as a time of hope and love: Spring … March … Youth … This should be enough. These three words convey more than all the treaties, agreements, and political scheming … At dusk the entire Freimann camp goes for a walk. A couple after a couple, exemplarily, like in a good novel. Their silhouettes are disappearing in the darkness, the forest is singing moon serenades with the swoosh of the leaves, and the empty meadow seems to tempt and lure them with the smell of the heated-up ground. The stars are flirting with the moon, in the darkness of the night the nations are making the treaties of eternal friendship, the world is breathing calmly with the balsamic air of the first postwar spring. The souls are bright and the world is merry. What matters is that after a day comes a night, that after winter comes spring and that humankind has a right to believe that such a spring will come which a future historian will call the “Springtime of the Peoples.”39 Jurek, a young man who had served in the Holy Cross Mountains Brigade, a unit of the National Armed Forced evacuated to West Germany, and supposedly had committed some crime or offence in the aftermath of the war, gave a description of his personal revival in the correspondence with a Polish priest.40 He managed to get to France in 1949 but kept in touch with the priest who offered him spiritual support and practical help. Thanking him for the moral guidance, Jurek wrote,

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Dear Father, here spring is coming and the world really presents itself to me in different colours than there in Germany. I am happy that I managed to get out of that cave of evil, otherwise I would have to still wander in the path of crime and iniquity. But, thank God, all that passed irrevocably and I think all that was a dream and a horrible nightmare ... It is so beautiful here, I am in a town surrounded by low mountains and my heart is full of joy that the world is starting to awake to life again. The same is happening to me, I woke up to the new life and only now I see the difference between this and that.41 He explained his final transition from a man of war to a man of peace as a result of falling in love, which he understood as a gift from God: “While in Germany I wanted nothing more than to go to the front line and to get revenge but now I feel unexplainable fear that this new war can start and multiply the fear and destruction with even bigger force than before.”42 In another letter, he confessed, “For all these sufferings and evils which were accompanying me until now, God showed mercy upon me and gave me her [a beloved woman]. She is a bright figure for whom I desire to be a human and to live in accordance with God … God had mercy upon me and tore me away from Germany – this nest of sin.”43 The link between nature, morality, and God which Jurek saw as a basis for his revival appeared in many conceptualizations of the postwar transition to peace. In the rhetoric of postwar revival, “spring” interlocked with “resurrection.” Religious celebrations of Easter united Poles in worshipping God and celebrating his son’s resurrection after humiliation and suffering. Revival of God, preached by priests in makeshift camp chapels, brought hope for a revival of the people and of the nation. One of the editorials in Na Obczyźnie (In the Foreign Land) read, “[Christ] resurrected after days of suffering and in this way not only proved his divine origins but also wished to symbolize the revival of a human who should rise from the haze of evil to the peaks of perfection. The Lord’s Resurrection is then a symbol of a new life, a better, more dignified life of a righteous man.”44 Priests abundantly evoked this kind of imagery, steering dP s’ revival. In spring 1946, Reverend Tadeusz Malec addressed the inhabitants of the dP camp in Haltern with the following words: “A long year of freedom has passed, even if on foreign land. But did we all resurrect spiritually? Does the heavy stone of sin, the stone of immorality, pushed inside us by the enemy, still rest on our souls, on our Polish character? Is

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there something to reflect on? These kinds of experiences which we went through during the war should speak to our hearts and should change them. But it is different. Many of us are not worthy of Resurrection.”45 Priests such as Malec called for moral and spiritual revival, for rejection of the Nazi-inflicted burden of sin. In interwar Poland, the Roman Catholic clergy opposed eugenics and theories of race and condemned Nazi racial policies. After World War II and during postwar exile, the Roman Catholic clergy encouraged dP s to turn their thoughts toward spiritual and natural revival.46 The rhetoric of natural and religious revival after the hecatomb of war was intertwined with calls for the renewal of family, society, and nation. Human life, described as “plants,” “trees,” “sparks,” needed the right soil and tender care to grow into desirable forms. Józef Czapliński, one of the leaders of the dP camp in Ingolstadt, turned to young boys and girls at a school ceremony with the following speech: “Your life is a young plant which needs a lot of sunshine and care to grow into a useful tree.”47 As Tara Zahra has demonstrated, viewing children as national treasures and defining their “best interests” in nationalist terms was commonplace in post–World War II Europe.48 Czapliński, too, saw children as a treasure of the nation, a bodily and morally strong collective that would build Poland in exile: “The future, which requires healthy and strong people, depends on you. Each of you bears in your heart the measure of the future laws and future borders of our Fatherland. The bigger your souls will be and the better and more noble your hearts will be, the more righteous will be the laws of our future Poland and the bigger its borders.”49 Every child, man, and woman had a role in this collective revival. Priests and intellectuals evoked the figure of Mother-Pole, ready to sacrifice everything for the family – “the most perfect educational institute of the characters” and “a temple of the most valuable elements of the nation.”50 The Polish woman was construed as an educator and nurturer of the nation; young girls were to prepare for this role. This process should take place first of all in the family where “father’s reason and mother’s sweetness form and ennoble the young generation.” The individual revival should be then a step towards building a stronger and healthier nation because “a healthy tree will bring healthy fruit.”51 However, not all women and not all nationalists wanted to view femininity this way. Polish girl scouts in the Weiden dP camp swore in their oath, “We don’t care for ourselves but for the Big Holy Aim – Poland … For this aim we will be able to offer up even those, so for us dear womanish traits such as goodness and mildness. We shall become soldiers

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who fight, who pour over blood, who kill!”52 Unlike what most Polish nationalists wished for, some women and men did not want to or were not able to move on from wartime gender shifts but explored femininity and masculinity beyond its conservative registers. Seeing revival in natural, religious, and collective terms was an attempt to regard the war not as an apocalypse but as a catastrophe, which may be overcome, part of the cyclical course of destruction and renewal. The human as a part of this system could be healed and incorporate his or her body and soul into the body of the nation. Polish exiled elites tried to encourage, direct, and mobilize this personal revival for the greater cause, the exile mission that rested on the strong and fertile bodies of the refugees.

“P e o P l e n o n -P e oP l e ” : body and i denti ty This revival started with the individual reckoning with war and displacement, with the regeneration of the body, and reflection on what it meant to be human. One dP remembered the first night after the liberation: “How happy I was when I lay down in the bedbug-infested bed with a feeling of safety and certainty. Here, in a foreign land where my fatherland and I were being defiled for the last five years, I become a human again.”53 Józef Betari bitterly reflected, “For six years we have been deprived of all civil rights. In Roman law this kind of death is called ‘capitis diminution media’ or if you wish ‘maxima.’ We survived, we exist and we don’t have any intention to cease existing.”54 The excesses of liberation contained within itself the promise of future revival. Coming to terms with war began with survivors’ reflecting on their own bodies. “My own body is no longer mine,” wrote Primo Levi about his condition as a prisoner of Auschwitz, putting into words the experience of millions of people enslaved by the Nazis.55 When the war finished, dP s prefigured a possibility of regaining their own bodies. Usually, the first realization was that against all odds they were alive, that their bodies still worked, that they could breathe, eat, and move. Tadeusz Nowakowski wrote in his autobiographical novel about a man who, during the first hours after the liberation, suddenly became conscious of the fact that he did not share the fate of many others: “‘But I have survived!’ He laughed, and the tears streamed down his face. ‘I am alive, I was not burned up, not shot to death, not buried in wet sand, not starved, not flogged to death by a SS-man! I am alive, you son of bitches!’”56 Expressing confusion and uncertainty towards the new identity, Tadeusz Borowski wrote in a poem,

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What’s here? Yearning and sleepless nights, Some streets and somebody’s poems. I am alive. Descent from people non-people. Displaced Person.57 Bodily regeneration was often the first aim of liberated people. Before making any decisions about the future, they wished to recover from wartime miseries and gather their energy for further action. Maria Horodyska wrote, “I was so impaired and exhausted by the long-term illness that I decided to wait out the period of the regeneration of my physical and mental forces in the exile.”58 Borowski in one of his letters to his friend Zofia touched on the problem of leaving the reality of concentration camps in which humans were reduced to the Muselmänner and “finding his own self”: [Your] letters [were] from another, better world, one that knew neither boundless hunger – the most ignominious of human feelings because it reduces man to the level of an animal eating scraps, grass, and clay – not a hatred so corrosive because absolutely powerless; not fear, the worst fear because it was daily, and completely impotent; not the disgusting, repulsive death by gas – not for one’s country, but simply from wasted flesh, from swollen legs, from boils and phlegmon, from scabies and typhus. I deluded myself that you would all remain on that other, better side of the world and that I, returning from here, would find you all just as I had left you. I deluded myself, too, into thinking that I would find my own self.59 Another concentration camp survivor by the name of Czesław Grądzki recounted the change he felt having eaten, shaved, had his hair cut, taken a bath, put on clean underwear and civilian clothes, and had his personal details written down: “Finally, we looked somehow like people. We couldn’t recognize one another.”60 Then, he walked towards the Soviet zone to get to Poland as soon as possible and rebuild his life. For Karol P. from Hohenfels camp (Lechów, as renamed by the Polish inhabitants), only the moment when he got a job and started working for the collective brought the feeling of a new start: “I started working as a maths teacher and thanks to that I returned to a balanced state of mind.”61 Descriptions given by survivors of horrifying wartime experiences were a sign that they had started to reckon with their past and made the first step in overcoming their traumas. The Muselmann was seen as a

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creature without a story, who could not give testimony; the Subhuman concerned only with basic needs and focused on the present. Talking and writing about past experiences meant being above this level, leaving testimony meant being human. Survivors transcended their biological existence and became ready to give testimony, thereby becoming not only the victims of war but also its witnesses. Writing these early scribbles and testimonies, to echo Anette Wieviorka, helped in reclaiming one’s identity and emerging from wartime.62 Thus, the proliferation of history making in dP communities was symptomatic. Poles, seeking to reconstitute their individual, collective, and national identities upon reckoning with the violence of war and postwar, talked and wrote about their experiences, erected monuments, cared for graves, wrote monographs about the camps, drew, sang, and compiled albums. In a small gesture, Zofia with another girl put flowers on the graves of people they knew.63 In Ingolstadt, as in some other camps, dP s created a special committee to care for Polish graves.64 dPs began to confront and contemplate their own bodies, often for the first time since the beginning of the war. Many felt a need to put their appearance in order by washing, clothing, decorating, and managing the body. The bodies of other displaced persons served as mirrors in which people could see their own miserable condition. Nowakowski depicted the appearance of some of the ex-inmates of the concentration camps in the following words: “Shadows in prison rags with sticks in their hands, their heads closely shaven, lurked in the side streets.”65 Reflection on the body was often closely connected with attempts to analyze and understand one’s position in the new order. The tension between recovery through external intervention and working on oneself became more and more acute. Borowski cynically expressed the feeling of external agencies trying to shape and rehabilitate dP s in the poem entitled Revival of a Human: They liberated me, dressed me in the SS uniform, A human became a human! Why shouldn’t I be proud of it! Freedom and life!66 The dP camps became sites of physical regeneration, reflection, and revival. The time spent there allowed people to observe their bodies and reflect on their corporeal states and changes, their decay or recovery. Jan Michalski noted, “Almost a month passed since we ceased to be Pows. We put on flesh and our ribs weren’t so visible through the skin

Figure 5.1 | Sport played an important role in rebuilding the body after the war. In this picture from 1946, a group of dP children perform a gymnastic exercise.

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anymore. Our necks, so thin few weeks ago, now got fatter, our thighs, calves, and arms stopped being just bones covered with yellow skin.”67 Obsessive thinking about those who had perished shadowed the process of personal survival. For Borowski, as for many of those who had witnessed death and destruction, the dying bodies of his companions became something almost corporeal to him, merging with his own body. In the poem Prayer for Oblivion, he explored the intertwining themes of life and death, corporeality and spirituality: And the people from eternal abyss shall come, From the heaven and from the purgatory, and from the hell, To judge in the Judgment Day The body of a living man.68 He talked about survivors as those who had escaped death and had experienced such extraordinary dimensions of human existence that they had been changed into different beings: People of crematoria went out Tattooed people went out Into the free world, into the green summer On the meadows and on the fields. People who survived went out People went out to seek the dead They went out to collect the ashes of the burned Nameless, flimsy, friable.69 The link between the dead and the living was compulsively explored in Borowski’s poetry, as it was an important element of the Polish concept of refugeedom, based on the martyrological idiom. He manifested the puzzlement and guilt of being alive, labelled by the psychiatrists of the postwar era as “survivor guilt” or “kz syndrome.”70 The visions of ghoulish corporeality haunted him, turning his lost companions into the living dead who coexisted with him in his life – “walking with me,” “growing in me,” and “getting tangled in my blood.”71 The experiences of war, camps, and forced labour became a part of the corporeal and collective identity of the refugees and of the regenerating nation. The past could not be easily overcome, as those experiences sank into sensory memory and became an intrinsic dimension of the body with “the burning of the German bread,” “the smell of the rotten turnip,” “the scream

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of Szucha Alley,” “the ruins of the September’s street still in our eyes,” and “the mud and the smell of the camp.”72 These deep corporeal and mental changes called for remedies. As nobody was believed to have gone through the war untouched, or bodily and morally “clean,” they all needed a form of transition to normal life. The camp provided a grid where this rehabilitation and revival unfolded. The metaphor of limbo was used by some dP s to describe the situation in which they ended up, or “a dP purgatory” (dipisowski czyściec) as Tomaszewski called it.73 Both a punishment and an opportunity, the camp held people in a liminal state, “betwixt and between” to use Victor Turner's phrase. They did not belong anymore to their prewar communities and not yet to the new society.74

“ f l o w e r s o f evi l”: m e n t a l c o n d it io n a nd moral s tate “The eye is the most sensitive organ in the human body,” wrote Doctor Helena Fedukowicz in an article in which she linked the physical, the psychological, and the social in the refugee plight. Fedukowicz, born and educated in Soviet Ukraine, developed an academic career as an ophthalmologist in the ussr , from where she fled with her husband to Poland after the Nazi invasion and after having been investigated by Soviet authorities. Captured by the Nazis for forced labour, she spent the war in Bavaria and after the end of hostilities continued her research and clinical work among the dP s.75 Having noticed an abnormal number of eye diseases cases and its variety among her patients in the dP hospital in Regensburg, she treated the eye as a lens showing symptoms of the psychosomatic state of the refugees. She emphasized the importance of nutrition and hygiene on the body and the mind, indicating how living in the camps was ruinous for refugees and contributed to their psychological disturbances. “As a rule, every dP should be treated as an ill person,” she insisted. “After the atrocities of war, misfortunes keep piling up in the last three years. Difficult experiences of the first months, after the tragedy of slave labour and concentration camps, people suddenly found themselves behind barbed wires, without the right to work; many times emigrants were turned in to Soviet authorities, never-ending screening and commissions with all the false promises, camp relocations without any reason, treating dP s like cattle, complete lawlessness, complete defencelessness, and the loss of the fatherland, home, friends, property, faith in justice etc. etc.” All this together, in her opinion, left a mark on refugees’ moral, psychological, and nervous condition, leading to var-

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ious diseases, from gastric ulceration to asthma. At the same time, it caused a series of suicides and mental problems. According to her, the eye – as an extension of the brain – focalized these problems, illustrating how the nervous state of dP s led to multiple disorders.76 Her reflections represent a wider trend of connecting the physical, moral, and social in understanding the toll of war and displacement. The infamous word “demoralization” – denoting at the same time immorality, undermined morals, and low spirits – embraced concerns around the bodies, minds, and souls of refugees. Repeated countless times in reports, the dP press, and personal accounts, it encapsulated anxieties about the consequences of the dP s’ poor physical condition coupled with mental and emotional disturbances. One of the liaison officers reported to the Polish government in London in August 1945, “The condition of the Polish civilian population in Germany raises serious concerns. There is huge demoralisation, lack of willingness to work. People who come from Poland, as well as the youth from concentration camps, is very good human material. The moral state of Polish women on the territory of the Reich is very low.”77 Such reports and such vocabulary were plentiful. Polish elites believed that “dP criminality” was the result of demoralization. Actions that did not suit former social and religious norms were seen as a result of the war and its ruinous influence over the mores of Poles. By extension, it meant that Germans were to be blamed for Poles’ corporeal, mental, and moral misery. One of the liaison officers commented that “five years of German captivity left huge stains on the morality of [the] civilian population” because “the politics of depriving them of any human features” was methodically implemented to lead them to “material and moral poverty.”78 A dP from the Hülchrath camp wrote, “This diabolical war ruined us, destroying our beautiful cities and villages, and displacing us around the world … It managed to leave a malignant stigma on our souls.”79 As Fedukowicz noted, wartime traumas were coupled with problems peculiar to the conditions of the dP camps, the dP s’ new and unclear status, and the consequences of postwar political and economic uncertainties. Nowakowski described it in the following words: “The camp inmates, flotsam and jetsam of the battlefields and concentration camps, simmered in a stew of bitter memories and suppressed passions.”80 He referred to the mental state of the dP s: “Some day I’ll get rid of this barbed wire complex” he [the main character] would mutter to himself, entering the camp. Most of the Papenburg inmates were mental cripples, slaves of habit, afflicted

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with prisoners’ psychoses of all kinds. In the street he often saw respectable ex-prisoners fall into a panic at a sight of a police officer. Like sneak thieves they would make for the next doorway, vanish around corners or hurriedly cross to the other side of the street. Others, unasked, would insist on showing their personal papers, hastening to identify themselves, infected as they were with the camp madness of passes, certificates, permits, and ration cards.81 Wojciech Zaleski, a pre-war national activist and an escapee from Poland who became a lecturer at the unrra university in Munich, divided dP s into four main groups, claiming that each of them contributed to camp life with their “particular burdens from wartime.”82 Firstly, former prisoners of concentration camps, who barely avoided death, were very excitable. They needed many years in “normal life conditions” to change. Secondly, the Pow s, who spent the war incarcerated, were chagrined and charged with so-called “pawianizm.” Zaleski explained this term in the following way: In Germany everyone knows more or less what this strange word means but nobody has tried to define it so the term “pawianizm” remains mysterious for those who have not heard it before. “Pawianizm” is a set of complexes due to years spent in Pow camps. This kind of life was characterized, besides lack of freedom, by intense emotional involvement in the great events without the possibility to influence them. It is known that when one has assigned functions lower than those towards which he is talented he feels broken and disheartened. Let alone lack of any function which led to huge tensions, for example the already famous case of dividing a table with the chalk into spheres of influences! It should be added that an officer is a man used to give orders while in oflags [prisoner of war camps for officers] he did not have any occasions to do so or could do it only in trivial matters to his fellow inmates. Finally, each of oflags’ inmates led a bachelor’s life and with the passing of time gained old-bachelorhood’s features.83 Tomaszewski used the same term, arguing that “pawiany” remained embittered and full of envy.84 The third and the largest group of dP camp inhabitants distinguished by Zaleski were forced labourers. According to him they experienced a group animal-like life, they were uprooted from their pre-war educational environment usually at a very young age, did not have the possibility to attend schools, and often could not even

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read. Germans treated them like half-slaves, which awoke in them a desire for revenge. Their morality was dubious, they believed they could make up for their unpaid work by stealing or that they should sabotage the work. He concluded that, “in this atmosphere the boundary between what was allowed and what was forbidden became unclear.” The last group Zaleski listed consisted of people who were not in any kind of captivity during the war but who, like himself, came to the dP camps from Poland. All of these groups, according to the author, went through a bitter crisis in 1945. They needed to find a way to avoid demoralization and to be re-educated.85 These kinds of categorization, exemplified in Zaleski’s article, confirm the argument presented by Anna Holian that dPs defined themselves and understood their displacement in relation to the persecution they suffered from the Nazis or the Communists.86 dPs stressed the perceived abnormality of daily behaviours as the most visible sign of the mental issues which were common in the camps. Odd habits, obsessions, gestures, and glances acted as visible indications of a disrupted mind. Doctor Neville Goodman, director of unrra’s European Division of Health, noted that during the first stages of recovery “the former slave workers seem merely to vegetate. They may sit in the sun for hours doing nothing whatever, or wander about in dazed happiness with a bunch of flowers in their hand. For a long time we are apt to find them continuing to hide a herring or piece of bread in their bed clothes. They are slow to get over their fear of intense hunger.”87 Sterner recalled a widespread obsession with food, mentioning that at every occasion dPs took as much chocolate, cigarettes, meat, and other goods as possible, even when they had more than enough.88 Children who came from dP camps in Germany and Austria for holidays in England were reported to eat as much as adults and hide bread in their beds, as well as gather and guard things that they did not need.89 These observations fit into the growing conviction that the emotional “war inside,” as Michal Shapira describes it, required intervention to safeguard and repair citizens’ mental health.90 Living in the dP camps was perceived as a source of new problems for mental and moral health. Many complained that “refugees languished systematically.”91 People had to get used to their new environment, which was significantly different from what they had known as normality. Nowakowski indicated that it gravely impacted the mental health of dP s: In Papenburg slang, to begin to “warble” meant to become eccentric, to go to pieces. The camp was full of “warblers.” The years of confinement had done their work. There were inmates who counted the

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clouds during their walks, who told fortunes from coffee grounds, who collected empty tin cans, who wrote memoranda on the injustices done to Poland, or used their last pennies to send, by registered mail, petitions to the Pope and to the President of the United States. A special form of mania, fortunately harmless, was that of the hygiene fanatics who lived in constant fear of bacteria.92 Petitions and memoranda, like those mentioned above, are easy to find among dP publications and notes preserved in the archives. Some dPs, dwelling on the impossible situation they found themselves in, prefigured impossible events, like a man who reportedly believed himself to be a powerful saviour, about to change the world order. “I am this Evangelical lion foretold in the prophecies,” reads a letter reprinted by Głos Polski (Polish Voice). “[M]y ideal birth cannot wait anymore so you have to inform the government that I am coming [to Poland] with my majesty and power – you will see me in the sky on the 5th of March.” Planning to cross the border with the American zone to find work in a factory or a company in Salzburg, he declared that “there will be wars and revolutions against me but I will save the whole world.”93 This vision, considered ridiculous and insane by his fellow dP s, magnified the fears and hopes most of them felt. In one of his letters, Borowski mentioned an example of the unusual behaviours stemming from disrupted mental states: Soon, it will be a year after liberation, a year of emigration. A year of ups and downs … We dressed ourselves in SS uniforms and started forming an army, marching for whole days and singing patriotic, very legionnaire, and very Piłsudski-regime songs. Those imbued with a different spirit – like me, who lay belly-up in the sun learning Greek and reading a tale about Ulenspiegel, or my comrade from Łódź with three surnames who maintained that if those others were responsible for Katyń, then they’d done well. Clearly it had been necessary. In a word, people’s craziness takes different forms.94 Another author described the atmosphere in the kingdom of barracks as “a mire of camp’s psychosis.”95 dP s experienced some of the actions of the unrra , Allied military forces, and German police as brutal repressions that added to their emotional burden. These included transits between different camps, low food rations, pressures on repatriation, inspections, and imposing collective responsibility for crimes and offences. For instance, a Polish liaison officer reported that American

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soldiers, in front of local Germans, forcibly removed Polish families from their flats in Bayreuth. Mrs Klachowa, a former political prisoner, who was evicted along with her son “suffered a severe nervous breakdown due to sorrow and despair.”96

“ t h e n a t io n w il l c leanse i ts elf”: b u il d in g c o m m u ni ty i n exi le Relief workers and social elites believed that mental problems and challenges became social problems, contributing to the rise of “dP criminality” and antisocial behaviours. Banditry, thievery, and trickery among Polish dP s were, according to some exiled journalists, “flowers of evil grown by the enemy during the war in our society.” One proposition of how to tackle and eradicate crime was by creating Polish councils and a police force in the camps. In behaving properly, the Poles could convince others that they were worthy of guarding European civilization and order.97 That was not unique to the Polish group; leaders of Jewish dP s complained about physical, psychological, and moral degeneration and tried to combat criminal behaviors, especially by organizing the kibbutz.98 The end of the war brought the opportunity for vengeance. For some dPs that was an occasion to ease tensions and frustrations, seek justice, cease to be victims, and adopt to the role of perpetrators. On the other hand, for some dP s abandoning the fantasies of vengeance was the first step in regaining their mental health and becoming human again. Michalski wrote, “Our hearts became hard, petrified with the desire of vengeance and revenge, deeply pervaded with hatred, there was no pity.”99 Others claimed to have undergone a profound change after the liberation, like one of the characters of Nowakowski’s novel: “For the last five years I lived by only one passion: vengeance, bloody vengeance … I do not need it anymore. I am slowly coming back to the human form.”100 Adam Tomaszewski, who observed with satisfaction defeated German civilians at the train station in Munich, noted that after a while “the satisfaction and Schadenfreude somehow wander off at the sight of malnourished begging children and cripples in the rags of military uniforms.”101 Concern for lawlessness and criminality initially divided Polish elites. On one hand, they defended people who they regarded as victimized. On the other hand, they tried to reform and re-socialize them to improve the community. A belief that following liberation roles would be inverted and Poles would become a privileged class was common and fuelled a

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fight for new hierarchies. Sterner realized how deeply attitudes towards work and the social order had changed while searching for people to perform some functions within the community: Big groups of “dP s” remained passive. The majority of them were quite primitive people, taken away from their villages and small towns. Many could only write their name, few completed primary school education. They used to receive food for their work and usually were treated by their German employers like “subhumans.” Now they rightly considered themselves victims of the Third Reich. They believed that the victorious Allies are obliged to compensate them (with surplus) for their suffering. After all, the Allies have power and are very rich. All their statements started from the word “we.” We first opposed, we fought for London, we have suffered the longest, we won at Monte Cassino. It would be a deep ungratefulness of Englishmen if they would not give us fair compensation for all this. Now Germans should be our slaves!102 According to Sterner’s account, dP s called for nearby villages to be emptied of Germans and for the allocation of a separate house and German servant for everyone.103 Additionally, this fragment illustrates the mechanism of building an imagined community around heroic narratives in order to lay the groundwork for practical demands. Horodyska mentioned very similar claims and wishes among her fellow inmates. These demands were satisfied to a certain degree in few cases in which Poles received German houses (for example in Haren) and better food supplies than the local population. However, the majority of dPs soon became disillusioned and disappointed, developing feelings of having been betrayed and humiliated. “We are forced to lead the life of underprivileged creatures on a hostile land” wrote Poles gathered in Osnabrück.104 The fantasy of becoming new masters quickly vanished for most of the dP population. To relieve their bottled-up frustration and humiliation, dP s in the Freimann camp hung cardboard SS men, lit a bonfire under them, and sang patriotic songs accompanied by marching camp police.105 The state of morality of Polish dP s especially concerned the clergy of the Polish Catholic Mission in Germany.106 Reverend Edward Lubowiecki, a former prisoner of Mauthausen and Dachau, serving as the vicar general of the Polish Diocese in Germany from 1946, attempted to describe in detail the morals of the Polish dP s, dividing them into categories. The most demoralized were, according to him, the young

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families (people who met during the period of forced labour), young people (especially young girls and what he called “children-old men” who were denied a normal childhood), embittered Pow s, and the criminal prisoners of concentration camps. He claimed that young girls who worked for Americans were deeply endangered by moral degeneration and possibly were already corrupted. He criticized them for being unable to resist the temptation of marrying foreigners, seen as a betrayal of the nation, or of accepting small gifts which stimulated their vanity and led to an immoral life. He underlined that the cause for bitterness among “children-old men” was their lack of family life and normal childhood. Lubowiecki also listed the main “vices and crimes” of Polish dP s: 1. Assaults and robberies … mostly committed by pre-war criminals. 2. Black-market – due to circumstances and lack of other activities, it causes inspections and arrests. 3. Drunkenness – lately smaller but only due to difficulties in obtaining alcohol. 4. Dissolute life – it is a cause of venereal disease. 5. Fraternisation with Germans – it would be even greater if not for envy due to different treatment of Germans and Poles by the Allies. [People say:] “Germans who were enemies now are masters – and we, allies, are slaves.”107 The priest hoped that these people might still be useful for Poland despite the fact that Nazism had been depraving them for the previous five years. Another Polish clergyman from a dP camp complained, “In spite of the Polish chaplains’ work the state of the morality in the Polish camps is not satisfactory.”108 Reverend Lubowiecki also championed Polonizing efforts, especially those directed at young families married in Germany who often formed their relationships during the period of forced labour. Many of the women were, as he phrased it, “Ukrainians or Ruthenians (ruski) from the Soviet Ukraine.” He described them as “uneducated and unconscious in regard to religion and morality, morally weaker” and suggested they should be Polonized through religious work. He viewed them as “nationally coming close to Polishness” and believed that social and pastoral work made them religious and encouraged them to develop family values.109 The leader of the camp in Admont thanked Reverend Czopp for travelling from Graz to visit the camp, claiming that the priest “uplifts our spirits and ruthlessly removes weeds that multiply in our camp life.” Like many others, he saw the religious revival in patriotic terms: “We

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are cheerful because we know the truly good life means a Catholic life which is the straightest way to the tomorrow of our Fatherland.”110 Morality was widely discussed in the new social and political reality. One editor called for the communal examination of conscience, saying, “The times are changing, and with the times conditions and people are changing. Today there exist such sins compared to which the seven cardinal sins seem irrelevant. And other sins that used to be condemned now are necessary qualities in today’s life.”111 Anxieties stemming from postwar uncertainties often focused on women’s bodies whose morality and sexuality was considered an internal threat. Policing women’s bodies and regulating their sexuality was a part of rebuilding the nation after the hecatomb of war, as it is shown in the next chapter. The Allies also complained about “demoralization,” “lethargy,” and “apathy” among dP s. One British officer wrote from Austria, The Polish Displaced Persons group, which number some 7,000 in the British Zone [of Austria], is, according to all reports, a lethargic and demoralised community. The majority are living together with their families and seem to have little other desire than to continue their bleak but assured existence on unrra aid, with the ultimate ambition of emigrating to America. They are largely uncultured, often illiterate, and seem to have no formed political consciousness, beyond an intense fear of the Soviet and a determination not to return to their homeland, which they conceive being totally under communist influence. They are occasionally shaken out of their lethargy into a panic by the arrival of a Commission from the Soviet or the Warsaw Government.112 Western psychiatrists, sociologists, and social workers who prepared a June 1945 unrra report on the psychological problems of displaced persons, drafted by the Inter-Allied Psychological Study Group, warned fieldworkers to expect a series of problems and pathologies in dealing with the victims of war. They listed characteristics that applied to the dPs: regression to earlier stages of psychophysical development, bitterness and tenderness, greediness, forced pleasure-seeking, depression, self-destructiveness, immorality, and many more. “Demoralization, promiscuity and prostitution” were flagged up as major problems, believed to be stemming from despair and violence.113 The physical, mental, and moral were perceived as strictly interconnected. Poor physical states were thought to lead to mental issues, which could cause immoral conduct. Thus, body, mind, and morality had to undergo the process of

Figure 5.2 | In this drawing dP s employed intertwining bodily and patriotic imagery of liberation, as the revival of the human was supposed to bring the revival of the nation.

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repair in order to elevate refugees from their perceived miserable state. Only then would the Polish community and Poland as a political and cultural entity truly revive. The revival of the human was believed to bring about the revival of free Poland. Conviction about the upcoming biological and moral regeneration of the people, of the nation, and of the state echoed nineteenth-century concepts of Poland as a Christ of nations. In a nativity play performed by children in one of the camps “Satan” says, “I poured devilish brews of venom into your souls, which in days of yore were as sound as a bell, I predisposed you to lies and falsehoods, I pulverized the pillar of hope.” “Angel” answers that the enemy cannot penetrate their hearts as at its altar there is God, Honour, and Fatherland.114 The prolific dP journalist, Eryk Zieliński, argued that the Polish nation was one of a kind and full of inexhaustible forces: “Poles are a phoenix among the nations, always able to be reborn from ashes, always able to rise from the fall.”115 dP s who created the Polish Work Division in Lübeck, encouraged others to work, study, and improve themselves, pointing out that “Polish forced emigration” was “the nation on the march” and “the nation on the way.”116 Poles believed that “forced Polish refugeedom” was part of a wider movement of Polish renewal. The author of the article in Nasze myśli (Our Thoughts) adopted the idea of the “second revived Poland,” drawing on a patriotic underground brochure. He called for the renewal of “Polish souls” through internal discipline and for the fight against national weakness. “To bring a new Polish man into the new life” was a foundation of the reborn country. Representing a widespread conviction among the elites, the author envisaged the revival of Poland as an effect of cooperation between all Polish-speaking social classes: “faith [in reborn Poland] is deeply rooted in the Polish worker and in the Polish peasant, in the Polish intelligentsia and in the Polish bourgeoisie [mieszczaństwo].”117 Patriotic and peasant imaginaries often met there, as in the piece describing how libraries and Polish circles in exile would help “to survive this refugee preharvest without harm to the Polish soul.”118 The ideas of wide social alliance and popular mobilization resonated among the youth who viewed organic work as a strategy toward strengthening Polishness and rebuilding Poland. Students of the dP gymnasium in Lippstadt aimed “to renew our souls and fight with national weaknesses and in this way to bring a new Polish man into the new life.” The end of year memory book they published, dedicated to their teachers as “Prometheuses of Polishness,” outlined their vision of Poland resurrected through their effort and sacrifice: “We have to know right

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now how to live in the future to build such Poland which would be lasting for centuries thanks to its moral and material strength.” This process was to start with themselves, striving to self-improve. “Each of us, male and female, without exceptions is a soldier in the fight for the new Polish man.” They continued, “This fight must take place all the time in every place. Above all, in ourselves.” The youth embodied the nation, their strong bodies carried the potential of regenerating and spreading Polishness, especially to the lower social classes. Four factors of spiritual development would allow Poland to be renewed: religious culture, civic culture, family culture, and work culture. Enlightened Catholicism was viewed as a fundament of future Polishness. They felt it was their duty to build a stateless society in which “every Pole would be our brother” when “aristocratic ideology disappears.” Evoking the activism of organic work, they called for fighting ignorance and for educating the masses: “The enlightenment we are receiving at school and in life we need to carry to the popular masses.”119 dPs prefigured the spiritual revival of the nation by drawing on nineteenth-century positivist and romantic discourses. Quoting from a play on the November Uprising, the editors of Na szlaku (On the Trail), articulated their belief in the “great bright Sign of Rebirth,” postulating that “the nation will cleanse itself in the fires and the new time will come.”120 The world itself was considered to be “riddled and declining” but at the same time people trusted that barbarism would not triumph and “the world must come forth revived from this murderous war” with a new order and a new morality.121

c o n c l u s i on The spring of 1945, particularly warm and sunny, brought liberation and hope to millions of victims of war. After the devastation of war, complex emotional responses to the new reality found an anchor in the vocabulary and imagery of spring, resurrection, and regrowth. Polish dPs viewed their passage from war to peace as regaining their bodies, cleansing their souls from the residue of war, and rebuilding their identity on an individual and collective level. Their dreams of compensation and revenge mixed with the desire to reconnect with nature, enjoy communal life, fall in love, start anew. In the kingdom of barracks, medicalized approaches to rehabilitation coexisted with a grassroots understanding of overcoming the trauma of war and displacement as healing, regrowing, and resurrecting, all strongly embedded in religious, natural, and rural imageries. While

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the unrra leaned towards new, science-based, psychologized modes of humanitarian aid, the rhetoric and work of Polish agents in the dP camps resembled the earlier traditions of Polish charities and benevolent organizations with their long-term struggle to strengthen and heal the Polish national body. Poles construed their transition towards peace as a revival rather than rehabilitation, drawing heavily on religious and natural imagery. This revival – personal, familial, and national – was rooted in Polish cultural traditions, creatively drawn upon in the conditions of exile. The elites encouraged and influenced personal revival to capitalize upon it for the rebirth of the nation, which was to embody an imagined Poland in the absence of the independent state. In exile, Poles spun mythologized narratives of their displacement, and one of the most powerful was the rebirth of the nation, prefiguring the renewal of the people, of the nation, and of the state. Pondering strategies of healing the body and the soul of the nation, the anticommunist elites envisaged Polishness as a part of Western civilization, once again the bulwark of Christendom, this time against the “Bolshevik barbarity.” Debates on demoralization encapsulated anxieties around the degenerating nation. The corporeal, mental, and moral were viewed as strictly connected layers, which constituted a concept of the human. Curing and moulding them would allow for the regeneration of individuals and society. How these practices interwove with the Allies and international aid agencies’ plans of rehabilitation into a sort of civilizing mission is the topic of the next chapter.

6 “Changing Human Rags into a Rightful Man and a Citizen”: The Civilizing Mission in the Archipelago of Refugee Camps

Civilization had worn thin, it was widely believed in the aftermath of the war, and the refugee war victim was the symbol of this decline. William van Ark, unrra camp director and later iro employee, wrote about the path Polish dP s took from the misery of war to life in society through “physical and moral rehabilitation” carried out by international organizations: The dP s were in a pitiful condition when they were gathered in the Assembly Centers, their stomachs could be filled, clothes and temporary shelters provided, but it was horrible to see how Hitler’s hordes had succeeded in kicking them in the gutter and making slaves out of them. Thanks to the United Nation’s efforts, unrra was able to rehabilitate these masses and an excellent job was done to recover decency and make them feel and enjoy the privileges of civilized people again. The response was a pleasure to behold. Their first act was to plan regular church services, their domestic life was put in order and under leadership of unrra officers, a form of self-government established.1 After gathering dP s in the safety of the camps, military men and aid workers started to tackle “the second R,” or rehabilitation, to produce citizens able to take part in rebuilding war-torn countries. Polish social elites joined the lament on the need to uplift and regenerate displaced victims of war with the aim of integrating them into the national body. Concerns about the health of dP s, especially that of children, brought together international agency workers and Polish elites in introducing practical measures in the camps. Teachers, doctors, priests, and social

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workers combined their forces to teach dP s how to use latrines, read and write, refrain from promiscuity, take care of their babies, work diligently, wash themselves, and clean their rooms. In short, unrra took it upon itself to educate dP s on how to become civilized again and partake in building postwar societies. Józef Betari commented on this patronizing approach with irony: “unrra not only feeds and dresses us. It moulds our souls and forms our characters.”2 This chapter looks at rehabilitation practices directed at dP s and their responses. It discusses how concerns around the bodies and minds of refugees grew into a series of interventions and projects realized in the archipelago of dP camps. Work among the displaced was informed by traditions of humanitarianism and charity, as well as new trends in Western expertise. Military and humanitarian practices drew on the heritage of the imperialist civilizing missions which glorified progress and modernity.3 In the Polish context, civilizing subjects was not a new idea either. From organic work among the peasantry under the partitions to modernizing the eastern borderlands, the elites and intermediaries worked in health, education, and infrastructure under the assumption that segments of the population, and whole regions, were backward and uncivilized. Examining the debates and interventions around public health issues and race science in Prussian Poland, Lenny Ureña Valerio has demonstrated how the German empire launched a campaign of civilizing and subjugating to the imperial power its Polish population which was considered culturally backwards while at the same time Polish elites developed “a colonial imagination” and colonially inclined settlement projects in Brazil.4 In the interwar period, the eastern borderlands were construed as a space in need of civilizing and nationalizing projects. As Kathryn Ciancia has pointed out, in the interwar period Poles adopted the civilization language in their modernizing efforts, navigating their in-between position on the global civilization scale. In the case of the multi-ethnic rural province of Volhynia she analyzed, the projects of infrastructure, settlement, public health, and education had a distinctively Polonizing and modernizing aspect.5 After the war, Western European ideas of civilization alongside Polish elites’ visions of transforming and modernizing the nation interwove with the Allied practices directed at displaced victims of war. Firstly, this chapter explores the discourse on the civilizational decline of the dP s and demonstrates how understanding health as a key to moral guidance informed the practices of the elites, middlemen, and aid workers. It shows how personal recovery strategies intertwined with the topdown preoccupations of elites and the unrra concerning rehabilitation,

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which resulted in various attempts at self-civilizing. Secondly, it discusses the practices of controlling, recording, and intervening employed in the modernizing space of the refugee camp. Thirdly, focusing on training and education, it analyzes the role of class, gender, and ethnicity in re-educating dP s and preparing them for the work of reconstruction. Many of these projects revolved around children. In particular, schooling and scouting contributed to disciplining and nationalizing the youth. Finally, this chapter examines the attempts at reforming the national body through gendered patriotism, regulating sexuality, reforming motherhood and family, containing promiscuity and prostitution, and combatting venereal disease and abortion.

t h e c iv il iz in g mi s si on in t h e h e a r t of euro Pe “Cities cannot be rebuilt, factories cannot produce again, civilization cannot be reborn unless those who must do the work have the clothing to give them the warmth of courage and hope,” appealed the voluntary organization Victory Clothing Collection, calling for donations for dP s in Europe.6 The organization expressed the common conviction that war and Nazism had ravaged European civilization. The language of civilization, as Paul Betts has shown, “reemerged as a potent metaphor to ascribe positive meaning to material and moral reconstruction after the war.”7 Descriptions of the continent and its culture in ruin were plentiful. Displaced victims of war, as future citizens capable of undertaking the task of reconstruction, were to be re-civilized and re-educated. Post1945 international refugee aid offered more than “soup kitchen” relief, “for man does not live by bread alone.”8 Doctor Goodman, director of the unrra ’s European Division of Health, viewed the welfare program as an answer to refugees’ physical and mental problems: “We have found that good treatment creates no desire to stay in the camps indefinitely. On the contrary, in proportion as we restore health and mental stability, these war victims become eager to face the problems of life again in their home countries and help restore what has been damaged or destroyed by the war.”9 With time, this aim to rehabilitate and repatriate became less and less achievable. “We all understand that ‘Relief’ implies feeding the hungry, clothing the destitute, and giving medical care to the sick and injured,” representatives of the associated youth-serving organizations, including girls scouts and ymca , highlighted while describing their role in the postwar relief effort. Psychological and spiritual uplifting was to follow:

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The second phase, and probably the most difficult, will come under the heading of “Rehabilitation” and it is in this field that the private youth-serving agencies feel that they can make their contribution. To feed a child does help rebuild his body, but that is only half the story. After the brutal impact of war has registered, it will take many months, perhaps years, to restore the self-confidence and spiritual equilibrium of these children. His faith in human beings will surely have been shaken if not destroyed, and it will take patient, intelligent, experienced people to bring back the child’s love of life rather than his constant fear of death and destruction. Psychologically, these children will be shock cases and must be treated as such. This applies also to the adolescent.10 While there were many, often competing, visions of how to rehabilitate the refugees, they had one thing in common: the belief that something must be done to avert potentially horrible consequences. The Allies would not let “the seeds of the Third World War” grow into a new conflict and Polish elites strived to regenerate the national body and mobilize it for two competing projects.11 Rehabilitation, vaguely understood as “the amelioration of psychological and social suffering and dislocation,” was backed up by new expertise in nutrition, sociology, and most importantly, psychology.12 Implementing these ideas in the politically unstable area under the constant threat of infectious disease was another thing.13 Ideas on the decay of civilization centred around the damage brought about by Nazism but with time they started to refer to the threat of “Soviet barbarity,” too. The lack of adequate food and clothing coupled with wartime violence was believed to have stripped people of their civilized appearance and behaviour. “Civilization has worn very thin in the past war years. Millions of men, women and children have been reduced by the savagery of war and its aftermath to a condition approaching barbarism.”14 On the ground, in the archipelago of dP camps, many aid workers believed that the mission of rehabilitation was hindered by the dPs themselves. “The ignorance of the most elementary rules of sanitation which exists amongst certain elements of the dP population” was considered one of the main obstacles to establishing civilized life conditions in the camps.15 dPs, too, employed the language of civilization, pondering the depth of moral degeneration and possibilities of re-civilizing. They complained about “animal-like vegetation” and strived for the “life a human deserves.”16 Concepts such as Western culture, civilization, European

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Figure 6.1 | Care and control intertwined in the practice of “uplifting” displaced victims of war. Children with their carer at Kloster Indersdorf dP camp.

values, Christian community, society, and family provided a framework and vocabulary for thinking about postwar regeneration. Józef Betari compared the dP to a dog, “laying under the table and waiting for foods; with no napkin, no fork, no porcelain, no alcohol, no toothpicks, no cigar – an uncultured creature.”17 Tadeusz Borowski discovered how much his bodily habits had changed when he visited an ex-Pow camp: “I was in Murnau, the notorious center for officers. They gave out American pineapples there, and the products of white civilization long unknown in Europe: toothbrushes, razors, and even chewing gum and powdered eggs with which we sprinkled the beds, because they’re good for killing fleas.”18 Imported exotic fruit, a luxury product in pre-war Poland, and basic toiletries reminded him of the privation he had experienced for the last years. The liaison officer Henryk KaszubaDąbrowski upon his visit to the ex-Pow camp in Lübeck pointed out

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that the Germans and the camp conditions were to blame for the fact that officers ceased to be civilized men and led lives focused on the most basic needs.19 Access to the goods of “white civilization” frequently bemused dP s and animated them to re-learn how to use objects to improve their bodies. Zofia Kruk, painfully aware she was dressed in rags, observed how American soldiers used cutlery: “Another thing that fascinated us was the Americans eating with their forks. They used knives to cut everything up small, then tucked in with forks. It had taken me four years to get used to doing without a knife – having to peel dirty potato skins with a fork, but here were rich Americans using forks all the time, too.”20 Similarly, Maria Horodyska felt like she forgot the lifestyle she had led before the war. When the first occasion presented itself, she needed to brush up on her old social skills. When along with other dP s she was invited by English soldiers to a tea party she felt amazed by the tablecloth, candlesticks, crystal plates, porcelain, and flower decorations. She engaged in a polite conversation with one of the officers, trying to distract his attention from the behaviour of other dP s. Noticing that they had packed the remaining cigarettes and sweets into their pockets, she felt embarrassed at their lack of manners. Once the party finished, she scolded them for their behaviour at the table, arguing that now the British would have a bad image of Polish culture.21 Such appeals were common. Polish scouts in Germany wanted to discipline and mobilize other members of the movement and declared, “Although not on our Polish Land but here in exile, we are building [Poland] through our life. Let the whole world, watching our conduct, understand that we are worthy of freedom for which we were fighting and for which we will never cease fighting, let’s show that we are culturally and intellectually equal to those who feel superior to us.”22 These cultural anxieties were amplified in encounters with welfare providers. For millions of dP s of various nationalities, there were three to four thousand unrra workers over the first postwar years, many engaged mostly in supply and logistical duties.23 In July 1947, international iro personnel numbered 2,040 people, rising to 2,877 in 1949 and falling to 262 in 1952 when the organization was in the process of liquidation.24 The staff of these international organizations was composed predominantly of Western fieldworkers, mostly from English speaking countries, with those from the uk representing 33 per cent, from the usa 16 per cent , France 14 per cent, and the Netherlands 7 per cent. iro workers originating from Poland made up just 1 per cent as Poland was not a member state of the organization.25

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Members of the traditional Polish social elite and middlemen were much more numerous and closer – culturally, linguistically, and often physically – to the masses of refugees. In the camps, there were approximately 900 Polish priests and 4,000 active Polish teachers, while each camp had a Polish commandant, and on top of that there were scout leaders, journalists and writers, doctors and nurses, political activists, as well as high school and university students.26 They explained and preached, forbid and complained, encouraged and shamed, trying to convey to the rest of the dP s their vision of how to rebuild their lives. dPs engaged in these debates. While these negotiations took place in an international space, it was mostly a nationally oriented enterprise. The influence of the clergy cannot be overestimated. Bishop Józef Gawlina, later called a “bishop-Nomad,” was nominated to provide pastoral care for Polish emigrants, extending “moral and spiritual care” over them. The exiled government cooperated with the Polish embassy to the Vatican to “summon as many priests as possible to do pastoral work among the Polish refugees scattered in the camps in Germany.”27 The leaders of Polish organizations agreed that priests had a significant influence on “the moral level” of Poles in exile, educating them about the individual and collective duties of Polish refugees towards the Fatherland. Zygmunt Rusinek, the head of the Polish Union in Germany, underlined that the priests came from the same community, having been prisoners and refugees themselves, and they supported the pre-war state and resisted the pressures of the new regime. At some point priests coming with “Warsaw passports” started their activities in the camps, too, he observed, and they did not have strong anti-Soviet and anti-communist attitudes.28 To realize their aims, unrra and the military tried to act through Polish elites, especially the persons of high esteem and good social standing. In the activities designed to hasten repatriation, the instruction planned the “utilization of teachers and priests to help people understand the importance of returning to Poland now. Teachers and priests must be shown that it is their duty to influence and to lead their people in their own best interest.”29 In many cases, this strategy backfired with priests and teachers gaining positions of great influence but taking a strong anti-repatriation stand. Healthcare in the dP camps of Germany and Austria was organized mainly according to American, British, and French standards: “unrra health officers completed an expanded program of medical care last winter for the remaining dP s in assembly centers in occupied Germany with full-scale hospital and dispensary services, and extensive schedule

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of preventative medicine used on standard American public health procedures.”30 Sanitary and hygienic services were considered a basis of civilized life and unrra teams pledged that “there will be done everything in spite of limited possibilities to enable the camp inhabitants to stand all the hardships and privations of the postwar time.”31 While at times the international organizations and Polish elites had conflicting agendas, there were many areas, especially in public health, where their aims and practices interlocked. Cooperation was strengthened through public health and educational actions, working with the Polish Red Cross, and translating recent medical literature into Polish. Together they organized training and education activities for Polish doctors and nurses. Eric Townsend, chief medical officer in the British zone of Germany, suggested that medics specializing in tuberculosis treatment take graduate courses, visit sanatoria in the zone and in Switzerland, and use unrra fellowships to gain experience outside Germany. unrra in cooperation with the Polish Red Cross sponsored Polish translations of recent Western works in medicine and psychology.32 The organization trained girls and women as nursing aids. Nurses with diplomas from Poland were offered refresher courses. For example, in Little Drutte hospital in Lower Saxony nurses “were given instructions on up-to-date nursing practice by Miss Mary Stockholm, Danish nursing instructor.” Once they returned to Poland they would “play their part in fighting the war of disease.”33 All dPs, including Polish professionals such as doctors and scientists, became exposed to Western expertise and practices. “Health is the core of the Polish refugees’ soul,” wrote Jan Barański, a representative of the Polish government-in-exile and former inmate of a concentration camp. By focusing on health, he claimed, London Poles stood a chance in “the great war for the souls of the Polish nation” against “Bolshevik” Russia.34 Reverend Forys appealed to those serving in the Polish Guards companies: “The morality of Poles in exile is the most important issue now, it is a foundation on which we will be building a New Poland, not only Free but also Pure, not riddled with the rot of decay.”35 Concerns about the health of dP s, especially that of children, brought together unrra /iro workers and Polish elites. Members of Durzyń (Wildflecken) “town council” urged parents not to use home remedies but to bring their children, whose “health is the greatest treasure” for them and for society, to a doctor or a hospital if they felt ill. They explained, “The society and the nation have a crucial interest in making their members strong and healthy – healthy in spirit and in the body according to the maxim ‘a healthy mind in a

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healthy body.’ The most important task for the parents is to bring up a healthy and normally developed child.”36 When mothers opposed sending their tb -infected children to the hospital, camp leaders assisted by the Allied military forcibly brought them to the sanitary building. Polish decision-makers insisted that sabotaging regulations and being “agitated, undisciplined, and unreasonable” would not be tolerated and warned that the disobedient would face one year in prison or eviction from the camp.37 Similarly, in the Jewish dP community, welfare workers complained about non-compliance with health advice. Modern medicalizing social hygiene efforts, as before the war, were met with suspicion among women who often relied on non-medical resources and counsel.38 Members of the elite and middlemen, both immigration- and repatriation-oriented, perceived the dP camp as an opportunity to enhance modernizing efforts and configured it as a training ground. dP camps, organized in a military fashion, provided a space open to control and intervention. It facilitated transforming people, as well as improving their living and working spaces. The “Warsaw” dP camp paper printed a photograph of children working under the supervision of their teachers, supplied with the caption, “Even in the camp one can get things fixed up decently. Well-lighted, spacious, plenty of air, nice and discreet oversight – ideal conditions.” The caption assured that children looked healthy because they were under good care. “After all they live in ‘Warsaw,’” the author concluded, referring to the images of the capital city as a vanguard of modernization and progress.39 Camp news urged people to “clean the floor and the window lids every day,” “use baths once a week on designated days,” “collect the supply of the vitamins for youngsters,” “avoid drafts” and to refrain from “abusing alcohol,” “doing laundry in the room as it causes mould,” and “throwing rubbish from the windows.”40 Polish health practitioners, influenced by Western humanitarian expertise, sketched brochures, posters, and leaflets to educate dP s about proper nutrition, links between a lack of hygiene and disease, and a healthy lifestyle. dP Dr Mikołaj Minkiewicz, a Polish national of Belarusian origin, acting as a Class II unrra medical officer in Lippstadt, for instance, published a series of prints financed by unrra with titles such as “On alcoholism,” “Healthy teeth – healthy man,” “Fly – a carrier of infectious disease,” “Hygienic abc ,” “The louse spreads typhoid,” and many others. Richly illustrated guidebooks on nursing infants consisted of precepts and interdictions directed at women, ranging from “Mother! Breastfeed your child at regular times! Look after cleanliness!” to “Mother! Do not touch a pacifier with your lips!” Step-by-step photo

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Figure 6.2 | A step-by-step guide explaining the “Anglo-American way of wrapping a nappy” exemplifies the Polish elite exploitation of dP s’ exposure to Western lifestyles in order to reform Polish society.

guides taught mothers how to wrap a baby in the nappy following the “Anglo-American style.”41 Needless to say, many pieces of advice such as keeping a child’s room clean and well-ventilated and bathing a baby every day with the best quality soap were unachievable under camp conditions. The camp came to be construed as a miniature society and one much easier to control and discipline than pre-war Polish society. There were numerous strategies used in the emancipation from bad physical and mental conditions, as well as from the “moral decline,” often through attempts at self-civilizing. Regaining health was a pressing concern for officials, aid workers, and the nationalizing elite but also for the camp inhabitants. dP s sought medical attention for the most urgent matters (for instance, Zofia Kruk went to the doctor to extract rotten teeth) and applied self-treatment if they could not reach doctors or did not trust them (for example, Maria Horodyska collected herbs to treat her wound). Michalski mentioned that women in his camp adapted the clothes from unrra and mimicked the fashion of the pre-war residents

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of Warsaw. Nevertheless, rebuilding class identity through clothing was not just an imitation of pre-war standards. Maria, who came from an intelligentsia family, was amazed by the variety of old clothes donated by the Americans but eventually decided to choose only practical and warm clothing. She commented, “When was the last time I saw silk, velvet, lace? At the same time, what could those American ladies know about our wandering life in Germany? Did they really think that here we are going to elegant balls and picnics as they did in their country?”42 The best way to regain masculinity through clothing was to wear a clean, ironed uniform, possibly an Anders’s Army one with its fancy beret or at least the one of the Guards companies. A number of conflicts with the American military arose from this issue with Poles being sent to prison for wearing items from American uniforms, items they had chosen to augment their sense of masculine pride and, potentially, position within the power relations between dP s, soldiers, and the local population.43 Many believed that the passage from wartime habits to “civilized” and “cultured” ones required some external stimuli. Even officers who spent the war in relatively acceptable conditions experienced difficulties adjusting to the new standards. A liaison officer visiting the camp in Lübeck wrote in his report, “My objective was to shake the ambition of the officers who spent a number of years behind the barbed wire and being maltreated by Germans sank to the level where their only dream was to get something to eat and something to cover themselves. They lost the appearance of a cultural man and were engulfed by apathy which was hard to shake off. The officers started to shave and use the field baths … They became interested in the cultural life in the camp, created an orchestra, began to edit the journal, to organize dancing parties and to live in the way a normal cultured man does.”44 Living “in the way a normal cultured man does” required attributes of civilization from the very basic to those more sophisticated. Wacław Sterner did not fail to mention that shortly after the liberation they received toilet paper.45 One woman mentioned she felt happy to receive a mirror and to comb her hair. Michalski noted that after the supply of clothes from the local population “the citizens of Sandstrasse and other camps started to look like the average Europeans of small towns a dozen or so years ago.”46 When Maria and her friends saw other dPs learning waltzes, tangos, and polkas, it reminded them of pre-war parties and dances. Melodies and movements made them feel that the body may experience and express something more than hunger, pain, and fear. One of them came up with the idea to organize a party with dancing and to invite a British commandant with the

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officers to “let them see how Poles can have fun.”47 For the Poles, to play and to be observed by others meant being civilized and the bearers of culture. Maria prepared a beautifully organized show for the British. She confessed that the party let her forget “about Germany, the camp, the wounds.” A friend asked her during a party, “How come that after six years of a break, dancing is still so amazing as before at our place in Oczki street [in Warsaw]?” To which Maria answered, “You see, there are two things which one never forgets – dancing and cycling.”48 dPs rediscovered the joy and satisfaction of playing, engaging in socially acceptable physical contact, and recreating traditional cultural patterns. This layer of culture, which seemed to have been destroyed, turned out to be ingrained in the body. Dance and play functioned as a reminder of what they used to do and who they used to be before the war. On 26 May 1945 in Lübeck a café called Polish Tavern was opened which reportedly offered “good music and great atmosphere.”49

co n t r o l l in g , r e c o r d i ng, i nterveni ng Flies, cockroaches, and bedbugs cohabited with dP s in the kingdom of barracks. They sucked dP s’ blood, infected their food, and made them feel frustrated with the “uncivilized” conditions they were forced to withstand. From posters and health talks, dP s knew they needed to cover their food and wash fruit before eating it to avoid dysentery, typhus, and cholera carried by flies. ddt powder was widely used for delousing. The gap between poster ideals of health and space and the realities of barrack life was huge. The rooms were often cold, and dP s had no chance to wash themselves, as a medical conference in the British zone pointed out.50 Fresh air was deemed necessary, but dP s refused to open windows as the heating was inadequate or non-existent. Kathryn Hulme, screening the camp and its inhabitants with a civilizing gaze, complained that Poles prepared their rooms for “winter in Slavic style.” “They nailed windows to stay shut until spring, bound babies like papooses in endless unhealthy yards of woolen swaddling clothes, and swung ever-burdened clotheslines in the crowded interiors to produce, as our medical people said sadly, the proper incubating steam for swift transmission of respiratory disease.”51 In Babenhausen dP camp in Hesse, stables for horses were converted for dP s, and some rooms were reported to have no windows, no ventilation, and no heating.52 When the unrra took over the Rhine Barrack Camps – devoid of central heating as a result of Allied bombing – the barracks were littered with refuse, the floors were

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Figure 6.3 | Children cleaning the common space at Kloster Indersdorf dP camp. Teaching dP s rules of hygiene and cleanliness was considered necessary to turn them into modern and productive citizens.

dirty, and the space around covered in faeces, as there were not enough latrines. Swarms of flies and mosquitoes buzzed around.53 “The team spent the first weeks in directing and assisting in a general clean-up of the premises and making them less revolting as a place of residence,” Dr Hendrickx reported. “[Under iro ] the conditions here are an affront to the most primitive requirements of humanitarianism,” dP s in the region of Hanover complained, indicating that it was impossible to maintain personal hygiene and clean rooms without soap, cloths, combs, and brooms.54 In some camp kitchens cockroaches roamed, the alarmed inspectors noted down.55 In Landeck dP camp, there were three times more people than the camp’s official capacity. Bedbugs crawled in all barracks and a shortage of brushes, brooms, and ddt powder made the mission of improving hygiene and cleanliness tedious and frustrating for all involved.56 In some camps, dP s stared at the leaflets presenting fresh fruit and a pyramid of healthy food while standing in queues to collect their rations issued only as tins.

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The discrepancy between an idealized vision of camps and the grim reality encouraged aid workers to introduce stricter controls and harsher measures. Various techniques of recording, controlling, and intervening were employed, connecting aggressive measures with gentle encouragement. Regulating life in camps was thought to be necessary to uphold sanitary standards and help dP s regain health. “Sanitation squads” inspected barracks, latrines, and kitchens. They monitored how many people took a bath. dP s suspected of suffering from tuberculosis were detained and placed in special barracks.57 “Every dP should have a bath at least once a month,” the medical conference pronounced, underlining also that “fresh air is necessary.” They complained that people suffering from gingivitis did not want to take vitamin tablets saying that they were useless. Helpless in convincing them, they decided to turn to the Polish Bureau to make an announcement that “everybody has got to take those tablets because they replace the vitamins which are missing in the dP rations that are only issued in tins.”58 In Volksgarten camp in the American zone of Austria, the leaders inspected living quarters daily for sanitation and to see if they were properly ventilated.59 dP s were told to air their bedding for a few hours each day, kitchen inspections took place once a week, and the personnel were instructed in cleanliness.60 As the fear of epidemics and contagious disease persisted, the question of immunization preoccupied military authorities and international organizations alike. They planned “ddt dusting, sanitary supervision of the premises, speedy isolation of contagious cases, and immunization measures.” In Germany, dP s were vaccinated against typhus, diphtheria, typhoid, and smallpox.61 Sanitation measures were in place to prevent the spread of diseases. The situation in Wildflecken after the withdrawal of American units was a cautionary tale of what would happen if military discipline was abandoned: The situation in Wildflecken is acute. Underground elements stirred to action by screening activities taking place in the camp went so far as to threaten women applying to unrra for medical services for their children. Infant mortality rose greatly, to which also contributed the high rate of illegitimate births prevalent at the camp: many new-born babies were found dead in garbage cans. As a result of the attitude of the camp population and the withdrawal of American troops who were maintaining law and order, it appeared extremely difficult to control outbreaks at Wildflecken of diphtheria, arteritis, measles and the disease of unknown aetiology described in the December report.62

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Not only social but also environmental factors greatly impeded public health protection. When floods devastated camps in the region of Emsland in February 1946, the Polish 1st Armoured Division carried out a rescue operation. Afterwards, they helped drain the houses, then printed and sent around the camps 3,000 leaflets explaining what to do to avoid epidemics and supplied vaccinations against typhus.63 In Hellbrunn camp, the unrra along with Polish camp authorities introduced an obligatory vaccination campaign under the threat of eviction from the camp. In a joint effort, they meticulously compiled lists with names to make sure everyone complied.64 Reports showed that dP s frequently tried to evade immunization and so mass medical screenings were often compulsory. Doctors organized checkups for venereal diseases. Radiographers set up laboratories and mobile X-ray units which toured the British zone of Germany in December 1946.65 These harsh measures were accompanied by education, health propaganda, and gentle encouragement. The director of Itzling camp in Austria inspected the barracks, personally telling people how and when to air and clean up rooms and to shake bedclothes. Doctors recruited from dP s organized a “Well Baby” clinic where mothers were told about nursing activities, pregnancy, and prenatal hygiene. The camp was turned into an educative space: “Notices are posted throughout camp, especially in latrines and washrooms, how to keep general cleanliness.”66 Aid workers distributed vitamins to children and gathered groups of youngsters for ultraviolet lamp therapy.67 In Kufstein camp, children took part in hygiene competitions at school and were awarded prizes for best health posters.68 Similar measures were tried with adults. In the Salzburg camp, Polish editors reported that the unrra rewarded the barrack “Kometa” (Comet) in a hygiene competition for keeping the space clean and orderly and encouraged others to follow the barrack’s example. The inhabitants of the barrack received cigarettes and chocolate as their prize.69 In another camp, nurses distributed leaflets on tb , baby feeding, and the negative effects of using a pacifier.70 Dental stations and feeding stations for mothers and children were arranged.71 Due to the high number of venereal diseases reported, two lectures on the topic and how to combat venereal disease occurred within the same month at Landeck dP camp.72 In relation to Bindermichl camp, the medical officer noted: “Education of use of latrines very necessary. Difficult to educate these people as they are devoid of any community spirit. The landings and corridors are now kept clean, due to frequent inspections of block leaders. Lectures

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Figure 6.4 | Posters in Polish on preventing rickets and on the need to fight flies in dP camps. dP health campaigns followed Polish charitable traditions of reforming the national body.

delivered three times weekly to nurses, also practical demonstrations.”73 The military men complained that dP s did not know how to use toilet paper or refused to do so, while one official pointed out there were occasions when dP s preferred to relieve themselves on the floor.74 Polish intermediaries called for maintaining order in the barracks and behaving in respectful ways in the camp papers and across notice boards. A Polish liaison officer commented that the camp in Pulverweg could be considered an example of cleanliness and culture “in spite of the fact that many of the inhabitants are Poleshuks,” or people from the rural region of Polesie, considered nationally indifferent and backward. He underlined that this was achieved only through “many months of battling people’s old habits and superstitions.”75 The rationale and methods of these interventions were supported by expertise. However, it was not just simply the implementation of the programs drafted in Washington, dc , and London but on-the-ground learning through inspections and controls. The officers and aid workers adapted methods on the go and reported back. It made dP s not only

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objects of intervention but also objects of examination which generated scientific knowledge. Observations and data gathered in the dP camps served in medical and academic work in the West.76 Surveys of the dP camps confirmed that each team included a clinician, nutrition officer, laboratory officer, and other specialists. They installed and used mobile laboratory equipment. To assess the efficiency of the implemented methods, they cooperated and gathered data on the situation in the camps and on dP s. “Their work is coordinated with that of unrra nutritionists who are setting up a new system of food accounting showing average daily consumption. These records will be utilized by the survey teams in their visits to assembly centers.”77 Except for dP hospitals and sanatoria, facilities such as infirmaries, laboratories, and screening units were often organized in the camps. In Kufstein, the dispensary, laboratory, and apothecary were arranged in one of the barracks.78 With the aim of controlling “the nutritional state of the dP population,” doctors and nurses weighed dP s and recorded changes in their body composition. In one time period, they noted that those in the ten to nineteen years age group had dropped 3 kg on average and pondered why that was the case.79 Based on this kind of measurement, they introduced new ration scales: “Reports of weighing teams show that the dP weighs 10–20 pounds heavier than the average German, and this standard may be of use in later assessments when the effect of present standards is registered.”80

d is c i P l in in g , t r a in ing, re-educati ng Training and schooling in the archipelago of dP camps had a strong class component. On the wave of modernizing efforts directed in particular at the “backward” Eastern European population both Western aid agencies and Polish elites enthusiastically supported such projects. Turning peasants and proletarians into skilled agricultural and urban workers and educated citizens would benefit both the Western markets looking for a cheap labour force and the countries of East-Central Europe that were undergoing reconstruction while embarking on the project of rapid modernization and industrialization. In one region of the British zone of Germany, welfare officers interviewed all men and women between the ages of sixteen and twenty-two who were not employed or attending school with the plan to enrol them in vocational courses. Workshops were organized in the camps “as testing grounds for young people’s attitudes.” In only one month, the unrra had established three new agricultural schools.81

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The popularity of teach-yourself books and handbooks published by Poles in Germany and Austria confirms the demand for educational services. dP s had access to phrasebooks in four languages, orthography handbooks, and books on mechanics, electric installations, plant cultivation, and chicken rearing.82 Learning and teaching reflected exposure to Western standards and international aid, as in the electric installation handbook where some illustrations were courtesy of the ymca and the tables were “complied according to the newest modern German norms.”83 The Polish Technical High School in Esslingen published a series of laboratory reports.84 To regain old skills and teach dP s a trade, they were offered metalwork, woodwork, forestry, tailoring, and chemistry courses, among others. In July 1946, in the US zone of Germany, for instance, 1,645 dP s enrolled in farming and agriculture courses.85 In the Wentorf camp, dP s could learn car mechanics and obtain a driving licence, as well as learn how to make hats and gloves, repair radios, make keys, master tailoring, try painting, and learn English or Russian. Overall, more than twenty different courses and workshops were offered.86 The training was gendered. Girls and women were encouraged to take part in courses for domestic workers, nurses, ward aides, child welfare aides, seamstresses, and dressmakers, alongside training in household management and child-rearing.87 While many courses were funded and organized by unrra , they were often taught by Polish specialists. While in theory dP s were free to attend universities and technical schools, “a continued and increasing desire among the dP s to attend German institutions of higher learning” led the unrra to try to limit attendance over concerns attendance at such institutions would delay repatriation or resettlement.88 The Polish factions, on the other hand, supported students with scholarships and book donations. Young people were often eager to continue their education, attend university, and gain professional skills, which meant prolonging their stay in occupied Germany or Austria and in Italy to finish school, receive diplomas, and gain qualifications. Illiteracy and a low level of education among the dP s caused deep concerns. Most of the dP s came from peasant and proletarian backgrounds and had had limited schooling opportunities before and during the war. Schools and courses in the camps gave them unprecedented educational opportunities. A welfare officer in a centre for 2,000 Poles housed in a former German barracks reported that in September 1945, there were ninety-five persons attending school, thirty children in kindergarten, and thirty-two students in the evening courses for illiterate adults.89 In a camp

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Figure 6.5 | The drawing “Polish Public School in Meierwik” illustrates the national school system’s attempt to embrace all Polish-speaking children, a project that was not completed in the Second Polish Republic as many peasant children did not attend schools regularly.

weekly, P.T. Sobolewski pointed out that there were many illiterate people in each dP camp, unable even to sign a list with anything but a cross. He called for more systematic and diligent learning: “It is a fact that in each centre each illiterate person had an opportunity and time to learn how to read and write, or at least to sign their name. These opportunities they had here will never be repeated.”90 Another family, Julian and Władysława, peasants taken from Volhynia in 1943 for forced labour, were illiterate. Two of their four daughters, ten-year-old Bolesława and eight-year-old Anna, began attending primary school in 1945 in Wiesbaden dP camp where they learnt to write in Polish.91 Antoni and Weronika and their two small children were deported in 1943 from Nowiosiolki village in the Nowogródek province to conduct forced labour in a factory. In Reckenfeld dP camp, Weronika took a six-month course for the illiterate to learn reading and writing. She could speak Polish and Russian fluently, and picked up some German while doing forced labour, but learnt to read and write in Polish in the dP camp. Antoni finished three classes of village school back in Poland. Weronika’s brother and elderly mother, who

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accompanied them, were illiterate. Their children attended primary school in each dP camp they went through.92 Hundreds of thousands of children and young people lost years of education because of the war. Teachers reported that in secondary and high schools in dP camps, students of all social backgrounds, various life experiences, and varying ages, in some cases as much as twenty years, studied together. “[N]ext to the teenagers on the same school bench sat grown people, often married.” The challenges of teaching such groups were enormous, especially given that “in the first days their calloused hands were more fit for working in mines and factories, for holding a machine gun than to use a piece of chalk or a pen.”93 With libraries and editorial offices mushrooming in the camps, reading became a pastime and a form of self-improvement. A dP serving a sentence in an Allied prison for juvenile offenders wrote to a priest to thank him for sending reading materials: “The books and newspapers I receive here are difficult to read for me and to be completely honest I don’t understand everything I read. Sometimes a man reads just to pass the time … But thanks to that I am able to read prayers.”94 Schooling in dP camps had a distinctive patriotic and nationalist touch, with teachers viewed as the “Prometheuses of Polishness.”95 During lessons, pupils often declaimed strophes from Pan Tadeusz and sang patriotic and religious songs. In September 1946, for the camp celebration in Grafenschau the common room was decorated with the Polish national colours and flowers, with pictures of the white eagle in a golden crown. Next to that, dP s hang portraits of national bards, President Władysław Raczkiewicz (the first president of the Polish government-in-exile), General Anders, and a painting of Bolesław Chrobry (the first king of Poland).96 Polonizing efforts were directed at Ukrainians and Belarusians, as much as at people with strong regional identities who often spoke in village dialects. Social workers, Polish elites, and many dP s fretted about the degenerating influence of idleness and considered work the main virtue of a modern man. Work and education were also to deter men from crime and women from prostitution. The unrra and iro promoted occupational therapy. Courses on knitting, modelling, handicrafts, and toy-making were offered to dP s afflicted with tuberculosis during their hospital stay. unrra workers who delivered the courses trained hospital staff recruited from the dP s to take over. “The mind of the tb patient is in particular need of this therapy,” one convenor commented.97 At times, personal projects intersected with those of external agencies. Michalski wrote, “The more healthy and strong we felt the more acutely

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we suffered from idleness, the more desire we had to finally do something, to occupy ourselves with something useful, to act.”98 The dP paper of Wildflecken camp noted that “a zestful rush to shake off the horror of gloomy experiences and defeats of the past war” found its expression in the creation of multiple associations and organizations, which allowed for a way to return to the normalcy of pre-war life.99 Work and gaining professional skills as methods of recovery and regaining dignity appeared in many plans of moral and physical regeneration. However, most of the dP s did not want to work for Germans or Austrians or, for that matter, for the “enemy” economy at all. Those who found themselves in the French zones became forced to do so because the authorities introduced forced employment for able-bodied dP s. Laure Humbert demonstrated how this bylaw was linked to the ideals of the French Republic and its ethic of work and how its implementation was believed to boost the spirit of self-reliance among dP s and help them to avoid a “begging complex,” thought to be enforced by the approach in the American zones.100 Many commentators and dP s themselves pointed to idleness and the lack of work as the biggest contributing cause of further demoralization. A British officer complained, “Very many Poles without ‘encumbrances’ who are being kept, housed, fed and clothed free in idleness are refusing to make any decision about going home for as long as possible. These are deteriorating rapidly into ‘workhouse inmates’ and will become less and less use to any country.”101 The reference to the Victorian system of managing the “undeserving poor” intersects here with the limitations of the dP camp as an institution capable of producing valuable citizens. dP s often used similar discourse. Tadeusz Borowski wrote, “Here I learnt to waste time.”102 In a letter to his fiancée, he confessed, “This sedentary style of life is driving me to despair … For nearly two months, I’ve done nothing, absolutely nothing.”103 Eryk Zieliński commented, “We got used to continuous begging, which is humiliating for every honourable man! It has entered our blood, it has become second nature to us! We always want something from someone, we claim we deserve it, that they have to give us things! The biggest malady of our exile – a man unlearnt how to work! A man usually cannot work! And what is worse, a man does not want to work! We have learnt to consider work a disaster of our lives, a compulsion. We avoid it as much as we can, we are simply afraid of it. Laziness has become a common illness of our refugeedom.”104 This rhetoric was eagerly repeated by the leaders of dP communities. dP s often explained that their idleness was due to the lack of proper opportunities and an unwillingness to return to their previous

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dependency: “We will not work for the Germans. We want the British to put up a factory inside the camp so we can produce goods. We are anxious to educate our children, who have lost the best years of their lives, so they can be fit to take their places as citizens when they go home.”105 dPs who wanted to work outside the existing system usually ended up disappointed. The military governments frequently suppressed grassroots ideas for bigger projects. For example, some Poles came up with the idea of a big co-operative of craftsmen to export only and earn in foreign currency (they refused to earn in German mark) in order to collect money for emigration under the principle “help Polish Displaced Persons to help themselves.” However, the British authorities refused, claiming that the idea was impractical and too hard to implement under the current conditions. One of the officials wrote, “The cost of resettlement is a matter for the international body which has been set up to deal with this question and should not be confused with the other issue.” He added that the idea was an excuse to avoid recruitment into the German economy and that the labour was needed in the Occupation Forces.106 The idea of opening a bank by Polish dP s was eventually suppressed in the same manner.107 When the occupiers started to close the dP newspapers, claiming they hindered repatriation, many people lost their source of income.108 Black-marketing was rife. Adam Seipp, writing about relations between local Germans, dPs, expellees from Poland, and Americans in Wildflecken, demonstrated how the Polish camp served as the nexus for a vast regional underground economy.109 These subversive acts did not cease even if their performers and the rest of the community suffered punishments and repressions as a result. Except for simple bargains and small-scale operations, there is evidence of much more complex businesses and criminal networks, such as the trade in coffee, cars, and cigarettes from Germany and Austria to Belgium.110 Officially approved options to earn money were scarce. Only a few dPs found jobs within the camps or for the unrra. A significant number of dP s undertook the opportunity to serve in the Guarding Companies under Allied command.111 People worked guarding magazines or train stations. Wojciech Zaleski believed that joining these units was the best way to fight demoralization and prepare dP s for civilian life. He argued that men could finally earn money, take responsibility for their life, and lead a normal existence that was impossible in the dP camps where “all needs were (usually very poorly) covered by unrra or iro . These institutions decided what kind of trousers dP s should wear, with what they should clean their teeth and what movies to watch.”112

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Alongside work, joining the Second Polish Corps in Italy functioned as a means of realizing an important aim and as a remedy for idleness. This idea – a recurring theme in testimonies – seemed exciting, courageous, and noble to many people, especially the young. It provided a sense of community and the opportunity to feel like a victorious soldier, gain prestige and money, experience adventures, and also to eventually emigrate. For some dPs even little things were enough: to wear a fancy uniform, to visit warm and romantic Italy, to deceive the Allies by running away from Germany or Austria and travel half a continent. Borowski mentioned that everyone talked about going to Italy. Antoni Caputa, a worker’s son from Pietrzykowice who was captured by the Gestapo when trying to flee to the West to join the Polish Armed Forces and incarcerated in a concentration camp, wrote that he really had wished to join the Polish army in Italy but failed. Tomaszewski reported somebody saying, “Officers from the September Campaign are going [to Italy] because they think that there they will be again what they were before the war. Our boys and girls from the Home Army are going there … Today all Italy, from Como and Maggiore to Naples, is a little Poland, wandering Poland. There is everything there.”113 Talks about a well-organized centre of Polishness in Italy made many dPs feel that they were missing out and needed to act. Military discipline was thought to be a solution also in the upbringing of displaced children. Leaders appealed for combatting moral and physical degeneration through sport, scouting, and schooling. The enthusiastic participation of some part of the youth led to the creation of thriving teams. The strength of the body must be paired by the strength of the spirit, urged a scout leader to win over the young Poles. He asserted that “the youth can revive and strengthen what was forgotten and neglected” with its faith in “a better world, better people, and better future.”114 The Sport Club “Eagle” in Augsburg camp realized the aim of building spiritual fitness through bodily fitness by simple daily activities: “cleanliness of the body! morning exercises! evening training!” They offered a wide range of activities, from chess to boxing, blurring the barriers of class-specific sports.115 dP camps and staying in exile also offered other opportunities. The “Falcon” Polish Gymnastic Society organized a skiing course and in the first postwar winter forty-two people completed it.116 A high number of young Poles involved in crimes and offences spurred anxieties about the degenerating nation. Defence counsels’ petitions defending Polish dP s in front of the Allied Military Courts preserved in the criminal records give a window into understanding the origins of crime in the exiled community:

Figure 6.6 | David Birenbaum in skiing equipment in Germany in 1946. Staying in dP camps opened up new opportunities for entertainment and development for wider masses of people.

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Most Polish nationals in this territory were brought here in a barbarous way, some still as young boys, being deprived of the good influence of their parents, schools, and friends. They were deliberately ill-treated and demoralised. The sinister purpose of the Nazi leaders was to have these people reduced to the state of slaves and outlaws. To survive, people had to break laws almost every day. The effects of long years of such life cannot be offset in three months by even the hardest social work undertaken and carried out by the Polish Union and by the more educated and healthier members of Polish camps.117 They viewed dP criminality as a long heritage of war. Social work and reintegration into society through the care of family, school, and the church was a remedy. When Jan G. from Haffkrug dP camp was sentenced to ten years in prison for an assault resulting in death, his defender blamed the Nazi regime for his moral decline: “The defence submits that the accused, being only 23 years old, in that he was taken away from his home by force, suffered in a prison and later on in a concentration camp, where through no fault of his own he lost his sense of proper behaviour. He was deprived of the good influence of his family, his usual surrounding and the Church … [The modern punishment] improves the criminal by teaching him to live properly and to work.”118 Tomaszewski expressed a similar opinion on the morality of dP s: “The German occupation brought huge moral havoc, it derailed personalities. Some people are like young trees crooked by the whirlwind. Shall life, which is becoming more and more normal, be able to make these contortions straight? Maybe yes, but maybe it is too late.”119 The clergy, the émigré government, the Polish military, and many dP s insisted that these processes of rebuilding humans must proceed according to national and Catholic values. “Rules of morality and religious life will be necessary in rebuilding the psyche of a human used to destruction and hatred” wrote an editor of Głos Polski (Polish Voice) in Ulm dP camp.120 Reverend Lubowiecki deliberated in conclusions to his paper on morality whether Polish people in Germany could be a positive element of the “Polish cause.” He underlined that their moral rehabilitation depended on providing “life opportunities” and only then could they become an “element useful for Poland.” According to him, young men ought to get involved in social work and training to help them find a profession, while young women should return to “the conditions of family life” in their country as soon as possible. Pow s could recover if they had legal status and a job, for example in the Polish Guards companies. The

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youth studying at universities were considered promising. The author concluded, “From the point of view of our pastoral activity, even if it is difficult, I must say with joy that the Polish soul is truthfully Christian. It sometimes goes astray but we must consider that Nazism has put so much effort during these five years to deprave it and succeeded in contaminating so many young hearts with the pagan plague. The fact that these young hearts were inoculated with the Christian and Polish ideas through the family, the Church and school while still in their fatherland converts them back to the ideas of Christianity and the Western culture.” Here, the return to traditional gender roles, old values, and the power of the family, which contributed greatly to the Catholic patriarchal order, were seen as the ideal model of society. Polish exiled elites were supposed to make dP s better people and better citizens, helping to shake off the burden of war. Stanisław Czapliński in his article in Orzeł Biały (White Eagle) referred to this process: “We are taking revenge for 1939, the tragedy of September is fading in people’s memory. Nobody else but Poland, its [government-in-exile] and its institutions are bringing them out from the bottom of the hell, they are changing human rags into a rightful man and a citizen.”121 Polish dP s believed it was necessary for their transformation “to remove from the souls of underprivileged refugees the feeling that we are subhumans,” to become ordinary men equal to others. To be Polish meant to exhibit culture, cleanliness, high ethical standards, taste in speech, the ability to have fun with panache, Christian values, usefulness to society, and moral responsibility, as one article underlined.122 War and displacement marked a social change, bringing all Polish social classes closer than ever before and redefining the notion of a “valuable person” with a stronger emphasis on personal efforts and achievements rather than class affiliation. The town council in Durzyń (Wildflecken) tried to convince dPs to enrol at schools and courses because “an illiterate man cannot function among Western societies.” They insisted that now education and moral value decided a person’s position in the social hierarchy, not social background as before. An individual without professional qualifications, according to them, would encounter huge difficulties and lose the desire to live. “Become a valuable man!” they urged them.123

u P l if t in g a n d e d u c ati ng chi ldren Numerous projects and visions of re-civilizing centred around children, who were considered the future of the nation and its biological strength. National schooling in the camps played a pivotal role in maintaining

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national culture and rescuing demoralized children. For many peasant children this was the first opportunity they had to obtain an education, as in their native communities they often did not attend school or attended it only irregularly because they had to help parents in the field and in the household. What remained impossible to achieve for social reformers in pre-war Poland was continued in exile within the structures of the emerging refugee regime. unrra supported the rehabilitation of children and recognized their specific needs. Martha Bascombe, unrra chief child welfare specialist, stated, “It has rightly been said that reconstruction cannot be confined to economic and political problems; any program of reconstruction implies methodical assistance to children and the re-education of youth. War is made not by machines, but by the human beings behind them, and it is war which unleashes the bloodthirsty instincts and sweeps away the civilizing effects of education and cultural enlightenment. The task is therefore one of wiping out the deep scars which the war has imprinted in the minds and hearts of children and adolescents.”124 Various agencies competed to bring up children in a desirable way.125 For instance, the Irish Red Cross offered to take 200 orphaned Polish children from dP camps to Ireland, but the Warsaw government opposed this, claiming that the children needed to return to Poland even though the country was deeply damaged by war and could not fulfil their basic needs.126 A representative of the American War Relief complained that children as old as sixteen could not read or write: “Much can be done for them. They are the most innocent; they are the ones upon whom the foundation of any nation rests. The shortage of reading materials for the adults has contributed much toward their delinquency.”127 As Tara Zahra noted, “lost children” in postwar Europe stood at the centre of the conflict between different agencies who competed to determine their fate. The reconstruction of the family, democracy, and European civilization was thought to depend on the result of this struggle.128 Children were considered the future of Poland, be it imagined Poland in exile or communist Poland. After children in the Polish school in Kleinkötz camp received a parcel from the Polish American Congress, a schoolgirl by the name of Teresa wrote a letter of thanks explaining how the teacher used it as an occasion to teach them democratic values: “When we were leaving the church after a special mass celebrating the Independence Day, our Teacher announced that we should all gather at school … He started to take out paper, notebooks, pencils, erasers, crayons, and rulers from the parcel. When everything was on the table, the Teacher announced shortly: ‘Now you need to divide it between

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yourselves.’ We answered that it would be better if the Teacher does it himself. The Teacher said: If I do it I would be nothing different but dictator Stalin. And I don’t want to be him. You are forming here little Poland and you must show that you can share and rule justly.”129 While anti-communism in exile schooling, often provided by army officers and members of the intelligentsia loyal to pre-war Polish middle-class values, was common, so were pro-repatriation attitudes, especially in the first three years after the war with attempts to subordinate the system of schooling to the Ministry of Education in Warsaw.130 Both sides highlighted the importance of Polish traditions and customs in civilizing children. In Walchum camp, children born in exile and those who could only faintly remember Poland were taught to dance krakowiak (a cracovienne) and zbójnicki z ciupagami (a traditional highland dance with shepherd’s axes), the observer commented, “in their nerves and in their blood they have the rhythm and melody of Polish dances.”131 Boarding schools for refugee children were a tool of implementing stricter discipline and training them to study and work systematically. Observing rules of hygiene and order coupled with daily routine and surveillance was believed to keep them from bad influences.132 In beautiful surroundings, at the foot of Harz mountains, a group of Polish officers, who were former Pow s, converted a palace for the needs of a boarding school: “The school camp for young people in Imbshausen was organized on the pattern of English schools. The main rule there is strict discipline. The boys have a duty to work from 7 am to 10 pm, including lessons, sports classes, work in the editorial office of the bi-weekly ‘Cadet,’ in the model-making shop of the aviation club, historical club, and sports club.”133 To exercise even tighter control over dP children, elites promoted the idea of summer camps, which would teach them “punctuality, obedience, decent behaviour and camaraderie,” as well as bring physical benefits through gymnastics, sports games, and folk dances. According to the camp leader, children manifested plenty of enthusiasm and only “parents show little understanding for these kinds of formative events.”134 Physical activity, combined with the stricter discipline, appeared to be a solution for the declining health and morals of children as well as adults, especially men. In his report, the liaison officer Stanisław Szafrański praised one of the dP centres for placing greater emphasis on physical education, including morning group exercising, summer camps, and activities in the fresh air. He believed that young men “curbed by some discipline would certainly ascend morally and physically.” The officer complained that the gender-mixed camps made the atmosphere

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“educationally unfavourable.” His suggestion to solve this problem was to transfer young males to the tent camps organized in a paramilitary fashion.135 In her longstanding work for dP children, Zofia Arciszewska, a Polish émigré active in the London Ladies’ Circle, considered the raising of them as Poles and Catholics as her priority. The final aim was to rescue them from denationalization and “to preserve them as useful people and good Poles for future free Poland.”136 The youngest Poles, she feared, suffered from living in the “harsh, often desperate” setting of the dP camps. “It was clear that abnormal conditions for existence, the threat of tb , moral depravity, the frequent lack of a family home, became more and more dangerous for these young creatures. In a short time, these children could be irrevocably lost both for Polishness and for a normal honest life.”137 Drawing on early twentieth-century traditions of female activists, for whom social reformism was a way of entering the male-dominated public sphere within the Polish “shadow state,” Zofia Arciszewska and other Polish women in London created an association to support Polish children in dP camps in Germany and Austria.138 They sent money collected at charity balls, visited the camps, and invited children to England for holidays and schooling. Zofia often hosted children at her own house. She underlined that they needed civilizing because most of them were just “small savages” (who ruined her garden and because of whom her husband said he would move to a hotel). They needed to learn how to speak properly, how to eat with cutlery, and how to behave towards other people. What is most important, they needed their morality to be repaired and bad habits to be eradicated.139 When representatives of the Polish diaspora in London, including Zofia, invited dP children for a visit she emphasized that these “little creatures” need re-civilizing to unlearn bad habits. “We watched the children in bewilderment. They did not even know how to use knives and forks at the table … they were taking the food with their hands and pushing into their mouths. Kind ladies helped them to clean daubed and stained clothes.”140 The children who spent time with Polish families in England swore, called each other “disgusting” names, stole, destroyed objects, and behaved loudly. When posing for a group picture, the photographer had to teach them how to smile because they did not know how to do it.141 Briefly, they were labelled as savages, decivilized by the war and by the immorality and impropriety of the dP camps. Zofia complained that the children who had been attending schools in England and then spent their holidays in the dP camps of

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Germany and Austria with their families returned “bizarrely dressed and noisy.” She blamed “derailed parents who could not make the paths of their lives straight” for the bad influence.142 The ability to speak and write Polish was seen as an indicator of how “civilized” or “savage” the children were. Consequently, those who learnt to speak proper and polite Polish brought great satisfaction to their “English aunties.” Socialization in the conduct and customs of the higher classes contributed to rebuilding the Polish intelligentsia and replenishing the anti-communist vanguard. Additionally, it represented a wider bourgeois effort to civilize the lower classes by teaching them middle-class values.143 Zofia described the case of two little girls who came to England for adoption and turned out to be “endlessly sad, ragged and ugly.” They did not speak but only reached out for food. Zofia noted that they kept their bodies in the wrong position with “stomachs tucked out” and “bowed backs.” The ladies felt shocked by their appearance and behaviour and doubted whether potential parents would accept the girls. They dressed them nicely and kept correcting their posture by pushing back their tummies and straightening their backs. As they could not communicate with them through language they just used gestures and touch to show them the right behaviour. According to Zofia, the attention and love showed to the children by the adoptive parents greatly helped to civilize them.144 Zofia Arciszewska complained about moral decay and the ruinous consequences of war for children and therefore for the whole nation. She summarized the situation of young parents in a tone akin to the one used by the priest Lubowiecki: Mostly they were the youth torn away from the fatherland when 16–18 years old … After the end of the war they had to start a life in a foreign land: unprepared, uneducated, without a trade, ill from malnutrition and destructive work. Those who were physically and morally healthier came back to the country or emigrated. tb and other diseases were widespread among those who stayed. Poor allowances and compulsory collective dwellings fostered relaxing norms, broke personalities and discouraged faith. Also, it made fleeting relationships easier what rarely went hand in hand with starting a family. Naturally, also alcoholism spread.145 Echoing nineteenth-century reformers, she was troubled by moral changes, sexual freedom and its consequences, and loosening ties with the Catholic Church. The use of the notion of “moral health” was symp-

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tomatic. It revealed a widespread belief in the interconnectedness of the physical, mental and moral, as well as an understanding of morality as something organic that could be cured and healed like the body. Scouting, as one of the remedies to reform dP children into a healthy collective, flourished in the camps. The military-style of Polish harcerstwo combined elements of nationalism, patriotism, and Catholicism. Polish scouting was organized in Germany and Austria as soon as the fight ceased. There were 25,000 scouts and guides at the end of 1945 in the western zones of Germany. One of the organizers of scouting in the “Lechów” dP camp in Hohenfels noticed, “Our scout teams managed to inspire the hitherto sluggish youth of Lechów, give them decent entertainment which pulled them away from the sources of demoralisation, awoke in them the sense of national identity and pride, as well as love for the fatherland.”146 Scouting was, therefore, seen as a tool to channel the youth’s energy into desirable activities and fill them with patriotic feelings. It was closely linked to sporting activities, which aimed to maintain a strong and healthy body to contribute to the regeneration of the “biologically damaged nation.”147 The aim of scouting was “to cleanse the souls and minds of the youth from the foreign influences and from the depravation of today’s unhealthy times,” as one of the scout leaders put it. Scouting was viewed as an answer to the increase in crime, which was believed to damage the reputation of Poles in exile and weakened the national health. “Our task is to protect our youth from the destructive influence of people who don’t respect the Polish nation – to protect them from playing cards, addictions, drunkenness, theft, and immoral conduct.” In other words, it was directed at the enemy within. “We want to defend the honour of the name Pole , we want that the name Pole was a synonym of the man of dignity. Enough with leniency for brawlers and criminals who tarnish our name – we will fight against it with all our forces and we believe we will achieve our objective.”148

r e f o r m in g t h e n ati onal body: g e n d e r , s e x u a l it y , Prosti tuti on, a n d m o t h e rhood Gendered ideas about upbringing children went hand in hand with the mission of strengthening the nation. The model of the self-sacrificing patriotic “Matka-Polka” (Mother-Pole) was widely promoted among girls and women. The leader of a scout team in Enns explained the aims of their activities employing these tropes: “We wish to preserve for our

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Country the righteous sons of the Fatherland who understand how a citizen of free Poland should behave, in what to believe, what rules to follow and acting always according to the idea ‘for the glory of the Fatherland.’ We wish our girls – future Mother-Poles – were worthy of this name.”149 This gendered patriotism characterized scouting and sports activities across camps. Cultural anxieties of disrupted gender order and untamed female sexuality fuelled moralizing efforts through articles and stories and prompted leaders to devise disciplining measures. Acting mostly within the Catholic and conservative register, journalists, teachers, and camp leaders promoted traditional family values and combatted promiscuity. Priests pledged to fight the plague of unmarried couples and mixed-race relationships. To restore gender roles, aid workers encouraged young girls to help take care of babies, feeding them and changing their nappies, to prepare for their role as mothers and wives.150 Light rhyming strophes in a dP weekly reminded women to be faithful to “their” men and fulfil their domestic duties: “Our pretty young ladies, dark-haired Stefka, redhead Zocha, instead of putting their hands in the laundry, they fall in love with ‘O-keys.’” Aside from ridiculing women for their relationships with “O-keys,” standing for American and British soldiers, the poem humorously asked them to wash long johns for Polish men because otherwise “unrra would laugh seeing them wash their drawers” and they would not be clean when they come to make advances.151 One Polish camp commandant preached that the woman has a special role in the camp which was one big family, the role a mother has in every family, convincing them to take on more duties in the camp sewing room, as women should be ready for the biggest sacrifices.152 Women’s circles organized childcare courses, venereal disease talks, and hygiene clinics. Connecting the bodily with the patriotic in an effort to maintain the national “moral health,” at the same time they invited women to attend talks on democracy, society, freedom, and Polish history.153 Teachers in one of the camps expelled two girls from camp school for attending dancing parties and “flitting between barracks at night.”154 To reconstruct “normal families,” Polish camp leaders organized better accommodation for married couples.155 World of Janeczka: A Refugee Story, published in Hamburg in 1946 “to spite the cynics,” is an example of moralizing refugee literature. It recounts the story of a young peasant girl from her wedding day in the camp, through her work as a seamstress and the birth of her first child, to the decision to return to Poland. Unlike many other girls, she was a virgin when marrying after a three-year-long relationship during which

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Figure 6.7 | “One of the greatest problems of the unrra staff is to ‘unlearn’ the mothers of their traditional habit of testing the food before giving it to their children,” read the official caption. Foreign aid workers along with Polish elites attempted to “civilize” dP s by imposing on them Western and middle-class values.

her fiancé did not dare befoul her and, for her, changed from a womanizer into a hardworking husband. Tired of living in a shared barrack, Janeczka, quickly becoming a good housewife, was happy to move into a separate room to live “like humans not like cavemen.” She turned their room into a “folksy” space with a colourful kerchief on the wall, flowers, and curtains. They created an exemplary household and after the birth of their first son decided to return to their native land where “golden apples weigh the branches toward the ground” to contribute to the postwar reconstruction.156 Camps and exile became a ground for reforming motherhood and family and through that the health of the nation. Among Jewish survivors, too, fertility and maternity helped to claim personal agency and construct a new community, and childbearing was mobilized for national rebirth.157 In some camps, stations for mothers were organized

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where they could feed and bathe their babies under the eye of nursing personnel and attend weekly consultations and controls as well as get advice on feeding.158 One hundred and twenty young girls who became pregnant or had babies were considered delinquent and placed in a strictly supervised children’s home in Loccum.159 The encounter of female traditional experience with male expert knowledge in the refugee camps can be illustrated by a child-rearing guidebook My Child: Hygiene, Diet, Upbringing, published by the refugee press in 1946. “Don’t listen to the advice of village midwives [babka] and quacks,” it warned.160 Co-written by Polish doctor Lechimski and Danish nurse Krusell, the book was based on talks delivered to mothers and pregnant women in camp Bothfeld in Hanover in 1946. Using their experience of fieldwork in the archipelago of the dP camps, they compiled detailed advice on maternal care. Their book was directed mainly at peasant women whose stay in the camp was considered a chance to cut them off from un-modern and harmful village ways of rearing children. “We tried to write in simple language which is easy to understand for most people.” They complained about bad habits the mothers inherited from other women: “such a horrible barbarity of mother towards her child – those old wives’ home advice! … To give vodka or poppyseed in the baby’s pacifier. It is really a high time to finish with vodka, methylated spirit, and poppyseed given to the baby in the bottle.”161 Promiscuity and prostitution focalized fears over interconnected social, moral, and physical degeneration. In the same breath officials complained about overcrowding and promiscuity. In Landeck camp in Austria, a transfer of new dP s and overcrowding in one part of the camp were believed to bring “fatally an increase of the promiscuity and is prejudiciable [sic] to the hygiene and cleanness.”162 Linking cleanliness to morality, Polish elites and international aid workers acted together to contain prostitution and venereal disease. In Papenburg camp, according to Dr Struther’s report, venereal disease was prevalent in both sexes.163 The chief medical officer for the American zone of Germany organized venereal disease spot checks and mass examinations in some districts.164 The reports from various areas contained similar concerns: “Prostitution and venereal disease are a current problem. All efforts and action are being coordinated through the Medical Officer, Welfare Officer and Camp Police to overcome this problem.”165 One unrra doctor suggested conducting blood tests to single out cases of syphilis and “a systematic examination … to detect gonorrhoea in men and women suspects.”166 Premarital counselling, run in tandem by unrra and Polish leaders, too, was offered as a method of preventing the spread of sexually

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transmitted diseases.167 Many women had to undergo compulsory examinations for venereal diseases which could make them aware that, as Lisa Haushofer explained, the military government considered them to be an infectious source, a “contaminating agent.”168 Abortions, reported to be common among dP s, were tackled by investigating and punishing the women. “Illegitimate” children were viewed as a problem to be solved through adoptions and marriage. Lack of access to safe abortion went hand in hand with cases of foetuses found in the latrines or garbage cans, and cases of abandoned babies: “The U.S. Zone reports that in some districts pregnancies among unmarried women, and in a number of cases young girls without their families, are looming as a major problem. The women are reported to be resorting to abortion, desertions and hasty adoption placements.”169 During internal meetings, medics complained that “abortions are often procured” and one of them proposed that “a speculum and a curette should be provided for the Lahde Hospital in order to enable MOs to diagnose whether an abortion was practised or not.”170 In July 1946 in Broitzem camp, for the payment of two packs of cigarettes, thirty-four-year-old Ewelina W. performed an abortion on nineteen-year-old Janina G. The operation was carried out with a pair of metal tongs and a rubber syringe and with the use of several liquids leading to Janina becoming seriously ill and admitted to the hospital. An English Quaker social worker called the military police. Both women were tried and found guilty of respectively providing and procuring a “criminal abortion.” As Janina remained very ill, the court passed a suspended sentence on her while Ewelina received a four-year prison sentence (later reduced to eighteen months), being considered a “professional abortionist.” In the petition to the court, the legal counsellor pointed out in mitigation that “the general living conditions of post-war people, not excluding dP s, do not favour motherhood. In today’s times, a child is unfortunately an undesired guest and a charge.”171 Contempt for the “fallen women” was mixed with the missionary zeal to reform them and make them useful for society. As Kathryn Hulme described in her memoir, in Wildflecken camp Madame Stanisława, previously “a diplomaed engineer in Warsaw, a mathematician of repute and a belle of the old prewar society,” tried to discipline and reform “the camp’s public women,” former prisoners of Dachau, Buchenwald, and Ravensbrück camps. Marching them through the camp and making them work in the warehouse, this “gifted Polish aristocrat had gathered them together in fierce possessive pride and created work for them to do to bring them back into society slowly and surely.”172 Efforts at re-education were

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directed at single mothers and young women, too. Policing their bodies was considered a means of safeguarding the national honour and rebuilding the Polish family. The venereal diseases inhabiting women’s and men’s bodies embodied the moral threats the nation faced. The family, physically and morally healthy, was viewed as the foundation of the reviving nation.173

c o n c l u s ion The dP camps were configured as a modernizing and civilizing space open to control and intervention. Refugees concentrated in the archipelago of the camps were easier to reach and mould than people scattered through villages and towns of pre-war Poland. The concentration of the refugees in a militarized space, often barracks that were easy to keep under surveillance, facilitated disciplining and standardizing efforts, exposing them to Westernizing and Polonizing projects. Public health and education undergirded the civilizing efforts. Interlocking agendas led to combining forces of unrra and Polish elites in field practices and producing expertise, as when the Polish doctor and Danish nurse cooperated to write the guide for refugee mothers. The battle over hygiene and health in the dP camps manifested the civilizing and reforming endeavours of the elites and the state in the interwar and partition periods. The preoccupation with hygiene and cleanliness was shared with other dP groups.174 Polish camp leaders eagerly used the unrra and iro infrastructure and methods of exercising power to discipline and educate Polish peasants and workers. The concerns over “demoralization” legitimized reform-minded interventions. Morality, considered organic and expressed in the terms of “moral health” and “moral disease,” was as important as a properly working body. Exiled Polish elites saw the remedy for “dP criminality” in a proper Catholic and national environment for refugees. People were supposed to be re-civilized: they had to learn the proper use of the language, personal hygiene, handling personal items, dressing, eating, manners, and moral conduct. These practices frequently revolved around children, considered the future and biological assets of the nation. By fighting illiteracy and providing a range of professional training opportunities, the authorities hoped to re-educate the youth, discipline and enlighten children, and turn peasants and proletarians into skilled workers and obedient citizens. Girls and women were encouraged to focus on family life and trained in care professions, domestic service, and light industry jobs. Issues of class, ethnicity, and gender interlinked in rehabilitating refugees and moulding them into useful citizens.

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Reforming the national body was fuelled by moral panic about promiscuity, prostitution, and crime. International aid agencies and Polish elites worked together to contain the spread of venereal disease and abortion, regulating dP s’ sexuality and linking cleanliness to morality. Restoring gender order disrupted by war and displacement was crucial for realizing the vision of motherhood and family as, at the same time, the traditional bastion of Polishness for the nationalizing elites and the bedrock of civil society for the British and American humanitarian activists.175 Top-down attempts at “civilizing” dP s coexisted with personal projects of overcoming the legacy of war and social improvement which often turned into collective bottom-up initiatives. dP s embraced and opposed various attempts at “rehabilitating” and “civilizing” them and negotiated their own ways to normalcy, as they did not wish to deteriorate into “workhouse inmates” nor remain “at the bottom of hell.” Following imperialist discourses and internalizing them, dP s’ attempts at self-civilizing found their expression in small significant actions and bigger life projects, from learning how to dance or drive a car to getting a school diploma. In rebuilding their identity, some dP s rediscovered the privileges and joys of “civilized people,” like going to the theatre again, taking language lessons, or skiing, while for others the opportunities offered in the camps were unprecedented in their lives.

7 “Where Should We Go?”: Propaganda, Emotions, and Debates around Repatriation

In October 1946, to initiate the Repatriation Week program, unrra officials advised fieldworkers to display large graphs in the shape of a thermometer in the camps. A repatriation rate of 100 per cent indicated the goal and aid workers adjusted the graph daily or weekly to reflect the progress achieved to date. Other suggestions included installing an information booth with literature and newspapers, situated near the food display, and appointing an officer who would answer questions and sign persons up for the next transport. Public readings of encouraging letters from Poland, meetings with people who decided to return, parades with Polish flags and music, and the distribution of white and red badges were to follow. In short, at that time, late 1946, the unrra along with the military authorities went to great lengths to get rid of dP s and close down their operations.1 When the war finished the desire to “go home” was rife among many of the liberated Poles, who observed how the French, Belgians, and Italians enthusiastically boarded trains taking them to their homelands. The Polish government-in-exile tried to keep abroad as many Poles as possible, hoping it would “underpin [their legitimacy] in terms of numbers by retaining the Poles in Germany to counterbalance the Russian demands and Lublin aspirations.”2 The Allies, on the other hand, were eager to solve “the dP problem” by swift repatriation. The dP s, considered to be people out of their place, were to be transported to their country of origin at the first convenience.3 However, in line with the Yalta Agreement, the repatriation of Soviet citizens was given priority and, as a result, the first mass repatriation movements of Polish dP s took place a few months after the war ended.4 The destruction of transportation routes, shortages of coal, and the administrative fragility of the new Polish state exacerbated the problem, slowing down the pace

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of repatriation.5 During this time, it became clear that many Polish dP s did not wish to return for a variety of reasons: personal, familial, professional, political, and others. While the unrra along with the Polish State Repatriation Office (Państwowy Urząd Repatriacyjny, Pur ) and the Polish Red Cross struggled to repatriate as many Poles as possible, the Polish government-in-exile and its ideological circles continued to oppose the prompt return of dP s and supported the creation of an exile community.6 Around 1947, when the hope of a third world war decreased and the communists in Poland had entrenched their power, repatriation continued at a slower pace but more Poles in the dP camps could choose resettlement options. Centring around the main axis of emotions, this chapter discusses debates around repatriation, examining the attitudes of Polish dP s towards the return, the possibilities they had, and the challenges they faced. It shows the tensions between the exiled elite attempts at strengthening the Second Great Emigration and building a small alternative Poland in exile and the intense propaganda and pressures of the communist government and international Allies to repatriate the dP s. These two opposing pressures produced a volatile atmosphere in the kingdom of barracks which started to dissolve only with the intensification of the Cold War. The chapter begins by showing how repatriation action unfolded and how dP s tried to navigate it. Then it discusses the propaganda and pressures by the combined forces of unrra , the military, and the Polish Repatriation Mission. The repatriation of vulnerable refugees, often against their will or without their consent, was at the intersection of attempts by the communist government to bring as much of “human material” back as they could and the desire of aid organizations and the Allies to reduce the number of dPs. Finally, this chapter looks at how anxieties about the return to and life in Poland grew over time, shifting the focus further towards resettlement.

“ Po l a n d is c a lli ng you”: t h e r ePa t r ia t io n camPai gn begi ns “The decision regarding repatriation is the most important life choice,” wrote the editors of the Polish Union bulletin.7 For many dP s, deciding what to do next was beyond difficult. Tadeusz Borowski’s letters to his fiancée Maria, who was at the time in Sweden having been evacuated there from Ravensbrück by the Swedish Red Cross expedition, bear witness to the emotional turmoil he went through:

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[D]espite good material conditions, lots of publishing opportunities, social work, friends (three), etc., I’m dying of homesickness. I get very warm letters from Zosia Świdwińska and Staszek Marczak [friends from the clandestine Polish literature studies in Warsaw] – they believe I’ll return. They returned in summer already – on foot. My parents … your parents … everyone is there, even Czesław and Maria. Life is probably hard for them, but when was life ever easy in Poland? … I stand at an open door at all times and can slam it shut if I want to. Quite simply: I can whistle at everything and go wherever I want. My plans are totally dependent on you. If you absolutely do not want to return, I’ll settle down here; if you return, I’ll go back at once. My possibilities “there” are very limited. I don’t know whether, for example, I’d have an apartment.8 Pondering various options, he confessed, “I have friends here (three), and everything I need, apartment, money, even plans for Canada or America. But that would keep me dreadfully far away from you. I’m not going. It’s hard for me to live without you. I’m writing a bit more calmly now, although from the moment I got your letter I went around in a daze. I don’t know how to live. I’m becoming increasingly uptight and doing ever more stupid things.”9 Borowski’s letters, like those of other dPs, were permeated with nostalgia and with painful indecision about his next steps. Problems with repatriation and uncertainty about the future made people lose their mental balance, a representative of Polish organizations noted, referring to the situation in April 1946.10 It cannot be underestimated how much the magnitude of Poland’s destruction impacted dP s in their decisions. The country was devastated. Many cities and towns laid in ruin, farms did not produce, shortages of fertilizers and seeds persevered, livestock was decimated, factories razed to the ground or dismantled. With every fifth citizen of pre-war Poland killed, half of this number made of murdered Jews, most families lost someone. Letters from family members played a huge part in dP s’ decisions over the future. Some people decided to wait in exile to see how the political situation unfolded. While the conditions in Germany and Austria were grim, the news from Poland painted the picture of a country in ruin and an unstable political situation.11 Marian Malinowski, a peasant’s son from Gromnik near Tarnów taken to Austria for forced labour, walked back to Poland right after the end of hostilities. As he had no money, he asked to be resettled in the territories taken from defeated Germany. He was assigned to work as a postman in Stargard and his first impression of the town was adverse: “The town was empty, it seemed abandoned …

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We were looking at black empty windows of burnt or devastated houses with conflicting feelings. We met armed civilians with white and red armbands. It was a patrol of Citizens’ Militia. They told us to go towards the mill … We could see only empty wreckages of houses and depopulated streets covered with rubbles. After a long search and wandering, we have found a flat of our friends …We believed that with time it would get easier and better.”12 Popular reactions to postwar chaos, violence, and the disintegration of social structures have been described by historian Marcin Zaremba as “the Great Fear.”13 At the war’s end, five million Polish nationals were outside the new territorial borders of the country. The governments aimed to create ethnically homogenous nation-states. This resulted in huge migratory movements. Ethnic Germans escaped or were expelled to the West. More than 1.5 million people were affected by the population exchange between Poland and Soviet Ukraine. Poles from the east were resettled in the territories annexed from Germany. In 1947, as a part of “Operation Vistula” Ukrainians, Boykos, and Lemkos living in south-eastern Poland were forcibly resettled in various villages and towns, mostly in the “Recovered Territories.” At the same time, migration from the villages to cities began.14 Needing hands and brains for rebuilding the ravaged country, the authorities of communist Poland pushed for mass repatriation. Concurrently, the fear of imperialist spies and “infiltrees” grew in the communist bloc. Polish communist security services (Department of Security, or Urząd Bezpieczeństwa Publicznego, or ub ), investigated repatriates and recruited some as agents. They aimed to determine if the repatriates were potentially dangerous or unsympathetic toward the new power but also tried to single out specialists, such as plane mechanics, needed for the reconstruction.15 Officers made lists of dP leaders and reported on the atmosphere and anti-repatriation activities in the camps.16 However, the newly established state structure was unable to repress or even investigate millions of repatriates, as it lacked the people, infrastructure, and means to do so.17 One officer reported “a catastrophic shortage of agents” to investigate the repatriates and uncover subversive networks. They had only four informers, none of who had much value for the operation.18 ub documents acknowledge that the action as a whole was a failure, with a lack of a proper plan and a poor network of informants.19 The apparatus of the new communist state was unable to spy on all repatriates, let alone repress them en masse. As the newest research shows, even in the ussr the scale of repression towards repatriates was much smaller than previously assumed.20 The eye of

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the communist security services focused more sharply on soldiers and officers, as well as pre-war activists and members of the higher classes. Repression against these groups escalated with time, exploding at the end of the 1940s and the beginning of the 1950s. Still, catastrophically ruined and depleted of population, the country needed specialists and new personnel, and these practical reasons tipped the balance in favour of the decision to admit many officers of Polish armies into the Polish People’s Army and members of pre-war elites into managerial positions in the first postwar years.21 In the war-torn country, the preparation of administration and the facilities needed to welcome repatriates was a tedious task. Pur occupied itself primarily with the forced resettlement of the Polish population from the eastern parts of Poland, now taken by the ussr . The dP s, gathered in camps, expected to be allowed to return very soon but the waiting time was protracted. The main reason for this was a lack of available transportation since all means were being used for repatriating Soviet citizens, who had been granted priority by the Allies. For a significant group of Poles who wished to return quickly, the situation appeared unclear and frustrating. When the transports started, Pur assisted returning dP s by providing them with food at the transit points, paying out cash aid, helping them find work, and assigning them land and housing. According to Pur instructions, in Łódź the repatriates had the right to receive a one-off payment of 200 to 1,000 zlotys.22 But lack of resources, administrative chaos, and daily incompetence led to many repatriates being left without adequate assistance. The article “The Return of a Wanderer” in Dziennik Ludowy (People’s Daily) published in Warsaw, one of few which openly commented on the harsh conditions in the country and criticized the government, as unrra officials noted, presented a dreary picture of 1946 repatriation from the perspective of the receiving country: A stream of repatriation continues to flow from the West. In spring this mass migration to the homeland will even increase. We see returning ex-prisoners of war, and civilians, and they return not in order to see other people working, when they themselves cannot find work (we would not need them if they did not want to work), nor do they return to starve. Not everyone of those returning is a farmer who would be able to secure land in the liberated territories. Not everyone of them has a family who would look after him until he obtains a job … None of these people return to Poland with valuable property which might enable them to lead a life of idle plenty.

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The help given by Pur and the Polish Red Cross was deemed to be “absurdly small.” Warning that people who could not secure jobs would return to the West, and claiming there already were such cases, the authors called on the state authorities to act, pointing out that the Ministry of Labour and Public Welfare showed “incomprehensible inactivity in this field.” The authors appealed, “The question of finding immediate employment for repatriates is a matter of extreme urgency, and importance which must be solved at once.” The problem had not only economic but also a political dimension, they underlined, as repatriates unable to find jobs “in their hopelessness turn their eyes to the West.”23 By ship and by train, on foot and by military trucks, over a million Poles returned from the West to communist Poland. Too often, conditions on the repatriation trains and at the transit points were dire. Due to the “most unsatisfactory conditions” on a train, two babies and an elderly man died en route to Poland in December 1946.24 In the same month, on the SS Isar taking repatriates from Lübeck to Szczecin in the cold winter weather, in poor conditions, and without a doctor on board, eight babies and one elderly person died, while twelve people were hospitalized.25 This kind of news discouraged dP s from returning when it reached them in the camps. “We want to return to our country to work together on rebuilding Poland and … get out from [here] and from under the influence of the propaganda which puts at risk peace and humanity,” wrote the repatriates gathered in Lauf, Germany. They complained they were forced to wait three months in transit camps in horrible conditions, suffering from hunger and cold. They described themselves as “victims of fascism” and their plight as “Gehenna,” in reference to sacrifice and suffering, or the abode of condemned souls, in Christian eschatology. Disinformation and mistreatment at the hands of iro officials reinforced their frustration.26 In spring 1946 it became clear that the pace of repatriation was slowing dangerously. The slower it got, the stronger the repressive measures and propaganda became, with “Operation Carrot,” officially known as “Sixty-Day Ration Plan,” unfolding during the summer months. unrra workers paraded dP s in front of piles of food. They promised dP s they would receive sixty days of rations if they repatriated.27 A cable by Ralph Hoddinott, who prepared press material for unrra , testifies to the increasingly insistent tone used to convince Poles to leave the camps: “We in unrra ask you now to consider carefully your future. Your Prime minister has stated ‘Poland suffers today from a great lack of brains and hands. We need farmers and manual workers, engineers, technicians, lawyers, teachers, professors, clerks, doctors, priests.’ Poland is calling

Figure 7.1 | A display of food rations for a family of four, in the background a map of Poland with its new borders and a poster that reads “The country is calling you.” As a part of Operation Carrot, dP s were promised sixty days’ food rations if they agreed to repatriate.

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you. Poland with your own proud traditions, your own people, your own language needs you. A generous offer of assistance awaits you if you choose to return home now.” Jobs, homes, and farms awaited there, he insisted, while unrra was closing down its operations. “Thousands of Poles in Germany are returning home [to] get those benefits. They will take farms you might have had. They will again be Poles in their own country. If you don’t join them you will remain foreigners in a foreign land.”28

“t he y m u s t g o ” : r eP a t ri ati on ProP aganda a n d P r e s s u r e s in the cam Ps While right after the war the authorities tried to keep Poles in dP camps, in autumn 1945 they encouraged mass repatriation, and by summer 1946 turned to intense propaganda and pressures to get rid of them. “A study made of Polish newspapers reaching dP camps in Germany indicated that there are disseminating opposing extremes of propaganda which is seriously affecting the desire of dP s to return to their homeland” reported Theodor Bruskin, the chief of the unrra Office of Public Information, in May 1946.29 Allied armies and the unrra feared that anti-repatriation propaganda, including that from Polish Americans, was hampering their efforts to solve the dP problem once and for all. The policy in the US zone of Germany was to mobilize all fieldworkers to shift their focus from relief and rehabilitation to repatriation: “unrra personnel must feel themselves to be the ‘prime movers’ of a crusade, and gauge their success in their jobs by results achieved in numbers of people repatriated. The US Army will support unrra policy in the drive in every way possible, and the use of its facilities and personnel can be called upon.”30 In some areas, measures were harsh. “Do not employ Poles – repatriate them as they must go home,” William Holman, unrra area employment officer, wrote to the team director. “Take all Poles out of work project and repatriate unless he or she has a repatriation date then they can work until date to go to Poland, essential to get them to Poland, [there is] no such thing as an unrepatriable Pole. They must go.”31 Mutual resentment grew over the issue of repatriation between Polish dP s and British military authorities, as Samantha Knapton shows, and with time the tendency to speak about Poles as a troublesome nuisance intensified.32 At times, increasingly restrictive measures turned into outright harassment. Closing schools, forced movement from camp to camp, reducing food rations, liquidating newspapers, and police raids wore people out and made them put their names

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on repatriation lists. Activities deemed “anti-repatriation” were tracked down and fought. A former liaison officer from London who resided in a dP camp as an ordinary dP , was removed along two others, for spreading “anti-repatriation agitation.”33 unrra officials complained that in May 1946 “London liaison officers [were still] attached to and living in most of the camps” while only in one of the five camps visited was there a Warsaw liaison officer. They feared that emissaries of the government-in-exile had the means to attract dP s to their vision of the Polish nation in exile: “Team directors in the camps were unanimous in stating that London representatives had far more pleasing personalities and had better education.”34 The Polish communist government, aided by the unrra , encouraged and at the same time threatened Poles to make them return. Members of the Polish Committee of National Liberation stated in its 1944 manifesto that it would “strive for the immediate return of the emigrants and will take steps to organize this return.”35 Polish politicians gave speeches, distributed in print and on the radio in the camps, urging dP s to return and convincing them that Poland awaited them with open arms. Some of the Poles trapped in the camps sent letters and petitions to Poland, begging to be swiftly repatriated.36 However, before mass repatriation became possible in the autumn of 1945 and the spring of 1946, vast numbers of dP s grew sceptical or hostile towards the idea of repatriation under the current conditions. Many also realized that emigration and life in exile could open up new possibilities. This perspective had its roots in the influence of the liaison officers who were loyal to the Polish government-in-exile, the Polish armies, and the Anders community. The press, speeches, and posters conveyed messages that were opposite to those of the new Polish government and the unrra , providing dP s with an alternative to repatriation and making the idea of the different postwar order appear legitimate. The Polish Repatriation Mission officers from Warsaw were greatly outnumbered by the liaison officers of the London government, until the Allies decided to outlaw the activities of the latter. The reaction of the pro-repatriation side was strong, resulting in the production and distribution of multiple materials. For example, during a single week, unrra headquarters received from Poland copies of eighteen different publications, including Foreigners on Poland, Rebuilding Culture, The New School, Little Atlas of Poland, and Polish Review, to be distributed in the dP camps.37 The popular magazines Repatriant (Repatriate) and Osadnik (Settler) provided them with information on the situation in Poland, professional and educational possibilities,

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and the progress of the reconstruction. They also included stories of successful repatriates and new lives in Poland, stressing the improved opportunities available to the working-class and peasants. In September 1946, the prime minister of Poland, Edward Osóbka-Morawski, issued a proclamation that was distributed in the form of posters. He claimed that after liberation, every Pole had a duty to rebuild his country and that Poland needed the citizens who remained abroad. Convincing them that they would be welcomed like brothers and sisters, he urged them to return immediately, stating that every month of delay was a loss both for the country and for themselves: “What kind of future would you have abroad, a harsh life among strangers? Here the dearest and closest friends are waiting for you and you can work here for the benefit of your country. Everyone who will come back will receive job and land.”38 Posters, radio broadcasts, and films strengthened this message. A mobile film unit showed the reel The Way Home. Students who had visited Poland toured the camps, sharing their impressions.39 Another way to encourage repatriation was through establishing contact between the dP s and their relatives and friends in Poland. A postcard scheme was one way to achieve this aim. The idea was that in Dziedzice (the repatriation point in Poland) “returning Poles will announce their safe arrival, the fact that they have been issued with a food parcel, and that they are on their way to their final destination.”40 Officials encouraged distributing tracing forms, which were then returned to the National Tracing Bureau in Warsaw, to locate relatives and friends of the dP s. Archival evidence suggests that unrra officials were often convinced that if the dP s were to receive a letter or a postcard from their family in Poland, they would decide to repatriate. However, this was not always the case. For example, one unrra worker expressed surprise that young boys, soldiers of the Warsaw Uprising deported to Germany after the defeat and living in a children’s home in Imbshausen, refused to return to Poland even when they were put in touch with their families.41 In a fake letter, first published in a satirical magazine Szpilki and then reprinted in Repatriant, a mocking vision of life in Poland was depicted to dissipate concerns on conditions there. In the “secret letter sent out from prison to [Jan] Lechoń (poet),” the author wrote, I advise you not to return. Don’t return. The life here is not for you … In Lodz there is no one. All have been deported. I, myself, with a bunch of writers sit on prison cots in rags and in chains, with muzzled mouth. For punishment we are forced to see the new films of Ford. Our heads are shaved. Our only food is sawdust from the

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brains of immigrants. The Militia catches us and under chloroform they order us to write for “Szpilki” and praise the reform. We have no water and no electricity. Course, no one goes to church. It is dangerous because there you find a Russian gendarme disguised as a priest. Everyone who appears is sent to Siberia, and so on and so forth. unrra officials warned that the satire was “appreciated by the more intelligent Poles” but “considered to be a statement of the actual conditions in Poland by the majority of Polish dPs in the camps.”42 Such dismissive views of the intelligence of rankand-file dP s were common. Still, many dP s were indeed confused by conflicting propaganda. While the conditions in Poland were difficult and the newly established communist apparatus was not benign towards the opposition, there also circulated grossly exaggerated and fantastic stories of persecutions. One of the repatriates asked in letters dated 1948 if they would be sent to the Chinese front.43 unrra propaganda on life in Poland showed markets full of fruit and meat, happy family reunions celebrated with vodka drinking and pickle snacking, and repatriates in their new houses, as well as working in farming and in the developing industry.44 “Food, Jobs, Farms, Homes, and Schools Await Repatriated Poles in Homeland,” ran an article headline in the unrra Team News distributed in Germany.45 Photo reportages of repatriated families presented their lives as happy, safe, and filled with satisfying work. The family of Bolesław and Salomea with their infant daughter were portrayed living in a pretty farmhouse near Szczecin they had received from Pur in the area emptied from the German population. Salomea, “who originally came from a farm family,” was depicted in a nicely decorated and well-furnished house, “contentedly sew[ing] in the sitting room of her new home.” The article explained step by step how and by what rules repatriates could receive property and land.46 Visual incentives, such as film screenings and food displays, were directed in particular at the dP s with no or basic literacy skills. The US zone director ordered that “arrangements should be made to read and broadcast significant sections of newspapers, announcements, and proclamations and other repatriation literature for those who are illiterate or nearly illiterate. This calls for careful planning on the part of the Polish Repatriation Committee.”47 Propaganda filled with positive messages was accompanied by some making dP s feel guilty and frightened. Officials tried to convince them that by refusing to repatriate they were betraying their country and

Figure 7.2 | unrra repatriation propaganda depicted happy life in Poland, playing on the longings of dP s for family life and their aspirations for better material conditions and social standing. A page from the paper Journey to the Fatherland.

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wasting their lives. Those dP newspapers that remained under the strong influence of unrra and the Polish Repatriation Mission joined officials in threatening the dP s that they must enlist for transport to Poland “before it is too late” or they would lose their right to assistance and would be left alone. Officials often perceived the Poles as susceptible to manipulation, like for example the district director of the French zone of Germany who emphasized that “it must be remembered that large numbers of the Poles at the Camps are ignorant, lack education, and are very easily misled.”48 Some heavy-handed and over-the-top propaganda had adverse effects on dP s, though. unrra officials complained that at times its “effect is to breed suspicion among Polish Displaced Persons rather than to encourage repatriation.” They believed that some dP s found Repatriant to not be objective reporting, as it contained nothing on the harsh conditions in Poland and too much praise for the Soviet Union’s virtues. The London newspapers were considered by far the more popular and they “appear to contain more cleverly written propaganda which is believed whole-heartedly by the vast majority of Polish dP s.” The attempts at encouraging repatriation were countered by London papers, broadcasts from Warsaw and London, Polish liaison officers, and rumours and letters coming from Poland. Returning dP s saw the war-ravaged country, not the images promoted by Repatriant.49 Polish dP s complained that the worsening conditions and forced transports from camp to camp were a form of harassment meant to make them return. Indeed, the Allies undertook multiple efforts to solve the problem of the “dP burden” as soon as possible. A British official wrote, “We are utilising all means of propaganda to urge them to return home now … [T]hey ought to be warned that a date will be set in the not too distant future when they must say ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ and, according to their answers must be moved out of D.P. Camps.”50 A Polish liaison officer commented in his report that the percentage in polls changed when the conditions in the camp did. He posed the example of the situation in the camp in Haffkrug where dP s lived in “nice private houses.” “[O]nly 5% [of the dP s] wanted to come back but after moving the inhabitants to the military barracks in ‘Cambrai’ camp in Lübeck already 25% of population registered for repatriation and left.” He summed up by stating that the British authorities were likely to use these kinds of “psychological pressures” more often.51 The arbitrary decisions of humanitarian workers made these pressures even stronger and pushed dP s to show no hesitation. The example of Bolesław J. illustrates how one wrong move could seriously limit a

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person’s access to assistance. He wished to repatriate but for unknown reasons did not proceed. Having been interviewed by an iro officer, he was forbidden to resettle and told to repatriate at his own expense. The officer who interviewed him wrote, “he wanted to be repatriated and still wants but he said he should have had a minor surgery on one of his fingers but there are no medical documents, so he deliberately avoided repatriation, now he wants to take part in a US Scheme – repatriation on his own expense only!”52 To counteract the influence of anti-repatriation propaganda, repatriation officers attempted to address people’s doubts. A popular way to do so was through the form of a list of questions and answers entitled “What Every Returning Citizen Should Know.” The distribution of sheets with such questions was organized, for example, as a part of “Operation Carrot.”53 Such questions were also discussed during meetings and printed as posters and leaflets. The questions concerned areas such as work and unemployment, agriculture, and state and legal questions. The first question was more general: Q: Will I be welcomed having delayed my return for so long? Will there be any discrimination against me for this reason? A: Poland welcomes all Poles who will work for the rebuilding of their country. The earlier you come, the better prospects and job you will have and there will be no discrimination.54 The leaflets with questions were printed in November 1946, nearly one and a half years after the end of the war. The answer contained two important messages. Firstly, Poland was aspiring to be a mono-ethnic state according to the principles of the new order. Secondly, the new system was based on work and it was open to all who wished to contribute. Therefore, the social order had changed and those who previously lived off the work of others were welcomed only if they wished to work. Other questions included “How can I get work?,” “I have no tools, can I get them?,” “Must I have been a farmer to get land?” The answers explained in simple words how the agrarian reform worked, that the new education system was more inclusive than the previous one, and how to resettle in the newly obtained lands in the western territories. People supposedly also asked about attitudes toward the soldiers of the Home Army, the deportations to Siberia, and ownership rights. Liaison officers and unrra employees used polls to probe the mood in the camps. dP s gave their answers directly (by writing on a piece of paper) and indirectly (answering the officials’ questions). To illustrate

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the usual outcome of the polls in mid-1946, we can look at the report of one of the Polish camp commandants, summarizing the unrra poll to the liaison officers. He wrote that 1,736 people, who made up 96 per cent of the camp’s population, participated in the poll: 7 per cent voted in favour of repatriation, 93 per cent against. The main reason given in opposition to return was the political system in Poland. People expressed this, for instance, in the following ways: “presence of Russians in Poland,” “communist regime,” “lack of democratic government,” “I am afraid of a Russkij,” “when Poland will be free I will come back on foot,” “because I am not a communist,” and “because I know communism.” The political situation and its potential influence on an individual’s life made up 90 per cent of the answers. Some others referred to their family and social situation (“I have no family,” “I have no one to come back to,” “the family was deported”), while 4 per cent of people gave no reason or an answer that was not valid according to the commandant. However, one example of an “invalid answer” – “because I don’t want to”– reminds us that not all personal motifs were expressed in the polls.55 Economic reasons were often hidden behind the political ones given, as Anna Holian explains, analyzing the “political explanation.”56 In the iro questionnaires “political grounds” was a popular and safe answer to the question of reasons to refuse repatriation. It would smoothly bring a candidate closer to their chosen country of emigration. Similar answers included: “Opponent to the current regime in home country,” “home east of Bug,” “will not return under communism,” “in disagreement with the present communist regime.” Many people mentioned fear of persecution: “Fears to be persecuted and murdered,” “Does not return because fears political terror and prosecution.”57 Some dPs gave longer answers explaining how their personal backgrounds did not allow them to return. For instance, an iro officer wrote in Olgierd Ś.’s documents, “Subject was brought up in a surrounding which is completely opposed to the communist [illegible]. He completely disagrees with communist regime in which there is no freedom of religion, speech and action. He personally, as a former capitalist would be persecuted, the more because Poland is now [under] Russian control and subject’s family had before the first world war lived in Russia.”58 People who worked for the previous regime, who were involved in refugee organizations, or were members of military formations in the West, used these as legitimate reasons to refuse repatriation, as Witold R. did: “As Delegate of Polish Relief Organiz[ation] in Rome [he] is already considered an enemy of the present regime in Poland. Besides unwilling to yield to a regime

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which is against his principles. As Polish Anders Combat[ant] would meet prison and persecution. Unwilling to end in prison.”59 Political explanation or communal alibi, as Anna Holian calls it, opened doors for emigration.60 Bronisław A. refused repatriation stating that “he has nobody left in Poland and always wished to emigrate overseas.” When rendered ineligible, in his appeal he invoked the political explanation by stating that he “did not agree with the present political and social regime.” As he did not show up for the next interview, the review board did not want to reverse their decision.61 dPs were forced to make decisions about their future based on scraps of information, gossip, and propaganda, in an atmosphere of uncertainty and under multiple pressures. A welfare officer in Salzburg mentioned that the situation was so acute that an ordinance was issued that forbade anyone to disseminate “any rumour calculated to excite the people.”62 The dilemma about the future came soon after liberation and with time did not become easier to face. Jan Barański, a prisoner of Sachsenhausen and earlier on an activist of the National Party, wrote in his memoir, “We were liberated. What should we do now? We are between Russians and Americans. Where should we go? To the east, to the country, families, memories of childhood, but also to Russians? Or to the west, to foreign countries, in the unknown, to emigration towards Americans, our liberators? Are they going to be real liberators of the world? It was a tragic moment. We had to decide.”63 Soon dP camps filled up with conversations about the possible choices. Young men talked about joining the Second Polish Corps in Italy, dreaming up heroic stories full of adventures.64 Spreading gossip about the third world war pushed some to wander on their own in search of Polish units that they could join. Fearing the next war and persecutions, others were determined to leave Europe as soon as possible. People who came from Poland brought threatening news about chaos, violence, and poverty. The unrra encouraged dPs to repatriate, using the rhetoric of rehabilitation through work and playing on refugees’ nostalgia. The Warsaw government promised social justice with jobs and land, especially in the so-called “Recovered Territories” in the west. The London government claimed that Poland had lost its independence and remained under Soviet domination. Anders’s people, visiting the dP camps from Italy, brought news of their ordeal in the Soviet Union and their heroic march through continents. The first news about the possibility to resettle abroad appeared but nobody knew anything about the criteria or the directions of emigration. One of the dPs, Antoni Caputa, remembered that after being “liberated and fed by the Americans,” he, along

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with his friends, started to think about “what to do next and where to go” and had many different ideas, some of them “unrealistic,” as he admitted.65 The situation did not necessarily improve with time. In 1949, Józef I. wrote, “I am waiting already so long and I don’t know what to do, whether I should still wait for a sponsor or maybe sign for emigration to another country.”66 Stefan Czyżewski, who stayed in the dP camp in Wildflecken, recalled in his 1998 oral testimony that mealtime conversations focused on the problems of repatriation and emigration: Well, they were worrying about their friends and relatives back in Poland. They were worrying what they are going to do. They were worrying if they may be forced to repatriate back to communist Poland. They were discussing possibilities of emigration. At that time, all in 1945, six, even seven, nobody dreamed that they would be able to go to America. America was kind of a seventh heaven somewhere way up there. Nobody thought they would ever be able to reach it. So, many people started emigrating in 1948, to Belgium, to work in the coal mines. To Great Britain to work in the coal mines. Later on, when emigration became available to Canada, many people went to Canada. Then eventually, U.S. legislation passed a special bill that allowed the refugees from Displaced Person camp to come here outside of the quota.67 Czyżewski, who himself eventually emigrated to the usa , pointed out that the dP s made their decisions when possibilities opened up, fearing they would miss out otherwise. Uncertainty was a prevalent feeling, especially given the unstable power relations and conflicting messages. Regulations and policies changed, while dP s’ declarations and actions could rarely be taken back. In other words, people were afraid that if they decided to repatriate, believing there was no possibility for them to resettle, they would regret the decision, having learnt that a new program had opened up or that the policy had changed. At the same time, waiting in the dP camps for these new possibilities to emerge stirred fears that the longer they waited, the smaller the chance of obtaining jobs and houses in Poland. To return or not to return, to resettle abroad or to stay in Germany or Austria – where, when, and with and without whom – made for highly emotional decisions. Women in Poland sent letters to Polish communist authorities asking for help in the repatriation of their husbands and sons. Franciszka S. from Gliwice wrote, “I am 60 years old, I have no

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forces and possibility to work for my most basic life needs. Only the return of my son and his work can give me maintenance and save me from complete poverty.”68 Some others offered, genuinely or not, to go to Germany and Austria to bring their men back, as did Alicja F., a “repatriate from Lwów,” who asked permission for her mother to go to collect her father, a Pow , and make him return.69 Repatriation officers used this kind of material to kindle nostalgia and guilt among the dP s.

r e t u r n in g t h e v u l n erable refugees While Polish dP s, unlike Soviet citizens, were not subject to forced repatriation, there were groups of people returned without their conscious consent, in particular children and the ill. Others, especially the elderly and those in Allied prisons who were released if they chose to repatriate, returned as they did not see any other option. “[He] wants to be a sailor” noted a welfare officer during an interview with Jurek that took place in January 1946 in the British zone of Germany. Jurek, a teenage boy born in Poland, had spent the previous years in different correctional homes after being taken by the German National Socialist People’s Welfare from his home in Łódź. When the war ended, he was transported to the dP camp in Lübeck and, soon afterwards, to the Polish children’s home in Travemünde. Asked about his future plans, he spoke of his dream and possible career prospects instead of stating whether or not he wished to repatriate, as did most of the dP s.70 Minors were an easy target for forced repatriation, even if they openly opposed it. For example, an orphaned teenage boy, Janek K., deported to Germany at ten years old and then taken care of in Maczków dP camp, was sent to Poland with a temporary “foster father” chosen almost randomly from the dP s, despite the fact that during his interview an officer noted that Jan “does not wish to return to Poland – is terrified of Russians and begins to cry when it was suggested that he might return there.”71 Two sisters living with their grandmother, to give another example, opposed repatriation but were sent to Poland anyway, the grandmother acting as a foster parent, obliged to bring them back there. The girls came from Wilno and, being separated from the rest of their extensive family during the war, ended up in the Maczków dP camp. During their interview, the welfare officer wrote that Helena had “no wish to return to Poland and is terrified that she will be sent back there.” Her sister, Rozalia, “has heard there is a possibility of Ireland taking a certain number of Polish D.P.s and wants to go there if there is a group of children going.” Although the grandmother, being eighty-eight

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Figure 7.3 | Polish refugee children repatriated from Freising receive candy.

years old, agreed with their views, in the end they all went to Poland, to a different region than the one where they had lived before the war, as their hometown was now on the Soviet side.72 Younger children, especially those in orphanages, were often not asked for their preferences but were simply put on the trains to Poland. This constituted a part of the postwar battle over children and preserving Polishness. The Polish Repatriation Mission, in close cooperation with the unrra, acted fast to help the children and to efficiently do their job of allowing as few Poles as possible to stay abroad and act against the communist power. The will to repatriate children as soon as possible seemed frenetic. The chief of the Polish Repatriation Mission in Vienna instructed the unrra officials, “The Polish government is interested in having all Polish children removed from Austria and repatriated … No adoption of Polish children should take place in Austria. If Polish adults have been caring for a child and wish to adopt him, they should wait until they are repatriated to Poland and adopt him under Polish law.

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Polish adults who do not wish to return to Poland will not be permitted to keep Polish children. These children must be repatriated.”73 Mentally ill dP s who stayed in hospitals often were repatriated in special trains without being given any other option. When Doctor Wielawski from the Polish Red Cross suggested that “approaching the problem legally, an insane person should not have the right for decision [on repatriation],” unrra officials urgently called for a “speedy repatriation,” mentioning that the hospital was “taxed to the limits.”74 Discussing the situation of chronically ill dP s, Dr Rudolphe Coigny from the unrra health division asserted that “it should always be borne in mind that repatriation is the best solution to this problem, and every effort will be made to achieve a maximum of repatriation.”75 Prisoners sentenced by the Allied military courts constituted another group of dP s who were refused resettlement and forced to repatriate. These included people convicted of serious crimes as well as those who had committed minor offences, such as black marketeering or illegal border crossing. When the opportunity emerged in 1948, many wished to sign a confirmation that they would repatriate and not return to Alliedoccupied territories. Those who committed minor offences or simply did not behave according to the Polish refugee community’s norms but did not end up in Allied-managed prisons also had reduced opportunities, as the next chapter details.76

a n x ie t ie s a b o u t the return a n d l if e in Poland Anxieties about life in Poland permeated the decision-making process. People who delayed their repatriation additionally feared it would bring them troubles, both in terms of persecutions and lack of access to housing and work. Letters sent to the editors of Repatriant testify to these anxieties. Stanisław wrote: I would like to come back to the country soon but I hesitate because when my friends were coming back I couldn’t do that because I was ill … I desire to come back and work in my profession as a chauffeur, if that is possible, and to help out my mother and my widowed sister. Apart from me, my friend and maybe even more friends would like to return but we don’t know where to go to organize our return to Poland and to find out more information. Also, there are rumours that if someone worked in some military formation, he would be sent to prison for 20 years. And that for these people there is no

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coming back to the country. Please send us information and give us directions about return to Poland. Could we work in our professions as chauffeurs or mechanics? … Often I hear about Siberia, that prison or forced labour will be a punishment for people who returned to the country too late.77 He asked where to get information about the return and for more details on the practicalities of repatriation: if there would be free transportation, if repatriates can have a fortnight travelling card to find family members, if repatriates receive a job in their profession even if they returned late. Another man, the head of a family staying in France wrote, “I intend to come back to Poland but I don’t have family there nor a place to go, and it seems pretty bad to get out [from the train] onto the street with the family of five small children, ages 5 years to 3 months … Maybe I should also have a right to be a human and live in the right fatherland.”78 Karol sent a series of questions to the editors of Repatriant, enquiring “who is considered a Pole today? Is Slavic origin the main thing in determining that?,” “does the behaviour during the war influence the definition of the term ‘Pole’?,” “if somebody comes from a place that is outside the border of today’s Poland will he be returned not to Poland but let’s say to Siberia?,” and so on.79 In 1948, when mass repatriation schemes were concluded, Stanisław with his wife and children asked Repatriant for help in returning to Poland: “Why and for whom are we working and starving here? The country working on the reconstruction is shorthanded and we could live properly there for our work, let alone Germanizing our children here etc. With longing we are awaiting a day when we can feel we are at our own home.”80 Gustaw M. who repatriated from Germany wrote a letter to the readers of Repatriant to convince them to return: I am writing to you after a long consideration … I worked with you in the mines and Polish associations, we fought for Poland and Polishness. Hitler took our children away to the military service under various threats … and many of you were imprisoned in the concentration camps. Compatriots! Now we have the People’s Poland for which we fought but my dear, now I believe that you can fight for Poland only when you are on the Polish land. And you too have this possibility to show you are really Poles and Poland awaits you and for everyone there is a job … everyone is equally respected, and talented ones will be appreciated, I became a steiger [mine manager], and in our mine there is a Pole by the name

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of Zieliński who came from Oberhausen and he is a director now … Stop believing this wicked propaganda, stop serving the foreign capital and better work for yourself and for the People’s Poland.81 The citizens of the newly founded People’s Poland engaged in the conversation on refugees and rebuilding the country. Sixteen-year-old Krystyna Skrzyńska from Warsaw asked the editors of Repatriant, which she regularly read, to give her an address of a Pole abroad to find a pen pal: “I would very much like to know how our compatriots in the exile are doing, and to send them a few words about our life in the country. I am a person of a fiery disposition, I am 16 years old (I am attending 3rd grade of the gymnasium). The age of my [female] correspondent doesn’t matter for me. Through the correspondence I would like to find a soulmate to fill up my loneliness because my siblings and all my family died in the Warsaw Uprising, and I am left only with my parents.” The editor drafted a kind response and put Krystyna in touch with Weronika L., a Polish woman in Westphalia, through the Polish Association in Germany.82 The editors of Repatriant received some letters with enthusiastic proposals of cooperation, often from former repatriates who wanted to share their experience and opinions. One such letter came from the representatives of a student association in Poznań: “We are ready to help the mission of return to the country of all Poles who are still abroad.”83 A group of Poles in Seftenberg volunteered the material in the form of reportage and photographs about planned repatriation.84 The case of Ludwika Z., repatriating from Austria to Poland in 1948 with her family, shows how accumulated emotions, piling up upon complicated family relations, exploded into a tragedy. In a barrack of the transit camp for repatriates in Dziedzice, Ludwika stabbed herself twice in the chest with a knife. A day earlier, on 26 May 1948, a transport of repatriates arrived from Vienna, including several Volksdeutche, as a security services officer reported. Most of the repatriates left on the same day, but those who had signed the German nationality list during the war were detained to explain why they wished to go to a different place than their pre-war address in Cracow. Ludwika, who travelled with her daughter and two grandchildren, expected her husband to come from Wałbrzych to pick her up but when he showed up, their reunion was reportedly cold. The officer explained in the note to his superiors: “The behaviour of this woman was abnormal, she was only walking lost in thought, without saying a word to anyone.”85 After the tragic incident, Ludwika was taken to the hospital and the repatriation officers called other repatriates to testify. Her daughter,

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Zuzanna, told the interviewing officer, “my mother had heart problems and nervous issues for a long time already … recently she has been telling all kinds of incredible things, that she did not want to live anymore (why she was saying that I don’t know), that she did not want to return to Poland because they would close us up there and take everything away from us because we had been Volksdeutche in Poland (my mother was influenced by the foreign enemy’s propaganda).” Testimonies given by other persons paint a landscape of the complex social and emotional turmoil Ludwika went through. Janusz Ś., another repatriate who met Ludwika and her family at the railway station in Vienna, recounted that previously she seemed happy to come back and her main worry was whether her husband, a dentist in Wałbrzych, had found a lover but would calm down when the daughter comforted her. According to his words, when the train passed the Polish–German border she shed tears of joy. She might have worried, he added toward the end of the interview – perhaps under the pressure of the interviewer – that she might have feared repercussions for having signed the Volksliste.86 Wiktoria P. testified that the daughter treated Ludwika poorly and called her “idiot” and “old loony,” and poked her. The relationship between Ludwika and her husband seemed cold, too, and reportedly she did not react to him calling her.87 What caused Ludwika’s nervous breakdown and what exactly drove her to stab herself remains unclear. She did so when detained in a repatriates’ camp, awaiting a stressful interview, having just returned to her home country and to the husband she had not seen for years, fearing she might be punished for signing Volksliste and unsure about the future of her grandchildren. All this points to her great emotional turmoil. According to a note written by the officer in charge, she survived and made a full recovery.88 Those who returned faced various difficulties but also found unprecedented opportunities. Maria Horodyska returned and started a career in journalism, she published her memoir in 1989, shortly before her death. Tadeusz Pasierbiński, a teacher and organizer of Polish schools in dP camps, worked for the communist government in its campaign against illiteracy and for the development of the school system. Tadeusz Borowski returned and reunited with his beloved Maria in 1946. He stopped writing poetry and turned to prose, authoring highly prized short stories. At the age of twenty-nine, he committed suicide by inhaling gas from an oven. Julian Tuwim, a famous poet who fled to the West after the Nazi invasion, returned in 1946. Leon Schiller, the theatre director who founded the People’s Theatre in the dP camps, returned in 1945 and soon became the head of the National Drama School in Łódź. Marian Malinowski got

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a flat in the devasted town of Stargard in the “Recovered Territories.” He remembered, “These were for me years of a fulfilled duty and personal life advancement … I began to love this town. Because this is the town of my postwar start in life, my success and my hope for the future.”89 Jurek returned to Poland on the Polish Red Cross train and reunited with his family.90 It is not known if he fulfilled his dream of becoming a sailor. For some, the way back to Poland was far from straightforward. In December 1945, against the will of her parents, twenty-year-old Genowefa K. married a Jewish man and a week later escaped with him to Western Germany. They lived there for two years, trying to emigrate to the usa . Eventually, Genowefa argued with her husband and returned with their baby, explaining to the officers interviewing her, “my place is in Poland.”91 Klaudiusz Hrabyk, a politician, journalist, and activist of the Polish diaspora, lived in a dP camp in Germany until 1949 when he emigrated to the usa . In 1958 he returned to Poland and collaborated with the regime. On the wave of the Gomułka’s thaw and as a part of a “repatriation campaign” of the Communist authorities, the famous writer Melchior Wańkowicz returned, too. Yet, many never returned. In 1948, repatriation decreased, and most people turned their eyes to Western countries as possible new places to live or tried to establish themselves in Germany or Austria. Military officers and many fieldworkers realized that insisting upon full repatriation made little sense, and as the military governor of the American zone of Germany Joseph McNarney put it in a telegram, “Realistic appraisal reveals that majority dP s in the US zone, Germany are non-repatriable and must, in the main, be considered political and racial refugees.”92

c o n c l u s i on Homecoming, never a straightforward process, proved particularly complex for dP s strained by life in the camps in the ruins of the Third Reich. Poland changed drastically in respect to the situation in 1939. The borders changed, the social structures changed, the political system changed. The newly established communist government struggled to manage migration and effectively help repatriates. While the continent was undergoing a painfully slow reconstruction from the devastation of war, people sought to carve out a future for themselves in the new order and improve their lives, whether by returning, seeking resettlement, or staying put. Some left Poland only after the war ended, some returned to Poland and escaped back to the West, some lived abroad for years or decades to return to Poland in later life.

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The repatriation–resettlement debate, grown on the ground of an intensifying Cold War, framed people’s decisions about their future and informed the way in which they represented themselves in front of international organizations and diaspora groups. Pondering politics and economics, and often lost in the argument while being attacked by conflicting propaganda, dP s were forced to see their individual situation as a part of a bigger picture. Discussions in the camps unfolded against the backdrop of the postwar “Great Fear” in Poland.93 Many delayed repatriation, hesitated, or changed their minds more than once. Personal and familial motives played a paramount role. Referring to the wartime upheaval, Tadeusz wrote to Maria, “A great wheel of events has opened up for us, and will come back and close only when we are together.”94 To harness the support of the masses, the government-in-exile supported anti-repatriation propaganda, while the communist government in Warsaw insisted upon full repatriation. It cannot be denied that a popular desire to return observed in the immediate postwar period was to some extent driven by a genuine wish to build new Poland and make a new life for themselves there. If not for the efforts of the London government-in-exile and diaspora organizations, more dP s would have repatriated and fewer would have remained in the West. However, as hard as it was to accept by many nationalists and communists alike, there were some Poles, including peasants and workers, who did not want to live in communist Poland or in any Poland at all. The war and displacement gave them the opportunity to have a degree of choice in what country they wanted to live in. In the international community, dP s increasingly became seen not only as Nazi victims but also as refugees from communism. Equipped with a political explanation, they could make themselves part of the Second Great Emigration. The opportunities opened for them in the new international refugee regime are discussed in the next chapter.

8 “Slave Market in the Heart of Europe”: Resettlement and Remaking of the Polish Diaspora

“The applicant is a good looking, broad-shouldered, strong and healthy-looking man with only slightly Asiatic features,”1 noted an iro official about Shao. He tried to help him get a placement and resettle abroad, pondering if his Chinese origin could hamper his immigration chances. Shao and his wife Maria felt torn between the idea of going to Poland, to China, or emigrating elsewhere. Shao immigrated to Poland in 1936 and made a living peddling Chinese manufactured items. Maria was born in the village of Ludwików where she attended two years of primary school before moving to Warsaw to work as a domestic servant at a doctor’s house. In 1944 they got married. Shao converted from Buddhism to Roman Catholicism and acquired the Polish name Stanisław. Both were taken to Germany as forced labourers after the fall of the Warsaw Uprising. When asking the Polish committee for help in emigration, Maria explained, “Initially, my husband and I had an intention to go to China but due to the sudden change of government we can’t go there. The present Poland and China aren’t for us.”2 They decided to seek resettlement in the usa . Mass resettlement of dP s from Europe became possible as the refugee regime entrenched in the newly created United Nations focused on individuals of European origin fleeing states considered oppressive, dictatorial, and hostile to the West. As Cold War tensions grew, refugees became useful reminders of the wrongdoings of the Soviet bloc. In two competing visions of the world, they fitted into the Western vision as both victims of communism and defectors from Eastern Europe. As Heather Johnson put it, “the refugee was useful in this discursive contest, not only to bolster the humanitarian image of the industrialised states who aided and supported refugees, but also in arguments that it was the misguided policies and politics of the ‘other side’ that were

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causing such displacement.”3 At the same time, dP s were seen by other countries as a pool of manpower and as potential migrants whose confinement in the camps facilitated selective recruitment of the most desirable settlers. As Daniel Cohen underlines, the selectors were clearly not motivated by humanitarianism.4 Poles were seen as those who “constituted an unmatched reservoir of white, European, young, healthy, and malleable workers.”5 For many countries, they were a good fit to replenish the population and fill the gaps in job markets. Smaller resettlement schemes had already started in 1946 with Belgian programs for miners, the Westward Ho! scheme to Britain, and recruitment to France.6 After 1948, non-European countries started to accept larger numbers of dP s and fifty resettlement mission outposts functioned in Germany, Austria, and Italy. This process, consisting of preselection carried out by the iro and the evaluations of manpower experts in resettlement centres, was designed “to offer only healthy and productive refugees to labor selectors.”7 That meant that many individuals and families were rejected. In some cases that led to families leaving some of their members, such as disabled children or elderly parents, behind.8 How did dP s experience these practices and comment on them? Why did farmers, workers, and intellectuals frame their resettlement and opposition to repatriation as “the exile mission”? This chapter looks at the ways in which various groups of Polish dP s experienced resettlement and how their determination to immigrate was capitalized upon by the selectors, employers, and governments. It shows that although in the position of weakness, they criticized profit- and market-oriented policies and practices and came up with bottom-up projects of how to improve or change the system governing migration. This critique often centred around the plight of the most vulnerable refugees – the ill, elderly, and disabled, pregnant women, and single mothers – who were the most marginalized in resettlement programs. This leads to the discussion of how diaspora groups mediated resettlement programs through what is termed here “moral screening.” The chapter concludes by affirming that the processes unfolding in the dP camps and exile contributed to the making of a new layer of the Polish diaspora.

“in t o t h e u n k n o w n ” : governments’ e xP e c t a t io n s a n d dP s ’ k nowledge shari ng “I don’t have any intention to go abroad, like hell I will, and to be examined at points like a horse in the marketplace to check if I am fit,” wrote Stanisław, expressing his will to repatriate.9 Those who

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turned to resettlement had little choice but to subjugate themselves to the selection teams who arrived in the camps to interview and evaluate dPs. The focus of resettlement programs on productivity and the usefulness of potential immigrants did not escape dP s’ notice: “Not only the cruel fate made us lose all the material goods, from which we were torn off by the brutal enemy, and deprived us of an equal start in life after the war: on top of that today we are the reservoir of energy to which one can reach to exploit us instead of giving us a helping hand without reaping a profit from it.” dP s who sketched these words for a camp paper called for the relaxing of immigration rules, assuring that the “capital put by the states at the beginning will return quickly and with interest,” as “extra hands mean bigger production.”10 Representatives of the Polish Union in Germany claimed that restrictive recruitment rules turned the whole process into “modern human trafficking.”11 This slave market rhetoric echoed late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century discourse in which Eastern European commentators insisted that emigration from Eastern Europe to the New World “delivered [emigrants] to new forms of bondage and misery.”12 At the same time, this rhetoric had a colonial and racist overtone. Polish dP s refused to be treated like “white negros” and demanded conditions adequate for white European settlers.13 Recruiters picked and chose from the “human material” available. The selection was underwired by racialized and class discourses. dP s were to help with manpower shortages and assist economic reconstruction. Countries, companies, and individuals wanted to select migrants that suited their needs best. While the US and Canada had established Eastern European diasporas, for Australia this was the first time non-British migrants were to settle on its territory en masse.14 The authorities of that country wanted to ensure they received “best migrant types” – white and strong, ideally with blond hair, fair complexioned, and blue eyed.15 Polish dP s fit this vision, the lines of their identity still blurry as they were not ascribed to a well-defined racial category.16 Australia favoured manual labourers and discriminated against large families.17 The country started its resettlement program in 1947, looking primarily for “hornyhanded sons of toil.”18 More than 60,000 Polish dP s arrived in Australia between 1947 and 1952.19 Directed to reception centres and assigned placements for two year contracts, they were expected to quickly learn the “Australian Way of Life.” As Jayne Persian writes, “the dP s were sent as unskilled labour, essentially indentured labour, to heavy industry, public utilities including projects such as the Snowy Mountains Scheme, agricultural work, and domestic and hospital work.”20

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Canada accepted more than 46,000 Polish dP s. In a brief prepared for the Canadian senate hearing in 1946, William Van Ark who had worked for the unrra portrayed Polish dP s as “democratic, deeply religious, frugal, hardworking people” who “would make ideal settlers for the Canadian West.” Emphasizing that they were fit to do heavy manual labour and, with their few and easily satisfied needs, could make contributions “in the field of construction and agriculture in the forest” where workers were sorely needed in Canada.21 Thomas Keenan, a Canadian unrra employee in Germany, called for accepting dPs to answer the economic needs of Canada and on moral grounds. He also suggested creating artisans’ camps under the name Operation Beaver for those who did not fit into the Canadian immigration policy: “they would be working like beavers producing things of utility and beauty out of native Canadian materials.”22 As Susan Armstrong and David Murray show, the Canadian government, motivated by labour requirements and ethnic prejudice, accepted those dP s who had skills needed in the country and who would easily integrate into Canadian society.23 As for the usa , the campaign of the Polish American Congress helped pave the way to mass immigration. Among other activists, President Karol Rozmarek of Pac campaigned for the admission of Catholic refugees, depicting them as anti-communist and anti-Soviet, as well as valuable assets for American society.24 The 1948 Displaced Persons Act allowed 205,000 dP s to enter the country, with 30 per cent of visas earmarked for persons with an agricultural background.25 With subsequent amendments, this number was nearly doubled. Those granted entry still had to meet immigration law criteria. President Truman ensured that “these laws provide adequate guarantees against the entry of those who are criminals and subversives, those likely to become public charges, and those who are otherwise undesirable.”26 Polish dP s started to arrive in the United Kingdom as European Volunteer Workers in late 1946, taking jobs in low-paid professions. However, many were rejected as Britain wanted immigrants of “good human stock” and Poles were often viewed as “peasantry with unclean habits,” as Samantha Knapton points out.27 The Polish Resettlement Act of 1947, followed by Operation Pole Jump, allowed former servicemen and their dependants to settle in Britain. By 1951 the Polish-born population in Britain counted at more than 162,000 people.28 In other European countries, manpower deficits and a drive for reconstruction triggered policy makers to seek foreign labourers, too. Operation Black Diamond brought dP s to Belgium and the French Metropolitan Scheme to France to work in mining and other key industries.29

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Brazil had a history of Polish economical emigration with tens of thousands of peasants, mostly from the Russian Empire, settling to work on small farms and coffee plantations. In the 1940s Brazil was rapidly industrializing and thus fished for skilled industrial workers and agricultural specialists among the dP s. Vocational training provided in the camps helped many potential immigrants fulfil these requirements.30 Venezuela, like many other South American countries, sought remedies for perceived underpopulation and hoped to attract skilled workers for the project of modernizing the country. The oil boom led to the politics of encouraging European immigration from the 1930s and continued after the war, even before the iro took hold of resettlement. dPs were accepted as agriculturalists, craftsmen, and professionals in various sectors.31 Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Paraguay, and other Latin America countries that wished to expand manufacturing and develop natural resources accepted dP s who would give a boost to their state and nation-building projects.32 While it is well described in scholarly literature how the discourses around mass resettlement were racialized, it should also be mentioned that they were also permeated with class language. This was often expressed through descriptions of the body and appearance, such as “broad-shouldered,” “neat,” “well-mannered,” or “clean looking.” An employment advisor noted in the file of Wanda W., a single mother of two young boys, “Her needs are very simple … [her] sons are very neat, well-mannered children … The family leaves an excellent impression as simple people, victims of circumstances.”33 Filip and Nina A., a couple from a small village in eastern Poland declaring Polish as their mother tongue and White Russian as perfect, were described by the interviewer in the following way: “He has pleasant manners and an appealing attitude … His wife is an attractive and clean looking woman.”34 In another case, reasons for rendering Olgierd Ś. eligible for assistance were given as “A gentleman, his statements seem to be true.”35 dPs helped each other navigating resettlement. A refugee publishing house in Lippstadt reprinted a novella by Henryk Sienkiewicz, After Bread: A Sad Story of Polish Emigrants to America (Za chlebem. Smutna opowieść z życia emigrantów polskich w Ameryce). Originally published in 1880, this popular short story talked about hardships and nostalgia suffered by Polish peasants going to America as economic immigrants in the nineteenth century. In the newly drafted introduction, the editor wrote: Again we are giving to your hands a new book. This time it is an exceptional one. It describes the fate of people like us, who decided

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to leave the country and go into the world – into the unknown, among the strangers, for wandering. They don’t know the conditions, the language, they are being exploited, various “dignitaries” and “commissaries” hoodwink them, promising them golden mountains. Read this book carefully. Read between the lines. Compare that situation with our own. One can learn a great deal … and avoid a great deal of bad things in the future. Our wish as publishers is that this book makes an impact on the dP community. First of all, it should show all the bad sides of staying in a foreign land and should convince those who can return to the country to do so. Second, it should show those who decided to stay that an individual going alone to an unknown country, without knowing the conditions and the language, will be lost! Thus, we should act collectively and amicably. We should learn foreign languages and learn about the conditions in the country where we intend to go.36 Linking the plight of displaced persons with that of economic immigrants in the nineteenth century, the editor warned about the dangers awaiting emigrants and called for them to support each other. dP s shared knowledge about possible destinations, too. Brochures and press articles provided information about immigration requirements and life in resettlement countries. The legacy of Polish colonial and settlement projects, such as in Brazil in the nineteenth century, gave Poles a sense of cultural superiority while, at the same time, allowed them to identify with the plight of natives in colonies.37 This has been translated into the racialized views of resettlement countries. Typically, Polish dP s saw themselves in rank with other white European settlers, while the leaders warned them about some destinations and some occupations which could make them live on the level of the native population, playing on the fear of “white poverty.” Uruguay, for instance, was presented as a country supporting the immigration of skilled and healthy farmers. The editor of Naród i Praca (Nation and Work) portrayed the conditions there in a favourable light, as the climate was supposed to be right for European settlers and because the government offered exemption from tax for ten years and credits from Banca Abrario to buy land and a farmhouse. The ministry of agriculture would provide help with obtaining seeds and tools,

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as well as with learning adequate agricultural techniques. The editor warned potential settlers that they should consider “different conditions of work, climate, and language.” Factory workers and craftsmen were advised to secure a work contract before emigrating or count on their family members and friends who lived in Uruguay.38 While typically dP elites wholeheartedly supported resettlement, some critical voices were raised. In April 1946, Leon Rejewski, discussing the issues of emigration in Głos Polski (Polish Voice), a weekly of Ulm dP camp, discouraged Poles from seeking resettlement and criticized them for believing that “the West is some kind of biblical promised land.” He pictured the countries of South America as not only the countries of Brazilian coffee, Paraguayan yerba mate, and Argentinian wheat but also countries of the “climate deadly for Europeans, the jungle surging into the fields, and vegetation on the level of half-wild forest dweller or in the best case a port worker.” In opposition to the government-in-exile policy, he condemned those who tried to keep Poles abroad “as a form of some kind of ‘protest,’” claiming that the elites were trying “to make a martyr for the cause out of a peasant going to the land of his forefathers.”39

“vic t im s o f t h e Pe a c e ” : ex Peri enci ng and i m P r o v in g t h e Pr o c e s s of res ettlement The refugee community emphasized the importance of freedom of choice in the repatriation vs resettlement dilemma and called for making choice a basic refugee right. The pressures and propaganda from various agencies only strengthened this stance. The project of the Refugee Rights Charter, discussed in more detail in chapter 4, was one of the grassroots initiatives aimed at expressing dP s’ wishes of self-determination. The authors believed that the main right of the refugee should be the freedom to make decisions considering repatriation and the future on their own without any external pressures.40 Nevertheless, the choice was never free: the possibilities for dP s depended on the way their bodies and minds were evaluated. Resettlement was reserved mainly for those who were young, sane, and able-bodied. A member of the Canadian immigration committee stated, “Their physical rehabilitation is complete now and the men and women are fit to do heavy manual labour. They are accustomed to it, they come from the rural sections.”41 Commissions and exams assured that only this kind of refugee would be allowed to emigrate. Observers quickly started invoking images of the slave trade and indentured labour, with one journal

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Figure 8.1 | “Is he fit for work?” unrra personnel and Polish elites joined forces in improving the health of dP s so as to make them fit for the work of postwar reconstruction.

branding it “a slave market in the heart of Europe.”42 The dP s used similar metaphors to describe these processes. Marian Pawiński, a dP who enlisted for emigration to Canada, wrote, “Like in the past, like a few centuries ago the English … did human trafficking to the Negros, now agents of different overseas firms appeared. To get out of a camp, to travel overseas to live a normal life – these thoughts filled our minds. The young, healthy, and strong – those had the best chances. First, the body weight was taken into account. They looked at the hands to check if one had performed manual labour before.”43 The chief of the Association of Farmers and Agricultural Workers in the British zone of Occupied Germany called it “wild emigration,” complaining that “foreign employers and recruitment commissions treated refugees like slaves who in ancient times were put up for sale.”44 Representatives of the Polish Union claimed that the Western nations had a duty to create living conditions for the refugees. Instead, they used criteria that were too strict and limiting, which changed the whole process into a “modern slave trade” and turned the dP s into “victims of the peace.”45

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The long and confusing procedures caused human tragedies and were against human dignity, many dP s claimed. Members of the Polish Union pointed out the unclear and unfair elements of the system: “What will happen to those suffering from tb and those who used to have tb ? What will happen to the families where one child only had tb ? To protect themselves from [an unwanted] child, by many rightly considered the biggest treasure, many virtuous and religious women turn to criminal termination of pregnancy. Who will be punished for that?” Describing procedures in the transit camps, the authors indicated the emotional havoc the dP s went through: “Most of them go for the commission exams like for an execution – pale, trembling, frightened specimen of homo saPiens .” “Shortly, it is just one huge thorny way” they concluded, adding that all this was happening in front of the international community that usually talked so much about human dignity.46 Conditions in the transit camps sparked complaints, too. “Dirty rooms, bedbugs, stinking dirty covers, no windowpanes, lodgings in the attic, cold, rude workers, tasteless food served in horrible conditions,” Funk Caserne in Munich, one of the worst camps, was described in the emigration bulletin.47 dP s petitioned and protested to no avail. The more experienced refugees recommended that those accepted for resettlement bring with them a vacuum flask, Esbit stove, a torch or a candle with matches, sanitary products, and a wooden chest. Families with children should also take a milk jug, a washing bowl, and additional food. For many individuals and families obtaining these objects was simply unachievable.48 Even those considered healthy and able-bodied had a long way to go before being allowed to resettle in another country. The dP s saw the procedures leading to emigration as complicated, tedious, and exhausting. A caricature, “A dP ’s way to u.s.a. ,” that circulated in the dP camps showed a camel that went through not one but four needles’ eyes and a loop. The labels attached to the needles represented iro medical examinations, American doctors’ check-ups, quarantines, and interviews with consuls and inspectors. The camel, emaciated and exhausted, has not even reached the Statue of Liberty.49 In another source, dP s used the metaphor of the Last Judgment to describe how they felt in the screening for resettlement.50 Antoni Caputa described the obstacles he met before emigrating in his memoir: When enlisting for leaving Germany to any country one would move to the transit camp in “Funk Kaserne” in Munich. Then one had to wait long weeks to queue for professional, political, and medical commissions, and then for the consul, if one had been accepted in

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all the previous commissions. When I was rejected from the work to Canadian mines, I enlisted for work in Canadian railways. [iro ] picked and chose in human material in terms of ability to work, political past, health, appearance, etc. My friend, Władek S., was rejected because the medical commission found the bacteria of venereal disease in his blood. He asked me to go for the exam again and give his surname. Unfortunately, I had to refuse, due to the rules. If he would have asked me about that before going to the commission it would be different: many people first went to the private doctor and then in case there was something wrong, they asked healthy friends to come to the commission under their surnames. My own exams didn’t take long. The first person examined my ability to work in Canada by looking at my hands. Probably it was enough because they didn’t ask about anything and weren’t interested in my political past.51 Antoni feared the medical commissions because he knew that his lungs and heart were not in good condition. However, he was invited for an appointment with the Canadian consul and was granted permission to emigrate. Stefan Czyżewski, too, remembered that the procedure caused him a great deal of distress. Relying on friends and resorting to tricks, such as the use of false documents, helped in passing multiple commissions: I had friends, close friends, and the wife of the family worked for the emigration office to America and she helped to put me on the list. And eventually my name came, my number came, I was called in and was asked to collect documentation and went through the doctors and all kind of commissions, question this and question that, went through the consulate. Especially I had a hard time with a doctor or else I didn’t have a hard time with a doctor, but Captain Vulcanovsky said, “Well, your lungs are scarred. You’ll never go to America. Come on, let’s have your documents.” So he took my little card with the x-ray on it and he said, “Here, stick this one on.” “What is that?” “This is my x-ray, I never had any problem with lungs.” That was it, I came under false pretences. I came here as a former tuberculosis patient, almost dying there and I haven’t been sick a day since I came here.52 Stefan was accepted only because he managed to hide the fact that he had tb by using a false X-ray copy. The dP s who did not have a desirable body and did not manage to falsify their documents did not stand

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a chance at gaining permission to emigrate. Arbitrary decisions of selection team members frustrated dP s. One of the dP papers mentioned a situation where the chair of the commission recruiting domestic servants to Canada, an elderly woman, could not stand “overdressed ladies.” All the women ran to change their clothes but, when they got back, the new chair refused to accept “such sloppy creatures.”53 In 1951, after seeking resettlement for several years, Franciszek and Antonina, farmworkers deported from the Łódź region to Germany, agreed to leave their teenage son behind if that was be necessary, since the boy suffered from tb .54 Jan A. tried to fight back when he found out that his mother could not emigrate with him and wrote to the American dP Commission, “I live together with my mother Mrs. Stanisława A. in Wentorf and support her … My Security Ground Check has been made at the end of March in Wentorf and I hope to be called to Transit [camp] presently. I found out that my mother cannot emigrate. She has been rejected from emigration in 1949 by usdP - Commission. I cannot leave her alone under any circumstances. I ask you to give permission to my mother to emigrate with me.”55 However, permission was not granted, and Jan emigrated alone.56 All this resulted in the exclusion from resettlement of whole groups of refugees, especially the ill, the elderly, the disabled, unaccompanied minors, and criminal offenders. Members of the intelligentsia, too, struggled to secure employment. Often they falsely claimed they had agricultural or manual labour experience to secure visas. The selection was made based on the dP s’ physical and mental states, as well as on their “moral health.” Immigration policies and multiple medical exams stigmatized the ill and the elderly. Many felt that there was no place for them in the new order. A representative of former concentration camp prisoners wrote, “those healthy and strong have so many tasks to achieve that nobody would think about ‘the living dead’ found in the death camps.”57 Yet, some of the iro officials showed a great deal of flexibility and compassion while interviewing the refugees and helped them craft their narratives in ways that increased their chances of being accepted for support.58 Also, applicants could appeal negative decisions at the iro Eligibility Review Board, quite an innovative body created to instill some professionalism in vetting refugees. While iro officers were on the lookout for false papers and fraudulent statements, they also increasingly gave individual refugees the benefit of the doubt and a significant number of dP s had their status reversed.59 The thriving core of the Polish refugee community praised moral and physical health, echoing pre- and wartime eugenic beliefs, namely the

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same discourse that brought about the policies carried out by iro and the resettlement commissions. The editors of Nasza Emigracja (Our Emigration) pointed out that the ill were labelled by iro “without chances to emigrate”: “On the immigration market where the value is measured by the strength of the muscles, and not by the human value or by the example of good Samaritan, these people – mostly from the intelligentsia – are rubbish without any value. Only a merciful death will bring liberation to them and to those who have to take care of them.”60 Mental illness, as much as tb , venereal disease, or physical handicaps, would result in ineligibility or even, in the case of those confined to a hospital, limited access to basic assistance. For example, Helena W., a dP suffering from schizophrenia who “wished to emigrate to any country,” was rejected because of “medical reasons.” Before being diagnosed and sent to the hospital where she received electroconvulsive therapy, she was considered to be only “a helpless and puzzled person in need of sound advice.”61 Another woman, also classified as schizophrenic, was thought to be “incapable of making any decision” and was consequently repatriated. Her husband obtained a divorce and left for the usa with their little son.62 Even the suspicion of mental disease could make a dP lose any chance to emigrate. Tadeusz R. was classified as ineligible and later on it was pointed out that he was “considered to be a psychiatric problem.” Tadeusz appealed the iro ’s decision and provided supporting documents. Officials arranged the doctor’s appointment, which confirmed that Tadeusz behaved in a paranoid manner. He fought for the right to stand before the resettlement commission but again was rejected because of the suspicion of mental illness.63 People above a certain age, and the elderly in particular, faced immense difficulties in finding resettlement. Considered “hard core” cases, they struggled to be accepted by any country. Jan C., a farmhand, worked at the railway as a forced labourer and when the war finished as a lumberjack. When he started to suffer from arthrosis, he was admitted to the dP Home for the Aged in Rengsdorf in Germany. At the age of sixty-four, he was classed as “aged” and iro officials tried to find an institutional placement for him, ideally a care home in France. In the placement recommendation, they stated that Jan had “led a hard-working life and only ceased labour 5 months ago. Although his health is by no means brilliant, he needs no special medical treatment, and is able to walk up and downstairs.”64 As a further treatment they recommended “medicaments and warmth.”65 He did not manage to secure any offers of resettlement and was subsequently classified as “homeless foreigner.”66

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The Polish refugee community criticized the resettlement arrangements and put forward their own ideas and projects. In March 1948, the presidium of the Polish Union in Germany wrote to the Polish American Congress to “express the stance of all Polish war refugees.” They presented the “Desiderata for iro ” with their vision of how resettlement should be conducted. Claiming that “up to now the process of resettlement is chaotic, unplanned, and against the basic rules of humanitarianism,” the signatories pointed out the most problematic outcomes: “Recruiting only the healthiest and the strongest makes the general refugee mass less valuable in terms of job markets. It leads to leaving a significant number of people who are elderly, unable to work, and physically weak in the hostile German environment.” Therefore, they demanded that iro create a holistic plan of emigration that would be based on humanitarian premises. This plan should be devised according to the needs of the victims of World War II and of the labour markets. Furthermore, it should include whole families and a fair proportion of those able and those unable to work. The recruitment contracts should be standardized. A refugee should have free choice of profession, families should not be separated, and the community should have the possibility to cultivate their religious and cultural life in their native language. Recruitment to all destinations should be announced at the same time.67 Three years later, Mieczysław Kalinowski, an editor of Nasza emigracja (Our Emigration), sketched the goals that displaced Poles should achieve regarding immigration to the usa . Firstly, he demanded that all Poles who desired to leave Germany should be allowed to do so regardless of their age, health condition, or family situation. The US government should acknowledge a moral debt towards the dP s who fought for the Allies and suffered in the concentration camps and under slave labour. All the money that iro received for the care of the dP s in Germany should be given for the purposes of emigration. There should be much more liberal health requirements for soldiers and partisans, inmates of concentration camps and labour camps, and children of those who lost lives or health in these circumstances.68 Until these demands were fulfilled, Kalinowski continued, all civil jobs in the occupation armies should be given to the dP s, while the Germans should be pressured to pay compensation to the concentration camp prisoners. The representation of the refugees should also be officially recognized and all authorities should be persuaded that Poles would not agree to stay in Germany and be part of a German political, social, and cultural system, no matter what the future of Europe might be. In the meantime, there must be adequate conditions for cultivating the Polish “spirit

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and culture.” In the article, the editor explained that the Poles suffered “inhumane exploitation” during the war, which left them physically and nervously exhausted. Therefore, they could not compete with other nationalities. In the current system “where every little spot on the lungs” was a reason for rejection, those who sacrificed the most for the Allied cause were sentenced to stay in Germany and Austria. Referring to the Christian tradition of brotherly love, he suggested that choosing only those who were young and healthy and leaving other family members behind meant just “buying workforce and army material.”69 There is no evidence suggesting that the authorities responded positively to such demands. On the other hand, the writing of dP s informed the thinking of diaspora groups, especially Polish Americans, who used some of their rhetoric when lobbying for their cause. Fitting into immigration requirements included also proving their nationality. Aid and immigration programs were designed along national and religious lines. In seeking resettlement, it was crucial if somebody was considered a Pole, a German, a Ukrainian, or a Dutch. For example, Mira A., claiming to be a Polish national born in Łódź from a Polish father and a Dutch mother, asked for to be resettled in Argentina. “The petitioner claims to be a Pole because she is a daughter of a Pole,” the official wrote down. “She has however no documents to prove her identity and does not speak a word of Polish. She explained that she spent her youth in Belgium and that her mother tongue was Flemish.” Unable to answer when questioned in Flemish, she claimed she went to school in Aix-la-Chapelle in Germany and learnt Plattdeutsch there. The interviewers gave no credence to her account and considered her an economic migrant.70 Some pledged allegiance to Polishness for instrumental aims, some committed to this identity. Telling one from the other was not always possible. Wolfgang W. penned a letter addressed to the United Nations in 1947 where he asked for help in emigration: Could you please help us to find a new home in Brasilia, Argentina or usa ? Our family, my wife, two boys and myself, are of Polish descent and, before the war, lived in Danzig. Since Danzig is occupied now, we cannot return and are, therefore, without a country. No member of my family has ever belonged to the Nazi Party or was in sympathy with its objectives. As soon as it was possible, we volunteered our services to the United States Military Government in Germany. I was employed by the Counter Intelligence Corps (cic ) from which we can obtain the highest of recommendations.

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We hope that you will give us the opportunity to find a new home, to build a new life in any country. We have never asked, nor do we now ask, for charity; but seek, on the contrary, the chance to use our body and mind in a new – perhaps pioneering – endeavour. I beg you to give this matter your full consideration and to grant my petition if you possibly can. Please let me know your answer at your earliest convenience.71 Life in exile and emigration supported along national and religious life encouraged people to embrace Polishness. Helena Fedukowicz, nee Biantovskaya, was born in Petrovka in Soviet Ukraine as the daughter of an Orthodox priest, and developed a successful career as an eye doctor and academic researcher. She met her husband, Wacław Fedukowicz, in the ussr and together they fled to Poland and then were captured by the Nazis and taken to Germany. After a period of life in dP camps, they emigrated together to the usa in 1949. All they could afford was an unfurnished apartment in Brooklyn, with Helena unemployed and Wacław, who was a university professor before the war, working in a factory. She spoke little English and was unsuccessful in trying to get a job in an ophthalmologist office. Thanks to her contact with the Polish Committee and an exiled aristocrat, Prince Sapieha, she was introduced to his family and offered English lessons. She was put in touch with an eminent ophthalmologist and offered an academic position. She made an outstanding academic career.72

“ Pio t r w a s k n o w n here as a good a n d d e c e n t P o l e ” : m o ral screeni ng i n t h e P o l is h r e f u g e e communi ty Polish diaspora organizations and camp elites often mediated in the resettlement of dP s. Kazimierz Papée, the ambassador representing the Polish government-in-exile to the Holy See, intervened to help a monk who had escaped Poland, putting his name on the right list and obtaining an Argentinian visa for him.73 Priests and camp commandants issued “certificates of morality,” usually based on their personal opinions, reputation in the dP camp community, and information obtained from Poland (frequently through parish records). This sort of reference was used in pre-war Poland and by other immigrant groups, too. The typical certificate read, “I confirm that B. Piotr was known here as a good and decent Pole, religious and of a moral conduct. He, along with his family, deserves support and help in issues of emigration to the

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usa.” The same priest also issued a recommendation for Alfons R.: “He was an active Catholic and had the best opinion. He had a lot of mercy for the poorer.”74 Thus, priests and commandants had the power to decide whether or not a dP ’s conduct was moral and adequate for a member of the Polish and Catholic community. These documents could serve as a ticket to a better life, as they facilitated emigration and finding support abroad. They also proved useful in obtaining help from Polish organizations and members of the Polish diaspora. Those who were deemed to be physically and “morally” healthy were allowed to build new lives abroad. The Polish refugee community conducted a sort of “moral screening,” providing an additional net to stop the “unworthy element” from emigrating and promoting the best individuals. The clergy, military men, and other elite refugees, guided by the values of the exile mission, played the role of selectors. Potential immigrants appealed to Polish diaspora organizations for help with securing assurances of accommodation and work which would enable them to resettle in the usa . The American Committee for Resettlement of Polish Displaced Persons (acrPdP ) was created by the Polish American Congress in 1948. Accredited by the US dP Commission and the iro , it was the only independent American agency with representatives abroad in charge of resettling Poles in the usa .75 As it could issue its own assurances, thousands of dP s sent letters asking for help. Recounting their life stories, they adopted the language of patriotism, anti-communism, and martyrology.76 Most of the petitions were penned by dP s of peasant and worker origin hoping to find jobs and start a new life in the usa , by many considered “a seventh heaven.”77 Representatives of the Polish American Congress ensured in one of their brochures that there was a rigorous selection of the candidates who were “investigated thoroughly as to their morality and their political convictions.”78 In another document, they assured that bringing dPs to America would be beneficial for both sides, strengthening the Polish diaspora and saving the “very valuable Polish element” that otherwise would be sentenced to annihilation in Germany. “These people are an excellent element of stout-hearted characters, they are used to toil and difficulties, they are mostly young.” They concluded that “everyone helping them is committing a patriotic act.”79 While it was not codified whose application should be rejected, the notes and marks on the letters point to the reasons of rejection. Władysław was probably rejected because his wife’s birthplace was Breslau, presuming she was of German origin.80 Aleksander was rejected on the basis of his Jewish- or

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German-sounding surname.81 Others were excluded due to their old age or elderly relatives. Immigration law, to which incoming dP s had to adhere, clearly informed these decisions. Stefan Nowicki, the head of the Polish Union in Germany, reassured members of the acrPdP that every candidate for emigration was carefully checked in terms of three aspects: professional, socio-moral, and security.82 Priests suggested in their official stance that this procedure protected the reputation of the Poles: “With all our forces, we need to defy the departure of the criminal element to the foreign countries, as it compromises Poland’s good name.” They clarified that this included people who were in “illegal marriages” and “while politically not engaged don’t want to return to their family out of egoistic reasons.” They called for stigmatizing them from the pulpit.83 Reverend Jan Wojciechowski, the Polish chief chaplain and the director of Polish Caritas in the British zone of Germany, underlined in his correspondence with the acrPdP that their common aim was to send for emigration “the best element in moral and professional terms.” To achieve this and “to avoid shame [for American Poles],” Caritas conducted a preliminary registration in cooperation with sponsors. He assured the acrPdP that only “truly the best people” were chosen, unlike earlier when the most “mobile” individuals applied to the committees. To make sure that that situation did not occur again Wojciechowski planned to introduce the same system of selection in all dP camps in Germany.84 He promised to support only people who were thoroughly checked in terms of their Polishness and “moral side” so they would constitute “a valuable element.”85 The relations between Wojciechowski and Edward Plusdrak, serving as the committee’s secretary, worsened due to the differences in their approaches to sponsors’ matrimonial offers. Plusdrak mentioned many applications from farmers who sought Polish wives “from 40 to 50 years old who desired peaceful work on a farm, protection, and prospective marriage.”86 In the next letters, he repeated the request and also asked for two women to marry the sons of a local farmer, one widow with a child for a wealthy home, and a single girl. Wojciechowski answered that he supported all people in leaving Germany but refused to “arrange the marriages from a distance,” arguing that it is hard to imagine such a relationship.87 Plusdrak explained that the proposition came from the fact that there were 2,810 single women on the last list and added that if Wojciechowski did not want them to emigrate, they should not be put on the list, suggesting that unmarried women could immigrate as candidates for wives or not at all.88

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As this case shows, resettlement regulations and practices were gendered. Women and men had different opportunities and received different treatment, according to familial, religious, and gendered visions of rehabilitation. In iro procedures most women were defined as “dependents” and assessed as part of a family unit, if they had a living male relative, instead of on their own merit.89 They were also supposed to fit into the new societies and bring economic benefits to the hosting countries. Men, chosen mostly for hard labour, often had no possibility of resigning from the work for which they signed up. For instance, reportedly the dP s recruited 1947 for work in Belgian mines but who then refused to start their jobs, as conditions in the mines were unacceptable, were put into an isolation camp and sent back. Some of those who completed two years of compulsory work in Belgium were not later offered other jobs but instead became “chained to the mineshaft almost like slaves.”90 Many men complied and saw working abroad as an important factor in reconstructing their masculinity after the emasculating experience of being a refugee. Józef H. depicted his experiences: “Many families left and forgot about this dipi life. They can work for bread, with their own hands without waiting what others will give them and when … Because after these ten years of sufferings also a poor man would like to run away from this hostile land and to get where he desires and to work there, no matter what work it is, for myself and my modest family, my wife and my child.”91 Women, on the other hand, were more likely to be excluded from resettlement schemes due to reasons beyond their control. “Being unworthy” of joining the Polish American community was often related to sexual conduct and marital status. Reverend Jan Śliwowski, who sponsored two women to work on his farm, complained to the acrPdP that the screening in Germany had not been done properly, as he received two divorcees. The women moved from his farm to another sponsor, leaving him disappointed but happy that he was rid of them because he had learned that they both “had husbands in Germany wedded in church” with whom they had obtained a civil divorce. According to the reverend, one of the men was a bigamist who worked for the Germans and ended up in prison, while the second one had been left by his wife. He mentioned that these women should cover their inland transport costs themselves, as they came with big luggage and elegant clothes.92 An unmarried woman suffering from physical or mental problems, with children from more than one father, was placed at the very bottom of the unwritten hierarchy of resettlement. This resulted from the

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unofficial and official screening of the sexuality and morality of women. The chief of the Polish Combatants Association explained in a circular that women with more than one illegitimate child would automatically be rejected because the commission suspected depravity.93 These regulations forced women to conduct abortions, which were not only illegal and dangerous in the dP camps but were also condemned by most of the refugee community. Biuletyn Prasowy (Press Bulletin), published in Hanover, quoted the story of a woman who decided to undergo an abortion in the uncertainty of the transit camp due to the fear of losing the chance to resettle: “They have been in Wentorf already for seven months. They have already sold the most valuable things for food. There are two small children in the family. The third one is expected. There are various rumours [in the camp]. They are accepted but what will happen? She is pregnant. The rumours are worrying. She has done an abortion. Finally, they started transporting people. They have taken also families but only those where women were 6-months pregnant. The woman who did the abortion went through a nervous breakdown – she killed a human. Taking under consideration all these circumstances – can we deplore her?”94 Some voices were raised to gain support for single mothers, but the atmosphere was less than encouraging. The author of the article “Disappointed Hopes of the Unmarried Mothers” disapproved of the decision to reject them from immigration schemes and pointed out that the iro commission did not even register this category of dP s, as no country agreed to take them. He called for better opportunities and some understanding for them: “By no means we praise their recklessness that resulted in an illegitimate child. In the times of war and postwar degradation of customs and amorality of the environment, we should have a sort of appreciation for a woman who decided to give life to her illegitimate child and bring the child up in the harsh conditions of a dP camp.” He condemned iro officials who kept excluding women from the schemes even after Brazil, New Zealand, and Australia expressed their willingness to accept some of them.95 Women made up a large proportion of so-called “hard core” cases. Wanda W., a farmhand from Lwów, represented a particularly difficult case. In 1954 she was still seeking resettlement, assisted by the National Catholic Welfare Conference (ncwc ). The interviewer noted, “Applicant is an unmarried mother of two young boys, the fathers of whom are Ukrainian displaced persons, who have since emigrated, one to Canada, and the other one to Australia. Both promised to marry her

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until she was pregnant.” Wanda tried to emigrate to the usa but was unable to receive an assurance as “no one was found who would take a mother with two children.” Since the iro assistance ceased, she lived on state assistance struggling to provide for her children. The dossier prepared for Wanda by a social worker from ncwc exposes how vulnerable and desperate dP s were in their search of sponsors and employment possibilities: “The Applicant is prepared to accept any kind of work available and promises that her employer will not be discontent with her. In addition, she promises to remain with her sponsor as long as the sponsor is willing to have her. Here in Germany she only has seasonal work as a farmhand, helping out when there is a need for extra help.”96 Her case highlights the gender aspect and the plight of those excluded from resettlement and left behind.

“don ’ t y o u h a v e a n y t h in g better to choose f ro m ? ” : w o r k , sP o n s o rs, and exclus i on If a dP were to emigrate to a new country it would be for one reason: to work. This was made crystal clear to the refugees so those who seriously thought of immigration promised that they would work and literally begged for jobs. Propaganda was saturated with humanitarian vocabulary but, when it came to arrangements, it was all about work, muscle, strength, and youth. Polish Americans, preparing a report for Congress, quoted the exile paper Zgoda (Harmony): “Polish D.P.’s immigrating to the United States, must through their conduct, efforts and hard work, gain the hearts of Americans, and then with their help assist other Polish D.P.’s arriving here. Everyone in the D.P. camps must realize that he who comes to the United State must work hard for his daily bread and cannot look for charity. Nor should he look for continued helping hand of the voluntary organizations.”97 As Tara Zahra points out, also social workers, psychologists, and policymakers saw in dP s a potential resource: “Properly rehabilitated, they were the construction workers who could rebuild bombed-out city buildings, the agricultural laborers who would replant the earth, and the children who would repopulate decimated nations.”98 To resettle in the usa , dP s had to obtain an affidavit from a sponsor, often on an individual basis. If they did not have relatives or friends who could give them a guarantee of a job and accommodation, other organizations and committees helped them to get in touch with potential sponsors who were found through adverts in the press and local networks of Polish schools and clubs. One of the brochures read:

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1. Who are the Polish Displaced Persons? Answer: They are mainly young men and women who have opposed Nazi and communist aggression, and now are stranded in D.P. Camps in Germany, Italy and Austria. 2. Why will the Polish dP ’s not return to their homeland? Answer: Poland today is subjugated by a Communist imposed regime and upon their return they would face liquidation or deportation to Siberia.99 While many sponsors had a great deal of good will and made sacrifices to host dP s, some were very straightforward and specific in their requests for dP s and invoked rather commercial than humanitarian principles. “At the present, I am in the market for a single man for a year around job on my farm” stated a farmer in a letter to the acrPdP .100 Marguriete D. asked about “obtaining Displaced Persons” to help running her farm because she heard that dP s “come to this country to work” so she “felt that perhaps this would be my salvation in managing the farm.”101 Another sponsor, Stanley C., who had been injured while serving in the army during World War II and was unable to walk, wrote, “I would like to have a young woman between the ages of twenty-five and thirty to take care of me. I can’t take anyone with children.”102 Jenni D. from Indiana could not decide between two women, commenting that neither of them was a fit as one was too old and the other had a child. She concluded, “So I don’t know, don’t you have anything better to choose from?”103 One family expressed their interest in “these little refugees” and asked to have children’s photographs sent: “we would choose one of them, a dark brunette girl, a pretty one so she will fit with the family, the age of the child must be between 3 and 5 years old.”104 As mentioned before, some sponsors’ letters had a clearly matrimonial character, as with the one from a farmer based in Michigan who wrote, “I am a bachelor, I am 37 years old and I am a Pole and I kindly beg to give me the address where are these ladies – dypistki who came from Germany. Because there is this issue about these ladies who came and don’t have a job. I would like to take one Miss to my home for permanent life. I work on a farm. It can be a Miss from 25 to 35 years old. It might be a widow without children. I would wish to marry her.”105 Representatives of the resettlement committee informed the Polish Union in Germany that sponsors wanted first to see photographs of the candidates and learn their details, while almost nobody wished to give blank assurances.106 Still, obtaining assurances from sponsors did not guarantee success in proceeding with immigration. According to a report of the acrPdP ,

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almost one-third of the assurances given to the “selected emigration material” were invalidated. Among the reasons, they mentioned “lack of address,” “marriage with a German woman,” “illiteracy,” “resignation of the sponsor,” “rejection by the dP commission,” “resignation,” “double assurances,” “emigration to another country,” “repatriation,” and “death.” The authors stated that in many cases a simple misunderstanding or mistake could result in the rejection of a dP with assurances at some stage of the process. They gave the example of a dP who had on his card “watchmaker” instead of “watchman” due to the mistake of an unprofessional translator. He got into trouble when he said to the consul that he did not know how to repair clocks.107 As refugees’ letters reveal, plenty of other reasons for missing a chance to immigrate existed. For instance, Bolesław G. explained his situation in the following way: “Be honoured work! … my conditions are almost hopeless because I have been for a longer time in a transit camp with the intention to go to Australia. In the end, I wasn’t accepted because my wife is five months pregnant. In this camp I spent all my money and got rid of all winter clothes.”108 Others faced the decision of whether or not they should leave their families and friends behind. Krystyna H., who was ready to leave, asked for assurances for her forty-two-year-old mother and eleven-year-old brother so they could follow her to America.109 At any stage, sponsors could resign or an organization processing the claim could cancel the application. For example, Aniela C. from the dP Camp in Diez-Unterlahn in the French zone of Germany had her application cancelled because she became pregnant and the “sponsor will not accept children.” The family of Bronisława and Roman K. from the dP camp in Münster were denied having their application processed because the dP s were unmarried and the man was a divorcee. Józef L., a dP from the American zone of Germany, was rejected because he “was a member of Communist Party” while Bronisław M. was discovered to have a criminal record.110 Having little choice left, many dP s complied and adopted a discourse in which they attempted to “sell themselves.” They presented their usefulness for the labour market in terms of physical attributes, mental and moral qualities, family situation, religious virtues, and general attitudes. One of the dP s, trying to get to America, wrote, “I am single, 32 years old, without addictions, profession: silversmith-gilder.”111 Another presented himself as “single, strong and healthy” and promised to “do any job to please my merciful employers.112 Poles declared their usefulness to society, the Polish American community, and to a vaguely understood Poland in general. Maksymilian J. asked them to let him “as a Pole get in the ranks of Polonia and keep

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fighting for my Fatherland.” He asserted, “I won’t be a burden for the society there but having plenty of forces, motivation, and energy I will become a useful member of the society.”113 They depicted themselves as enemies of communism and supporters of freedom and democracy. Navigating between various reservoirs of values and cultural codes, they blended peasant, worker, and upper-class imageries, as well as patriotic, democratic, and anti-communist discourses. In their letters, they praised work and promised to take any job. One of the teachers from the Neustadt dP camp stated, “Wherever they want me, I will go.”114 All the dP s, including those whose decision to emigrate resulted from economic considerations, had concerns about the journey and about finding decent conditions in the hosting countries. They often felt that they needed to belong to a stronger network of support and charged their dP identity with the appropriate ideological connotations. This could potentially save them from some of the difficulties that their forefathers faced when emigrating to America. As argued in chapter 2, many nonelite dP s adopted the values of the “exile mission” to facilitate their resettlement, as a form of social and cultural advancement, and as an acceptable mode of framing and politicizing their emotions. Some dP s were rejected and sent back to Europe when the ship they were on reached its destination. They were classed as “rejectees.” In Buenos Aires, iro officials tried to return the undesirables – people with contagious diseases such as tuberculosis or trachoma and the disabled – on the same ship on which they had arrived: “there are so many cases of people who escape from surveillance while the authorities are waiting for a ship on which to send them back and remain illegally in Buenos Aries, that the anxiety of the Argentines to send rejectees back on the same ship, or the next ship of the same company, is understandable … However, we hope that under the new system of selection precautions will be taken to see that the iro does not send people to Argentina who would be disqualified under the immigration law.”115 In Australia, the situation was similar. Authorities deported persons mainly on three grounds: “in the first place health; in the second place security; and in the third place behaviour.” They needed an easy way to send the undesirables back. One official wrote, “It seems to me that there has been developed, by a process of trial and error, a procedure whereby refugees deported from Australia are admitted to the Zone of country of previous temporary residence.”116 Canadian authorities wanted to get rid of people “troublesome in any way.” There was no will to deal with “problem cases” and deportation was seen as the best solution. “It should not be forgotten that Canada’s motives in taking

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Figure 8.2 | Wanda Ciecierska and her friends preparing for the resettlement journey from Germany to the United States. A page from Wanda’s private photo album.

displaced persons is primarily the filling of an economic need for people for the development of the country. Humanitarian or international considerations are secondary.”117 Letters to the iro from dP s wishing to return to Europe focus on problems faced by the newcomers. Hard manual labour, family separation, language difficulties, miserable living conditions, nostalgia, and the inability to adapt to the new situation pushed people to seek return. Irena, twentythree-year-old domestic worker, wished “to rejoin fiancée, as his application for admission to Canada has been rejected under Close Relative Scheme” and in her case officials sought a re-entry permit to Germany on

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compassionate grounds.118 Józef arrived in Canada to work as a woodworker, leaving his wife and little son in Germany. Soon it became clear he was unfit for bush labour because of a medical problem causing him pain when doing heavy lifting. He refused to undergo surgery because he promised his wife “he would under no circumstances undergo an operation unless she were present.” Authorities moved him to a hostel and tried to find a new job for him but Józef became increasingly anxious to return to Germany. While officials were eager to send him back, obtaining the necessary documents which included a job contract proved difficult.119 Tadeusz W. requested a return to Germany on compassionate grounds. He was sent to do farm work in Manitoba but, suffering from asthma, he found the climate was unsuitable, and he ended up in a hospital. Since he was not able to support himself anymore, he asked to be returned to Germany where the climate was more beneficial to his health and where his wife and two sons remained.120 The doctor who examined him indeed confirmed Tadeusz suffered from bronchial asthma which, in his opinion, had “a strong nervous supplement.” “Until he is re-united with his family he will continue to have symptoms of asthma and will be unable to work,” the doctor concluded.121 An iro official telegrammed from Geneva that it was doubtless that the family could lead “useful and productive lives” in Manitoba. Eventually, Tadeusz agreed to settle in Canada and visas for his wife and sons were issued to allow them to join him there. How and why he came to this decision – and was it even his free will to proceed this way – remains unknown.122

r e m a k in g o f t he P oli s h Po s t – w o r l d w a r i i di asPora Over the course of four and half years, more than 357,000 displaced Poles resettled abroad thanks to iro assistance. Most of them were dP s from the camps in Germany and Austria. Additional 165,000 Polish servicemen resettled in the uk along with 40,000 of their family members. Nearly 36,000 civilians moved there as European Voluntary Workers. Many more resettled outside Poland via other programs and on their own initiative. The biggest group, nearly 111,000, found their new homes in the usa . Australia took 60,000, almost 47,000 went to Canada, and more than 35,000 to the United Kingdom (to add to those previously listed).123 Many emigrated to South American countries such as Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, and Venezuela. A significant number of Polish dP s remained in continental Europe, resettling in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and other countries.124 Some of them joined families,

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some reached the country of their dreams, some went where they were allowed to go. Immigration, on whatever terms and to whatever country, still appeared for those who refused repatriation as a better option than staying on “the goddamn soil of our eternal enemy, the soil soaked with a sea of our blood, sweat, and toil.”125 Those left behind stayed in Germany and Austria, living in private accommodation, isolated camps, farms, children’s houses, prisons, hospitals, and asylums. In 1954, nine years after the end of the war and fifteen years after its outbreak, Zygmunt F. sent a letter to the Pac asking for some newspapers in Polish: “There is a group of us, Poles, in prison on the territory of the American zone in Hessen. We are abandoned, we don’t have any money nor the contact with Poles abroad. It can be said that we are lost.”126 Bronisława, the young Roma woman mentioned in chapter 3, spent twelve years in prison after the war for inciting to murder and was released in 1960. She remained in Germany, got married, and had a baby. She was considered a case of “successful parole.” The official noted that since her release Bronisława “has led a law-abiding life, a perfect example of a former convict who had adjusted to a life in freedom.”127 The displacement and emigration of the Polish diaspora opened up possibilities of social and cultural advancement for many non-elite dP s. In the long run, resettlement brought material and social advancement to the vast masses of refugees. The poorest Polish workers often managed to improve their material and social conditions and live more affluent lives than their forefathers. In the United Kingdom, the ascension of immigrants into the lower middle class came hand in hand with taking up British values.128 Emigration to the West held promises of material and social betterment but at the same time stirred anxieties about living and working conditions. Playing on the dP s’ desire for a better life and stability, one resettlement bulletin encouraged them to take work in agriculture in France by presenting a series of step-by-step drawings depicting how dP s could make a life in a new country. First, they would have just a table, then some pans and a pot after a month, soon a cupboard, and a flat furnished with bed, wardrobe, and chair after a year. “Take your family and go to work in France!,” the leaflet read.129 According to documentation kept by the Polish Union, the initial response was enthusiastic but the negative experiences of those who emigrated discouraged other dP s, with one dP deported from France along with his family.130 Countries that sorely needed to increase their workforce, such as France or Australia, often tried to lure dP s with such promises, painting the picture of a better life for them and their families.

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Former elites, often forced to work next to immigrants of peasant and worker origins, gazed with mixed feelings on the material betterment of the masses of dP s. Disillusion with the Western consumerist culture grew. Zbigniew Abdank announced his decision to return from Canada in an article for Kultura. He criticized Western materialism with its focus on money, the artistic production as a “cultural trash of this rich country,” and a lack of “enlightened social stratum,” or the intelligentsia. He observed that a rich person would clear snow off the pavement in front of his house and read the same papers and comic books as his workers. He looked with alarm at workers’ aspirations and commented on the cultural impoverishment embodied in a society that prized reading comic books. Fears about the emergence of a classless society, the rising importance of pop culture, and opportunities for social advancement went hand in hand with the diminishment of old hierarchies. The weakening influence of the intelligentsia was a particular worry: “Young dipisy jump at this affluence like a hungry person jumps at bread. First, they buy furniture, then a radio transmitter, then a cooker, then houses and cars, and then the only important thing is who has a better house and car etc. etc. If a former Second Corps soldier sometimes mentions other matters, other times and works, the children don’t understand it anymore.”131 “Idle and meaningless” comforts, when easily achievable for all, impoverished a man, he claimed. The intelligentsia feared the emancipation that came with emigration to foreign countries, far from Polish land and Polish values. In his correspondence with the editor-in-chief of Kultura Jerzy Giedroyc, exiled poet and future Nobel laureate for literature Czesław Miłosz called Abdank’s article “clever.”132 The perspective of those who benefited from these changes was strikingly different. For instance, Bronisław Szneliński, coming from the prewar underclass, remembered his life before the war as rife with poverty and deprivation. He ended up in prison for theft and endured torture there. He was released in 1939 due to the outbreak of war. Soon, he got into trouble with the Gestapo and subsequently volunteered for labour in the Third Reich. Disillusioned with tough conditions he left but after his ex-wife informed on him was arrested and sent back as a forced labourer. He recalled in his memoir, written in France where he resettled after having spent a couple of years in various dP camps: “I’ll buy an elegant car and go for holidays to Poland. I know nobody will recognise me because I left as a dziad [pauper, beggar] and I’ll return as a human. I’d love to bump into my ex-wife and her mother to thank them for sending me to Germany.”133

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For many of those who managed to emigrate, “the wandering” did not finish and they viewed their fate as a continuation of their displacement. Unlike for the iro officials, for them the “dP problem” still existed. In new countries, they often had to go through the refugee or resettlement camps again. Their professional and social prospects were determined by the fact of having been a dP . Above all, their identity changed because of what they experienced during and after the war. Marian Pawiński, who emigrated to Canada, wrote in his memoir that at work local people “called us Di-pi … as we would be criminals or unwanted people.” He concluded, “Di-pi will follow in my footsteps like a shadow, it will accompany me through all my life, it will attach to me like a stigma.”134 If diaspora is to be treated as an idiom, stance, and claim, as Rogers Brubaker suggests, the Polish emigration assumed an anti-communist idiom and entrenched itself in a sense of betrayal and memory of heroism and martyrology, all that soaked in nostalgia for the lost lands.135 Collective representations of the trauma of war and uprooting through displacement, as well as subsequent revival and perseverance in exile, became the bedrock of their narrative. dP camps and the wider exile community provided a space for negotiating and hammering out visions and myths of shared memory on their point of origin – pre-war Poland stretching from the coal mines of Katowice to the marshlands of Polesie, from the port of Gdynia to the peaks of the Tatra mountains, with Lwów and Wilno, and with Kresy or the Eastern Borderlands (today’s Ukraine, Belarus, and Lithuania) as a bulwark of civilization. In general, diasporas “retain a collective memory, vision, or myth about their original homeland – its physical location, history, and achievements.”136 dP camps were a space for crafting these “memory-scripts,” as Fiddian-Qasmiyeh calls the product of memory-making practices by the leaders who politicized and transmitted the memory of home-land and home-camp among the Sahrawi refugee camps in Algeria and beyond.137 Leaders were capable of governing the representation of memories. The protracted encampment of Poles allowed for spinning and cementing refugee mythologies, similar to the case of Palestinian refugees where “camps acted as a symbol of severance from one’s homeland, they became the site for the social construction of memory and identity.”138 Portraying immigrating Poles as the victims of Nazi persecution and communism was a cornerstone in construing the postwar Polish community abroad as a “victim diaspora.”139 Exilic memory, seen as “a collectively shared representation of the traumatic conditions that led to the dispersion of the group from the homeland,” cemented the Second Great Emigration.140

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The elites were concerned about how the dP s would fit into the Polish diaspora. Poles abroad did not present a unified ideological stance. Representatives of the government-in-exile and Polish representatives in the Vatican complained in their correspondence about the “warsawizing” priests in Brazil who supported the Communist government.141 Bishop Śliwiński, a particular concern for the authorities, was reported as saying during a sermon in São Paulo, “I am a communist because Christ was a communist” and “the current government is the best Poland ever had because it is the government of workers and peasants not of landowners and this butcher Piłsudski.” They worried about popular support, as “many simple people from old emigration are attracted to [pro-communist clergy] because they have inveterate grievances against Poland and its government.”142 Diaspora members provided an aid network, at the same time keeping an eye on the newcomers’ conduct. Diaspora elites brought into the spotlight the exploitation of dP s by employers, especially their underpayment, inadequate housing and clothing, and insufficient food. They intervened when abuses were revealed, for example when dP s were mistreated at sugar plantations near New Orleans.143 Concurrently, they extended care and control of individuals and families. For instance, the Immigrants’ Protective League and the Polish Welfare Association in Chicago visited families in their homes. In one case, they intervened when a little boy called Zenon was reportedly missing school and consuming alcohol. The son of dP s, former concentration camp prisoners, born “out of wedlock,” as social workers pointed out, was thought to be neglected. The father worked in a shoe factory, earning a dollar per hour, while the mother worked part-time in a store, bringing home $8 a week. They denied that the boy drank alcohol and promised to take better care of him.144 Overall, almost half the Poles displaced by World War II did not make it back to Poland. Krystyna Vetulani emigrated to the United States in 1950, finished her studies, and worked as a language teacher. Once retired, she volunteered in helping to find information about World War II missing persons. Young Zofia Kruk emigrated with her new husband to the United Kingdom. Later she settled in Australia and in 1968 travelled from there to visit her elderly mother living on her own on a little farm in Poland. It was the first time they saw each other after being separated in the early days of the war.145 Tamara Szechidewicz emigrated to the usa , married a Polish count, and made a career in an international silverware company. The names of Wanda W. and her two young sons appear on the 1956 list of dP s going to the usa , sponsored by a woman

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from Brooklyn.146 Antoni Caputa was seasick during his nine-day trip to Canada, arriving at the port of Halifax in the early morning on 15 June 1948. He remembered receiving oranges and cigarettes from ladies representing a local charity, before being sent to hard labour on the Canadian railways. Maria and Shao left Germany by ship from the port of Bremen on 14 August 1951. They arrived in New York three weeks later and settled in Youngstown, Ohio. Shao died in 1976; Maria died in 1993. Wanda Ciecierska, the young nurse who welcomed the end of the war while listening to the radio, and her husband Stanisław emigrated to the usa in 1949 with the aid of the National Catholic Welfare Conference. She became an American citizen in 1961. In their papers they kept postcards and pictures of the Statue of Liberty and the Manhattan skyline; the draft of a letter to a friend in Poland read, “People make America, and people are more or less the same everywhere in the world.”147

c o n c l u s ion Polish dP s faced decisions about their future in difficult circumstances, under multiple pressures, and in an atmosphere of uncertainty. Scraps of information, gossip, and conflicting propaganda served as the basis on which to enlist for repatriation transport or to await resettlement options. Being exposed to threats and incentives, dP s called for the freedom to make decisions as a basic refugee right. dP s did complain and did speak out but the authorities did not listen. They called for immigration based on humanitarian principles and drew detailed plans of how resettlement should be handled. Emerging possibilities to resettle in other countries soon turned out not to be for everyone who chose that path. The decision-makers’ perceptions of their mental and physical conditions could drastically limit their options. Possibilities for dP s depended on the way their bodies and minds were evaluated. They felt that immigration schemes were based on market demand instead of humanitarian values. Resettlement was reserved mainly for those who were young, sane, and able-bodied. dP s viewed the practices of resettlement commissions as resembling the slave trade and other inhumane practices, inscribing it into a discourse of commodifying human beings. The multistage, tiresome, and humiliating process of obtaining permission to emigrate did not stop dP s from seeking ways to cheat the system. Selection was based on their physical and mental states, as well as on their “moral health,” as “certified” by Polish priests and camp commandants. The iro checked the dP s’ bodies while priests and camp commandants wanted to check their souls.

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These practices resulted in the exclusion of a high number of refugees from resettlement schemes, as well as from participating in the wider refugee community. The ill, the elderly, the disabled, single mothers, and prisoners had little chance to emigrate and were more likely to be repatriated against their will. If they were allowed to stand before the resettlement commissions, their words were diminished and their appeals ignored. In the discourse of rehabilitation and revival, echoing the prewar notion of eugenics, they turned out to be the most undesirable bodies and minds, which did not fit the vision of postwar reconstruction. Most of those who opposed repatriation framed their reasons as political. Out of their own convictions and out of necessity, they depicted themselves as patriots and anti-communists who opposed the communist regime in Poland and feared persecution. They employed various imageries and discourses when appealing to the institutions led by diaspora members and elite Poles. Appeals to ethnic ties and benevolence mixed with pledges to the patriotic cause and promises of hard work. Gathering and sharing knowledge of the resettlement countries and immigration policies, dP s prepared to craft their applications in an effective way. This political mobilization, undergirded by the mythologized narratives of their displacement, contributed to the shaping of the post–World War II diaspora. The emerging layer of Polish diaspora, entering the ranks of worldwide Polonia, brought in new visions and myths about Poland. Bravery and victimhood in World War II, postwar betrayal by the Western Allies, and subjugation to the Soviet Union became a familiar tale. They drew on nostalgia, especially to native nature and its portrayal in nationalizing literature, and the lost Kresy understood as a vanishing forefront of civilization. Memory of persecution by the Nazis and the Soviets, and to some degree appreciation for rural cultural heritage and working-class ethos, completed the picture.

Conclusion

On New Year’s Eve, dP s welcoming 1948 in the Voerde camp in Germany dimmed the lights, played music, and hurled bangers. “People danced and had fun, putting aside all the worries of the daily life,” the camp chronicle stated. Tears shone in people’s eyes when the camp leader wished that the new year bring them stability in their lives. As the days passed, the realization that their future remained uncertain brought back fear and worry: “The change of the year found the world plunged in the darkness of incertitude. We can’t guess what the new year will bring us. The old year left us many unsolved problems as its legacy. There is no peace. The hopes we had for the last year burst like soap bubbles.”1 At the heart of divided Europe, the kingdom of barracks started to crumble. With the sealing of the western Polish border and growing anti-communism in the West, the Polish nation broke in two. dP s remaining in Germany and Austria found themselves at the rupture of the East–West divide. As two competing versions of Poland emerged, the battle over the dP s was the harbinger of a newly divided world. Their story is the story of ordinary people entangled in the making of the Cold War world. In the aftermath of World War II, refugees had to speak in national terms if they wanted to obtain assistance. dP camps became a place to develop and strengthen a sense of shared heritage and loyalty to the Polish national cause. Polish elites in exile desperately needed masses of civilians to support them, often willing to embrace and Polonize Belarusians, Ukrainians, Jews, Silesians, and Pomeranians, as well as mobilize peasants and workers from various regions. Polish nationalism in exile in the postwar period allowed the displaced members of lower classes to enter the realm of politics and national culture on a wider scale than they could before the war. World War II displacement and attempts at building the nation in exile were the last accords in the more than a

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century long history of mobilization aimed at wiping out national indifference and uniting people of various social backgrounds from various regions into a Polish nation. Exile mythologies embraced people of all classes, drawing on memories of heroic noble exiles. The postwar reconstruction and remaking of the community was at the heart of the discussion in the kingdom of barracks. This book reframes the making of exile identity as a cultural negotiation and a way of collective healing, inscribing this episode in the history of migration and the process of sharpening national identity. Building “the Polish exile nation” or “the Polish nation on the move” was an unfinished project. But its idea helped the refugees find their way in the postwar world, when obtaining assistance and when integrating into new communities. With the intensifying tensions of the Cold War, when the political power of the exiled elites continued to weaken, the idea of the exiled nation survived, as people embraced it as their mode of existence in exile and a link with their pre-war life. For peasants, domestics, and workers who remained in the West, having been encouraged to do so by the Londonbased elites, this decision opened the possibility to more fully enter the realm of the nation and of politics. While it is well established in literature that dP s became politicized in the camps, it is worth flipping this narrative, indicating that many of them politicized themselves in the camps, taking unprecedented opportunities to participate in national life in its cultural and political forms. The camps became a space of intervention for the Polish nationalizing elites and for Western aid workers. Along with powdered milk, chocolate, cigarettes, and vaccines, refugees were handed down the ideas of liberal democracy, freedom, and the Western lifestyle. It was also a space for them to reinvent their lives. dP s were not passive recipients of humanitarian aid. They sought their own ways of coming to terms with war and displacement. Homo dipisiensis spoke, using various registers, languages, and discourses. Rather than a univocal expression of the refugee condition or a single utterance, this took the form of a polyphony of voices emanating from barracks, prison cells, makeshift shelters, mental hospitals, and subsequently from places of greater security including new locations elsewhere. Looking at the dialogic quality of these voices provided a means of understanding and deconstructing the two main narratives on Polish World War II refugees – that of the exile mission and that of the successful humanitarian intervention. By going beyond those, this book has shown how Poles in exile conceptualized their refugeedom, or uchodźstwo, and how that concept grew out of a series of uneasy cultural negotiations.

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These voices make up a cultural history of Polish refugees who left their homes during and after World War II. This book has explored the meanings Poles attached to their displacement and situated their experiences in the broader context of emigration from Central-Eastern Europe. Building on the scholarship which reconstructed how Allies invented the category of displaced persons, it demonstrated how Polish dP s in Alliedoccupied Germany and Austria tried to fashion themselves within this imposed category. Thus, it provided a nuanced analysis of this group of Polish refugees, framing it as an imagined community entangled in wider exile networks. Tracing the tensions and alliances that arose from differences among dP s revealed the plethora of positions within the emerging refugee regime imposed by the occupying armies and international organizations. It showed how cultural negotiations bound people of various origins around the idea of refugeedom. It demonstrated how two hegemons, Polish exiled elites and inter-governmental organizations, projected their worldviews onto the non-elite dP s, making them identify with their values and meanings while accepting some of their aspirations. Displaced Poles, concentrated in the imposed space of the camp, negotiated cultural values and political aims from positions of power and positions of dependency, navigating the regime of care and control. dP camps became sites of shared emotions and values. Built on a network of schools, newspapers, and people, they provided common spaces for living and expressing feelings where Poles learned to frame their sentiments as nostalgia and patriotism, fuelled by a sense of betrayal and victimization despite their wartime sufferings and sacrifices. Polish exiled elites mobilized emotions lived and expressed there for the cause of the nation in exile. The ideology of the anti-communist, patriotic, nationalistic, and Catholic “exile mission” drew on nineteenth-century traditions of political exile and employed cultural and literary imagery to this end. This concept formed the core of the “political explanation,” accepted by the new international community as legitimate reasons to refuse repatriation. In reality, however, it also embraced various personal and collective motives, one of which was a desire to start a new life elsewhere while benefiting from a network of support. Framing the decision to oppose repatriation as political was the result of cultural compromises rooted in the peasant, intelligentsia, and upper-class emigration traditions and the social legacies of pre-war Poland. The episode of World War II displacement is part of a wider history of migration from Eastern Europe, especially that of the exodus of the poor to the Americas. This reiteration of exile is part of a larger trajectory of Polish migration history. After

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World War I millions of Poles or people with Polish heritage sought to return to the newly created state, often being rejected at the border or facing disappointments further on. One reason exiled Poles were so cynical about returning in 1945 is no doubt because they had a lived memory of the ravished postwar state millions of their families came back to in 1918.2 dPs of various social origins adopted the language of martyrology, patriotism, anti-communism, and freedom to maximize their chances of emigration and as a step in their cultural formation. dP s combined middleand upper-class values with those of peasants and workers. Peasantness was seen as a source for regenerating the essence of Polishness, or a reservoir of vital forces, while middle-class habitus was construed as a way of rebuilding civilization and re-civilizing humans. The growing imagery of “the contemporary Polish pilgrimage” – the first Polish migration that encompassed and brought together all social classes – intertwined the values and imaginings of peasants, workers, the intelligentsia, and the upper-class. The leading classes played the role of ideological hegemon in this process, filtering their visions down to non-elite Poles while accepting some of the elements of “ordinary” dP s’ views. The juncture of the London government-in-exile’s desire to highlight the refugees’ plight and communist Poland’s effort to reclaim refugee bodies kindled the notion of a political rather than an economic exile. This book has calibrated the focus on refugees and the variety of narratives that they produced. Combining the sources created by the refugees of various origins, including marginalized refugees, revealed the complexity of the internal divisions and hierarchies in the Polish refugee community. The dynamics of this community and the fact that dP s functioned within an emerging refugee regime, made the majority of refugees speak from positions of weakness. To make their voices heard, they engaged in the discourse of rehabilitation, individualism, democracy, human rights, and anti-communism. Through counterhegemonic practices, such as satire, jokes, and passive resistance, they denounced the falsehoods of the linear self-congratulatory vision of humanitarian help held by the Allies. Through various strategies and vocabularies, Polish dP s commented upon the material conditions in the camps, contesting and negotiating the refugee regime. Their bottom up-critique of the postwar humanitarian practices and their own community was centred on the notion of the absurdity of incarceration and the disciplinary regime. Displaced Poles, seeking physical and spiritual revival, also engaged with the unrra - and iro -promoted idea of rehabilitation and opposed it by promoting revival, or odrodzenie, on their own terms. To this end,

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they endorsed a revival around discourses of a natural, religious, and spiritual transition from war to peace. Grassroots reflections on human nature, displacement, and humanitarianism helped them come to an understanding of the damage the war and displacement brought to them as human beings and as members of groups and communities, especially the national community. Situating these reflections against the background of postwar medicalized discourses of rehabilitation, interwoven with slogans of democracy and citizenship, this work has shown how refugees negotiated and contested approaches and policies regulating their lives. dP s’ experiences and the debates surrounding them revolved around the body. A strong focus on biological existence and primary needs dominated dP camp life. Thus, the body became central for personal and collective revivals and for transition to a new life. Liberation brought with it the first outburst of emotions that later became normalized by Polish elites and dP camp communities. The absolute freedom of the first period after liberation appeared to be only a momentary transgression and was followed by attempts to mirror traditional cultural norms, particularly through marriages and reuniting families. The national and religious revival, which saw leaders looking to save Poles from moral and corporeal degeneration, began in the dP camps. Poles believed that the war disrupted gender roles and therefore encroached upon the hierarchical patriarchal family – the very foundation of Polish society. After the postwar chaos, these feelings resurfaced, fuelled by fears about prostitution, crime, and depravity, which were thought to pollute and weaken Polishness. The war and displacement were widely believed to have inflicted humans with “moral disease.” Thus, morality, just as the body, was to be healed. Polish elites saw a proper Catholic and national environment as the remedy for moral corruption and a means to re-civilize refugees. Polish elites used the unrra and iro structures to realize their own agendas. These derived from earlier charitable and interventionist traditions of reforming the national body, which was construed as the basis for a revival of free Poland. The institution of the dP camp worked as a grid for these interventions, providing a militarized space for managing and remoulding humans. The elites saw the displacement of masses of Poles and their concentration in the camps as an opportunity to reinvent society and the nation. The Nazi and Soviet occupation, resembling the partitions, urged them to acknowledge the unresolved social problems of the Second Polish Republic. They revitalized the traditions of organic work and social reformism, promising a new Poland based on the rules of social justice. The communist takeover reinforced this trend, making the elites rethink Polish society as a space of equal rights and opportunity

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for everyone. However, these attempts came too late, and the only space where they could try to reinvent the nation and Polishness was through “the miniature Poland” in exile. Personal revival became mobilized by the elites and by the Allies for the cause of the postwar reconstruction of the nation in exile and of wartorn Europe. Polish elites echoed pre-war reformers in their interventions upon dP s’ bodies and mores, realizing a wider project of reforming and disciplining the national body. Through promoting and imposing middle-class values and science-derived solutions, they used the concept of re-civilizing to reconstruct humans as valuable Poles and citizens. They tried to teach the dP s the proper use of language, bodily hygiene, handling personal items, dressing, eating, body positions and expressions, manners, and moral conduct. Public health and education campaigns were to re-educate them into the citizens of postwar societies. Children, considered a biological reservoir of the nation, were at the centre of these practices. While the unrra leaned towards new, science-based, psychologized modes of humanitarian aid, this book indicated that the rhetoric and work of Polish agents in the dP camps resembled earlier traditions of Polish charities and benevolent organizations in its struggle to improve the Polish national body. Within these circumstances, many dPs treated their revival as an opportunity to reinvent themselves and aspire to social and cultural advancement. The repatriation–resettlement debate deepened anxieties about the body, health, and recovery. Emotional turmoil caused by multiple pressures, unclear and changing policies, and a lack of reliable information, prompted refugees to call for decision-making freedom as a basic refugee right and to draft plans of improved humanitarian resettlement programs. dP s felt that their future depended on the results of a revival and rehabilitation, as their bodies and minds were evaluated on the basis of utility by decision-makers. Immigration schemes, based on market demand and reserved for those young, sane, and able-bodied, evoked comparisons with the slave trade. The Polish community added an additional layer to the selection process. Priests and camp commandants assessed dP s’ “moral health” and issued “certificates of morality” which facilitated resettlement and mediated obtaining help in the diaspora society. As a result, a high number of refugees became excluded from resettlement schemes. The ill, the elderly, the disabled, single mothers, and prisoners were often barred from emigrating and were more likely to be confined to institutional care or repatriated against their will. These practices frequently pushed the most vulnerable refugees outside the networks of humanitarian help. In the dominant discourse of rehabilitation

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and revival, they were the most undesirable bodies and minds and did not fit the vision of postwar reconstruction. In the kingdom of barracks, class, gender, and ethnic tensions that had built for years sizzled, firing the imagination and impacting the shape of alliances and communities. Building Polish modern nationhood was a painstaking project occupying generations of nation-oriented activists envisioning a better community able to face up to the challenges of the modern era. The history of the elites became the national canon, while selected elements of peasant and worker heritage were woven into national narratives, for example as folktales. Potentially dangerous and subversive elements, like the long history of peasant riots and protests, women’s struggles, and even the 1905 revolution (which became part of a national historical memory only recently), were obscured. History making for immediate political use and for long-term national goals unfolded in the dP camps as well. Post-1945 emigration consisted predominantly of wide masses of society, mainly workers and peasants, yet the elites’ narrative dominates the historical memory and historiography. In relation to Ukrainian dP s, JanHinnerk Antons called this process the homogenization of cultural, political, and historical frames of reference, describing how “the struggle to nationalize the community thus allowed the slave laborers to vanish from the discourse, for history outside the narrative of the national struggle for freedom was not worth recounting.”3 This book, assuming a cultural history approach, took a closer look at that narrative in the Polish community, showing that by engaging with elite discourse many members of the lower classes contributed to creating the dominant narrative and carved space for their experiences in the realm of the nation. Under the threat of communism, the exile elites were eager to accept more of the culture of the lower classes into the national pantheon and make access to “high” culture easier. But while the elements of people’s heritage were sewn into the fabric of national culture, the final shape was dictated by the elites and local leaders. Deep interest in the wellbeing of the lower classes shown during and after the war was typical in times of crisis and underpinned by wider processes of democratization triggered by the war, but this time it was also a means to counter the allure of communism. Anxieties and grievances about the upturned class order went hand in hand with hopes of social advancement. To illustrate this, one can picture two parallel scenes: impoverished generals making a living by washing dishes in London and peasants dressed in donated clothes sending their children to school in dP camps, benefiting from free medical care, and learning skills to take up well-paid jobs in the West.

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The post-1945 uchodźstwo marked a new moment in the history of Polish migration. War, displacement, and communist takeover reduced social differences and undermined the hegemony of the Polish social and political elites. Legacies of peasant immigration to the Americas, workers’ seasonal migrations, as well as upper-class and intelligentsia traditions of exile became interwoven in postwar imagery. “Going to the West” became framed as political while staying abroad was framed as a patriotic mission ransomed by the burden of nostalgia. In post-1945 discourse, immigration “after bread” and immigration “after freedom” became inseparable. dP s’ refugeedom had a quality that significantly distinguished it from previous migration movements in Polish history. Poles of various social origins, crammed together in the archipelago of dP camps and subject to the external powers governing it, construed themselves as a martyred nation, showing continuities with the nineteenth-century debates over the meaning of Polishness. The damage caused by the war enabled people to together revive into a new national body. The bodies of peasants, workers, and the intelligentsia, united by suffering inflicted by the war, revitalized the myths of the Great Emigration and embodied its symbolical universe.

Figures

1.1 Map of Poland’s changed borders after World War II. Prepared by Giovanni Ottaviano. | 29 1.2 Young Polish women in Maczków dP camp in the British zone of occupied Germany, 1945. Copyright: Gilles Lapers/Paul Rousseau, Porta Polonica. Courtesy of Gilles Lapers and Porta Polonica. | 38 2.1 Wanda Ciecierska with her future husband in a dP camp. A page from Wanda’s private photo album. Source: Large photograph album, circa 1945–50. Wanda Zofia Ciecierska Papers, 2003.385.1, ushmm . | 44 2.2 A Polish family makes a home out of a large room in the captured Wehrmacht post of Gneisenau Kaserne. Source: Photograph 6190, 6/151, Pia . | 47 2.3 Allied-occupied Germany and Austria. Occupation zones, representative dP camps with Polish population, and major cities. Prepared by Giovanni Ottaviano. | 64 3.1 Polish soldiers visiting schoolchildren in Maczków in 1946. Source: Phot.6302/6/151, Pia . | 98 3.2 Cloth doll in traditional Polish costume made as a Christmas present in 1945 by a Polish dP. Source: 2015.451.2, ushmm. | 102 3.3 Polish displaced persons folk dancing in the school yard of the Rottweil dP camp in Germany. Source: S-1058-0001-01-00205, un. | 104 4.1 Overcrowding was common in dP camps. Source: unrra 3077, Germany, S-1058-0001-01-00208, un . | 109 4.2 A list and photo of the exact amounts of food items dP s received created to point out inadequate provisions. Source: “Głodowe racje wysiedleńców,” Biuletyn Prasowy, 15–25 May 1949, p. 4, 471/024, Pia . | 111

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Figures

4.3 Józef Betari, Repatriacja na Księżyc, Dachau-Allach: Słowo Polskie, 1945. | 117 4.4 Józef Betari, Pieskie rozważania, Dachau-Freiman-MonachiumDillingen: Słowo Polskie, 1946. | 118 4.5 “Project of a friend from ‘Society of Moonshine Friends.’” Source: Jutrzenka, 14 July 1945, 592/155, Pia . | 121 4.6 Polish women spinning wool for making socks and mittens in Hohenfels dP camp. Source: unrra /3049: Hohenfels, Germany, S-1058-0001-01-00184, un . | 125 5.1 A group of dP children perform a gymnastic exercise, 1946. 1993.23.553_001_028_0016, ushmm, Gift of Lilo Plaschkes. | 146 5.2 Dziennik Polski, 24 April 1945, p.1, f.464/024, Pia . | 157 6.1 Children with their carer at Kloster Indersdorf dP camp. Source: Children, indoors at Kloster Indersdorf, approximately 1945–46. Greta Fischer papers, 1993.23.553, ushmm . | 165 6.2 A step-by-step guide explaining the “Anglo-American way of wrapping a nappy.” Source: Mikołaj Minkiewicz, Pielęgnowanie niemowląt w obrazkach, Lippstadt, 1946, S-0406-0034-0001, un. | 170 6.3 Children cleaning the common space at Kloster Indersdorf dP camp. Source: Children, indoors at Kloster Indersdorf, approximately 1945–46, Greta Fischer papers, 1993.23.553, ushmm. | 173 6.4 Posters in Polish on preventing rickets and on the need to fight flies in dP camps. Source: dP Health Education, S-0406-00340001, un . | 176 6.5 “Polish Public School in Meierwik.” Source: “Jak powstała szkoła polska w zachodnich Niemczech,” Dziennik Zarządzeń i Informacji, 15 May 1948, p. 14, 464/024, Pia . | 179 6.6 David Birenbaum in skiing equipment in Germany in 1946. Source: Birenbaum, David: Germany, 1946, Item, 1999.88_001_ 001_0003, Box 1, Folder 1, Lewis Shabasson collection, ushmm. | 184 6.7 “One of the greatest problems of the unrra staff is to ‘unlearn’ the mothers of their traditional habit of testing the food before giving it to their children.” Source: Phot.17, S-0800-0034-0001, un. | 193 7.1. A display of food rations for a family of four. Source: Droga do Ojczyzny: misja unrry nad wysiedleńcami, 1946, November 1946, Germany, P.36794 Chr A, National Library, Warsaw. | 204 7.2 A page from the paper Journey to the Fatherland. Source:

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Droga do Ojczyzny: misja unrry nad wysiedleńcami, 1946, November 1946, Germany, P.36794 Chr A, National Library, Warsaw. | 209 7.3 Polish refugee children repatriated from Freising receive candy. Source: unrra , Germany, 3004, S-1058-0001-01-00181, un. | 216 8.1 “Is he fit for work?” Source: S-0800-0034-0001, un . | 230 8.2 Wanda Ciecierska and her friends preparing for the resettlement journey from Germany to the United States. A page from Wanda’s private photo album. Source: Large photograph album, circa 1945–50, Wanda Zofia Ciecierska Papers, 2003.385.1, ushmm. | 246

Notes

i nt r o duc t i o n 1 Edward O. to the International Refugee Organization, 1950, 3.2.1.1/79677847, Arolsen Archives (its Digital Archive), Bad Arolsen, Germany (hereafter cited as aa ). 2 “Plemię Irokezów,” Gazeta Niedzielna, 9 December 1951, 8. Reprinted in Polak, 14 December 1951. Correspondence between Tadeusz de Julien and Polish dP Resettlement Committee, 245/84, Immigration History Research Center Archives, Minneapolis, US (hereafter cited as ihrca ). 3 Betts, Ruin and Renewal, 15–18. Lowe, Savage Continent, xii–xvi. 4 Zagórski, Szkice z podróży, 7–14. 5 Padraic, Rebuilding Poland, 27–8; Kersten, The Establishment of Communist Rule in Poland; Service, Germans to Poles, 40–2, 86–9, 92–5. 6 dP s functioned within the emerging refugee regime or a set of norms, rules, practices, and institutions governing states’ responses to refugees. This international regime, managing migrations in the increasingly interdependent world, originated in the interwar years in reaction to displacement in Europe and took shape in the aftermath of World War II. Asylum, assistance, and burden-sharing during the interwar regime arose out of ad hoc responses developed to aid mainly Russian and Armenian refugees. The crucial legacy of this period was the practice of treating refugees as a special category. Skran, Refugees in Inter-War Europe, 67–73, 295–6. 7 Wyman, dp s: Europe’s Displaced Persons, 157–62. 8 Judt, Post-War: A History of Europe Since 1945, 25–6; Douglas, Orderly and Humane, 1–6. 9 Ahonen, et al., People on the Move, 107. 10 Brubaker, “Aftermaths of Empire and the Unmixing of Peoples,” 155.

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11 Wróbel, Na rozdrożu historii, 401. 12 See: Judt, Post-War, 13–22; Mazower, Dark Continent, 215–52. 13 Incoming Telegram, Margolin to Cummings and Salisbury, 2 January 1946, Communications Section Division of Administrative Service, S-1174-0000-0059-00001, unrra Collection, United Nations Archives, New York, usa (hereafter cited as un ). 14 Loescher, The unhcr and World Politics, 34. 15 Cohen, In War’s Wake, 19–24. 16 Jaroszyńska-Kirchmann, The Exile Mission, 60. 17 Proudfoot, European Refugees, 238–9. 18 Balint, Destination Elsewhere, 4. 19 Person, Dipisi, 278. 20 Ibid., 231–6. 21 Ibid., 276–8. 22 Data for February 1946 from Rydel, “Polska okupacja” w północnozachodnich Niemczech 1945–1948, 142. 23 Initially, “dP s” and “refugees” were officially designated as separate groups according to the shaef handbook, the latter referring to German escapees and expellees from the east. 24 Khan, “Wars of displacement,” 278. 25 Proudfoot, European Refugees: 1939–52, 149. 26 Gatrell, “Trajectories of Population Displacement in the Aftermaths of Two World Wars.” 27 un General Assembly Resolution, 15 December 1946, quoted in Nasaw, The Last Million, 282. 28 On constructing and redefining ethnicity see: Manchester, “How Statelessness Can Force Refugees to Redefine Their Ethnicity”; Nagel, “Constructing Ethnicity: Creating and Recreating Ethnic Identity and Culture.” 29 Balint, Destination Elsewhere, 4. 30 Tara Zahra demonstrates how nationalist movements forced the discourse of national belonging and how the category of “national indifference” brings our attention to various ways of self-identification employed by people living in East Central Europe. Zahra, “Imagined Noncommunities.” 31 Figes, Natasha’s Dance, xxviii. 32 The term was coined in reference to the nineteenth-century Great Emigration, see chapter 1. 33 Wróbel, Uchodźcy polscy ze Związku Sowieckiego 1942–1950.

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34 Gatrell, “Refugees – What’s Wrong with History?,” 170. On the use of the concept of refugeedom for population displacement during World War I and beyond see Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking, 4–14. 35 Agier, “Between War and City”; Malkki, Purity and Exile, 3. 36 Agier, “Between War and City,” 337; Turner, The Ritual Process. 37 The work that paved the way for contemporary reflection on dP s was Mark Wyman’s book, published in 1980, in which he analyzed the political, social, and economic context of the post–World War II displacement. A historicized reflection on refugees can be traced to Michael Marrus’s The Unwanted from 1982. Yet only Peter Gatrell’s book, The Making of the Modern Refugee, provides us with a comprehensive history of the enforced migrations of the twentieth century, locating dP s in the wider context of displacement, humanitarian practices, and cultural representations. Wyman, dp s: Europe’s Displaced Persons, 1945–51; Marrus, The Unwanted; Gatrell, The Making of the Modern Refugee; Ballinger, “Impossible Returns, Enduring Legacies,” 128. 38 Woodbridge, U.N.R.R.A.; Holborn, The International Refugee Organization; Kulischer, Europe on the Move, 8; Proudfoot, European Refugees. 39 Reinisch, “Internationalism in Relief”; Reinisch, “‘Auntie unrra ’ at the Crossroads.” 40 Cohen, In War’s Wake, 79–80. 41 Tomas Balkelis illustrates how Lithuanians experienced life in dP camps, seen as a technology of power and a site of interventions, and how they constructed and tried to come to terms with the so-called “dP mentality.” Gatrell and Baron, Warlands; Patt and Berkowitz, “We Are Here”: New Approaches to Jewish Displaced Persons in Post-war Germany; Anderton, “Displaced Music: The Ex-Concentration Camp Orchestra in Post-war Germany”; Hilton, “Cultural Nationalism in Exile”; Bessel and Schumann, Life after Death; Person, Dipisi. 42 Holian, Between National Socialism and Soviet Communism, 219–21. 43 Jaroszyńska-Kirchmann, The Exile Mission, 2, 242. 44 Ibid., 2–7. 45 The concept of “imagined communities” helps to understand how these efforts translated into building nationalism in exile. Anderson, Imagined Communities. 46 Gemie et al., Outcast Europe. 47 Grossmann, Jews, Germans, and Allies. 48 Humbert, Reinventing French Aid; Humbert, “French Politics of Relief and International Aid”; Humbert, “Not by Bread Alone?”

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Notes to pages 13–14

49 Knapton, Occupiers, Humanitarian Workers, and Polish Displaced Persons; Knapton, “‘There is No Such Thing as an Unrepatriable Pole.’” 50 Hulme, The Wild Place. 51 Salvatici, “‘Help the People to Help Themselves.’” 52 Zahra, “Psychological Marshall Plan.” 53 Łuczak, Polacy w okupowanych Niemczech; Pilch, Losy Polaków w Austrii; Wróbel, Na rozdrożu historii; Nadolny, Opieka duszpasterska; Kosicki, Duszpasterstwo wśród Polaków w Niemczech; Kersten, Repatriacja ludności polskiej. Hładkiewicz, Polacy w zachodnich strefach okupacyjnych Niemiec; Kowalczyk, Szkolnictwo polskie w Niemczech; Łakomy, Polska książka na obczyźnie. Historiography in the Polish People’s Republic, remaining under the control of the state and subject to its censorship, tackled the problems of dP s mostly in the context of the repatriation of Polish citizens. Krystyna Kersten examined its logistics and sketched a spectrum of dP s’ attitudes towards the return. The first publication focusing entirely on Polish dP s came from Wiesław Hładkiewicz, who drew on materials from the Archives of Modern Records in Warsaw, numerous memoirs, and a plethora of dP presses. It gives insights into the political activity present among the Polish dP s and the approaches taken towards repatriation. Additionally, it sketches how the elites opted against it, framing their positionality as “Sanation supporters” or people close to the pre-war Polish government. 54 Rydel, “Polska okupacja.” 55 Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed; Kulczycki, Belonging to the Nation; Zahra, “Imagined Noncommunities”; Karch, Nation and Loyalty in a German–Polish Borderland. 56 Stone, “Refugees Then and Now.” 57 Bessel, Germany 1945; Judt, Post-war: A History of Europe Since 1945; Buruma, Year Zero: A History of 1945. 58 Gatrell and Baron, Warlands. 59 Gatrell, “Refugees – What’s Wrong with History?” 60 Kushner, Journeys from the Abyss; Frank and Reinisch, Refugees in Europe, 1919–1959. 61 Literature and poetry function as particular kinds of media for refugees’ voices, opening a space for dissecting mentality, worldviews, and fantasies. Fictional writing constructs and conveys voices, entwining the author in the narrator’s and characters’ voices. This is a form of coping with the legacies of war and the realities of displacement, as well as a conscious attempt to impact these realities. Additionally, satire and jokes stand out due to their capacity to convey uneasy emotions, doubts, and scepticism

Notes to page 15

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regarding the social and political order alongside subversive messages. Poems, as Carolyn Steedman demonstrates, can be read historiographically as cultural artefacts; poetry written within a given moment “moves and matters because it maps onto other minds and experiences in ways quite unintended by the poet.” I am interested here in what Anthony Rowland terms “testimonial poetry” in his article on Tadeusz Borowski’s writings and the wider work on Holocaust testimonies and memory. Rowland describes this style, which Borowski developed in the dP camp in Munich, as “anti-lyrical” and bearing “the generic characteristics of testimony.” Poetry, thus, expresses “one epiphanic experience” and the testimonial poem “mimics the stylistics of prose testimony.” Allen, “History and the Novel”; Oddens and Nieuwenhuis, “Using Satire in Historical Research”; Steedman, Poetry for Historians, 1–5; Rowland, “Culpability and the Lyric in Tadeusz Borowski’s Selected Poems,” 251, 259. For instance, the materials now creating the collection “Polish Displaced Persons in Germany,” held in the archives of the Piłsudski Institute of America in New York, reached New York in boxes in the late 1940s when the leaders of the main Polish organizations in Germany felt that their community was coming to an end with the closing of the camps and the termination of unrra ’s activities. At that point, they decided to send all documentation across the ocean. They hoped to preserve the memory of the Polish presence in Germany and Austria and thought the records would be safe with the Polish American diaspora in the usa , where many of them had immigrated. This abundant collection includes documentation produced by many grassroots organizations, schools, the Catholic Church, camp newspapers, postcards and pictures, petitions, and many other documents. Collection 024, Józef Piłsudski Institute of America Archives, New York (hereafter cited as Pia ). Wurl, “Documenting Displacement,” 86–8; Kaplan, “We Are What We Collect, We Collect What We Are.” Sarkar and Walker, “Introduction: Moving Testimonies,” 15. In analyzing personal documents, I rooted my reflections in the Polish tradition of personal accounts, dating to Florian Znaniecki and William Thomas’ The Polish Peasant in Europe And America (1918–1920), which contributed to the emergence of the Chicago school of sociology. Following this trope, I understand personal writing as a space for people to represent and reflect on their lives, constructing a socially, temporally, and situationally embedded self. In exploring people’s testimonies, I view them, after Annette Wieviorka, not as “factual truth, but the more subtle and just as indispensable truth of an epoch and of an experience.” Stanley,

272

66

67 68

69 70 71 72

Notes to pages 16–17

“To the letter: Thomas and Znaniecki’s The Polish Peasant and Writing a Life, Sociologically,” 140; Lebow, “Autobiography as Complaint,” 23–4; Wieviorka, The Era of the Witness, 132. Dan Stone emphasizes the potential of the immense collections held in Arolsen Archives for writing social history, saying that “we can hear the voices of those screaming out to us from the endless piles of paper.” Stone, “The Memory of the Archive,” 87. To Major R.S. Lawson from Polish Officers and Polish Administrative Staff, Wentorf, 12 June 1946. Polyphony, a key literary term used by Mikhail Bakhtin to describe Dostoevsky’s novels, introduced a new quality of writing where every “character is treated as ideologically authoritative and independent … perceived as the author of a fully-weighted ideological conception of his own.” Bakhtin borrowed the term polyphony from music, where it indicated the presence of many voices in a given composition, and claimed that in literary studies it serves to show what it opposes: monologism. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 5. Renfrew, Mikhail Bakhtin, 76–7. Gatrell, Ghoshal, Nowak, and Dowdall, “Reckoning with Refugeedom.” Angermuller, Maingueneau, and Wodak, The Discourse Studies Reader, 27; Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 7. I take inspiration from the concept of cultural hegemony, as introduced by Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) and developed by British Cultural Studies scholars in the late 1970s who focused on Gramscian negotiation of culture and ideology. It shows how a dominant class, or a hegemon, projects its worldviews onto other groups, making them identify with their meanings and values while treating the aspirations and views of subaltern people as an active element in its cultural and political program. To claim intellectual and moral leadership, the leading group creates an alliance with the subordinated groups, negotiating with them and containing their resistance. The use of hegemonic power, such as the mass media, schooling, social institutions, and distribution of resources, strengthens and deepens the hegemony. This hegemony might be limited, strongly underpinned by the threat of violence, or extensive, where masses of people give their consent to the hegemon in a spontaneous and active way. Forgacs, The Antonio Gramsci Reader; Bennett, Mercer, and Woollacott, Popular Culture and Social Relations; Hall, “Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies”; Jones, Antonio Gramsci, 41–56.

Notes to pages 19–22

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c haP t e r o n e 1 Deklaracja uchwalona dnia 29 listopada 1946 w Brukseli na Zjeździe upełnomocnionych przedstawicieli uchodźstwa polskiego, 29 November 1946, p.1, 9/024, Pia . 2 Porter-Szűcs, Faith and Fatherland, 86–8. 3 Deklaracja, 1946, p. 2–3, 9/024, Pia . 4 Wolak, “Archiwalia do dziejów organizacji polskich na emigracji,” 312–14. Several conferences, with delegates from the government and from the refugees, took place early after the war. The first convention of the Polish War Refugeedom took place in Brussels on 27–9 November 1946. It was initiated by the Rada Polityczna w Niemczech and its the first chairman was Zygmunt Rusinek. Out of ninety-nine delegates, predominantly from the Western zones of Germany and Austria, the Second Polish Corps, and Italy, there were only two women: Irena Mydlarzowa and Maria Swoboda. This was typical for Polish refugee organizations. See: Kol. 19/4, Protokół posiedzenia I Zjazdu Uchodźstwa Wojennego w Brukseli w dniach 27–9 XI 1946 r., 1–16, Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum Archives, London, uk (hereafter cited as Pism ). Zjednoczenie Polskiego Uchodźstwa Wojennego, kol. 19, Pism . 5 Jaroszyńska-Kirchmann, The Exile Mission, 2. 6 Kazimierz Sabbat, “Rola polityczna emigracji,” Kultura 4/259 (1969): 86–7; Friszke, Życie polityczne emigracji; Stobiecki, “Druga Wielka Emigracja,” 125–32. 7 Sula, Powrót ludności polskiej z byłego Imperium Rosyjskiego. 8 Zahra, The Great Departure, 112–13. 9 Labbé, “National Indifference, Statistics and the Constructivist Paradigm,” 162. 10 The first census was conducted in 1921 (it did not include the Vilnius Region and Upper Silesia) and used the criterion of nationality, while the second one was conducted in 1931 and used the criterion of “mother tongue.” The second one had a category of “Ruthenians” broken into “Ukrainians” and “Ruthenians.” Główny Urząd Statystyczny, Pierwszy powszechny spis Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej. Główny Urząd Statystyczny, Drugi powszechny spis ludności. 11 Zahra, “Imagined Noncommunities.” 12 Zieliński, Historia Polski 1914–1939, 124–6; Prażmowska, Poland. A Modern History, 102–8. On “tutejsi” see Labbé, “National indifference and the Constructivist Paradigm.”

274 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44

Notes to pages 22–7

Bjork, Neither German nor Pole, 6–7. Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed, 89. Kraft, “Who Is a Pole, and Who Is a German?,” 107–8. Brzoza and Sowa, Historia Polski 1918–1945, 112–18. On organic and rural intellectuals see: Forgacs, The Antonio Gramsci Reader, 300–2, 308–9. Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations, 3–4. Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed, 85. Dabrowski, Commemorations and the Shaping of Modern Poland, 223–4, 215. Davies, “Polish National Mythologies,” 141–57; Porter-Szűcs, Faith and Fatherland; Stauter-Halsted, “Policing the Borders of Belonging,” 37–54. Porter-Szűcs, Faith and Fatherland, 8–15, 86–8. Bjork, Neither German nor Pole, 13–14. Stauter-Halsted, The Nation in the Village, 100–8. Rauszer, “Buntów chłopskich nie było. Pańszczyzna i opór.” Porter, When Nationalism Began to Hate, 44–52, 233. Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations, 2. Jaroszyńska-Kirchmann, The Exile Mission, 1–3. Ibid., 3. Mazurek, Kraj a emigracja, 7–9; Zahra, The Great Departure, 25–38, 73–4; McCook, The Borders of Integration. Kicinger, Polityka emigracyjna II Rzeczpospolitej, 6. Zahra, “Travel Agents on Trial,” 163. Kulczycki, “Working-Class Nationalism among Polish Migrants in the Ruhr Region,” 126. Korzeniowski, “Refugees from Polish territories in Russia during the First World War,” 73–4. Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking, 154–7, 168–70. Zahra, “Travel Agents on Trial,” 180–5; Puchalski, “Emigrants into Colonists,” 1–17. Prażmowska, Civil War in Poland, 123–6. Mazurek, Kraj a emigracja, 10. Stauter-Halsted, The Nation in the Village, 108–13. Lebow, “The Conscience of the Skin,” 302. Żarnowska and Szwarc, Równe prawa i nierówne szanse. Kopstein and Wittenberg, “Who Voted Communist?,” 90–5; Stachura, Poland Between the Wars, 60–79. Lebow, “The Conscience of the Skin,” 298. Stauter-Halsted, The Devil’s Chain, 7–8.

Notes to pages 28–35 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59

60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75

275

Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed, 9. Kulczycki, Belonging to the Nation, 5. Karch, “Instrumental Nationalism in Upper Silesia.” Gawin, “Progressivism and Eugenic Thinking in Poland,” 171. Ibid., 178. Mazower, Dark Continent, 99, 105, 77–104. Gross, Polish Society Under German Occupation, 45–53; Gross, Revolution from Abroad, 106–8. Gross, Polish Society Under German Occupation, 73–84. Łuczak, Polityka ludnościowa i ekonomiczna hitlerowskich Niemiec w okupowanej Polsce. Berghahn, “Germans and Poles 1871–1945.” Szarota, Okupowanej Warszawy dzień powszedni, 26–30, 161–72, 304–5. Ibid., 436. Ibid., 427–35. Sword, Deportation and Exile. This number was initially thought to be as high as 1–1.5 million people, but the opening of the Soviet archives in 1990s revealed that the number was more likely much lower. Głowacki, Sowieci wobec Polaków na ziemiach wschodnich II Rzeczypospolitej. Piotrowski, The Polish Deportees of World War II, 4–5. Sword, The Formation of the Polish Community, 55–64, 70–1. Prażmowska, Poland, 137–9. Gross, Polish Society, 199–212. Jolluck, “The Nation’s Pain and Women’s Shame.” Pilch, Losy Polaków w Austrii, 49–51. Grzelak and Stańczyk, Kampania polska 1939 roku, 5. Brzoza, “Jeńcy polscy w zachodnich strefach okupacyjnych w Niemczech,” 141–3. Łuczak, Polska i Polacy w drugiej wojnie światowej, 180. Łuczak, “Polityka zatrudnienia w Trzeciej Rzeszy,” 19–34. Łuczak, Polacy w okupowanych Niemczech, 5–9. Pagenstecher, ‘“We were treated like slaves,’” 281–97. Herbert, “Forced Laborers in the Third Reich,” 193. Jastrzębski, “Warunki pracy i życia robotników przymusowych,” 103–13. Kundrus, “Forbidden Company,” 201–22; Hodorowicz Knab, Wearing the Letter “P.” Filipkowski and Madoń-Mitzner, ‘“You can’t say it out loud. And you can’t forget,’” 79; Herbert, “Forced Laborers in the Third Reich,” 199.

276

Notes to pages 35–9

76 Czerwiakowski and Wenzel, “The Fate of Polish Slave and Forced Labourers from Łódź,” 94. 77 Filipkowski, Madoń-Mitzner, “‘You can’t say it out loud,’” 80. 78 Snyder, Bloodlands, 132. 79 Mueller and Beddies, “The Destruction of Life Unworthy of Living.” 80 Berenbaum and Gutman, Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp. 81 Morrison, Ravensbrück, 92–3. 82 On prostitution and institution of brothels in the concentration camps see: Sommer, Das kz -Bordell. 83 Jaroszyńska-Kirchmann, The Exile Mission, 60; Proudfoot, European Refugees, 159. 84 Proudfoot, European Refugees, 238–9. 85 Cpt Rubienski, Report, 4 May 1945, p. 3, a.xii 54/5, Pism . 86 Guide to Nationality Reporting, fo 1052/453, The National Archives of the uk , Kew (hereafter cited as tna ). 87 Balint, Destination Elsewhere, 28–9. 88 The last names of dP s featuring in archival records, unless they are in the public domain, are anonymized. 89 On its and Child Search branch see: Stone, “The Politics of Removing Children”; Taylor, In the Children’s Best Interests. 90 Child Search – Janusz B., 1948, 6.3.2.1/84154642, aa . 91 Edward D. to acrPdP , 230/30/84, ihrca . 92 Bruno G. to Mr Napiontek, n.d., 237/31/84, ihrca . 93 Kazimierz J. to acrPdP , 13 October 1949, 242/84, ihrca . 94 Data for February 1946: Rydel, “Polska okupacja” w północnozachodnich Niemczech, 142. 95 Habielski, Życie społeczne i kulturalne emigracji, 208. 96 Łuczak, Polacy w okupownych Niemczech, 43 97 Holian, Between National Socialism and Soviet Communism, 18. 98 Jaroszyńska-Kirchmann, The Exile Mission, 62. 99 Łuczak, Polacy w okupowanych Niemczech, 43. 100 Kenney, Rebuilding Poland, 4; Lebow, “The Conscience of the Skin,” 302; Habielski, Życie społeczne i kulturalne emigracji, 215–17. 101 Sword, The Formation of the Polish Community, 445–6. Radzik, “Geneza i powstanie Zjednoczenia Polskiego w Wielkiej Brytanii,” 362. 102 Friszke, Życie polityczne emigracji, 119. 103 Rezolucja mieszkańców Polskiego Osiedla w Infundzie, 2 March 1945; Telegram from the Polish Red Cross in the Middle East; Telegram from the representatives of the Polish Scouting in the East, a.xii .1.66c , 1945, Pism .

Notes to pages 40–6

277

104 Habielski, Życie społeczne i kulturalne emigracji, 223. See also: Sosabowski, Droga wiodła ugorem, 199. 105 Dziś i jutro emigracji. Odczyt prof. Adama Pragiera, Dziennik Polski i Dziennik Żołnierza, 10 April 1946. 106 Kronika szkoły powszechnej w Lutter, powiat Gandersheim, założona przez kierownika szkoły Stachyraka Władysława dnia 5 lipca 1945/ Die Chronik der polnischen Grundschule in Lutter (Landkreis Gandersheim) für den Zeitraum 5. Juli 1945–22. Januar 1946 verfasst von Schulleiter Władysław Stachyrak, Pism via Porta Polonica 2017. 107 On national mythologies see: Zubrzycki, “History and the National Sensorium.” 108 Friszke, Życie polityczne emigracji, 6. 109 Maria Czapska, “Z doświadczeń Wielkiej Emigracji,” Kultura 16/17 (1949). 110 Ibid., 234. 111 Aleksander Grobicki, “Polacy w U.S.A w 1833 r.,” Kultura 1/18 (1949). 112 “Conditions in Poland and Factors Affecting Repatriation,” p.6, by Mr Dehn, Polish Class II Employee of unrra Team 6, Paderborn, S-12540000-0072-00001, un . 113 For more on Polish patriotic traditions, see: Walicki, Philosophy and Romantic Nationalism. Walicki, Naród, nacjonalizm, patriotyzm. 114 Stanisław Rola-Arciszewski, Freren, 4 April 1946, file 89, a.xii .47, Pism .

c ha P t e r t w o 1 Protokuł [sic] z pierwszego posiedzenia Rady Radiofonii, Przewodniczący Rady Radiofonii, K. Eydziatowicz, sekretarz K. Belina Brzozowska, London, 26 March 1945, Prm . 178 cz.1, Pism . 2 Przemówienie P.O. Naczelnego Wodza Gen. Dyw. W. Andersa na Odprawie Oficerów Sztabu N.W., No date, after Yalta conference, a.xii.1/27, Pism. 3 Wanda Ciecierska’s Diary, entry 20 May 1945, 2003.385.1, United Nations Holocaust Memorial Museum Archive (hereafter cited as ushmm). 4 Ibid., entry 15 May 1945, 2003.385.1, ushmm . 5 Cohen, In War’s Wake, 3; Shephard, The Long Road Home, 53–5. 6 Quoted in Hitchcock, Liberation, 212. 7 Hitchcock, Liberation, 250; Steinert, “British Humanitarian Assistance,” 421–35. 8 Hitchcock, Liberation, 253.

278

Notes to pages 46–51

9 unrra Standing Technical Sub-Committee on Displaced Persons for Europe. Report of the Expert Commission on Unorganized Movement of Displaced Persons, Appendix I. The Extent and Directions of Unauthorized Mass Trekking, 28 June 1944, a.xii .1/51c, Pism . 10 Standing Technical Sub-Committee on Displaced Persons for Europe. Expert Commission on Supplies. Food, 1944, a.xii .1/51c, Pism . 11 unrra Standing Technical Sub-Committee on Displaced Persons for Europe. Report of the Expert Commission on Unorganized Movement of Displaced Persons, Appendix I. The Extent and Directions of Unauthorized Mass Trekking, 28 June 1944, a.xii .1/51c, Pism . 12 Cohen, In War’s Wake, 64–9. 13 Reinisch, “Auntie unrra ,” 70. 14 Cohen, “Between Relief and Politics,” 441–2. 15 Proudfoot, European Refugees, 302. 16 unrra , Report “Psychological Problems of Displaced Persons,” 1945, Welfare Guide – dP s – Germany, S-1286-0000-0034, un . 17 Bessel, Germany 1945, 281–9. 18 Humbert, Reinventing French Aid. 19 Hitchcock, Liberation, 216. 20 Cohen, In War’s Wake, 62. 21 Salvatici, “‘Help the People to Help Themselves,’” 431–2; Reinisch, “Internationalism in Relief,” 77–9. 22 Footitt and Tobia, War Talk, 138. 23 Sękowski, “The iro ’s Resettlement Policy,” 3–5. 24 Constitution of the International Refugee Organization, United States Treaties, Library of Congress, access: https://www.loc.gov/law/help/ us-treaties/bevans/m-ust000004-0284.pdf. Bradley, Madokoro, Erdilmen, and Chanco, “Whither the Refugees,” 10. 25 Proudfoot, European Refugees, 399–409. 26 Holian, “A Missing Narrative,” 36. 27 Gatrell, Free World?, 17–19, 43. 28 unrra Expert Commission on Movement of Displaced Persons Appointed by the Standing Technical Sub-Committee on dP s for Europe. Report on the Problem of Unauthorised Mass Trekking, 17 June 1944, a.xii.1/51c, Pism. 29 Chief of Polish Military Mission to Maj. General A.W. Gullion, Chief of Displaced Persons, shaef , Control, care and disposition of refugees and displaced persons. Secret, 12 September 1944, a.xii .1/51c , Pism . 30 Ibid.

Notes to pages 51–5

279

31 J. Lipski Mjr, Kierownik. Ref. Polit. Gabinetu N.W., a.xii .1/51c , Pism . 32 Szef Sztabu N.W. Kopański Gen. Dyw. Do Pana Prezesa Rady Ministrów, London, 13 November 1944, a.xii .1/51c , Pism . 33 Szef Sztabu NW to Gen. Shally and Mjr. Zamoyski, Depesza Szyfrowana, 24 April 1945, a.xii .1/51c , Pism . 34 Habielski, Życie społeczne i kulturalne emigracji, 15. 35 Dr Władysław Józef Zaleski, por. Rez. Urzędnik wojskowy, Naczelnik wydziału Min. Spraw Zagranicznych, Odpis części listu Wł. J. Zaleskiego do Ministra Spraw Zagranicznych Adama Tarnowskiego 4 April 1945 a.xii.1/66c , 1945, Pism. 36 Sikorski, Naczelny Wódz, February 1943, London. Odpis, Top Secret, a.xii.1/79, Pism. 37 Edward Raczyński, Polish Ambassador to Anthony Eden, the Foreign Office, Memorandum, 30 September 1944, a.xii .1/51c , Pism . See also: Nota przy raporcie dla Ministra O.N., Inspektorat do Spraw Zarządu Wojskowego, 9 August 1944, a.xii .1/51c . 38 [Ed. Sztab Specjalny I Dywizji Pancernej], 1. Dywizja Pancerna na okupacji pomaga Polakom, Haren, 1947, p. 6, 129.527, Biblioteka Narodowa, Warsaw (hereafter cited as bn ). 39 Przemówienie P.O. Naczelnego Wodza Gen. Dyw. W. Andersa na Odprawie Oficerów Sztabu N.W., No date, after Yalta conference, p. 1–5, a.xii.1/27, Pism. 40 Szarota, Okupowanej Warszawy dzień powszedni, 464–6. 41 The arising conflict in the London-based elites reflected the ideological tension and eventually resulted in a split with Zamek (Castle) representing nationalists and Pilsudkiites, and Rada Trzech (The Council of Three) representing socialists, some Pilsudkitees, and Christian democrats. Friszke, Życie polityczne emigracji, 196–204. 42 Sanation was an interwar Polish political movement centred on the military officers supporting Józef Piłsudski. It came to power as a result of the May 1926 coup. 43 Rozkaz nr 54 Komendanta Głównego zwz Gen. Bryg. Stefana Roweckiego (“Kaliny”) do żołnierzy o zadaniach i celach zwz , December 1941, Warsaw, in Armia Krajowa 1939–1945: wybór źródeł, eds. Andrzej Chmielarz Grzegorz Jasiński Andrzej Krzysztof Kunert (Warsaw: Wojskowe Centrum Edukacji Obywatelskiej, 2013), 80–2. The original document is in the Archives of Modern Records in Warsaw, 203/I-2, k. 1. 44 Pismo Dowódcy ak Gen. Bryg. Tadeusza Komorowskiego (“Znicza”) do Delegata Rządu RP na Kraj Jana Stanisława Jankowskiego postulujące

280

45 46 47 48

49

50 51

52

53 54 55

56 57 58 59 60

61

Notes to pages 55–8

wydanie deklaracji o reformach społeczno-gospodarczych, 22 December 1943, Warsaw, Armia Krajowa, 147. O co walczy Naród Polski: deklaracja Rady Jedności Narodowej, Warszawa, 1944, 10, I 838.162 A Cim. konsp., bn . Applebaum, Iron Curtain, 57. Documents of the Ministry of Justice, M Komarnicki, Minister of Justice, Reforma Rolna, Prm .117, Pism . Władysław Sikorski, Uchwała Rady Ministrów z dnia 27 października 1941 r. w sprawie utworzenia Komisji Spraw Ustrojowych, 27 October 1941, Prm .k .20, Pism . Zasady przyszłego ustroju państwowego Polski opracowane przez Komisję Spraw Ustrojowych przy Prezesie Rady Ministrów, 1–3, 21 January 1942, Prm .k .20, Pism . Pietrzak, “Prymas Hlond o ustroju politycznym powojennej Polski,” 184–7. Komunikat informacyjny nr 4/45 dla Dowódców oraz Ofic. Oświatowych, 23 March 1945, London, Information Materials – Polish political information, 1943–1945, a.xii .1/50a , Pism . Szef Wydziału Wywiadu Obronnego Szt. J.W.WB in Great Brit[ain], major Gorgolewski, to Ministerstwo Obrony Narodowej, London, 22 February 1945, Top Secret, a.xii .1/50a , Pism . Wyciąg z raportów sytuacyjnych mjr. A. Nowotnego z dnia 2.4.1945, Secret, 21 April 1945, 3 May 1945, a.xii .1/50a , Pism . Notatka informacyjna. Działalność Polskiej Rady Jedności Demokratycznej w Londynie, 12 July 1945, a.xii .1/50a , Pism . Stosunek organizacyj [sic] prokomunistycznych na terenie Londynu do p. St. Mikołajczyka po konferencji krymskiej. Top Secret, London, 23 March 1945, Prm 164, Pism . Przemówienie P.O. Naczelnego Wodza Gen. Dyw. W. Andersa na Odprawie Oficerów Sztabu N.W., p. 3, a.xii .1/27, Pism . Edward Puacz , kv 2/3527, tna . Edward Puacz to Mr Dutkiewicz, Assn. to Aid Poland, Toronto, Canada, “Anders organizuje wojnę domową,” 1945, kv 2/3527, tna . Jan Gitlin, journalist, London, 19 January 1945, Prm 175 cz. II, Pism . Odpis. Temat: Artykuły “Dziennika Żołnierza” – reakcja.” Por. Klebankiewicz, Dowódca Drużyny Wywiadu Obronnego, do Szef Oddziału Wywiadowczego Sztabu I Korpusu, 8 June 1945, a.xii .1/50a , Pism. Jerzy Lerski, Notatka dla Pana Prof. Pragiera. Secret. 27 January 1945, Prm .173/1, Pism.

Notes to pages 59–65

281

62 Komunikat No 2, Szef Oddziału dla Spraw Polaków na Kontynencie mjr Czarnecki, Sztab Naczelnego WodzOddz. Dla Spraw Polaków na Kontynencie, Secret, London, 15 August 1945, a.xii .1/51c , Pism . 63 Komunikat No 2, Szef Oddziału dla Spraw Polaków na Kontynencie mjr Czarnecki, Sztab Naczelnego Wodza. Oddz. Dla Spraw Polaków na Kontynencie, Secret, London, 15 August 1945, a.xii .1/51c , Pism . 64 Sprawozdanie z konferencji u Naczelnego Wodza w dniu 9 sierpnia 1945 roku, Top Secret, a.xii .1/27, Pism . 65 Minister J. Morawski, Notatka z prywatnego zebrania odbytego u Ministra Raczyńskiego dn. 14 lipca 1942 r. dla dyskusji nad zagadnieniem ukraińskim, 14 July 1942, a.xii .1/86, Pism . 66 Sprawozdanie z konferencji u Naczelnego Wodza w dniu 9 sierpnia 1945 roku, Top Secret, 9 August 1945, a.xii .1/27, Pism . 67 Dalszy ciąg konferencji w dniu 10 sierpnia 1945 r. Sprawozdanie z konferencji u Naczelnego Wodza w dniu 9 sierpnia 1945 roku, Top Secret, 10 August 1945, a.xii .1/27, Pism . 68 Wanda Ciecierska’s Diary. Entry under 19 May 1945 [might be inaccurate], ushmm , 2003.385.1. 69 Poster, 352/024, Pia . 70 Proudfoot, European Refugees, 220, 238–9. 71 Wyciąg ze sprawozdania por. Chyrca Aleksandra, 5 June 1945, Prm 179, Pism. 72 Douglas, Orderly and Humane. 73 Buruma, Year Zero, 158; Halicka, Polski Dziki Zachód, 132–3, 193–7. 74 Proudfoot, European Refugees, 220. 75 Bessel, Germany 1945, 331. 76 Ibid., 169–70. 77 Donnison, Civil Affairs and Military Government North-West Europe, 232–4. 78 Reinisch, The Perils of Peace, 290. 79 Quoted in Bessel, Germany 1945, 167. 80 Ibid. 81 Bessel, Germany 1945, 177. 82 Seipp, Strangers in the Wild Place, 4. 83 Reinisch, The Perils of Peace, 294; Bessel, Germany 1945, 290–2. 84 Bessel, Germany 1945, 181. 85 Donnison, Civil Affairs, 283–96. 86 Ferring, “The Austrian State Treaty of 1955 and the Cold War,” 651–67. 87 [Sztab Specjalny I Dywizji Pancernej] 1. Dywizja Pancerna na okupacji pomaga Polakom, Haren, 1947, p. 4, 129.527, bn .

282 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120

Notes to pages 65–70

Jaroszyńska-Kirchmann, The Exile Mission, 77–80. Humbert, Reinventing French Aid, 19. Ibid., 260–3. Woodbridge, unrra , v. II, 502. Proudfoot, European Refugees, 52. Quoted in Jaroszyńska-Kirchmann, The Exile Mission, 67. Horodyska, Doczekać świtu, 129–30. Rydel, “Polska okupacja,” 117–24; Lembeck, Wyzwoleni, ale nie wolni, 110–15. [Sztab Specjalny I Dywizji Pancernej] 1. Dywizja Pancerna na okupacji pomaga Polakom, Haren, 1947, 129.527, bn . Program wieczoru satyrycznego “Wielkie pranie w Maczkowie,” Archiwum Aleksandry Sękowskiej, Porta Polonica. Seipp, Strangers in the Wild Place, 15, 94–6. Holian, Between National Socialism and Soviet Communism, 89–90. Kosicki, Duszpasterstwo, 95–100. Visit to the Camp at Landstuhl, 1 October 1945, S-0417-0004-12, un . Humbert, Reinventing French Aid, 19–20. Rydel, “Polska okupacja,” 122; Doctor Struther, unrra Report on Field Survey of Health of dP Children, p. 3–4, S-0409-22-5, un . Donnison, Civil Affairs, 288. Pilch, Losy Polaków w Austrii, 22–3. Akta dipisów w Austrii, 379-380/024, Pia . Pilch, Losy Polaków w Austrii, 46. Ibid., 48. F.M. Biraud, Kufstein dP Camp, Narrative Report for March, 1946, 1 April 1946, S-1494-0000-0146-00001, un . Pilch, Losy Polaków w Austrii, 61–3. Ibid., 226–30. Proudfoot, European Refugees, 353–4. Holian, “Displacement and the Post-war Reconstruction of Education,” 167–95. Borowski, Postal Indiscretions, 95. Betari, Pieskie rozwazania, 40. Polish Repatriation, 16 June 1947, S-0409-0007-0016, un . Y. Romain, Report on visit to Polish School Imbshausen, p. 2, 28 May 1947, S-0409-0007-0016, un . Łuczak, Polacy w okupowanych Niemczech, 68–175. Depesza szyfrowana do Pana Premiera, 29 May 1945, Prm .173/1, Pism . Quoted in Chwastyk-Kowalczyk, Katyń, dipisi, pkpr , 107–8.

Notes to pages 70–6

283

121 Jaroszyńska-Kirchmann, The Exile Misssion, 29. 122 Ibid., 50. 123 Brzoza, Pilch and Rojek, Działalność społeczna 2 Korpusu Polskich Sił Zbrojnych. 124 Ibid., 266, 308, 270, 308–9. 125 Pilch, Losy Polaków w Austrii, 45–54. 126 Jaroszyńska-Kirchmann, The Exile Mission, 9. 127 Piskorski reported that on the basis of the agreement with unrra he created six sub-offices in Germany and distributed supplementary supplies (210 tons of clothing and shoes, as well as cigarettes and tobacco) to camps with a predominantly Polish population. Florian Piskorski do Zarządu Głównego Rady Polonii Amerykańskiej, 15 April 1946, 4.03/8.1.f, Polish Museum of America Archives, Chicago, usa (hereafter cited as Pma ). 128 Jaroszyńska-Kirchmann, The Exile Mission, 40–9, 111–12, 150. 129 Correspondence with Polish religious organizations in dP Camps in Germany, 5/115, ihrca . Correspondence between Florian Piskorski and Polish Caritas in Germany, 4.03/8.1., Pma . 130 Military Government Court Records, rg 466/1142598, National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, md , usa (hereafter cited as nara). 131 Pilch, Losy Polaków w Austrii, 50. 132 Treatment of Displaced Persons, 30 January 1947, fo /1032-2106, tna . Dokumentacja dot. rewizji w obozach Limmer i Rhumspringen, 65/024, Pia. 133 Brzoza, Pilch, and Rojek, Działalność społeczna 2 Korpusu Polskich Sił Zbrojnych, 266. 134 Ibid., 308.

c h aP t e r t h re e 1 Vetulani-Belfoure, Z Ziemi Egipskiej, z domu niewoli, 60. 2 Zubrzycki, “History and the National Sensorium.” 3 Manchester, “How Statelessness Can Force Refugees to Redefine Their Ethnicity.” 4 The power relations are interpreted here through the Gramscian theory of cultural hegemony, showing how hegemonic groups pushed for “expensive hegemony in which a hegemonic group adopts the interests of its subalterns in full, and those subalterns come to ‘live’ the worldview of the hegemonic class as their own.” Jones, Antonio Gramsci, 53.

284 5 6 7 8 9 10

11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

Notes to pages 77–80

“Dni wyzwolenia,” Dziennik Polski, 24 April 1945, p. 1, 464/024, Pia . Kruk, The Taste of Fear, 152. Horodyska, Doczekać świtu, 130. Borowski, Poezje, 115. Leon Rejewski, “Zagadnienia Emigracji,” Głos Polski, 7 April 1946, p. 1, 464/024, Pia . The preface was reprinted in Dziennik Żołnierza, no 156, 2 July 1946, “‘Księgi Narodu i Pielgrzymstwa Polskiego’ na nowej emigracji.” Adam Mickiewicz, Księgi Narodu i Pielgrzymstwa Polskiego, with preface by Gustaw Herling-Grudziński, Rome: Instytut Literacki, 1946. Ppor. Midanowicz, Raport sytuacyjny, obóz lodz , Mulheim, a.xii.47/78f, Pism. Zieliński, Świat Janeczki, 28. Kronika dnia, 19 September 1946, Reprint from Na szlaku kresowej, June 1946, p. 9, 464/024, Pia . Borowski, Poezje, 115. Sword, The Formation of the Polish Community, 245–54. “Plemię iro -kezów,” Gazeta Niedzielna, 9 December 1951, 8. Jan Zbierski to Reverend Władysław Świetlik, 13 September 1948, 248/024, Pia . The Australian government tried to recruit “the best types” of labourers through an intense publicity campaign: Balint, “Industry and Sunshine.” Aniela D. to acrPdP , 6 October 1949, 203/26/84, ihrca . Cohen, In War’s Wake, 100. Małgorzata C. to acrPdP , 228/30, ihrca . Holian, Between National Socialism and Soviet Communism, 47. Betari, Pieskie rozwazania, 37. Editorial, Biuletyn Prasowy, 5 January 1949, 471/024, Pia . Świt Wolności, 23–26 October 1945, 592/155, Pia . Kruk, The Taste of Fear, 98. “Kochany Święty Mikołaju,” Nasz Głos, 5 December 1945, S-0436-00290003, un . “Światło w ciemnościach,” Defilada, 19–26 December 1946, 464/024, Pia. Informator. Tygodnik Obozu Polskiego Rheine-Gellendorf, 15 June 1947, 464/024, Pia . Korespondencja z Instytutem Józefa Piłsudskiego w sprawie przekazania archiwaliów, 1/024, Pia . “Historia wychodźstwa,” Biuletyn Informacyjny Spraw Kulturalnych i Wydawniczych, February 1946, p. 3–4, 463/024, Pia .

Notes to pages 81–7

285

32 Tomaszewski, Chleba naszego powszedniego, 166. 33 Niemojowski, Zmartwychwstania, 32. 34 Józef Stysiński, “Nasza walka,” Na szlaku, 15 May 1948, p. 2, 823/155, Pia. 35 Ibid. 36 Bronisława J.’s petition for clemency, 23 October 1953, rg 466/1142598, nara. 37 Bronisława J., rg 466/1142598, nara . 38 Adam Kruczkiewicz, “A Memoir of a Polish Officer and Gentleman,” 212. Private Papers of A.W. Kruczkiewicz, 16528, Imperial War Museum Archives, London (hereafter cited as iwm ). 39 “Dwie miary,” Polskie Nowiny Obozowe, 25 November 1945, p. 3, un . 40 Kruk, The Taste of Fear, 163. 41 Stempowski, Dziennik podróży do Austrii i Niemiec, 18–19. 42 Luciuk, Searching for Place, 65. 43 Person, Dipisi, 277–8. 44 Ibid., 234. 45 Quotation after Person, Dipisi, 275. 46 Person, Dipisi, 276–7. 47 Adam and Helen Gawara papers, 2014.208.1, ushmm . 48 Joskowicz, “Romani Refugees and the Postwar Order,” 786. 49 Tamara Pusłowska. Działalność zawodowa i społeczna, 2/1742/0/-/3, aan. Tamara Szechidewicz, “Turczynka niegdyś i dziś,” Życie Tatarskie, no 6, 1934. 50 Louis C. Stephens, Office of the General Counsel to Miss Radin, Chief of Repatriation and Care Division, Repatriation of Polish Ukrainians, 2 May 1947, S-1450-0000-0151-00001, un . 51 Edward A. Reich, Chief, Division of dP Care to Legal Advisor, Ukrainian/ Polish Nationality, 23 April 1947, S-1450-0000-0151-00001, un . 52 Sterner, Gefangeni i dipisi, 212. 53 Karol H., to the editor of Repatriant, 3 January 1948, 2/522/0/-/546, Archiwum Akt Nowych, Warsaw (hereafter cited as aan ). 54 Vetulani-Belfoure, Z Ziemi Egipskiej, z domu niewoli, 14. 55 Edward C. Case Records, RG466/1142598, nara . 56 Lambert G. to the International Court of Justice, Nurnberg, 17 April 1946, Schweinfurt, unrra Legal Rights, S-0425-19-7, un . 57 Rydel, “Polska okupacja,” 188. 58 Nowakowski, Obóz wszystkich świętych, 405. 59 Ibid., 372–3. 60 Ibid., 12–13.

286

Notes to pages 87–95

61 Echo Polskie, 2 June 1946, 464/024, Pia . 62 Wydział Opieki Społecznej Zjednoczenia Polskiego, 1947, 34/024, Pia . 63 Józef Wielawski, Copy. Some remarks in connection with the psychiatric survey of Polish insanes [sic] in the British zone, 1946, S-0401-0008-0001, un . 64 Józef Kamiński to Reverend Władysław Ćwiklik, 3 December 1948, 249/024, Pia . 65 V.S. Harshbarger, Present Situation at Goisern dP Tuberculosis Hospital, 10 April 1946, p. 2, 0527-235, S-1510-0000-0008, un . 66 Goisner Hospital. Copy of the weekly report, 17 May 1946, S-1510-00000008, un . 67 Interview with Stefan Czyżewski (transcript), 14 September 1998, RG-50.549.02*0023, p. 62, ushmm . 68 Nowakowski, Camp of All Saints, 341. 69 Ibid., 341. 70 Zagórski, Szkice z podróży, 7–14. 71 Vetulani-Belfoure, Z Ziemi Egipskiej, 55. 72 “My i chwila bieżąca,” Świt. Dwutygodnik, Hülchrath, 17 June 1945, no 4, bn . 73 Dziennik Polski, 25 September 1946, 464/024, Pia . 74 Odezwa, 3/024, Pia . 75 Correspondence of liaison officers with government-in-exile, 285–9, a.xii.54/5, Pism. 76 Instrukcja wyborcza i karta do głosowania, 1946–1947, 52/024, Pia . 77 Zahra, “‘The Psychological Marshall Plan.’” 78 A dP Camp for Poles, p. 18, unrra -Weekly Bulletin, no 56, 29 August 1945, Germany, S-1253-0000-0460-00001, un . 79 Polonia, 7 April 1946, no 6, S-0436-0009-0002, un . 80 Murawski, Budowa i obsługa samochodu, 89748650, bn . Władysław Murawski, cm /1, Reference Code 32110000, 79508685, aa . 81 Hładkiewicz, Polacy w zachodnich strefach, 132. 82 Quote after Rydel, “Polska okupacja,” 176. 83 Stauter-Halsted, The Nation in the Village, 244. 84 Ibid., 6. 85 Ibid., 8. 86 Davies, White Eagle, Red Star. 87 Barbara Głogowska, “‘Wczoraj’ w naszej Polonii,” in Heydenkorn, Pamiętniki imigrantów polskich w Kanadzie, 139. 88 Józef Betari, “Licentia Fantastica,” Nasze życie, 30 June 1946, p.13, S-0436-0045-0001, un . 89 Gatrell, The Making of the Modern Refugee, 102.

Notes to pages 95–103 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97

98 99 100

101 102

103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115

287

Zbigniew Abdank, “Jednak wracam z Kanady,” Kultura (1952): 7/8, 85. Melchior Wańkowicz, “Klub Trzeciego Miejsca,” Kultura (1949): 21, 65. Bronisław C. to acrPdP , 12 October 1949, 228/84, ihrca . Ks. Jan Stasiak, Polski Duszpasterz Katolicki to acrPdP , Franfurt/M.Hochst, 11 June 1948, 5/115, ihrca . Maria J. to acrPdP , 28 October 1949, 242/84, ihrca . As Timothy Snyder claims in the monograph The Reconstruction of Nations, 5. Maksymilian J. to acrPdP , 7 November 1949, 242/84, ihrca . T.R. Bruskin, Chief, Office of Public Information, to Chief of Operations, Report on Polish Newspapers in dP Camps, 23 May 1946, S-1254-00000072-00001, un . Francis X. Świetlik, The Polish Displaced Persons, American Relief for Poland: Chicago, 1945. S-1267-0000-0079-00001, un . Łakomy, Polska książka, 78. Introduction to Adam Mickiewicz, Pan Tadeusz (Hanover: Nakładem Polskiego Związku Wychodźstwa Przymusowego w Hanowerze, 1945), S-0418-0004-07, un . Pamiętnik ucznia Edwarda Błaszkiewicza, 209/024, Pia . Kronika szkoły powszechnej w Lutter, powiat Gandersheim, założona przez kierownika szkoły Stachyraka Władysława dnia 5 lipca 1945/ Die Chronik der polnischen Grundschule in Lutter (Landkreis Gandersheim) für den Zeitraum 5. Juli 1945 – 22. Januar 1946 verfasst von Schulleiter Władysław Stachyrak, Pism via Porta Polonica. Poster “Dziesięć Przykazań Polaka,” December 1945, 456/024, Pia . Malkki, Purity and Exile, 3. Antons, “The Nation in a Nutshell?” Janco, Soviet “Displaced Persons” in Europe; Wyman, dp s: Europe’s Displaced Persons, 67–8. Kwapisz-Williams, “Beyond Stories of Victimhood,” 440. 32110000, 79746680/its Digital Archive, aa . Maria and Shao C., ihrca . Maria and Shao C., 78992052/its Digital Archive, aa . Józef B., RG#466, nara . Arnold D. to acrPdP , 232, ihrca . Maria Swoboda to Zofia S., Linz, 23 July 1948, 379/024, Pia . Zofia S. to Maria Swoboda, no date, [Bad Hall], 379/024, Pia . Anna W., 32110000, 79924069/its Digital Archive, aa . Grzybowski and Grzybowska, “Memoriały uchodźców białoruskich,” 258–60.

288

Notes to pages 103–12

116 Grzybowski, Pogoń między Orłem Białym, Swastyką i Czerwoną Gwiazdą. 117 Sprawozdanie oficera łącznikowego, ppłk. A. Kruczkiewicza, przy 21st Army Group, 22 May 1945, Prm 179, Pism . 118 Leonard Andrzejczak’s letter, 3 November 1949, 249/024, Pia . 119 J. Adamus’ letter, 4 December 1949, 249/024, Pia . 120 Polonia, no 6, 7 April 1946, S-0436-0009-0002, un . 121 Mickiewicz, Pan Tadeusz, 17. 122 Zieliński, Świat Janeczki, 47. 123 Zubrzycki, “National Sensorium,” 37. 124 “Krakowiacy i górale,” Nasze Życie, no 29, 18 August 1946, S-12540000-0072-00001, un . 125 See for example a collection of plaster and cloth dolls wearing folk costumes, collected by social worker Esma Banner between 1945 and 1951. Items ht 31046-31053, Esma Banner Collection, Museums Victoria Collections, Melbourne, Australia. 126 “Co by zrobili, gdyby dzisiaj byli,” Nasz Głos. Pismo obozu Polaków w Ettlingen, 19 June 1946, no 26 and 27, S-0436-0029-03, un .

c haP t e r f o u r 1 This Polish proverb talks about malice and hatred towards somebody making them go to great lengths to hurt them. 2 Śmiej się Dipisie! 100 stron humoru, Nadrenia [Solingen]: Spółka Wydawnicza “Mewa,” 1947, 757.288A, bn . 3 Salvatici, “Sights of Benevolence.” 4 Grossmann, “Grams, Calories, and Food,” 123. 5 Balint, “The Use and Abuse of History,” 180. 6 “Stan psychiczny wysiedleńców,” Biuletyn Prasowy, 15–25 May 1949, p. 14, 471/024, Pia . 7 Borowski, Poezje, 162. 8 Dziennik Zarządzeń i Informacji Centralnego Komitetu dla Spraw Szkolnych i Oświatowych, 15 May 1948, p.15, 464/024, Pia . 9 “Zużycie elektryczności,” Biuletyn Prasowy, 5 February 1949, p. 7, 471/024, Pia . 10 “Głodowe racje wysiedleńców,” Biuletyn Prasowy, 15–25 May 1949, p. 4, 471/024, Pia . 11 Biuletyn Prasowy, 5 June 1948, p. 2, 471/024, Pia . 12 Dr Helena Fedukowicz, “Przebieg Chorób Ocznych u dP ,” Kultura, 1/18, 1949.

Notes to pages 113–23

289

13 Józef Betari, “Witaminy, gulasz i unrra ,” in Repatriacja na Księżyc, Słowo Polskie: Dachau-Allach, 1945, 28–9. 14 Ibid. 15 Betari, Pieskie rozwazania, 15–16. 16 Grossmann, “Grams, Calories, and Food,” 148. 17 Betari, Pieskie rozwazania, 15–16. 18 “Plemię Irokezów,” Gazeta Niedzielna, 9 December 1951, p. 8. Reprinted in Polak, 14 December 1951. 19 Correspondence between Tadeusz de Julien and Polish dP Resettlement Committee, 245/84, ihrca . 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid. 23 “Plemię Irokezów,” Gazeta Niedzielna, 9 December 1951, 8. 24 Zbigniew Małecki, “Notatki z podróży do Kanady,” Kultura (1951), 99. 25 Ibid. 26 “Jak powstała szkoła polska w zachodnich Niemczech,” Dziennik Zarządzeń i Informacji, p. 13, 15 May 1948, 464/024, Pia . 27 Jerzy Grot-Kwaśniewski, Komitet Społeczny 2-go Korpusu W.P., Sprawozdanie z akcji na obszarze Westfalia-Nadrenia, 6 May 1946, 365/024, Pia . 28 Jerzy V. to acrPdP , 4/115, ihrca . 29 Jaroszyńska-Kirchmann, The Exile Mission, 111–12. 30 A more literal translation would be Department for the Unfair Distribution of American Junk. Attachment 11: Extracts from a Report on a Survey of Polish Newspapers, Germany, May 1946, S-1254-0000-007200001, un . 31 Quotation simplified for clarity, Kruk, The Taste of Fear, 165. 32 Burney, “Resistance and Counter-Discourse,” 115; Gosk, “CounterDiscourse and the Postcolonial Perspective,” 200–8. 33 Śmieszny Anatol: Sto i jeden kawałów: wybór anegdot i dowcipów, Munich: Wydawnictwo “Irka,” 1947. 34 Toegel, Hitleriada Furiosa. Toegel, Hitleriada Macabra. 35 Śmiej się Dipisie! 100 stron humoru, Solingen: Spółka Wydawnicza “Mewa,” 1947, 757.288 A, bn . 36 Fik., “Rok 1995,” Jutro Pracy, 23 September 1945, p. 10–13, 590/155, Pia. 37 Ibid. 38 Jutrzenka, 14 July 1945, 592/155, Pia . 39 Scott, Weapons of the Weak, xv.

290

Notes to pages 123–31

40 “Szczyty,” Nasz Głos. Pismo obozu Polaków w Ettlingen, no 27, 26 June 1946, S-0436-29-03, un . 41 Humbert, “‘When Most Relief Workers Had Never Heard of Freud,’” 214. 42 Jaroszyńska-Kirchmann, The Exile Mission, 75. 43 Józef Czapliński, “Do rozważenia paniom,” Jutrzenka, 2 February 1946, p. 4, 592/155, Pia . 44 Zahra, “The Psychological Marshall Plan,” 41. 45 Incoming Telegram, Margolin to Salisbury, Press Public Information, 4 December 1945, S-1174-0000-0059-00001, un . 46 Incoming Telegram, Margolin to Salisbury, 3 December 1945, S-11740000-0059-00001, un . 47 Czesław Sońta, Szczepan Zimmer, Zarząd Główny Zrzeszenia Polskich Nauczycieli na Wychodźstwie w Niemczech, Maczków, do Kongresu Polonii Amerykańskiej, 10 June 1949, 125/84, ihrca . 48 Biuletyn Prasowy, 25 June–5 July 1949, 471/024, Pia . 49 Ibid. 50 Aleksandra G., 236/84, ihrca . 51 Stanisław F., 234/84, ihrca . 52 Stanisław S. letter, Straubing, 16 October 1949, 249/23, Pia . 53 Stanisław S. letter, Straubing, 30 October 1949, 249/23, Pia . 54 Report and press cuttings from Przegląd Literacki published in Karlsruhe, 1948, 9/115, ihrca . 55 Dr Michał Szkelnik to Chief Security Officer Deputy, unrra Headquarters, Wasserburg, 29 July 1946, S-0425-0019-0007, un . 56 Eldon Marple, Director unrra Team 161 to M.O. Talent, Acting Zone Legal Adviser, unrra US Zone Headquarters, Wasserburg, 22 August 1946, S-0425-0019-0007, un . 57 Lt Eduard Landsman, Lübeck, 12 January 1947 to 200 unrra hQ B.A.O.R., D.P. Complaints, Translation from Polish. Copy, S-0407-001809, un . 58 Witold Zadźwiński, Karta Praw Uchodźcy, 386/024, Pia . 59 Poster announcing a Polish book and press exhibition, photograph 6406, 6/151, Pia . 60 Helen B. to the Chief Office of unrra -Legal Section in Pasing/Munich, 27 September 1946, S-0425-0019-0007, un . 61 Ibid. 62 M.O. Talent to Helen B., 9 October 1946, S-0425-1900-0007, un . 63 Wanda C. to the Screening Commission, 79000050/its Digital Archive aa . 64 Edward O. alias Tadeusz R., 1950, 3.2.1.1/79677847/its Digital Archive, aa.

Notes to pages 131–7 65 66 67 68

291

Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Betari, Pieskie rowazania, 78–80.

c ha P t e r f i ve 1 Maria Kwiatkowska, Wiersz okolicznościowy, Notebook, Grunhaim, with original poetry, January–May 1945, Ciecierska Papers, 2003.385.1, ushmm. 2 Kruk, The Taste of Fear, 160. 3 The term recurs in the memoirs and other personal accounts of former concentration camp inmates, including Primo Levi’s book If This Is a Man (1947). Levi wrote, “This word ‘Muselmann,’ I do not know why, was used by the old ones of the camp to describe the weak, the inept, those doomed to selection.” Levi, If This Is a Man/The Truce, 94. Nowakowski ed., Muzułman wraca do domu. 4 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 40. 5 Reiter, Narrating the Holocaust, 87. 6 Diary entry, probably 15 May 1945, Wanda Ciecierska Papers, 2003.385.1, ushmm . 7 Nowakowski ed., Muzułman wraca do domu, 252. 8 Gawalewicz, Refleksje z poczekalni do gazu. 9 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 445–57; Domańska, “Muzułman: świadectwo i figura,” 71; Bock, “‘Nie chodzi o to, czy nienawidzi czy nie,’” 137. 10 Madajczyk, Polityka III Rzeszy, 483. 11 Directive No. 1306 issued on 24 October 1939. Szarota, “Poland under German Occupation, 1939–1941,” 50. 12 Agamben, Homo Sacer. 13 Niemojowski, Zmartwychwstania. 14 Ibid., 8. 15 Poem “Wspomnienie,” by Tadeusz “Filut,” Niesiemy plon, Lippstadt 1946, 404.648, bn . 16 Tomaszewski, Chleba naszego powszedniego, 167. 17 Ibid., 205. 18 I explore the carnivalesque atmosphere of liberation and the explosion of bodily experiences followed by the attempted normalization in my article, Nowak, “A Gloomy Carnival of Freedom.” 19 Koźniewski, Pamiętniki emigrantów, 1878–1958, 128.

292

Notes to pages 137–41

20 Tomaszewski, Chleba naszego powszedniego, 151; Nowakowski, Camp of All Saints, 144. 21 Horodyska, Doczekać świtu. 22 Kersten and Szarota, Wieś polska 1939–1948, 412–13. 23 Michalski, Obóz przy Sandstrasse, 258. 24 Polish speaking aid workers were highly sought after as the case of Charlotte Babinski illustrates. Stone, “The Politics of Removing Children.” 25 H.C. Givan, Deputy Director unrra Team 340a, Narrative Report for March 1946, 30 March 1946, Camp Neue Heimat, Braunau, Austria Mission: American Zone. Neue Heimat – Team 340a. Monthly Narrative Report, S-1494-0000-0353-00001, un . 26 Hulme, The Wild Place, 14. 27 Ibid., 24. 28 Iris Murdoch to David Hicks, 20 December 1945, Conradi, Iris Murdoch, 274. 29 Reinisch, “Old Wine in New Bottles?” 159. On the staff of American Polish War Relief and on the unrra ’s attempts to disallow former Polish liaison officers to regain their influence by becoming their personnel see: American Polish War Relief – Personnel, S-0416-0009-0010, un . 30 Tamara Pusłowska. Działalność zawodowa i społeczna, 2/1742/0/-/3, aan. 31 Distribution of Responsibilities of the Assembly Area’s Office Between unrra Staff and National Staff, a.xii.1/51c , Pism. 32 Poem “Wspomnienie,” by Tadeusz “Filut,” Niesiemy plon, Lippstadt 1946, 404.648, bn . 33 “Światło w ciemnościach,” Defilada, 19–26 December 1946, p. 1, 464/024, Pia . 34 “Zwróćmy naszemu życiu uśmiech,” Polonia, 7 April 1946, S-0436-00090002, un . 35 Zieliński, Gromada – to siła, 10. 36 Biuletyn, Dziennik Polski, 21 April 1945, 302/155, Pia . 37 Horodyska, Doczekać świtu, 201. 38 Ibid. 39 Betari, Pieskie rozwazania, 53–4. 40 Brzoza, “Od Miechowa do Coburga. Brygada Świętokrzyska Narodowych Sił Zbrojnych.” 41 Correspondence between Jerzy Tworkowski and Reverend Władysław Ćwiklik, 1949, 371/024, Pia . 42 Ibid.

Notes to pages 141–8

293

43 Ibid. 44 A. Burghardt, “Ostatnie na obczyźnie,” Na Obczyźnie, 20 April 1946, p. 3, 464/024, Pia . 45 Tadeusz Malec, “Zmartwychwstanie,” Na Obczyźnie, 20 April 1946, p. 1, 464/024, Pia . 46 Gawin, “Progressivism and Eugenic Thinking in Poland,” 178–80. 47 Józef Czapliński, “Na zakończenie roku szkolnego,” Świt Wolności, 30 June 1946, p. 3, 592/155, Pia . 48 Zahra, The Lost Children. 49 Ibid. 50 “Wychowawczyni narodu,” Jutrzenka, 14 June 1945, p. 2, 592/155, Pia . 51 Ibid. 52 Formula of the Girls Scouts “Emilia Plater” Team, Weiden, March 1946, 366/024, Pia . 53 Bartoszewska and Kaczmarek, Tak było. Z dziejów przymusowych robót w Niemczech 1940–1945, 236–7. 54 Betari, Pieskie rozwazania, 27. 55 Levi, If This Is a Man, 43. 56 Nowakowski, Camp of All Saints, 141. 57 Borowski, Poezje, 154. 58 Horodyska, Doczekać świtu, 144. 59 Tadeusz Borowski to Zofia Świdwińska, 6 October 1945, Munich, Borowski, Postal Indiscretions, 38–9. 60 Grądzki, Muzułman, 311. 61 Karol Poprzęcki (prawdziwe) vel Bogobowicz (wojenne), list do Marii Swobody z obozu w Lechowie, 22 July 1948, 379/024, Pia . 62 Wieviorka, The Era of the Witness, 44. 63 Kruk, The Taste of Fear, 138. 64 Akta Komitetu Opieki nad Grobami, 437/024, Pia . 65 Nowakowski, Camp of All Saints, 140. 66 Borowski, Poezje, 116. 67 Michalski, Obóz przy Sandstrasse, 19–20. 68 Borowski, Poezje, 139. 69 Ibid., 141. 70 Ryn and Kłodziński, “Na granicy życia i śmierci.” 71 Ibid., 194. 72 Ibid., 171, 184. 73 Tomaszewski, Chleba naszego powszedniego, 249. 74 Turner, The Ritual Process, 95. 75 Baum, “Helena B. Fedukowicz,” 215–18.

294

Notes to pages 149–54

76 Dr Helena Fedukowicz, “Przebieg Chorób Ocznych u dP ,” Kultura 1/18 (1949): 149–50. 77 Sprawozdanie z konferencji u Naczelnego Wodza w dniu 9 sierpnia 1945 roku, August 1945, Top Secret, p. 4, a.xii .1/27, Pism . 78 Polski Ośrodek Wojskowy, Sprawozdanie ogólne z opieki nad ludnością cywilną, 20 August 1945, a.xii .47/78e /p.II, Pism . 79 “Praca nad sobą,” Świt. Dwutygodnik, Hülchrath, no 3, 1 June 1945, P.31388 Cym A, bn . 80 Nowakowski, Camp of All Saints, 5. 81 Ibid., 14. 82 On unrra university see: Holian, “Displacement and the Post-War Reconstruction of Education.” 83 Wojciech Zaleski, “Społeczność wartownicza,” Kultura, 1950, 85. 84 Tomaszewski, Chleba naszego powszedniego, 236. 85 Zaleski, “Społeczność wartownicza,” 85. 86 Holian, Between National Socialism and Soviet Communism, 57. 87 “More than 1,000 unrra Health Specialists in Europe,” unrra Weekly Bulletin no 64, 27 October 1945, S-1253-0000-0450-00001, un . 88 Sterner, Gefangeni i dipisi. 89 Arciszewska, Ocaleni, 19. 90 Shapira, The War Inside. 91 “Głodowe racje wysiedleńców,” Biuletyn Prasowy, 15–25 May 1949, p. 4, 471/024, Pia . 92 Nowakowski, Camp of All Saints, 14. 93 List od Lwa Ewangelicznego, excerpt from Głos Polski, 380/024, Pia . The author might have chosen to mention the date 5 March because some rumours, reproduced in the Polish press, foresaw the end of the world or the outbreak of the war to happen on or around this date. Report on Warsaw Newspapers, 20 May 1946, S-1254-0000-0072-00001, un . 94 Borowski, Postal Indiscretions, 104. 95 Quoted in Chwastyk-Kowalczyk, Katyń, 144. 96 Brzoza, Pilch, and Rojek, Działalność społeczna, 251. 97 “Samorząd Polaków w Niemczech” (quotation from the Polish weekly Defilada), Orzeł Biały, 25 November 1945, 5. 98 Person, Dipisi, 161, 164–5. 99 Michalski, Obóz przy Sandstrasse, 9. 100 Nowakowski, Camp of All Saints, 27. 101 Tomaszewski, Chleba naszego powszedniego, 193. 102 Sterner, Gefangen i dipisi, 189–90.

Notes to pages 154–9

295

103 Ibid. 104 “Wolność uczuć, myśli i dążeń,” Biuletyn Prasowy, 15 June 1948, 471/024, Pia . 105 Borowski, Postal Indiscretions, 104. 106 Pf. Marian Iwański, Chronicle of Polish Life in Regensburg 1945–48. Pf. Marian Iwański, Fotoalbum des Regensburger Dekanats 1945. Polish church records from Maczków (Haren an der Ems) 1945–48 (originals in the archive at the St Martinus Catholic rectory in Haren, the Martin Opitz Library in Herne), Porta Polonica. 107 Edward Lubowiecki, Odpis. Stan moralny ludności polskiej w Niemczech, 312/PSdP /519/49, Pism . 108 Polish Chief Chaplain R.-C. British Zone, Memo, 10 September 1947, fo1052/176, tna. 109 Edward Lubowiecki, Odpis. Stan moralny ludności polskiej w Niemczech, 312/PsdP /519/49, Pism . 110 W. Miklaszewicz, Wesela w obozie Admontu, 256/113, Pia . 111 “Rachunek sumienia,” Wczoraj i jutro, r.2, no 12, 6 April 1946, Bergedorf b/Hamburg, P.31256 Cym A, bn . 112 Extract from the Intelligence Organization Allied Commission for Austria, 12 April 1946, wo 204/5783, tna . 113 unrra , Psychological Problems of Displaced Persons, London, June 1945. 114 Screenplay, Nativity play, Korespondencja, druki ulotne, 366/024, Pia . 115 Eryk Zieliński, “Feniks z popiołów,” Biuletyn Informacyjny Spraw Kulturalnych i Wydawniczych, February 1946, p. 1, 463/024, Pia . 116 “Tylko pierwszy krok jest trudny,” Biuletyn. Tygodnik Kół Zawodowych przy Wydziale Pracy Związku Polaków w Lubece, 15 January 1946, p. 1, 463/024, Pia . 117 “Przymusowe Wychodźctwo [sic] Polskie,” Nasze Myśli, 11 November 1945, p. 4, 832/155, Pia . The author was drawing on and quoting from Andrzej Brzoza, O powołaniu naszego pokolenia, Italy: Nakł. Oddziału Kultury i Prasy 2. Korpusu, 1945. 118 “Z wędrówki po obozach wysiedleńców,” Nasza Emigracja, 8 September 1951, p.4, 464/024, Pia . 119 P. Kołoszyc, “Nasze cele,” Niesiemy plon, Lippstadt 1946, 5–9, 404.648, bn . 120 “Od redakcji,” Na szlaku, 15 May 1948, p. 1, 823/155, Pia . 121 “Dwa światopoglądy,” Na szlaku, 15 May 1948, p. 5, 823/155, Pia . “Wczoraj, dziś i jutro,” Na szlaku, 15 June 1948, p. 1, 823/155, Pia .

296

Notes to pages 161–6

c h aPt e r s i x 1 William Van Ark to Members of the Standing Committee on Immigration and Labour, Ottawa, p. 2, 0437-28-06, un . 2 Betari, Pieskie rozwazania, 65. 3 Betts, Ruin and Renewal, 2–5, 39–50. 4 Valerio, Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities, 1–13, 148–50. 5 Ciancia, On Civilization’s Edge, 10–17, 53–5. 6 Special Release #116, Victory Clothing Collection, Lawrence Beller, National Publicity Director, S-1268-0000-0100-00001, un . 7 Betts, Ruin and Renewal, 3. 8 unrra , Psychological Problems of Displaced Persons, London, June 1945, p. 1. 9 “More than 1,000 unrra Health Specialists in Europe,” unrra Weekly Bulletin no. 64, 27 October 1945, S-1253-0000-0450-00001, un . 10 “The Role of the Private Youth-Serving Organizations in Post War Relief and Rehabilitation, Voluntary Agencies,” 7 December 1943, S-12670000-0021-0000, un . 11 Incoming Telegram, Margolin to Cummings and Salisbury, 2 January 1946, S-1174-0000-0059-00001, un . 12 unrra , Psychological Problems of Displaced Persons, London, June 1945, p. 1. 13 Reinisch, The Perils of Peace. 14 Special Release #117. Suggested Editorial. National Clothing Collection, S-1268-0000-0100-00001, un . 15 E. Meyers, Health Monthly Narrative Report – November, December 1948, January 1949, 22 February 1949, p. 10, aj 43/328, iro , anf . 16 Głos Warszawy. Pismo Obozu Polskiego “Warszawa,” Solingen, 15 September 1946, Pia . 17 Betari, Pieskie rozwazania, 8. 18 Borowski, Postal Indiscretions, 105. 19 Henryk Kaszuba-Dąbrowski, Sprawozdanie dla Szefa Sztabu Głównego, 26 June 1946, a.xii .47/54, Pism . 20 Kruk, The Taste of Fear, 139. 21 Horodyska, Doczekać świtu. 22 Korespondencja, druki ulotne, 366/024, Pia . 23 Salvatici, “‘Help the People to Help Themselves.’” 24 Holborn, iro , Annex 1, International personnel (1 July 1947–30 September 1953), 99.

Notes to pages 166–71

297

25 Holborn, iro , Annex 2 iro staff members, by nationality, as of 31 October 1949, 100. 26 Kowalczyk, Szkolnictwo polskie, 3. 27 Notatka z rozmowy Pana Ministra z Ambasadorem RP przy Watykanie, 16 March 1945, A.44.304/2, Pism . 28 Zjednoczenie Polskiego Uchodźstwa Wojennego do Ks. Kardynała Augusta Hlonda, 7 January 1948, Bruxelles, A.44.304/2, Pism . 29 Administrative Order No 177, unrra US Zone Headquarters, Heidelberg, 16 October 1946, S-1450-0000-0153-00001, un . 30 Health Services for dP s, Draft, 4 January 1947, S-1253-0000-045000001, un . 31 “Health is life,” Weekly Camp Kufstein, unrra Team 199, vol. 2, no 40, June 1946, S-1253-0000-0039-00001, un . 32 Eric Townsend, “Memorandum on the control of Tuberculosis amongst dPs in the British Zone, Germany, July 1946.” 33 “10 Polish Nurses Graduate From Little Drutte Refresher Course,” unrra Team News, vol. 1, no 24, 1 December 1946, S-1940-0001-0012-00001, un. 34 Jan Barański, Memoriał w sprawie pomocy Polakom w Niemczech, do prezydium Rady Ministrów w Londynie, 246/a.xii .54/5, Pism . 35 Ks. Dr ppl. Stanisław Forys, Dziekan W.P. Kompanie Wartownicze, Apel do Kompani Wartowniczych, 355/024, Pia . 36 “Zdrowie dzieci,” Biuletyn Informacyjny, 25 August 1947, 463/024 Pia . 37 Ibid. 38 Grossmann, Jews, Germans, and Allies, 202. 39 “Nasi milusińscy przy pracy,” Głos Warszawy, 464/024, 15 September 1946, Pia . 40 Biuletyn Obozowy, Świt Wolności, 23 March 1947 and 23–25 December 1945, 598/155, Pia . 41 Mikołaj Minkiewicz, Pielęgnowanie niemowląt w obrazkach (Lippstadt, 1946), S-0406-0034-11, un . Grzybowska, “Powstanie i działalność Zrzeszenia Białoruskich Lekarzy na Obczyźnie,” 107. 42 Horodyska, Doczekać świtu, 195–6. 43 Allied Military Courts dealt with multiple cases like that of, for example, Leon C. who received a sentence of nine months in prison for wearing a US army uniform, Military Government Court Case Record, 1948, RG466/1142598, nara . 44 Kaszuba-Dąbrowski, Sprawozdanie, a.xii .47/54, Pism . 45 Sterner, Gefangeni i dipisi, 148.

298 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68

Notes to pages 171–5

Michalski, Obóz przy Sandstrasse, 243. Horodyska, Doczekać świtu, 170–1. Ibid., 176. Henryk Kaszuba-Dąbrowski, Sprawozdanie dla Szefa Sztabu Głównego, 26 June 1946, a.xii .47/54, Pism . Medical Conference held on 28 November 1945, Medical Meetings, 1945–1948, fo 1052/549, tna . Hulme, The Wild Place. Sketch of Babenhausen Camp, S-0414-0001-16, un . J. Balfour Kirk, British Zone, Report on Trip, 13 September 1945, S-0414-0001-16, un . Biuletyn Prasowy Zjednoczenia Polskiego, Hanover, 5 January 1949, 471/024, Pia . Monthly Health Reports, French Zone, unrra Austrian Mission, S-14940000-0094-00001, un . Monthly Health Report, Landeck, Austria, 29 June 1946, S-1494-00000094-00001, un . Monthly Health Report, Zone French, Area Tyrol-Innsbruck, Austria, Camp Landeck, 30 November 1946, S-1494-0000-0094-00001, un . Medical Conference Held on 28 November 1945, Medical Meetings, FO 1052/549, tna . Monthly Health Report, Volksgarten, 31 January 1947, S-1494-00000275-00001, un . Monthly Health Report, Volksgarten, 31 December 1946, S-1494-00000275-00001, un . Health Services for dP s, Draft, 4 January 1947, S-1253-0000-045000001, un . Services to Displaced Persons. Health, 1947, S-1253-0000-0450-00001, un. [Ed. Sztab Specjalny I Dywizji Pancernej], 1. Dywizja Pancerna na okupacji pomaga Polakom, Haren, 1947, 27, 129.527, bn . Hellbrunn.Team 316, Medical Reports, S-1510-0000-0012-00001, un . Health Services for dP s, Draft, 4 January 1947, S-1253-0000-045000001, un . Monthly Health Report from Camp Itzling, Zone Salzburg, March 1946, S-1494-0000-0296-00001, un . Monthly Health Report, Zone French, Austria, Area Tirol, Camp Landeck, 2 May 1946, S-1494-0000-0094-00001, un . Camp Kufstein Weekly, unrra Team 1999, vol. 2, no 36, 7 May 1946, p. 1, S-1253-0000-0039-00001, un .

Notes to pages 175–8

299

69 Polskie Nowiny Obozowe, Salzburg, no 14, 29 November 1945, S-15100000-0033-00003, un . 70 Miss Brydone, Public Health Nursing Officer, Narrative Report for Month of December 1946 of Camp Landeck, 30 December 1946, S-1494-00000141-00001, un . 71 “Health is life,” Camp Kufstein Weekly, unrra Team 199, vol. 2, no 40, June 1946, S-1253-0000-0039-00001, un . 72 Monthly Health Report (dP ), Austria, Landeck, 31 October 1946, p. 1, S-1494-0000-0141-00001, un . 73 Monthly Health Report from Camp Bindermichl, Zone American Upper Austria, January 1947, S-1494-0000-0296-00001, un . 74 Nasaw, The Last Million, 117, 120. 75 Sprawozdanie, 1946, Komitet Społeczny Żołnierzy II Korpusu we Włoszech: korespondencja i przydziały darów Żołnierzy II Korpusu do obozów w Niemczech, 365/024, Pia . 76 Bakis, “The So-Called dP -Apathy.” 77 Incoming Telegram, Smith to Salisbury, 15 October 1945, S-1253-00000450-00001, un . 78 “Health is life,” Camp Kufstein Weekly, unrra Team 199, vol. 2, no 40, June 1946, S-1253-0000-0039-00001, un . 79 Services to Displaced Persons, Health, October 1946, Germany, S-12530000-0450-00001, un . 80 Germany, July 1946, Nutrition, British zone, S-1253-0000-0450-00001, un . 81 Excerpt from unrra Report, April 1947, S-1253-0000-0448-00001, un. 82 Murawski, Budowa i obsługa samochodu. Ogólna uprawa roślin, 1.418.130 A, bn . Raubo, Podręcznik do racjonalnej hodowli kur. Lindner, 1000 słów dla codziennego użytku, 732.607 A, bn . The Polish Refugee Union in Hanover reprinted a series of books on carpentry and woodworking, including Kuśmierski, Materjałoznawstwo rzemiosł drzewnych, 529.771 A, bn . 83 Lindner, Elektryk-instalator, 756.169 A, bn . 84 Szkoła Techniczna w Esslingen, Sprawozdania z laboratorium. 85 Excerpt from Narrative Report, July 1946, S-1253-0000-0448-00001, un. 86 Ostatni Etap. Pismo polskiego obozu Wentorf, 14 April 1946, bn . 87 Vocational Training in the British Zone, dP Monthly Report, 31 August 1946, S-1253-0000-0448-00001, un . 88 Excerpt from the dP Monthly Report, 31 May 1947, S-1253-0000-044800001, un .

300

Notes to pages 178–83

89 Welfare Division Bulletin, no 7, September 1945, S-1404-0000-000200003, un . 90 P.T. Sobolewski, “Z naszego życia na obczyźnie,” Wiadomości Polskie, Fryburg, R. 2, nr 41, 27 October 1946, p. 1, P.40602 Chr A, bn . 91 B. Family Application for iro Assistance, 22 March 1948, 78893390/its Digital Archive, aa . 92 N. Family Application for iro Assistance, 30 October 1947, 79537852/ its Digital Archive, aa. 93 Kowalczyk, Szkolnictwo polskie, 131. 94 J.A. to Władysław Ćwiklik, 23 October 1949, 249/024, Pia . 95 Niesiemy Plon, Lippstadt 1946, 1, 404.648, bn . Jaroszyńska-Kirchmann, “Patriotism, Responsibility, and the Cold War.” 96 “Z życia ośrodków polskich w Niemczech. Grafneschau kolo Murnau,” Byle Prędzej, v. 4, no 96/210/648, 25 September 1946, P.520168 Chr A, bn. 97 “Occupational Physiotherapy Offered To Tuberculous dP s,” unrra Team News, vol. 1, no 24, 1 December 1946, S-1940-0001-0012-00001, un. 98 Michalski, Obóz przy Sandstrasse, 20. 99 Biuletyn Informacyjny, 15 September 1947, 463/024, Pia . 100 Humbert, “‘When Most Relief Workers Had Never Heard of Freud.’” 101 Repatriation of Polish dP s, FO1032/821, tna . 102 Borowski, Poezje, 184. 103 Borowski, Postal Indiscretions, 109. 104 Zieliński, Gromada, 39. 105 Report on Visit to hohne Camp, 18 December 1945, FO1052/336, tna. 106 F.C. Baker, Proposed Scheme: Help Polish Displaced Persons to Help Themselves, co 823/139, tna . 107 Chief of Finance Division to Office of the Deputy Military Governor, Hamburg, 26 April 1946, FO/1032/821, tna . 108 Jaroszyńska-Kirchmann, The Exile Mission, 90–1. 109 Seipp, Strangers in the Wild Place, 99. 110 Józef B., Military Government Court Case Record, 1948, RG466/1142598, nara . Tomaszewski, Chleba naszego powszedniego, 171. 111 Muszyński, “The Polish Guards Companies.” 112 Zaleski, “Społeczność wartownicza,” 91. 113 Tomaszewski, Chleba naszego powszedniego, 191.

Notes to pages 183–9

301

114 Mieczysław Świrski, “Młodzież i harcerstwo,” Harcerz Ziemi Brunswickiej. Jednodniówka Okręgu Brunswick Południe, September 1945, 366/024, Pia . 115 “Powstanie, cele i zadania Klubu Sportowego ‘Orzeł’ w Ośrodku Polskim w Augsburgu,” Polonia, no 11, 19 July 1946, S-0436-0009-02, un . 116 Byle Prędzej, v. 4, no 96/210/648, 25 September 1946, P.520168 Chr A, bn. 117 J. Litterer, Petition for Review, 17 August 1945, Antoni B., FO1060/1588, tna. 118 J. Litterer, Petition for Review, Jan G, FO1060/1644, tna . 119 Tomaszewski, Chleba naszego powszedniego, 176. 120 “Gdy trwoga minęła,” Głos Polski, p. 4, f.464/024, Pia . 121 Stanisław Czapliński, “Polacy w dzisiejszej Francji,” Orzeł Biały, 24 June 1945, p. 10. 122 “Skutki małego nieporozumienia,” Głos Warszawy. Pismo Obozu Polskiego “Warszawa,” Solingen, 15 September 1946, 464/024, Pia . 123 “Uczmy się,” Biuletyn Informacyjny, 25 August 1947, p. 1, 463/024, Pia . 124 Martha Bascombe, Chief Child Welfare Specialist, unrra , International Study Weeks for Child Victims of the War, Zurich, 1945, p.1, Martha Branscombe’s Correspondence, S-1259-0000-0007, un . 125 Taylor, In the Children’s Best Interests. 126 Polish Orphan Children for Eire, FO/945-488, tna . 127 Eugene Buczkowski, Report on the Activities of American Relief for Poland in Western Europe, p. 9, received 8 August 1946, 17/703, Pma . 128 Zahra, The Lost Children, 20–2. 129 Do Rady Polonii Amerykańskiej na ręce p. Dr C Szulczewskiego, Monachium-Pasing, Pma . 130 It resulted in a serious conflict with unrra supporting the pro-repatriation teacher organization. See more: Educational Facilities for dP s, S-1450-0000-0244-00001, un . 131 “Podwieczorek w naszej szkole,” Nasza Gazeta, p. 2, no 27, 6 March 1946, P.31704 Cym A, bn . 132 Kowalczyk, Szkolnictwo polskie, 133–4. 133 Naród i Praca. Tygodnik Informacyjny Polskich Związków Zawodowych, nr 26, Hanover, 4 November 1946, P.31043 Chr A, bn . 134 “Dzień w obozie Y.M.C.A,” Biuletyn Informacyjny, 25 August 1947, 463/024, Pia . 135 Stanisława Szafrański, Sprawozdanie za okres 5.12.1944 – 25.6.1946, a.xii.47/54, Pism.

302 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160

161 162 163

Notes to pages 189–94

Arciszewska, Ocaleni, 44. Ibid., 15. Stauter-Halsted, The Devil’s Chain, 213–35. Arciszewska, Ocaleni, 51–3. Ibid., 17. Ibid., 49. Ibid., 51–2. Stauter-Halsted, The Devil’s Chain, 212. Arciszewska, Ocaleni, 61. Ibid., 38. Berowski, “zhP w Niemczech,” 17. Horodyska, Doczekać świtu, 179. Tadeusz Kuziemski to Maria Swoboda, Enns, 4 November 1948, 379/024, Pia. Ibid. unrra Photography, Germany – Children and refugees, S-0800-34-1, un. Świt Wolności, Ingolstadt, 10 February 1946, 598/155, Pia . Ppor. Czaplinski, “Do Rozważenia Paniom,” Świt Wolności, Ingolstadt, 2 February 1946, 598/155, Pia . “Sprawy kobiece,” Echo Polskie, 3 May 1946, p. 5, 464/024, Pia . Protokół nr 3. Odpis, 380/024, Pia . Protokół zjazdu przedstawicieli środowisk polskich, 312/PsdP /519/89, Pism. Zieliński, Świat Janeczki, 9, 47. Grossmann, Jews, Germans, and Allies, 194–5. “Health is Life,” Weekly Camp Kufstein, unrra Team 199, vol. 2, no 40, June 1946, S-1253-0000-0039-00001, un . Child Search – 77– Children’s Home – Loccum, S-0409-0007-07, un . Lechimski and Krusell, Moje dziecko. Higiena, dietetyka, wychowanie. Wskazówki dla kobiet ciężarnych i młodych matek, Zebrali materjał i przygotowali do druku: Dr J. Michel-Lechimski, wraz z p. Ellen Krusell, oficer lekarz i siostra unrra , Wydawnictwo Polskiego Związku Wychodźctwa [sic] Przymusowego w Hanowerze, 1946, 1.463.643 A, bn. Ibid., 28. Monthly Health Report, Austria, French, Camp Landeck, 29 June 1946, S-1494-0000-0094-00001, un . Dr Struther, unrra Report on Field Survey of Health of D.P. Children, p. 8, S-0409-0022-0005, un .

Notes to pages 194–201

303

164 Dr Cooney to Chief Medical Officer, Report on Medical Inspection Tour U.S. Zone, 19–31 August, 1946, p. 7, S-0414-0001-16, un . 165 unrra dP Camp, Kufstein, Narrative Report for the Month of September, 1946, S-1494-0000-0146-00001, un . 166 Dr Baras, Health Policy, 29 July 1945, p. 2, S-0414-0001-0013, un . 167 Dr Struther, unrra Report on Field Survey of Health of D.P. Children, p. 8, S-04090022-0005, un . 168 Haushofer, “The ‘Contaminating Agent,’” 1001. 169 F.E. Morgan, Chief of Operations, Germany, Narrative Report, 16 July 1946, p. 29, S-1450-0000-0025-00002, un . 170 Medical Conference Held on 28 November 1945, Medical Meetings, FO 1052/549, tna . 171 Janina G., Ewelina W., Military Government Court Case Record, 1946, FO1060/1650, tna . 172 Hulme, The Wild Place, 78–9. 173 Ks. Dr ppl. Stanisław Forys, Dziekan W.P. Kompanie Wartownicze, Apel do Kompani Wartowniczych, 355/024, Pia . 174 Grossmann, Jews, Germans, and Allies, 203. 175 Zahra, The Lost Children, 95.

c h aP t e r s e ve n 1 Administrative Order No 177, unrra US Zone Headquarters, Heidelberg, 16 October 1946, S-1450-0000-0153-00001, un . 2 Copy. Secret. H. Malhomme, Biuro Szefa Oficerów Łącznikowych przy shaef, do Szefa Oficerów Łącznikowych pułkownik J. Kaczmarek, 15 May 1945, Prm 179, Pism . 3 Malkki, “Refugees and Exile,” 515–18. 4 Proudfoot, European Refugees, 152–7, 207–23. 5 Hilton, “Pawns on a Chessboard?,” 91–2. 6 Kersten, “Repatriacja Polaków”; Kersten, Repatriacja ludności. 7 Zjednoczenie Polskie, Biuletyn Infromacyjny, no 15, 1 June 1947, 471/024, Pia . 8 Borowski, Postal Indiscretions, 99. 9 Ibid., 99. 10 On Osnabrück, Zjednoczenie Polskie, Zrzeszenie Organizacji Zawodowych w Lubece, Lübeck, 6 April 1946, a.xii , 47/78 E cz.1, Pism . 11 Prażmowska, Civil War in Poland. 12 Marian Malinowski, “W pocztowej służbie,” in Białecki ed., Drogi Powrotu, 171.

304 13 14 15 16 17 18

19 20 21 22 23

24 25 26 27 28

29

30 31 32 33

34

Notes to pages 201–6

Zaremba, Wielka Trwoga. Kersten, The Establishment of Communist Rule in Poland, 163–5. Wróbel, Na rozdrożu historii, 587. Ibid., 583. Ibid., 601–5. Top Secret, Report, Perlikowski do Z-cy Naczelnika Wydziału VI Dep. I-go Kpt. Gutowskiego, Warsaw 25 March 195[0], bu 00231/43/t.3, Archive of the Institute of National Remembrance (hereafter iPn ), Warsaw. Wróbel, Na rozdrożu historii, 601–5. Bernstein, “Ambiguous Homecoming.” Wróbel, Na rozdrożu historii, 566. Instrukcja wypłat zapomóg pieniężnych – doraźnych, Pur Oddział Miejski w Łodzi, mikrofilm 7153/2, State Archives in Łódź. Exhibit B, unrra Translation of H.P. “The Return of a Wanderer,” Dziennik Ludowy, Warsaw, 17 March 1946, S-1254-0000-0072-00001, un. unrra, Incoming Cable, Warsaw to Arolsen, Attention: Miss Gifford, 31 December 1946, S-1450-0000-0153-00001, un . unrra, Incoming Cable, Warsaw to Arolsen, Attention: Miss Gifford, 19 December 1946, S-1450-0000-0153-00001, un . Repatriates in Lauf to Repatriant, Lauf, 2 March 1949, 2/522/0/-/546, aan. Knapton, “‘There is No Such Thing as an Unrepatriable Pole,’” 697–9. Punctuation adjusted. Outgoing cable, unrra press, Austria, signed Mr R.F. Hoddinott, Distribution Pr Officer, Chief Economist, 12 November 1946, S-1492-0000-0098-00001, un . T.R. Bruskin, Chief, Office of Public Information, to Chief of Operations, Report on Polish Newspapers in dP Camps, 23 May 1946, S-1254-00000072-00001, un . Administrative Order No 177, unrra US Zone Headquarters, Heidelberg, 16 October 1946, S-1450-0000-0153-00001, un . William J. Holman, Area Employment Officer to Team Director, Copy, 16 October 1946, a.xii .47/61, Pism . Knapton, “There is No Such Thing,” 690–5. Miss Odette Despeigne, Zone Repatriation Officer Report on Propaganda Campaign in Favour of Spring Programme for Repatriation of dP s of All Nationalities, Haslach, 11 May 1947, S-1450-0000-0153-00001, un . Extracts from a Report on a Survey on Polish Newspapers, May 1946, S-1254-0000-0072-0000, un .

Notes to pages 206–11

305

35 Quoted in Reczyńska, “Polonia and Polish Emigration in Polish Communist Propaganda,” 91. 36 Kersten, Repatriacja ludności, 16; Kersten, “Repatriacja Polaków.” 37 Leo Fuller, Repatriation Publicity Material, 3 June 1947, S-0410-00020001, un . 38 Proklamacja do wszystkich Polaków w Niemczech od Prezesa Rady Ministrów Edwarda Osóbki-Morawskiego, Warsaw, September 1946, S-0421-0043-0005, un . 39 Miss Odette Despeigne, Zone Repatriation Officer, Report on Propaganda Campaign in Favour of Spring Programme for Repatriation of dP s of All Nationalities, Haslach, 11 May 1947, p. 4, S-1450-0000-0153-00001, un. 40 Roland Berger, Contact between Displaced Poles and Poland, 27 November 1946, S-1394-0000-0052, un . 41 Y. Romain, Report on visit to Polish School Imbshausen, 28 May 1947, S-0409-0007-0016, un . 42 Extract from a Report on a Survey of Polish Newspapers, Attachment 11, Annex B, Germany, May 1946, S-1254-0000-0072-00001, un . 43 Karol H. to Repatriant, 3 January 1948, 2/522/0/-/546, aan , Warsaw. 44 Droga do Ojczyzny: Misja unrry nad Wysiedleńcami, 14 November 1946, Germany, P.36794 Chr A, bn . 45 Maurice Frink, “Food, Jobs, Farms, Homes, And Schools Await Repatriated Poles in Homeland,” unrra Team News, Germany, vol. 1, no. 22, 1 November 1946, S-1253-0000-0417-00002, un . 46 “Poland Provides Farm Lands for Repatriated dP s,” unrra Team News, Germany, vol. 1, no. 22, 1 November 1946, S-1253-0000-0417-00002, un. 47 J.H. Whiting, Zone Director, unrra US Zone Headquarters, Heidelberg, Administrative Order No 177, 16 October 1946, S-1450-0000-015300001, un . 48 G. Drake-Brokman, Polish Repatriation, Landstuhl, 16 September 1945, p. 3, S-0401-0043-0006, un . 49 Extracts from a Report on a Survey on Polish Newspapers, May 1946, 1, S-1254-0000-0072-00001, un . 50 Repatriation of Polish dP s, FO 1032/821, tna . 51 Raport sytuacyjny, 18 June 1946, a.xii .47/78e /p.II, Pism . 52 Bolesław J., 1949, 7922376/its Digital Archive, aa . 53 Wyman, Europe’s Displaced Persons, 71. 54 “What Every Returning Citizen Should Know,” 0437-0024-0012, un .

306

Notes to pages 212–18

55 Ankieta repatriacyjna unrra , Rheine, 23 May 1946, a.xii .47/78e /p.II, Pism. 56 Holian, Between National Socialism and Soviet Communism, 87. 57 Sub-collection 3.2.1.1/its Digital Archive, aa . 58 Ibid. 59 Witold R., 1949, 3.2.1.2/80480359/its Digital Archive, aa . 60 Holian, Between National Socialism and Soviet Communism, 87–8; Holian, “Anticommunism in the Streets,” 1. 61 Bronisław A., Decision of the Review Board, iro , 31 May 1948, 78887324/its Digital Archive, aa . 62 Adjutant H. Duman, Objectional Article in the Woche, 23 March 1947, S-1309-0000-0030, un . 63 Barański, Drapieżny świat, 127. 64 Michalski, Obóz przy Sandstrasse; Sterner, Gefangeni; Borowski, Poezje. 65 Antoni Caputa, “W Niemczech po wyzwoleniu,” Z Pietrzykowic w szeroki świat. 66 Józef I. to acrPdP , 10 December 1949, 241/84, ihrca . 67 Punctuation adjusted and double words removed. Stefan Czyżewski, 8 April 1998, RG-50.549.02*0023P. 62, ushmm . 68 Franciszka S., 24 July 1947, 2/522/0/-/146, aan . 69 Alicja F., 1947, 2/522/0/-/146, aan . 70 Jerzy M., 1949, 6.3.2.1:84377028/its Digital Archive, aa . 71 Child Search: Jan K., 1950, 6.3.2.1/84298951/its Digital Archive, aa . 72 Child Search: Helena and Rozalia Z., 1946, 6.3.2.1/84586694/its Digital Archive, aa . 73 J. Bieszk, Repatriation of Polish Children, 19 August 1946, S-1492-00000276, un . 74 Józef Wielawski, III report on the psychiatric survey of Polish insanes [sic], 10 July 1946, p.2; Ian MacKay, Polish Mental Patients to Ilten Hospital, 21 August 1946, S-0409-0022-0006, un . 75 R. Coigny, Director of Health, From Health Division, Geneva to Chief Medical Officer, British zone, Chronic Sick, 16 September 1947, aj/43/328, iro, anf. 76 “Confinement, Repatriation and Deportation of United Nations Displaced Persons in the US Zone of Germany Convicted by Military Government Courts,” p. 3, RG466/ 1712489/7, nara . 77 Stanisław S. to the editor of Repatriant, Nienburg, 25 February 1949, 2/522/0/-/546, aan . 78 Stanisław Z. to the editor of Repatriant, France, 8 April 1949, 2/522/0//546, aan .

Notes to pages 218–24

307

79 Karol H., to the editor of Repatriant, 3 January 1948, 2/522/0/-/546, aan. 80 Stanisław to the editor of Repatriant, 6 May 1948, 2/522/0/-/546, aan . 81 Gustaw M. to the editor of Repatriant, Giszowiec (near Katowice), 10 April 1949, 2/522/0/-/546, aan . 82 Krystyna S., “Kto do mnie napisze,” to the editor of Repatriant, Warszawa, 9 December 1947, 2/522/0/-/546, aan . 83 Koło Akademików Opolan w Poznaniu to the editor of Repatriant, 26 March 1949, 2/522/0/-/546, aan . 84 Związek Polaków w Niemczech, Okręg Łużyczki to the editor of Repatriant, Seftenberg, 23 April 1949, 2/522/0/-/546, aan . 85 Zygmunt Wojdała, Grupa Operacyjna ubP przy Pur w Dziedzicach do Wojw. Urz. Bezp. Publ. Naczelnika Wydz. 1-ego w Katowicach, Dziedzice, 29 May 1948, bu 01062 33 16, iPn . 86 Janusz Ś., Protokół przesłuchania świadka, by Zygmunt Wojdała, Dziedzice, 28 May 1948, bu 01062 33 16, iPn . 87 Wiktoria P., Protokół przesłuchania świadka, by Eugeniusz Hantke, Dziedzice, 28 May 1948, bu 01062 33 16, iPn . 88 Zygmunt Wojdała, Grupa Operacyjna ubP przy Pur w Dziedzicach do Wojw. Urz. Bezp. Publi Naczelnika Wydz. 1-ego w Katowicach, Dziedzice, 29 May 1948, BU 01062 33 16, iPn . 89 Marian Malinowski, “W pocztowej służbie,” in Białecki, Drogi Powrotu, 175. 90 Jerzy M., 1949, 6.3.2.1/84377028/its Digital Archive, aa . 91 Genowefa K., Protokół przesłuchania podejrzanego, 26 March 1948, bu 01062 33 16, iPn . 92 Incoming cablegram, Joseph McNarney, Frankfurt, Germany, to War Department, Courtesy copy for unrra , 9 March 1947, S-1304-00000259-00001, un . 93 Zaremba, Wielka Trwoga. 94 Borowski, Postal Indiscretions, 101.

c h aP t e r e i g h t 1 Fritz Protivinsky, Interview Report on Shao C., 20 June 1950, iro , 80935013/its Digital Archive, aa . 2 Maria and Shao C., ihrca . Maria and Shao C., 78992052/its Digital Archive, aa . 3 Johnson, “Click to Donate,” 1022. 4 Cohen, In War’s Wake, 106.

308 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33

34

Notes to pages 224–7

Humbert, Reinventing French Aid, 41. Cohen, In War’s Wake, 106. Ibid., 111. Balint, “Children Left Behind,” 19. Stanisław S. to Repatriant, Nienburg, 25 February 1949, 2/522/0/-/546, aan. Na straży, 14 January 1948, no 2, P.36802 Ch A, bn . Poster, Zjednoczenie Polskie, “Do Polaków na terenie okupacji brytyjskiej w Niemczech,” Hannover, 11 April 1949, 471/024, Pia . Zahra, The Great Departure, 8. Correspondence between Tadeusz de Julien and Polish dP Resettlement Committee, 245/84, ihrca . Neumann, “The Admission of European Refugees from East and South Asia,” 64. Persian, “‘Chifley Liked Them Blond,’” 89. Ibid., 92–3. Neumann, “The Admission of European Refugees from East and South Asia,” 71. Persian, “‘Chifley Liked Them Blond,’” 92. Ibid., 100. Ibid. Armstrong-Reid and Murray, Armies of Peace, 339. Ibid., 340. Ibid., 342. Nasaw, The Last Million, 308–9. Cohen, In War’s Wake, 110. Nasaw, The Last Million, 311. Blaszczyk, “The Resettlement of Polish Refugees,” 71–2; Knapton, “A Troublesome Nuisance,” 185. Knapton, “A Troublesome Nuisance,” 216; Davies and Ciechanowski, The Formation of the Polish Community. Cohen, In War’s Wake, 105. Bastos and Salles, “Polish Post-war Migration to Brazil.” Huhn and Rass, “The Post-World War II Resettlement of European Refugees in Venezuela,” 262. Nasaw, The Last Million, 347–8. Wanda W., Application for Emigration. Request for Assurance, War Relief Services. National Catholic Welfare Conference, Interviewed by Jerome Brentar, Munich, 26 November 1954, 244/84, ihrca . Filip and Nina A., 80892419/its Digital Archive, aa .

Notes to pages 227–34 35 36 37 38

39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62

309

Olgierd Ś., 80489845/its Digital Archive, aa . Sienkiewicz, Za chlebem, 1.469.123 A, bn . Valerio, Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities, 7. “Warunki Uruguwaju,” Naród i Praca. Tygodnik Informacyjny Polskich Związków Zawodowych, no 25, Hanover, 28 October 1946, p. 6, P.31043 Chr A, bn . Leon Rejewski, “Zagadnienia Emigracji,” Głos Polski, 7 April 1946, no 7, 464/024, Pia . Karta Praw Uchodźców, 386/024, Pia . W. Van Ark to members of the Standing Committee on Immigration and Labour, Ottawa, p. 2, 0437-00028-0006, un . Quoted in Cohen, In War’s Wake, 112. Marian Pawiński, “W roli emigranta,” in Pamiętniki imigrantów polskich w Kanadzie, vol. 2 (Toronto, 1977), 133. Stefan Nowicki, Memoriał Związku Rolników i Pracowników Rolnych, p. 1, 141/84, ihrca . “Do Polaków na terenie okupacji brytyjskiej w Niemczech!,” Biuletyn Prasowy, 11 April 1949, 471/024, Pia . Biuletyn Prasowy, 25 June–5 July 1949, p. 13, 471/024, Pia . Nasza emigracja, 23 February 1949, Ragensburg, no 7, Pia . Ibid. Caricature “A dP ’s way to usa ,” c. 1950, photograph 6327/6/151, Pia . “Szlakiem wysiedleńców-emigrantów,” Biuletyn Prasowy, 25 June–5 July 1949, p. 3, 471/024, Pia . Caputa, Z Pietrzykowic w szeroki świat. Punctuation adjusted and double words removed. Czyżewski, RG-50.549.02*0023P. 62, ushmm , p. 88. Biuletyn Prasowy, 15 February 1949, 471/024, Pia . Institutional Hard Core Data, Kazimierz K., 1951, 79365207/its Digital Archive, aa . Jan A. to US dP Commission in Wentorf, via iro Area Team Offices, 9 May 1950, 78879389/its Digital Archive, aa . Stanisława A., 66430179/its Digital Archive, aa . List otwarty, p. 1, 1/024, Pia . Joskowicz, “Romani Refugees and the Postwar Order,” 775–7. Balint, Destination Elsewhere, 22–3, 154–6. “Apel do Polonii amerykańskiej,” Nasza Emigracja, 10 February 1951, p. 1, 464/024, Pia . Helena W., 1947, 3.2.1.3/80882340/its Digital Archive, aa . Edward J., 1947, 3.2.1.1/79233556/its Digital Archive, aa .

310

Notes to pages 234–9

63 Tadeusz R., 1950, 3.2.1.1/79677847/its Digital Archive, aa . 64 Jan C., Recommendation for Placement, 80944405/its Digital Archive, aa. 65 Jan C., Placement data, 80944408/its Digital Archive, aa . 66 Liste der heimatlosen Ausländer, 70801043/its Digital Archive, aa . Jan C., 79010940/its Digital Archive, aa . 67 Zjednoczenie Polskie w Niemczech, Dezyderaty pod adresem iro , 16 March 1948, 125/84, ihrca . 68 Mieczysław Kalinowski, “Jak mogłaby nam pomóc Polonia Amerykańska w emigracji,” Nasza Emigracja, 10 February 1951, p. 5–6, 464/024, Pia . 69 Ibid. 70 Mira A., Decision of the Review Board, 80305566/its Digital Archive, aa . 71 Wolfgang W., Germany, to un , iro , Lake Success, New York, 19 August 1947, S-0472-0073-26-00001, un . 72 Baum, “Helena B. Fedukowicz,” 216–17. 73 Kazimierz Papée to Wincenty Tomek, Rome, 2 April 1948, A.44.249/4, Pism. 74 Parafia w Monachium. Korespondencja, 371/024, Pia . 75 Jaroszyńska, “The American Committee for Resettlement of Polish Displaced Persons,” 68–9. 76 Nowak, “‘To Reach the Lands of Freedom.’” 77 Czyżewski, p. 88, rg -50.549.02*0023P . 62, ushmm . 78 Printed Information Materials, Pac , 1948-1950, 10/115, ihrca . 79 Ibid. 80 Władysław G. to acrPdP , 3 November 1949, 237/84, ihrca . 81 Aleksander G. to acrPdP , 4 November 1949, Neustadt, 237/84, ihrca. 82 Stefan Nowicki to acrPdP , 27 December 1948, 144/84, ihrca . 83 “Na obczyźnie,” Biuletyn Informacyjny, 25 August 1947, p. 10, 463/024, Pia. 84 Reverend Jan Wojciechowski, the Polish Chief Chaplain and the director of Polish Caritas in the British Zone of Germany to acrPdP , 21 December 1948, 191/84, ihrca . 85 Reverend Jan Wojciechowski to acrPdP , Hanover, 11 March 1949, 191/84, ihrca . 86 Edward Plusdrak to Jan Wojciechowski, Chicago, 17 December 1948, 191/84, ihrca . 87 Reverend Jan Wojciechowski to acrPdP , Hanover, 191/84, ihrca . 88 Edward Plusdrak to Jan Wojciechowski, Chicago, 24 March 1948, 191/84, ihrca .

Notes to pages 240–5

311

89 Balint, Destination Elsewhere, 60. 90 Mieczysław Kalinowski, “Powracający z Belgii lub Holandii. Nowi uchodźcy,” Nasza Emigracja, 10 February 1951, p. 2, 464/024, Pia . 91 Jozef H. to acrPdP , 8 November 1949, 240/84, ihrca . 92 Reverend Jan Śliwowski’s letter to Helena Koniszewska, 20 February 1951, 244/84, ihrca . 93 Prezes Zawalicz-Mowiński, sPk , Okólnik nr 60, p. 5, 7/115, ihrca . 94 Biuletyn Prasowy, 15 February 1949, 471/024, Pia . 95 “Zawiedzione nadzieje nieślubnych matek,” Biuletyn Prasowy, 25 June–5 July 1949, 471/024, Pia . 96 Wanda W., Application for Emigration. Request for Assurance, War Relief Services. National Catholic Welfare Conference, Interviewed by Jerome Brentar, Munich, 26 November 1954, 244/84, ihrca . 97 Blair Gunther, Report of the American Committee for Resettlement of Polish dP s to the Pennsylvania Commission on Displaced Persons, 30 September 1949, p. 4 (Zgoda, acrPdP ), 1/158, ihrca . 98 Zahra, The Great Departure, 187. 99 Delegates news-letter, 1948, Pac , 10/115, ihrca . 100 Lee D., letter to acrPdP , 17 October 1949, 249/84, ihrca . 101 Marguriete D., letter to acrPdP , 16 December 1949, 203/84, ihrca . 102 Stanley C., letter to acrPdP , 5 December 1949, 247/84, ihrca . 103 Jenni D., letter to Edward Plusdrak, 1949, 247/84, ihrca . 104 Andrzej D., letter to acrPdP , 16 December 1949, 247/84, ihrca . 105 Czesław D., letter to acrPdP , 26 September 1949, Michigan, 248/84, ihrca. 106 The Polish Union to acrPdP , 25 January 1949, 142/84, ihrca . 107 Sprawozdanie Komitetu Rozsiedlenia Polskich Wysiedleńców. Za okres od powstania do dnia 31 października 1950, p. 7, 32/158, ihrca . 108 Bolesław G. to acrPdP , 23 November 1949, 237/84, ihrca . 109 Krystyna H. to acrPdP , 30 July 1949, 239/84, ihrca . 110 Displaced Persons A–Z, 703/5, 1, Pma . 111 J.J. to acrPdP , 16 September 1949, 243/84, ihrca . 112 Józef J. to acrPdP , 25 October 1949, 242/84, ihrca . 113 Maksymilian J. letter to acrPdP , 14 November 1949, 242/84, ihrca. 114 Obwód Szkolny Lubeka-Polska Szkoła Powszechna w dP Camp 1227 Neustadt- Holstein, 91/024, Pia . 115 Robert Rossbourough, Deputy Chief iro Buenos Aires, to Geneva, Returnees and Rejectees returning to Europe from overseas Countries of Resettlement, 2 June 1949, aj /43/457, iro , anf .

312

Notes to pages 245–51

116 L.M. Hacking, Division of Mandate and Reparations, to Dr V. Gross, Protection Division, Deportation from Australia, 14 July 1949, aj /43/457, iro, anf. 117 Statistics and Operational Reports Office, to Dr Kullman, Chief, Legal Division, Narrative Report for January and February 1949 from iro Ottawa, 16 March 1949, aj /43/457, iro , anf . 118 Irena M., aj /43/248, iro , anf . 119 Subject Joseph B., Deputy Minister of Labour to H. Allard, Chief of Mission (Canada), 24 April 1951, aj 43/248, iro , anf . 120 Tadeusz W. to Major H.R. Richardson, Director of Farm Help Service, Department of Agriculture and Immigration, 28 November 1950, aj 43/248, iro , anf . 121 G.H. Hamlin to Manitoba Sugar Company, 31 October 1950, aj 43/248, iro, anf. 122 Taduesz W., aj 43/248, iro , anf . 123 Jaroszyńska-Kirchmann, The Exile Mission, 106–7. 124 Holborn, The International Refugee Organization, 438. 125 Kochani nasi Rodacy ze Stanów Zjednoczonych, 12 January 1947, 1/703/5, Pma . 126 Zygmunt F. to Polish American Congress, 25 May 1954, 245/84, ihrca . 127 Bronisława J., RG466/1142598, nara . 128 Habielski, Życie społeczne i kulturalne emigracji, 222. 129 “What You Should Know,” Resettlement Bulletin distributed by the Polish Refugee Union, 17/024, Pia . 130 Correspondence, Polish Refugee Union, 17/24, Pia . 131 Zbigniew Abdank, “Jednak wracam z Kanady,” Kultura 7/8 (1952): 91. 132 Letter dated July 1952, in Kornat, Jerzy Giedroyc, Czesław Miłosz. Listy. 133 Koźniewski, Pamiętniki emigrantów, 129. 134 Pawiński, W roli emigranta, 132. 135 Brubaker, “The ‘Diaspora’ Diaspora.” 136 Safran, “Diasporas in Modern Societies.” 137 Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, “The Inter-generational Politics of ‘Travelling Memories’”; Lacroix and Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, “Refugee and Diaspora Memories.” 138 Zureik, “Theoretical and Methodological Considerations for the study of Palestinian Society,” 156. 139 Cohen, Global Diasporas, 2. 140 Lacroix and Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, “Refugee and Diaspora Memories,” 687. 141 Prof. W. Folkierski to Kazimierz Papée, London, 28 September 1948, A.44.249/4, Pism .

Notes to pages 251–60

313

142 Wyciąg z raportu z Brazylii, 15 September 1948, A.44.249/4, Pism . 143 “Los Dipisów na plantacjach cukrowych gorszy niż opiewają ich skargi i żale,” Newspaper clippings, 1949, ihrca . 144 Correspondence with dP s, 207/84, ihrca . 145 Kruk, The Taste of Fear, 207–8. 146 Nominal roll, 24 November 1956, 81759415/its Digital Archive, aa . 147 Letter, undated, Correspondence, circa 1940–1961, Wanda Ciecierska Papers, 2003.385.1, ushmm .

c onc l us i o n 1 Na straży. Weekly Newspaper of Voerde, 4, 7 January 1948, P .36802 Ch A, bn . 2 Walaszek, Reemigracja ze Stanów Zjednoczonych. 3 Antons, “The Nation in a Nutshell,” 209–10.

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Index

abortion, 35, 163, 195, 197, 241 Acheson, Dean, 46 alternative visions of the postwar order, 113–14, 117–23, 224, 235–6 American Committee for Resettlement of Polish Displaced Persons, the, 37, 71–2, 96–7, 126, 245, 238–40 Anders, Władysław, 11, 32, 39, 43, 52, 58, 60, 69, 70–1, 78, 180 anti-communism, 4, 7, 10, 13, 19, 40, 50, 71–3, 93, 132, 188, 238, 254, 257 antisemitism, 7–8, 27, 84 Arciszewska, Zofia, 189–90 Arciszewski, Tomasz, 53, 58 Association of Poles in Austria, 68, 101 Auschwitz, 9, 35, 81, 95, 135, 143 Barański, Jan, 168, 213 Betari, Józef, 68, 79, 94, 112–13, 116, 132, 140, 143, 162, 165 body identity, 133–7, 143–8, 165, 170–1, 259; and the figure of Muselmann, 134–7, 144–5, 291n3;

and the figure of Untermensch, 36, 42, 134, 136, 145, 154, 186 body politics, 28–30, 168–77 Bór-Komorowski, Tadeusz, 54–5 Borowski, Tadeusz, 68, 112, 143–5, 147, 152, 165, 181, 183, 199–200, 220 Buenos Aires, 245 Caritas, 66, 72, 126, 239 child refugees, 8–9, 16, 31–2, 34–5, 37–8, 51, 68–9, 80–2, 85, 99–101, 155, 194–5, 207; forced repatriation of, 215–17; as national treasure, 142, 182, 191, 196; re-educating and “recivilizing,” 151, 163–4, 168–9, 175, 178–80, 186–91 class alliances in building the emigration, 40–1, 53–6, 158–9, 161–2, 260–1 community making, 70–1, 73, 75, 80, 92, 98–100, 142–3, 168; and emotions, 75–80, 98–9, 106, 256; role of humour and satire in, 105– 6; and social divisions, 75–7, 93–7 cultural activities in dP camps, 69, 72, 77–8, 91–2, 99–100; music and

340

Index

dance, 105, 133, 152, 171–3, 188, 254; theatre, 92, 105 cultural anxieties: around degeneracy, 27, 29–30, 150–5, 164, 168, 183, 194, 258; around disrupted gender order, 186, 191–7, 258; around immorality, 141–2, 148–9, 151, 156, 189; around the upturned class order, 95–6, 249, 260 deportations: of Poles to the Soviet Union, 11, 32, 50, 33, 37; of Poles to the Third Reich, 8, 31–4, 37, 50, 57, 62 diaspora, 12, 25, 41, 72, 76, 189, 222, 224–5, 240–2, 247–52 displaced persons, 5, 61, 8–9, 37, 83, 268n23; Baltic, 83–4, 101, 269n41; Belarusian, 83–4, 103, 169; classified or considered as mentally ill, 87–8, 101, 148–9, 130–1, 150–3, 217, 234; in hospitals and sanatoria, 68, 87, 97–8, 140, 177, 248; internal divisions and hierarchies, 81–3; Jewish, 7–8, 12–13, 84–8, 153; outside of camps, 87–9, 248; Poleshuk, 176; Polish, 6–8, 19–21, 38–40, 66–7; Roma, 9, 81–2, 84–5, 248; Ruthenian, 155; Soviet, 37, 100; Tatar, 9, 85, 138; Ukrainian, 37, 83–6, 100, 155, 180, 241, 260 Displaced Persons Act of 1948, 71, 226 displacement: and critique of standardization of assistance, 66, 112–14, 119–20; as disempowering, 111–13; and downward social mobility, 39–40, 94–5, 237, 249; expertise in managing, 4, 6, 46–9,

73, 137, 156–7, 162–9, 176–7, 196, 224; material culture of, 15, 44, 102, 105, 122, 124, 166, 171–3, 231; medicalization of, 110–12, 169–77; and redefining ethnicity and class, 20, 75–6, 86, 95, 103, 107, 75–7, 103–5; and shrinking social differences, 75–7, 90–3, 260–1; and social and cultural advancement, 27–8, 39, 91–5, 97 dP camps, 10, 65–8, 72, 76, 90, 250; as a militarized space of care and control, 3, 10, 98–100, 169; as nationalizing spaces, 7, 83–6, 100, 255, 260; as sites of shared emotions, 76, 123; as a space of intervention, 67, 100, 169–70, 172–8, 196, 255; politicization of refugees in, 41, 74, 93, 106, 250, 255; population makeup of, 8, 36, 38, 61 dPs’ agency: claiming rights, 108–9, 126–32; and counternarratives, 114–15, 116–23; engaging with human rights discourse, 108, 115, 173; petitioning, 126–7, 130–2, 152, 206; and subversive language, 110, 114, 120–2, 132 ethnic Germans, 13, 30, 182; expulsion of, 4–5, 11, 62, 89, 201, 268n23 fears of World War III, 6, 52, 69–70, 141 Fedukowicz, Helena, 112, 148–9, 237 First Armoured Division, the, 8, 11, 34, 38, 52, 65–6, 73, 81, 90, 98 folk culture, 104–5, 117, 124, 188, 193, 260

Index Gawlina, Józef, 66, 167 gender, 13, 27, 33, 38, 91, 129–30, 142–3, 178, 186, 191–7, 258, 273n4; in resettlement practices, 240–2 gendered patriotism, 24, 142–3, 163, 191–2, 196 Giedroyc, Jerzy, 249 Gomułka, Władysław, 221 Grabowski, Stanisław, 56 Grot-Rowecki, Stefan, 54 Gypsy. See displaced persons: Roma hard-working immigrant, figure of, 94, 96, 225, 234, 238, 244–5 Haren. See Maczków health education, 162, 167, 172–7 Hlond, August, 56 Holy Cross Mountains Brigade, 140 Home Army, 33, 54, 69, 81, 90, 130, 135, 183, 211 Hrabyk, Klaudiusz, 221 humour and satire, 105–6, 108, 116–23, 132 illiteracy, 98, 156, 178–80, 186, 196, 208, 244 imperialist and orientalizing discourse, 114–15, 172, 225, 228 interwar Poland, 21–30, 53, 93, 97; repatriation to, 26; social problems in, 26–7, 53, 55, 93, 103 iro, 49–50, 78–9, 223–7 Jankowski, Jan Stanisław, 54 Katyń massacre, 32, 95, 152 Kopański, Stanisław, 51–2 Kuryluk, Jadwiga, 92 Levi, Primo, 143

341

liberation, 33–4, 43–4, 59, 61–2, 65–6, 73, 77, 134–6, 139–40, 143–4, 159, 213, 258 Lipski, Józef, 51 literature and readership, 95, 104–6, 152, 179–80, 187 Łódź, 9, 22, 57, 152, 215, 233, 236; as repatriation point, 202–3 loss of dP status, 87–8, 130, 110, 130–1 Lubowiecki, Edward, 154–6, 185, 190 Lwów, 6, 41, 62, 100–1, 215, 241, 250 Maczek, Stanisław, 11, 52, 60, 66, 81 Maczków, 11, 37–8, 66–7, 87, 89–90, 98 Malec, Tadeusz, 141–2 Mikołajczyk, Stanisław, 53, 59 Miłosz, Czesław, 249 moral panic around prostitution and crime, 88, 149, 151, 153–6, 180, 185, 194–5, 258 motherhood, 163, 191–7 Muslims, 9, 85 National Catholic Welfare Conference, 241–2, 252 national indifference, 14, 22, 28, 103, 255, 268n30 national mythologies in exile: and anti-communism, 7, 57, 106, 132, 188, 238; rebirth of the nation, 4, 19, 56–7, 158–60, 250; Second Great Emigration, 10, 19–21, 40–1, 96, 106, 108, 199, 222, 250 navigating identities, 100–3, 236–7 Operation Vistula, 201 Osnabrück, 154

342

Index

Osóbka-Morawski, Edward, 207 Papée, Kazimierz, 237 Pasierbiński, Tadeusz, 220 Pianowski, Mieczysław, 92 Piskorski, Florian, 71 Plusdrak, Edward, 239 Polish American Congress, 71–2, 115–16, 187, 226, 235, 238, 248 Polish American diaspora and dP s, 71–2, 74, 100–1, 224, 236–42, 251 Polish Committee of National Liberation, 26, 206 Polish government-in-exile, 5, 10, 33, 44–5; and care and control of dP s, 43, 50–3, 98–9, 168, 186; and class issues, 53–9; and dP s as potential soldiers, 52–3, 69–71, 99; and intelligence services, 56–9; and peasantry as a source of Polishness and core of the nation, 55–6, 257; and plans of social and political reforms, 53–4; and preparation of humanitarian intervention, 51–2; and reimagining future Poland, 53–5, 168; seeking legitimacy and support of the dP s, 51–3, 56, 198–9 Polish Guards companies, 81, 97, 168, 171, 182, 185 Polishness in exile: and making of the imagined community, 23–5, 105–6; redefining, 3, 9, 13–14, 16, 20, 75–7, 85–6, 103–5, 218; as umbrella identity, 9–10, 22–3, 41, 69, 76–7, 85, 236–7 Polish Repatriation Mission, 68, 131, 199, 206, 210, 216–17 Polish Resettlement Corps, 78 Polish Union in Germany, 65, 68, 167, 225, 235, 239, 243

Polish War Relief, 11, 71 Polonization, 5, 21–2, 28, 60–7, 83–4, 103, 155, 162, 180, 254 Potocka, Maria, 73 Poznań, 219 prisoners of war, 8, 33–4, 36, 38, 67, 89, 150–1, 165 Raczyński, Edward, 52 refugee history, 14 refugee regime, 20, 65, 84–5, 110, 267n6; bottom-up critique of, 110–15, 199–223, 230–5 refugees as writers of their own history, 80, 144–5, 271n62 refugee voices as polyphony, 16, 75, 108–10, 255, 270–1, 271n61, 272n68 rehabilitation, 48–9, 90, 108, 137–8, 161–2, 164, 187, 205, 229–30; gendered, 124, 178, 191–2, 197; medicalized approach to, 123–4, 134, 159–60; through work, 123–6 religious conversions, 9, 84, 100–1, 223 religious revival, 4, 14, 70, 99–100, 126, 141–3, 155–60, 185–6 repatriation, 5, 44, 51–2, 57, 77, 85, 198–215, 217–22; of dP s with mental disabilities, 217, 234; of prisoners, 217; of unaccompanied children, 85, 215–17 resettlement, 5, 49, 78–9, 223–42, 248, 252–3; to Australia, 225, 245; to Belgium and France, 78, 214, 224, 226, 240; to Brazil, 227, 247, 251; to Canada, 225–6, 230–3, 246–7; and Cold War, 6, 10, 49, 78, 223–4; critique of, 224, 235–6; to South America, 227, 229, 247; to the United Kingdom, 78, 224,

Index 226, 247–8; to the United States, 71–2, 94, 226, 238–9; to Venezuela, 227, 247 resistance strategies, 110, 116–23, 132, 257; and satire as social protest, 122–3 revival, rhetoric of postwar, 4, 134, 136, 138–45, 155, 158–60, 257 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 45 Rozmarek, Karol, 71, 115, 226 Rusinek, Zygmunt, 167 Schally, Kazimierz, 51, 67 Schiller, Leon, 92, 220 schooling, 28, 55, 163, 177–81, 183, 186–90 scouting, 70, 142–3, 183, 191–2 screening, 72, 86, 130, 148, 174, 231, 237–42 Second Polish Corps, the, 11, 59, 67–74, 99, 115, 183, 213; and cultural impact on dP s, 69–71, 99, 180, 213 Second Polish Republic. See interwar Poland sexual violence, 33, 35, 97 Seyda, Marian, 55 Sikorski, Władysław, 52 social class, 4–5, 13, 16–17, 20, 23, 26–7, 39–40, 49, 54–5, 57, 75–7, 81, 89–95, 103–7, 158–9, 177, 183, 186, 188, 190, 207, 225, 227, 248–9, 253–61 social workers. See welfare workers Soviet occupation zone of Germany, 51, 62, 144 Soviet Union, the, 6, 11, 19, 26, 30, 32–4, 49, 52, 62, 69, 70, 73, 78, 148, 213, 253; repressions against repatriates in, 201–2 sport, 28, 30, 140, 183, 188, 191–2

343

State Repatriation Office, 15, 199 Świetlik, Francis X, 71, 98 Swoboda, Maria, 101 Tarnowski, Adam, 52 Toegel, Stanisław, 119 Tuwim, Julian, 220–1

unrra, 4–5, 12, 45–9, 67 vaccination campaign, 174–5 venereal disease, 28, 60, 155, 163, 175, 192, 194–6, 232, 234 Wańkowicz, Melchior, 95, 221 Warsaw, 5, 15, 31, 43, 68, 75, 116, 171, 210, 219, 223 Warsaw Uprising, 9, 34, 37, 43, 66, 75, 81–2, 130, 207, 219, 223 welfare workers, 13–14, 48–9, 76, 105, 111, 137–8, 156, 161, 166–9, 180, 203, 251; dP s and refugees as, 72–3, 89, 138; and linguistic difficulties, 49, 137–8, 292n24 Wildflecken, 10, 13, 66–7, 88, 92, 124, 137–8, 168, 174, 181–2, 186, 195, 214 Wilno, 62, 138, 215, 250 Wojciechowski, Jan, 239 Yalta Conference, 10, 39, 40, 45, 50, 52, 57, 62, 122, 198 Zagórski, Jerzy, 89 Zaleski, Władysław Józef, 52 Zaleski, Wojciech, 150–1, 182 Zieliński, Eryk, 158, 181