How the West Was Won: Pioneers, Settlers and Communism in the Polish 'Ziemie Odzyskane', 1945-1948

Tomasz Blusiewiczblusiewicz@fas.harvard.edu

Harvard University

Prepared for submission at: The Polish Review

1. Stalin, Yalta and the New Polish West in 1945

The Ziemie Odzyskane (Reclaimed Lands, further in the paper: the RLs) was a term first officially

coined in Poland to refer to the territory incorporated at the expense of Czechoslovakia on October 1,

1938. The contested Cieszyn Silesia region has remained a source of tensions between the two states

after it had been split in consequence of the 1920 plebiscite and then annexed by Poland while the

world’s attention focused on the Sudetenland. While it is questionable whether the addition of ca. 230

000 new citizens and 800 km2 of the Zaolzie land was worth the reputational damage that the country

suffered as a willing accomplice of Hitler’s aggression,1 the annexation was hailed as a historic victory

and exploited for propagandistic legitimacy purposes domestically. President Ignacy Mościcki spoke of

‘the Reclaimed Lands of the Cieszyn Silesia’ and appropriate festivities had been arranged in the town of

Cieszyn. Local ethnic Poles and soldiers marched through a triumphal arch that announced that Cieszyn

had waited for Poland to 'return' for the past six centuries.

The Zaolzie eventually returned to Czechoslovakia in 1945, but Poland faced new 'Reclaimed Lands' -

now on a much grander scale. More than 100 000 km2 of prewar German territory has been awarded to

the country in the aftermath of the Second World War. The transfer of that territory was officially

framed as a fair compensation for the Polish eastern Kresy borderlands the Soviet Union incorporated in

agreement with the provisions of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and did not fancy to return after the war

ended. As explained at Yalta and Potsdam conferences, the RLs was a necessary 'living space' for the

1 To give just one example: precisely that episode, relatively minor in the grand scheme of things one year before war was to break out in Europe, has been repeatedly used by President Vladimir Putin to defend the Soviet policy leading up to the signing of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, most recently during a joint conference with Chancellor Angela Merkel one day after the seventieth celebration of the war's end, on May 10, 2015. For more details, see, e.g.: Robert Coalson, "Turning Back Time: Putting Putin's Molotov-Ribbentrop Defense Into Context", Radio Free Europe, May 15, 2015. Accessed online at: http://www.rferl.org/content/putin-russia-molotov-ribbentrop-pact/27017723.html on June 24, 2015.

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several million Poles who were about to be 'resettled' from their homeland and 'repatriated' west. 2 The

Zaolzie precedent had thus become an unintended kind of blueprint for 'reintegrating' foreign territory

with the motherland and turning the process into a propagandistic cornerstone of national mobilization.

The issue was exploited by the communist-dominated Lublin Government to buttress its legitimacy, win

over support from at least a fraction of the Polish society and eventually – to establish a monopoly of

communist power. This line of strategic thought was succinctly put by the Vice Prime Minister

Władysław Gomułka - "the Western territories will tie the nation to the system."3 Stalin reasoned along

parallel lines – Poland will not be able to stand on its own feet without Soviet support since it will be

threatened too severely by the prospect of German revanchism.

An unprecedented propaganda machine was put into operation to explain the necessity and the

significance of reintegrating the RLs both to domestic and international audiences. The questionable

origin of the term in the now-decried imperialist interwar Poland was passed over in silence. But why

did the communists consider it necessary to make broad audiences at home and abroad sympathetic to

the cause of making the RLs permanently Polish? Most importantly, what was agreed in Yalta was

merely that a part of Germany territory was to be temporarily run by the Polish administration in

cooperation with the Red Army until a definitive border treaty would be signed after the war was over. 4

The Lublin Government could count on Stalin’s support in pushing the demarcation line all the way to

the Oder and Neisse rivers, but at the time it was not yet evident that Stalin’s support was all that was

required to secure such an outcome for a permanent border. The American and British (in particular)

positions were ambiguous and increasingly pro-German. In addition, the London Government was still

operating and of a very different opinion regarding Poland’s new borders. In light of those

circumstances, the new regime thought it highly desirable to present the Western powers with a fait

accompli – the RLs already with Polish population and administration in place at the time of the peace

2 The national socialist term lebensraum was not, needless to say, used publically. However, the Big Three negotiations were not unaffected by the kind of geopolitical imagery so keenly embraced by the Nazis. For example, on February 7, 1945, Winston Churchill uttered the following words in Yalta: "it would be a pity to stuff the Polish goose so full of German food that it got indigestion." After the Yalta Conference transcripts printed in: U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, Diplomatic Papers, 1945, The Conferences at Malta and Yalta, (Washington, DC: U.S Government Printing Office, 1955), 717. 3 Quoted after: Aleksander Kochański, Protokół Obrad KC PPR w Maju 1945 Roku, (Warszawa: Instytut Studiów Politycznych PAN, 1992), 33.4For more details on the Yalta-Potsdam transition dynamics, see, e.g.: Gwidon Rysiak, Zachodnia Granica Polski Na Konferencji Poczdamskiej : Zbiór dokumentów, (Opole: Instytut Śląski, 1970), 120-130.The perceived urgency of populating the RLs with as many Poles as possible was put straightforwardly by Prof. Zygmunt Wojciechowski during the first session of the Scientific Council for the Issues of the Recovered Lands [Rada Naukowa dla Zagadnień Ziem Odzyskanych] (30 July - 1 August 1945) in Kraków: "If the reintegration of our lands [i.e. the RLs] does not take place fast, it will not take place at all." Quoted in: Rada Naukowa dla Zagadnień Ziem Odzyskanych, I Sesja Rady Naukowej dla Zagadnień Ziem Odzyskanych, 30 VII-1 VIII 1945. Sprawozdanie Ogólne, Zeszyt 1, (Kraków: 1946), 16.

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conference.5 The first ‘settlers’ thus followed literally in the Red Army's footsteps as it neared Berlin in

the final months of the war.

Domestically, the RLs were exploited as a nation-unifying, rallying cause to win popular support for

the Lublin Government and the Polish Workers’ Party (PWP). Friendship with the now brotherly USSR

was explicitly presented as the sole guarantor of the new border. 6 The abandoned German property and

land in the RLs offered an opportunity to proceed rapidly with the communist policy agenda –

nationalization of the means of production and land re-distribution (land reform). The success of those

hallmark policies was in turn to present a model for the rest of the old country - where such radical

changes were initially tactically more problematic - to follow.7 Furthermore, the anti-German sentiment

was a convenient card to play. The reintegration of ‘the cradle of the Slavic peoples’ was a project that

no patriotic Pole could oppose. The Lublin communists, by portraying themselves as the sole guarantors

and executioners of that historic mission, hoped to boost their chances of winning some degree of

grassroots support in Poland.

The reintegration of the RLs before the peace conference was nearly impossible to carry out in

practice. The biggest city in the region – Breslau – was turned into a fortress and did not surrender until

May 7, 1945. Stettin and Die Pommernstellung were among the most bitterly defended parts of the

Reich as they constituted the gateway to Berlin. Furthermore, out of approximately nine million people

living in the RLs in 1939, at best one million could be considered Polish to some 'degree'.8 Polish

authorities estimated that about six million Germans who lived in the RLs in 1939 had either perished or

escaped in consequence of military operations. It meant that there were still about three million that, as

5 For the reasoning behind the fait accompli strategy, see, e.g.: Stefan Banasiak, Działalność Osadnicza Państwowego Urzędu Repatriacyjnego Na Ziemiach Odzyskanych w Latach 1945-1947, (Poznań: Instytut Zachodni, 1963), 28-30. As it was expressed by Kazimierz Kuligowski, an official dealing with industrial reconstruction in Wrocław: “the pace of reconstruction and the quality of administration in Wrocław could turn out to be an important asset in political contests at the future peace conference.” Quoted in: Mieczysław Markowski, Trudne Dni : Wrocław 1945 r. we Wspomnieniach Pionierów, (Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy im Ossolińskich, 1960), 136.6 For example, see: Stanisław Łach, Władze Komunistyczne Wobec Ziem Odzyskanych Po II Wojnie Światowej : Materiały z Konferencji (Słupsk: Wydawnictwo Uczelniane WSP, 1997), 16-17.7 The reasoning behind the 'model' role of the RLs is well caputred by, e.g., Radosław Domke in his book Ziemie Zachodnie i Północne Polski w Propagandzie Lat 1945-1948, (Zielona Góra: Oficyna Wydawnicza Uniwersytetu Zielonogórskiego, 2010), 16-25.8 After: Grzegorz Strauchold, Polska Ludność Rodzima Ziem Zachodnich i Północnych : Opinie Nie Tylko Publiczne Lat 1944-1948, (Olsztyn: Ośrodek Badań Naukowych im. Wojciecha Kętrzyńskiego, 1995), 19. The official count after the 1946 'verification' was 1 015 360 persons. After: Archiwum Akt Nowych (AAN), Ministerstwo Ziem Odzyskanych, Departament Ogólny, sygn. 479, Statystyka ludności rodzimej, stan z 31 XII 1949.

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it was put by one official - “would have to be removed."9 Transport capacity was limited with most of the

rolling stock either destroyed or operated by the Red Army. Most of major bridges and railway hubs

linking central Poland with the RLs were gone.10 The imposition of communist rule in Poland was not a

foregone conclusion until 1948. In that context, organizing the largest single population transfer in

history11 was not an easy task. As it was put by a leading communist Edward Ochab, originally put in

charge of the operation, it was of “gigantic proportions”12 that would pose a challenge for any

government in any country even under more 'ordinary' conditions.

2. Cold War Historiography and the Pioneer Myth

As a matter of fact, the new regime was unable to launch anything resembling an organized

population transfer until 1946 and the process had not been completed until the late 1950s. Yet up to

1.7 million ‘settlers’ found themselves in the RLs by the end of 1945.13 How did they get there? To

answer this question one would have to describe each journey and most of them supplied enough

material for an adventure novel. A train trip from Warsaw to Szczecin (350 miles) could take up to a

month and involved: numerous stops and transfers, marches, travelling on train roofs and in coal

wagons, high risk of being robbed or assaulted not to mention the hunger, thirst, physical discomfort

and the usually scant knowledge of one’s destination. In more general terms - the first wave of

9 After: Wojciech Wrzesiński, W Stronę Odry i Bałtyku : Wybór Źródeł, 1795-1950 (Warszawa: Oficyna Wydawnicza Volumen, 1990), 19. For a comprehensive, recent academic treatment of the German 'removal', see: R. M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane : The Expulsion of the Germans After the Second World War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012).10 For example, 7,563 out of the total 10,707 km of railways were destroyed in the RLs in 1945. After: Bohdan Gruchaman, Polish Western Territories (Poznań: Instytut Zachodni, 1959), 163.11 Counting according to the 1939 and 1950 official German and Polish population figures - it must have included at least 16 million people. In reality, the figure was closer to 10 million as many persons included in both counts had either perished, escaped or were otherwise displaced. Precise calculations are impossible and depend on various definitions of whom to consider a displaced person. Nonetheless, the figure of 16 million was used in wartime Polish preparations and plans to incorporate the RLs. For more details, see an article by Miroslaw Dymarski, "Zagadnienia Demograficzne Ziem Postulowanych (Ziem Nowych) w Prognozach Polskiej Konspiracji" in an edited volume by Ewa Frątczak et al., Demografia i Społeczeństwo Ziem Zachodnich i Północnych 1945-1995--Próba Bilansu, (Warszawa: Polskie Tow. Demograficzne and Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, 1996), esp. 75-83. Even if some of the estimates were perhaps exaggerated, the Polish administration correctly anticipated that the "task was enormously difficult, simply unprecedented in the history of migration settlement" See: AAN, Ministerstwo Administracji Publicznej, sygn. 2397, Memoriał Rajmunda Buławskiego skierowany 22 lutego 1945 do Ministra Skarbu w sprawie utworzenia Biura Planu Osiedlenczego.12 Wrzesiński, W Stronę Odry i Bałtyku : Wybór Źródeł, 1795-1950, 20.13 The 1.7 million figure after: Mieczysław Jaworski, Na Piastowskim Szlaku : Działalność Ministerstwa Ziem Odzyskanych w Latach 1945-1948, (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Ministerstwa Obrony Narodowej, 1973), 128.

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settlement was based on a voluntary (or rather: induced), 14 spontaneous and essentially individual

decision of each person or family to go to and remain in the RLs. In other words, while the new regime

launched a massive propaganda campaign to encourage its citizens to settle in the RLs already in the

early months of 1945, it lacked the resources to plan, conduct and secure an operation of dimensions

vastly outstripping its resources. It had to rely on each person's own willingness and initiative to leave

his or her home, embark on a risky journey and settle in a foreign no-man's land.

The context sketched above is exemplified by, for example, a speech by Bolesław Rumiński, an

official from the Ministry of Industry, in the Krajowa Rada Narodowa - the provisional parliament. On

May 5, 1945, Rumiński said:

“East Prussia – now it is nothing but dead cities with no inhabitants, no livestock; but whatever is still there is a great treasure for us, it has to be integrated with the national economy. […] We have to take control, the faster the better. Don’t wait for instructions, proclamations. The plan is simple. We have to take control by means of sending at least 10 percent of the population from just across the old border – without waiting for those who will come from behind the Bug River [from the Kresy] to conduct the proper colonization. At this moment, this process of colonization, this march of the peasants, is underway. The realistic plan. Several thousand peasants have marched since May 1. The peasant understands that it has to done quickly, without waiting for the State Repatriation Agency; we have to push toward these lands like to the Promised Land.”15

All of those who followed similar appeals were soon to be immortalized in the pioneers' myth. The word

myth does not dismiss the reality of their endeavor, to the contrary – the evidence in this paper makes

the heroic nature of the pioneers’ experience apparent. But the main analytical focus is slightly different.

I examine the deliberation process that preceded the pioneers’ decisions to settle in the RLs. What

motivated them to take it in the context of all the existential risks that it entailed? What inspired the

courage to sustain it? What were the most common reasons pro and contra and which were decisive?

These questions combine into the central inquiry of the paper: what was the relative weight of the

impact of the official propaganda campaign and other measures undertaken by the government

compared to exogenous factors not related to government action?

An evaluation of the influence of government supplied information on collective behavior is an

elusive undertaking under any conditions. The inherent limitations of such a pursuit are in this context

14 For an excellent discussion of some of the theoretical distinctions between forced, induced and voluntary migrations, see the appendix to: E. Morawska (2000). Intended and Unintended Consequences of Forced Migrations: A Neglected Aspect of East Europe's Twentieth Century History. International Migration Review, 34-4 (Winter), 1073-1075. In the main body of her article, however, Morawska usually writes of "forced and induced migrations" collectively and direct the reader's attention to the appendix to address the distinction between them. The evidence presented in my paper show that the category of induced migration indeed makes sense and that induced migration was something qualitatively different than just a not-literally -forced migration.15 Quoted in: Tadeusz Baryła, Warmiacy i Mazurzy w PRL : Wybór dokumentów : Rok 1945 (Olsztyn: Ośrodek Badań Naukowych Im. Wojciecha Ke̜trzyńskiego, 1994), 30-31.

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worsened by the fact that not everything could be said in Poland after 1945 and that the important

things were often said between the lines. Nevertheless, an examination of diaries, memoirs and

correspondence, both contemporary and written in the several decades that followed, combined with

an analysis of the methods of state propaganda brings certain patterns to light. 16 The impact of

propaganda’s language on how people narrated their stories of the early pioneer days in the RLs is

manifest and quite specific. The official rhetoric provided a façade of patriotic phraseology, 'historic' and

'epic' causes behind which a diverse set of existential reasons rooted in the dramatic postwar conditions

emerge as a more plausible explanation for why the pioneers settled in the RLs. More specifically – I

argue that one has to consider the state of the society after six years of war and occupation to

understand why there were so many 'volunteer' (or, again: induced) settlers in the RLs. All kinds of

actions undertaken by the state encouraging settlement in the RLs might be perceived as attempt to

channel the grassroots mobility potential, but not necessarily in terms of a 'primary mover' or

'totalitarian control'. What is meant by the term 'the state of the society' will became clearer by the end

of the paper, but the annihilation of residential property and arable land, loss of family members and

other traumatic experiences that can subsumed under a general category of uprootedness help to

explain why there existed such a large pool of people looking for a new start in the RLs in 1945.

The thesis developed above might appear too intuitive to be worth arguing. The enormous amount

of destruction and dislocation in postwar Europe and in Poland in particular has never been seriously

questioned. However, there are several reasons why it is useful. First of all, there is a tendency in the

historiography of communist Eastern Europe to transpose the ‘totalitarian’ lens developed to

understand the Stalinist period (1948-56, as well as the USSR itself) onto the immediate postwar years.

The totalitarian perspective leads to a conceptual mistake of comprehending the entire Polish-German-

16 Most of the memoirs I have surveyed were published (and some of them written) in the late 1950s during the thaw period following the October regime change of 1956 and then under Gomulka's 'nationalist' 1960s. The fact that most were published during a more liberal period alongside such elements as criticism of the Party and the Red Army or kind words about the Catholic Church to some extent mitigate the authenticity and credibility reservations. The authenticity reservations inherent in the hitherto understudied 'pąmiętniki Ziem Odzykskanych' [memoirs from the Recovered Lands] have been captured well by a leading English-language scholar of the RLs, Gregor Thum, who wrote: “Collecting pamiętniki – recollections by contemporary witnesses – had enormous significance in the People’s Republic of Poland and was repeatedly encouraged through elaborate competitions. The versions that were ultimately published, however, often differed significantly from what the authors had actually written. Information about problems with the Soviet military forces stationed in Poland or the labile national identity of the population that settled in the western territories was especially apt to be suppressed or falsified. Nevertheless, the pamiętniki are an important sources that can be read in a dual manner: On the one hand, they contain a plethora of information that is otherwise virtually impossible to obtain, and provide a lively impression of the atmosphere of the period. On the other hand, precisely because of state censorship they also constitute a central source in understanding the official conception of how “the pioneer era” in the western territories was depicted with the People’s Republic." Gregor Thum, Uprooted : How Breslau Became Wroclaw during the Century of Expulsions, (Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2011), 11.

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Soviet population exchange process as initiated and executed exclusively by states in which the efficacy

of government control and orchestration was close to complete and certainly paramount. 17 Such a view

might be misleading because it minimizes the role of individual agency and spontaneous social

organization and exaggerates the actual degree of control that, for example, the postwar Polish state

possessed.18 My research focuses on propaganda also because, in the early postwar years, the new

regime was often not equipped with resources beyond ink, paper and words while most of the resources

at hand were deployed in the literally existential struggle to establish a communist monopoly of

power.19 A nuanced view should be observed in which conceptual distinctions between

voluntary/induced/involuntary and organized/unorganized population transfers are taken seriously.

These distinctions are necessary not only for an adequate understanding of what happened in postwar

Europe, but also because the 'unorganized' or 'wild' movements preceded the 'organized' and 'forced'

and thus presented the Polish communists with a fait accompli after they finally secured a firmer degree

of control after 1948.

17 In the two of the most comprehensive publications on the issue of postwar population 'movements': Philipp Ther and Ana Siljak, Redrawing Nations : Ethnic Cleansing in East-Central Europe, 1944-1948 (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001) and Peter Gatrell and Nick Baron, Warlands : Population Resettlement and State Reconstruction in the Soviet-East European Borderlands, 1945-50, the history of the 'pioneers' of the Ziemie Odzyskane is scarcely mentioned. Both excellent volumes focus on 'expulsions' and 'forced transfers' and thus such an emphasis is understandable. In the context of these two volumes, my paper might be understood as a small caveat which reminds us that, even in the very midst of all kinds of compulsions and constraints imposed by the Nazi and Stalinist regimes (and made stronger by their confrontation, with the Polish Ziemie Odzyskane in 1945 as its direct, if unintended, consequence), there did exist significant space for independent, individual agency and decisions. To give one example of a skewed perspective that such the 'totalitarian' view might lead to, let me quote the following phrase from Redrawing Nations... : “[i]n addition, the newly acquired territories were settled by Polish nationals from Central Poland.” (Ther and Siljak, Redrawing Nations …, 83.) It is misleading to write about the Polish nationals from central Poland as 'an addition' - they were a majority in the RLs and were among the first ones to move there. Admittedly - a minor and rather 'semantic' misconception - but nonetheless indicative of the kinds of overlooks that are made possible by adopting a 'totalitarian' perspective exclusively18 This point of view is developed, for example, in the R. M. Douglas's book, Orderly and Humane... An outstanding scholarly work in German which shares it as well is Beata Halicka's, Polens Wilder Westen : Erzwungene Migration Und Die Kulturelle Aneignung Des Oderraums 1945-1948 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2013).19 The inability (as well as the 'objective' impossibility) of the new Polish regime to organize the process in a 'planned' manner is reflected, e.g. in the fact that the institution responsible for planning the operation (not to mention its execution), the Scientific Council for the Issues of the Recovered Lands, held its first plenary session on the last day of July, 1945. At that session, the Vice Minister for the Public Administration, Władysław Wiernik, uttered the following words: "we have sent people west when there was still no administration there - there were instances that one day we would send a team to create a unit of the State Repatriation Agency, while the next day a transport with repatriates was already on its way." Quoted in: "Przemówienie wiceministra Administracji Publicznej Władysława Wiernika na I Sesji RNdZZO" [In:] I Sesja RNdZZO..., Zeszyt 1, (Krakow: 1946), 4.The institution that preceded the Ministry for the Recovered Lands (established in November 1945) was the so-called Bureau of the Western Lands. The provisional nature of that institution is captured in the memoirs by the first Polish President of Szczecin, Piotr Zaremba. He wrote: "I would like to quote one document which demonstrates the difficulties confronting us then very well. It is a letter, in which the vice-secretary of state, who was then also the chief of the Bureau of the Western Lands, asks to ... "supply two iron stove-heaters in order to heat the [office of] Bureau of the Western Lands" This amazing correspondence of two ministers regarding two little iron stoves makes it clear with what kind of equipment we were setting forth to accomplish such a gigantic task." Piotr Zaremba, Wspomnienia Prezydenta Szczecina, 1945-1950, (Poznań: Wydawn. Poznańskie, 1977) 19.

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Local experts carefully divide the resettlement operation in the RLs into distinct phases and pay

much attention to the first - 'wild' - months. Nonetheless, they attribute a decisive role to the workings

of state incentivization - from purely verbal, through material, legal and existential (threats) - as the

driving force behind the 'pioneer' stage as well. The arguments is that the impact of information

circulating in private networks could not have rivaled state propaganda in its scale and impact. 20 Such a

conclusion could originate from the focus on the content of propaganda without studying how it

affected its audience. This is why a complimentary examination of personal accounts is necessary since it

reveals the existence of considerations and sources of information independent of official propaganda

and demonstrates the vital role that they have played.21

Finally, the sheer number of considerations in favor and against settling in the RLs and the immense

complexity of the rapidly changing variables that a pioneer had to consider while making the decision is

staggering. Some of the challenges are well-know to historians of, for example, the American West, but

other such as political instability (two opposing governments), ambiguity surrounding the final shape of

the western border or the 'revolution-from-abroad' (to use Jan Gross's phrase) in all aspects of social life

occurring simultaneously, not to mention the six years of war and occupation, made for a decision-

making framework that can be merely fragmentarily captured by the word uncertainty. Due to its

uniqueness and the momentous historic shifts visible in situ, this framework is worthy of a presentation

for its own sake.

3. Propaganda? Information? Both?

Several book-length studies dedicated to propaganda relating to the RLs are available.22 To

summarize it briefly - on the international level, the goal was not only to secure a favorable peace

settlement in Potsdam, but also to make the international opinion believe that Poland also held, beyond

20 E.g., see: Domke, Ziemie Zachodnie i Północne Polski w Propagandzie Lat 1945-1948, 60.21 It is worth emphasizing again that my paper focuses on the initial wave of settlement in the RLs, roughly between March and November 1945. The establishment of the Ministry of the Recovered Lands on 13 November 1945, with its primary task of "conducting a planned settlement operation", can be seen as an 'official' end to the pioneer stage, but of course there was a significant delay between that date and any real effect of the functioning of the new Ministry on the 'planned' character of settlement. The pioneer stage cannot be thought of as representative of the entire process. In approximate terms – nearly two million people out of the total figure of 4.8 million who had settled by 1948, can be thought of as participants of that first stage. However, the first stage was critical because the first arrivals set into motion certain patterns of organization, including land and property acquisition. In other words, the pioneers from central Poland were the ones who usually got the best farms, houses and jobs - a condition that mattered also when the more planned stages ensued.22 The best studies include: Domke, Ziemie Zachodnie i Północne Polski w Propagandzie Lat 1945-1948; Marcin Czyżniewski, Propaganda Polityczna Władzy Ludowej w Polsce 1944-1956 (Toruń: Wydawnictwo Naukowe "Grado", 2005).

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Soviet military backing, legitimate historical claims on the RLs. All of the RLs were to varying degrees

linked to Polish statehood, in particular under the medieval Piast dynasty. The East Prussian

Hohenzollerns were vassals to the Polish Crown until mid-seventeenth century and the Prince-Bishopric

of Olsztyn was an integral part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth until the first partition of 1772.

In terms of ethnography – about one million inhabitants of the region were brought under the heading

of autochthones (non-German, Slavic natives) in 1945 – Masurians, Warmiaks, Silesians or Kashubians;

most of them were somewhere on the spectrum between Polish and German. They were usually

officially framed as forcefully Germanized Poles. In addition, the Polish delegation in Potsdam claimed

that most of the Germans living there had already escaped – an argument frequently deployed by Stalin

as well.23

The RLs were also claimed on moral grounds – as retribution for war damage; on economic grounds

– the industrial areas of Lower and Upper Silesia required uninhibited access to the Baltic Sea for export

purposes24; on geopolitical grounds – as the shortest border line running along two wide rivers making

the next German aggression unlikely, weakening the German war capacity and finally annihilating the

traditional breeding ground of Prussian militarism.25 The varying quality and credibility of justifications

turned out to be largely irrelevant as long as Stalin supported the new border, which he did until his

death in 1953. No Soviet official has ever publically questioned the finality of the Oder-Neisse border

settlement.

On the domestic level, all the grand causes mentioned above were also deployed, but they were

connected to more practical visions encouraging settlement in the RLs.26 The main target audience of

the campaign – landless and poor peasants – could hardly be reached by mass media and thus direct

means of agitation such as village rallies and door-to-door visits were organized instead. “Agitators

toured the villages and described the government settlement plans for the newly acquired territories in

the west.”27 “Gigantic posters”28, proclamations and appeals were attached to city walls or electricity

23 In Potsdam, Stalin claimed that no Germans had remained in the RLs. The Polish delegation claimed the figure was ca. 1.5 million, which was an underestimation. After: Nitschke, Wysiedlenie Czy Wypędzenie? : Ludność Niemiecka w Polsce w Latach 1945-1949, 44-45.24 Hanna Jędruszczak, Wizje Gospodarki Socjalistycznej w Polsce, 1945-1949 : Początki Planowania : Materiały Źródłowe, (Warszawa: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1983), 203.25 Domke, Ziemie Zachodnie i Północne Polski w Propagandzie Lat 1945-1948, 58.26 One could also call it an informational campaign - a sharp distinction between propaganda and 'real' information cannot be established nor were the two categories imagined as strictly separate, as reflected in the official title of 'The Ministry of Propaganda and Information', established in July 1944.27 Kruszewski, The Oder-Neisse Boundary and Poland's Modernization; the Socioeconomic and Political Impact, 55.28 Zygmunt Dulczewski and Andrzej Kwilecki, Pamiętniki Osadników Ziem Odzyskanych, (Poznań: Wydawnictwo Poznańskie, 1963), 642.

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poles in the villages.29 A large map graphically presenting the opportunities waiting for the pioneers - the

shipyards of Gdańsk and Szczecin and the rolling wheat fields of East Prussia – could be seen in the old

city square in Kraków.30 The government employed all the resources it could muster to reach its citizens

and make them aware of the opportunities in the RLs. In general, the campaign was a success in a sense

that it would be difficult to find a conscious citizen in the entire country who would not know about the

RLs 'project'.

Initially, special reconnaissance missions were organized into the RLs to obtain information about

the local conditions. Bolesław Drobner, a socialist activist and the first mayor of Wrocław, was

designated as the leader of one of such reconnaissance groups in March 1945. “Maps, plans,

instructions? I had to search and find everything on my own” – he wrote in his memoir. 31 The group was

composed of “the ideological thirteen” – journalists, engineers, technicians, officers and artists – plus

ten truck drivers and fifteen heavily armed policemen.32 Furthermore, “since the team had a distinctly

propagandist agenda and was entering the ‘unknown country’” – three photographers and two radio

reporters were added to the crew.33 Drobner’s team reached Wrocław on April 14 , only to be stopped by

rearguard units of the Red Army at the outskirts. Festung Breslau was still a scene of heavy fighting. But

it did not prevent the journalists from sending reports back home, soon to be printed in national

newspapers. One of them, from April 20, read: “We are entering Wrocław. One does not think much of

the dangers. Joy fills our breasts. Polish governance has finally made it back to Wrocław, after seven

hundred years.”34 Finding undamaged printing presses and rolling out as many similarly enthusiastic

articles as possible was one of the chief goals of Polish journalism in 1945.

There were several kinds of argumentation used to encourage settlement in the RLs. Prospective

economic benefits were perhaps the most popular, especially among the peasantry. The RLs were

portrayed as a land of plenty with fertile soil and abandoned farmsteads waiting for new owners. The

peasants were promised at least ten hectares of land.35 Many German farmers left in a hurry as the front

29 A typical appeal read: “Polish People! Lower Silesia returns to the Motherland! Thanks to the heroic Red and Polish Armies, Polish banners are now billowing over the primeval Piast lands. On the streets of the Silesian towns founded by our ancestors centuries ago, Polish state emblems are now reappearing. You are not abroad anymore, but at home, in a free, independent Poland, on the lands of Chrobry and Krzywousty. You ought to dedicate Your talents, efforts and skills to this Poland, to the grand task of reestablishing Polish-ness in Lower Silesia. […].” May 15th, 1945. Quoted in: Towarzystwo Miłośników Wrocławia and Markowski, Trudne Dni : Wrocław 1945 r. we Wspomnieniach Pionierów, 93.30 Dulczewski and Kwilecki, Pamiętniki Osadników Ziem Odzyskanych, 128.31 Towarzystwo Miłośników Wrocławia and Markowski, Trudne Dni : Wrocław 1945 r. we Wspomnieniach Pionierów, 77.32 Ibid., 83.33 Ibid., 82-83.34 Ibid., 84-85.35 Andrzej Korboński, Politics of Socialist Agriculture in Poland: 1945-1960, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), 83-84.

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approached with livestock now roaming untended and no one to harvest the grain. That was why the

bureaucrats insisted on settling as many farmers as possible as soon as possible in order to prevent

waste and hunger during the coming winter and spring.36 The peasants were guaranteed individual land

ownership and reminded of their misery under the lords (panowie) of imperialist Poland.37 If they moved

to the RLs - a civilizational ascent awaited them: from the hey-covered wooden huts with clay floors to

redbrick-covered stone mansions equipped with cutting-edge mechanized technology.38

Industrial workers were presented with a similarly enticing prospect. The industrial prowess of

Germany was no longer a threat, but an opportunity now. The world-renowned firms like the Linke-

Hofmann train factory in Wrocław or the ports and shipyards of Gdańsk and Szczecin were advertised in

the press as vacant and waiting for new employees.39 A system of patronage was set up – a coal mine in

prewar Polish Upper Silesia would take care of its Lower Silesian counterpart and send volunteer

crews.40 In contrast to the ‘old’ Poland - where nationalization took place later - all non-agricultural

assets were taken over by the state immediately, including church property. The press and numerous

agitators were promising quick and easy rewards thanks to the new revolutionary social order:

guaranteed employment and housing, social security and professional advancement.

In addition to economic incentives, the communists did not hesitate to play the old nationalist, anti-

German card. Władysław Gomułka, imprisoned for his ‘nationalist-right deviation’ in 1949, led the

patriotic choir as the Minister of the Recovered Lands. As the very term ‘Reclaimed Lands’ suggests, the

fundamental idea was that Poland was not simply taking over a part of Germany in lieu of

compensation, but that the thousand year long struggle with the Germanic Drang nach Osten has finally

been won and the Polish workers and peasants could now safely return to the cradle of their Slavic

forefathers.41 Historians spoke of the long-awaited reversal of the misguided Jagiellonian conception of 36 As it was put by a Red Army officer at a meeting with peasants from central Poland in March 1945: “You - Poles - have to take over the villages, put everything in order and when the spring comes, you have to plough, sow and plant because, first of all – it will all be Polish, second – we need bread, and third – bread will not come from central Poland or Russia because there is none to be found.” Quoted in: Dulczewski and Kwilecki, Pamiętniki Osadników Ziem Odzyskanych, 447.37 A perspective of an autochthon peasant from the prewar German Upper Silesia: “The local folk here were afraid of the old, aristocratic Poland where the lords run their estates in such a way that poor villagers from Galicia crossed the border to work for us. That was the kind of Poland that the Germans were telling us about prior to the plebiscite in 1920.” Zdzisław Jerzy Bolek, Wróciła Polska : Pamiętniki z Pierwszych Lat Powojennych Na Ziemiach Odzyskanych, (Warszawa: Iskry, 1974), 42.38 From an article in Trybuna Robotnicza in April 1945: “The returning western territories belong to the best of the German Bauernstand […]. A peasant from Volhynia or Polesie will have to adapt quickly to the advanced farming methods.” Quoted in: Domke, Ziemie Zachodnie i Północne Polski w Propagandzie Lat 1945-1948, 63. 39 Towarzystwo Miłośników Wrocławia and Markowski, Trudne Dni : Wrocław 1945 r. we Wspomnieniach Pionierów, 200.40 With special benefits offered for those who volunteered, including wage premium of up to 150 percent of the previous wage. After: Hanna Jędruszczak, Upaństwowienie i Odbudowa Przemysłu w Polsce 1944-1948; Materiały Źródłowe, (Warszawa: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1967), 261.41 Domke, Ziemie Zachodnie i Północne Polski w Propagandzie Lat 1945-1948, 57-61.

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eastward colonial expansion. Poland now returned to the original, natural and rightful boundaries

established in the tenth century.42 A once-in-a-national lifetime window of opportunity was open and

had to be used quickly to secure a permanent re-Polonization of those lands. The patriotic duty called on

each Pole to contribute to the successful completion of the grand mission.

Both economic and patriotic arguments were embedded within the larger framework of postwar

reconstruction that promised a brave new future for the now ethnically homogenous, industrial and

egalitarian Poland. Equality and fair distribution of wealth were emphasized rather than socialism as

such; the word ‘collectivization’ was in fact prohibited. Only it 1946 was the idea smuggled under the

heading of ‘settlement-and-parcelization cooperative societies'.43 The historic shift westward was

presented in parallel to the equally momentous and long-awaited arrival of a people’s republic, yet few

dared to speak of communism openly until 1948.44 This 'innocent' idealism of the early days is reflected,

for example, in a report by Dr. Zygmunt Chrzanowski, a delegate of the Western Association [Związek

Zachodni] to East Prussia. He reported on his visit in April 1945:

“East Prussia is a land for pioneers and idealists who go there to work and receive proper reward and not to seek easy enrichment. […] They have to pull up their sleeves, get down to hard work and be ready for severe hardships during the first year. We have to inform anyone who wants to go there about this very well.”45

The measures undertaken on the central level were usually a mix of propaganda and information,

with the balance changing in favor of the latter the more local and case-specific the information was. In

the Party newspaper Trybuna Ludu [People’s Tribune] one could find out where employment was to be

found. The State Repatriation Office was set up. It offered food, shelter and local guidance: maps,

navigation tools, brochures, pamphlets. Despite those efforts, the knowledge that the early settlers

could rely on was fragmentary. One often heard widespread “nebulous, fairy-tale-like news”46, “the

most horrifying stories of how badly Poles are mistreated there”47 and “gossips circulating even during

the journey [to] the Reclaimed Lands that what awaits us there is a huge desert and that our new life […]

will have to start from erecting a clay dugout.”48

42 Baryła, Warmiacy i Mazurzy w PRL : Wybór dokumentów ; Rok 1945, 1.43 Łach, Władze Komunistyczne Wobec Ziem Odzyskanych Po II Wojnie Światowej..., 17.44 It was an unspoken, but also an unambiguous order from Moscow. Those who spoke of Marxism, communism, collectivization or Bolshevism were reminded of the (at the time) correct party line. For an example of 'naive' communist ideological enthusiasm being tempered by the new regime, see the memoir of a Polish Marxist intellectual Adam Schaff, Próba Podsumowania, (Warszawa: Scholar, 1999), 119.45 Quoted in: Baryła, Warmiacy i Mazurzy w PRL : Wybór dokumentów ; Rok 1945, 30.46 Dulczewski and Kwilecki, Pamiętniki Osadników Ziem Odzyskanych, 563.47 Bolek, Wróciła Polska : Pamiętniki z Pierwszych Lat Powojennych Na Ziemiach Odzyskanych, 280.48 Dulczewski and Kwilecki, Pamiętniki Osadników Ziem Odzyskanych, 560.

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4. In the Words of the Pioneers

In trying to understand the nature of the impact of propaganda on the behavior of individuals and

families, it is helpful to investigate it in three ways. The first is to examine the motivations of the

pioneers that were clearly unrelated to or at odds with official propaganda. The second is to search for

correspondence and connections between the two. The third is to understand the relationship between

propaganda and all the other sources of information and motivation. Finally, it is also helpful to contrast

the propaganda-painted picture with reality – a thread running through the entire paper. Schematic as it

is, it will constitute the paper’s main analytic scheme.

4.1. The Wild West and the Great Escape

The most ubiquitous common thread running through a great majority of accounts is the notion of

the ‘Wild West’. Usually put in quotation marks, it was an unambiguous reference to what Poles

imagined to be the American ‘Wild West’ as they knew it from literature and films. The virtually

universal presence of this term is striking, but also unsurprising given the initial conditions in the RLs.

Interestingly, many settlers mentioned it as one of the main reasons making them anxious of travelling

to the RLs while many others presented it a magnet - a source of fascination. The Wild West picture run

contrary to the official picture of land overflowing with milk and honey and ready to be taken over by

new masters. But it was perhaps a more veritable representation of what was perceived as a primeval

state of anarchy and lawlessness. A gun or a grenade was a necessity (both were not hard to find) and

travelling alone was considered silly. To give just one example, the first state-organized train from

Warsaw to Szczecin in September 1945 was assaulted twice by organized gangs of robbers, two settlers

were killed and several wounded.49

The term Wild West was also commonly used to describe the travel conditions of 1945. Bogusław

Jędrzejec wrote while coming back to Poland in May 1945 from forced labor in Germany:

“I’m looking at the platform. Real hell! A passenger train to Katowice is about to depart. At that moment I have clearly realized what the ‘Wild West’ really meant. The train roofs were full of passengers with huge boxes and packages of all kinds. People travelled not only on the staircases, but also on the bumpers, with luggage on their knees.”50

The pioneers travelled either in coal or cattle cars. They dubbed their trains ‘cattle-express’ [bydlęcy-

pośpieszny].51 There was no schedule, the route was changed along the way and the passengers often

49 Tadeusz Białecki, Z Nad-Odrzańskiej Ziemi : Wspomnienia Szczecinian, (Poznań: Wydawnictwo Poznańskie, 1974), 87.50 Bolek, Wróciła Polska : Pamiętniki z Pierwszych Lat Powojennych Na Ziemiach Odzyskanych, 18.51 Ibid., 264.

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had to organize alcohol (one of the few reliable currencies in 1945) collections to make the railway

servicemen more cooperative.

A vast majority of the pioneers denied that quick enrichment was something they were after while

suggesting it was what drove most of their travel companions. Not all them intended to settle

permanently and the distinction between the infamous and legendary szabrownik52 - the person who

was in the RLs to scavenge the abandoned post-German property - and the pioneer remained fluid.

Some memoirists were convinced that “Klondike gold rush”53 and “Eldorado”54 were pictures not

powerful enough to convey the scale of the looting. Lawlessness led to lax moral standards and a

general mood of living fast and loving free, as captured in the following ditty:

In the Wild West / Na Dzikim Zachodzie

All sorts of wonders you find / Wszelakie są cuda

A girl a day / Dziewczynka na co dzień

Binge and vodka / Koryto i wóda…55

Others dismissed the Wild West imagery as exaggerated – an invention of “those who had spent all of

their life behind a desk and now consider a five hundred kilometers long journey into an unknown

territory as an extraordinarily adventurous escapade.”56 Those words were written by Janusz Szyndler - a

sixteen year old soldier of the Home Army who fought in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. He continued:

“In fact the Reclaimed Lands were never similar to the dangerous, desolate prairies of the famous

American West […] where people took justice in their hands, rode horses and threw lassos.” The term

Wild West emerged due to “gossips of alleged riches and a bit of fantasy.”57

52 This term is difficult to translate into English. It might originate from the German schaben (to scrape) and a marauder is perhaps its best English equivalent. In Polish culture, this term refers specifically to the pillage of the post-German (poniemiecka) property after the war. As it was expressed by one memoirist: “many thick volumes could be written about it”. Ryszard Hajduk, Pierwsze Lata Władzy Ludowej we Wspomnieniach Opolan, (Katowice: Śląsk, 1971), 11. An excerpt from Dziennik Powszechny (18 July 1945) captured the ubiquity of the szaber equally bluntly (even if with some of the usual journalistic hyperbole): "the great majority of our society has already participated in the szaber, is engaged in it as we speak or plans to do it soon. Those who are hesitant envy those have already decided to go ahead." Quoted in: Marcin Zaremba, Wielka Trwoga : Polska 1944-1947 : Ludowa Reakcja Na Kryzys, Kraków: Instytut Studiów Politycznych Polskiej Akademii Nauk, 2012), 299. Zaremba's treatment of the szaber phenomenon is one of the best, most comprehensive in scholarly literature up to date. Any picture of the early years in the RLs is severely incomplete without taking the szaber into consideration, but in this paper I follow the pioneers’ distinction between themselves and the szabrownicy and leave it out of the main focus.53 Dulczewski and Kwilecki, Pamiętniki Osadników Ziem Odzyskanych, 584.54 Ibid. 501.55 Ibid. 364.56 Ibid. 590.57 Ibid. 589.

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Szyndler’s account of the Wild West is valuable also because it demonstrates the processual nature

of the entire resettlement operation in its gradual evolution. This important characteristic escapes a

scholars’ attention when the lens of forced migration is adopted exclusively. Janusz summarized it well

in an anecdote:

“When I left in 1945, my aunts bid me farewell with fear in their eyes. They tried to convince me that I

was going to be killed by the Germans or other […] gangs. Two years later I was welcomed back in

Warsaw with pomp as the proverbial uncle from America (read: the West), a country of opportunities.

After five years a curious ‘how is it going’ was asked and we compared the conditions. After ten years

there were no questions, because everything was virtually uniform [in the two Polands].”58

This gradualist perspective is also developed by Janusz Palichowski from the Gdańsk region: “As time

went by, the conditions of life and activity have changed: the period of grand improvisation [and]

creative zeal when enthusiasm and good will replaced solid skills was irrevocably gone.”59

The notion of the Wild West was an allure for many and a worry for most, but it was something that

was both not conveyed by official propaganda and the number one factor that each settler had to take

into account when making the decision. An equally important condition affecting the pioneers’ decision

was what happened in their towns and villages during the war. Jerzy Ristow, who was eighteen when he

returned to Warsaw in 1945 from forced labor in Germany, wrote that he “felt bad and somehow alien

in the ruins of Warsaw.”60 Jerzy decided to board the first available settlers’ train from Warsaw to

Szczecin. A similar reaction was recorded by Izabela Grdeń, who was an eighteen year old artisans’

daughter from the Kresy. Her memories of “the bombings in the memorable year 1939 conflated with

the assaults of banderowcy [the Ukrainian Insurgent Army], fires and screams of the children and

women murdered by them. Everyone was tired of it all. We wanted to escape and to forget. We thus

signed up en masse. There were commissions, they surveyed, estimated and promised compensation for

the lost property and [they] left people in numb stupor when confronted with the ‘unknown’.”61 Many

similar accounts indicate that the number of people who either had lost a lot of what tied them to their

previous life or who wanted to forget about it was very large in 1945. All they had to be informed about

was that there was a place waiting for them, a place promising a new start.

58 Ibid. 590.59 Bolek, Wróciła Polska : Pamiętniki z Pierwszych Lat Powojennych Na Ziemiach Odzyskanych, 281.60 Ibid. 92.61 Dulczewski and Kwilecki, Pamiętniki Osadników Ziem Odzyskanych, 195.

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The dilemma of choosing between staying in the ‘old’ Poland and resettling was well summarized by

Stanisław Dulewicz, a high school teacher from Kraków, who was deported to a small Pomeranian town

for forced agricultural labor in 1944. Just after the war ended in May 1945, he noticed a collective “split

personality syndrome”62 experienced by his compatriots. On the one hand, the prospect of staying in

Pomerania “promised a vision of prosperity and social advancement in the near future, which would not

be the case if we went back home.”63 Dulewicz’s family house was destroyed, those “who were in need

of our hearts were now lying in their graves”64 and there was no one waiting for his return. However,

Kraków was still his home while Pomerania a place where he performed slave labor for the Nazis. Yet

the arguments in favor of staying in Pomerania prevailed in Dylewicz’s case, the same way they did for

up to fifty new settlers coming to his town from central Poland each day. “Even for the strongly

decimated population”65, the number of houses remaining intact was not nearly sufficient there.

While only implicitly conveyed in the memoirs written and published in (after all) communist Poland

with its extensive censorship apparatus, the uncertainty with respect to the political future of the

country was quite tangible. Zofia Zielińska, a young girl who settled in Barlinek in Pomerania,

remembered a conversation she had with an elderly lady met on a train. The lady spoke of her son who

“went through a lot and knew a lot. He said that the Polish government which resides in London

allegedly disagrees with the one we have right now. But, you know, that prewar government has some

experience in ruling the country, unlike the new ones, still uneducated.”66 The ‘new ones’ tried to foster

a sense of security among the settlers by putting up posters glowing with patriotic imagery. But just

below the captions announcing – Zofia wrote – “’the Western Lands always ours’ immediately after they

appeared someone wrote: ‘Never!’” 67 Anxiety about ‘reactionary German revisionism’ did not end after

the Potsdam Conference. In fact, it intensified in particular after the Byrnes speech in Stuttgart in

September 1946. Nevertheless, the moment of celebration when the news from Potsdam reached the

settlers figures prominently in numerous accounts. “In the dining hall, I announced that Szczecin was

Polish. It was when Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt were in Berlin. […] The joy was immense among the

Poles [while] several Germans committed suicide that day.”68

62 Ibid. 491.63 Ibid. 491.64 Ibid. 491.65 Ibid. 501.66 Bolek, Wróciła Polska : Pamiętniki z Pierwszych Lat Powojennych Na Ziemiach Odzyskanych, 111.67 Ibid., 176.68 Dulczewski and Kwilecki, Pamiętniki Osadników Ziem Odzyskanych, 319.

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The fear of collectivization, also mentioned implicitly in the memoirs, was something that peasants

experienced long after they had resettled. In 1945, especially during the harvest, mutual assistance and

tool sharing was a subsistence necessity, but also a reason to worry about the government’s intentions.

Edward Apanel, whose family resettled from the Kresy in June 1945, wrote: “there was no way that

kolkhozes could be established at the time, but some of us complained that the teamwork was nothing

else than showing us the way to get there and that we will be forced to sign up.” 69 It was equally difficult

to believe in the promised land reform and for a good reason – similar promises were often made and

virtually unrealized in interwar Poland. “It was hard to believe in the land for free and participatory

government, but we did believe in the Reclaimed Lands.”70 As there was less arable land to be

distributed in central Poland, some peasants left after it became apparent that they would get little

where they lived but could count on more if they resettled.71

Those peasants who did trust the new regime were stigmatized by their neighbors who disregarded

the official appeals. There were several reasons – “the sermons of the priest behind the pulpit, a bit of

fear of the heirs’ [landowners] return, a bit of fear of the gangs.”72 Most importantly, however, they

were “leaving their patrimony and their folks behind to embrace the unknown.” 73 This negative image of

the pioneers is reflected in a sermon by a priest in a Lower Silesian town just after three Polish settlers

were killed there by the Wehrwolf in 1945: “… and let them speak that only the szabrownicy go to the

Reclaimed Lands; that we are all globetrotters here […] we know who we are and who we will be.”74 In

other words, the decision to resettle was not merely a decision about one's place of residence. It was a

political manifestation and it was perceived as such.

Edward Apanel’s story is also insightful because it shows the depth of intergenerational conflict

running through families. Edward became a member of the voluntary militia battalions organized by the

PWP “in order to honor the October Revolution. My mother could not come to terms: ‘They gave us the

farm because they had to! My husband and your father died at the front.’”75 Occasionally, the

relationship was reverse and it was the parents who convinced their children to embrace the new

ideology. Jan Krukowski, a peasant from Galicia who was wounded on the Italian front fighting for “our

69 Bolek, Wróciła Polska : Pamiętniki z Pierwszych Lat Powojennych Na Ziemiach Odzyskanych, 168. 70 Ibid., 265.71 Ibid., 265.72 Ibid., 265.73 Ibid., 265.74 Ibid., 29.75 Ibid., 172.

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dear Austria”76 and then on the Polish front fighting the Bolsheviks in 1920, in 1945 “pulled his son out

of the forest” [his son was a Home Army partisan] and then decided his family should answer the call to

settle in the RLs. “It was difficult to make up your mind […] Those were the days of extraordinary tension

when our entire society lived on the crossroads not knowing which way to go.”77

There was one other important aspect of the postwar Polish society which was not addressed by the

official propaganda directly. The end of the war ended the prison-like conditions of occupation which

often reduced life to a struggle for survival which left no space for cultural expression in the public

sphere. The RLs project provided new space to express the accumulated and long suppressed thoughts

and energy. Jerzy Ristow wrote: “when I arrived to Szczecin in 1945, I felt like everything was possible,

like I found myself in a city with great opportunities and that it was only up to us to shape its future.” 78 It

was an attitude shared by Ryszard Szyndler who moved to Koszalin in the summer of 1945: “Today, after

long reflection, I think that the desire to find a vent for my youthful energy and opening up a broad field

for my personality was decisive [in the decision to resettle].”79 The allure of a place where the sky was

the limit found reflection in many memoirs written by the younger pioneers.80

The title of this paper is a reference to the famous American western, but also a direct quote from

an interview with Andrzej Ziemilski, who was a 22-years old pioneer in Silesia in 1945: "We have become

unbelievably enamored with those lands and it is quite likely that we have behaved somewhat along the

lines of "How the West was won" [sic]. We felt like we were the pioneers indeed. It was a trans-

imposition of our previous defeats, complexes and humiliations upon this new space, upon its

construction and redevelopment."81 The familiarity of so many pioneers with the myth of the American

West is remarkable and it is an open question to what extent this familiarity influenced events on the

ground in 1945 and to what extent it was merely an afterthought embraced later, especially after the

new wave of 'classic Westerns' appeared in cinemas in the 1960s.

A close look at how knowledge about the RLs circulated in 1945 reveals that only the most general

information was provided by the state while the details were supplied by the word of mouth and local

networks. Zygmunt Szeloch was a young man from central Poland who knew that “new settlers were

76 Dulczewski and Kwilecki, Pamiętniki Osadników Ziem Odzyskanych, 16277 Ibid., 163.78 Bolek, Wróciła Polska : Pamiętniki z Pierwszych Lat Powojennych Na Ziemiach Odzyskanych, 101.79 Dulczewski and Kwilecki, Pamiętniki Osadników Ziem Odzyskanych, 576. 80 At the same time, their friends were hiding in the forest and engaged in partisan warfare against the new regime.81 "Wysiedlałem Horsta Bienka. Z socjologiem Andrzejem Ziemilskim rozmawia Adam Krzemiński" Polityka, 1988, nr 16 (1615), 11.

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arriving to the Reclaimed Lands, new factories were set up, new lands were claimed and a new Polish

life was slowly setting in. I knew so little, however, that I could not take the decision on my own and

leave for God-knows-where.”82 He was then told by a stranger he met on a train about where exactly

jobs and apartments were available and about the lies of “hostile propaganda” that claimed that the RLs

were “a temporary fact, that a Third World War was to erupt soon and that the Germans will return to

take what is theirs.”83 “Reliable news of an eyewitness” – received by Jerzy Brinken of Warsaw in June

1945 was “a most lucky circumstance”84 especially since it was brought by his sister from Szczecin “full of

greenery [with] free apartments to choose and a job.”85

The issue of public trust is critical when evaluating propaganda’s impact. It cannot be gauged

precisely, but suffice it to say that Poles had substantial apprenticeship in reading in between the lines

of the ‘party line’, first under the Russian, Austrian and German empires for over a hundred years and

then under the Nazis and the Soviets. The value of a trusted, personal source of information regarding

the situation in the RLs is prominent in numerous memoirs and cannot be overestimated.

4.2. Are the Bolsheviks right?

The scarcity of land in interwar Poland was a real problem that the communists wanted to turn into

mass political support. It found reflection in many memoirs and was an important factor behind the

emergence of the large pool of people for whom the promise of land ownership had a special appeal.

Franciszek Kluska from a small village in central Poland was one of them. He applied for a permit to

settle in the RLs already in May 1945 after reading an official manifesto posted in his village. He later

wrote about his place of birth: “the soil was poor, divided into tiny fragments with lots of landless flock,

with several wealthy farmers unable to hire all of them; no industry at all… poverty gaping wherever you

turned.”86 An evaluation not uncommon for the expellees from the Kresy was that “everything in

comparison with what we left behind the Bug River was splendid”87 even if it could not compensate for

the sorrow of expulsion. Similar descriptions can be found in hundreds of accounts. In this respect, the

picture of the land of plenty painted by the authorities was often verified positively and was perhaps the

most effective argument of the entire campaign.

82 Bolek, Wróciła Polska : Pamiętniki z Pierwszych Lat Powojennych Na Ziemiach Odzyskanych, 215.83 Ibid., 214.84 Białecki, Z Nad-Odrzańskiej Ziemi : Wspomnienia Szczecinian, 62.85 Ibid., 62.86 Bolek, Wróciła Polska : Pamiętniki z Pierwszych Lat Powojennych Na Ziemiach Odzyskanych, 257.87 Ibid., 167.

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Some people sought to verify the rosy official picture on their own and organized reconnaissance

groups to obtain more information. Ryszard Smaga, a fifteen year old boy from Kraków in 1945, wrote

about his father being “tempted by the ‘heavenly delicacies’ brought from the ‘lands overflowing with

milk and honey’ [who then] left in early August 1945 in a group of ‘bliss seekers’ together with his

friends.”88 Ryszard’s own first impression was mixed. The scenic beauty of the Sudety Mountains and

“the fruit gardens evoked admiration, especially among those who had only seen fruit gardens with

plums, pears and apples.”89 But upon closer inspection of their destination - the image was spoiled by

“the bodies of dead soldiers and civilians rotting on the streets” and “certain individuals whom no one

trusted”90 - the szabrownicy. Peasants, on the other hand, usually wrote in terms of a confirmation of

what they had been promised by what they saw. Especially the ones from the Kresy frequently spoke

about “a real Promised Land. Just think - we have received a furnished house, around the house - ripe

fields of wheat and corn that we could harvest and thresh for ourselves with no limits or quotas.”91

The economic dimension of official propaganda emerges as quite convincing in the accounts of the

pioneers. The first encounters with German architecture and the rolling hills of wheat provide a vivid

confirmation: “…we have crossed the old Polish-German border. From a boundless plain we entered a

rolling landscape surrounded by forests and hills, from where the rural huts were wooden and thatch-

roofed to the country of stone mansions with redbrick roofs. The road itself marked the border. Thus far

we travelled on break-stone and now on asphalt.”92 However, disappointment of raised expectations

was also not an uncommon reaction. The impression depended on the region to which the pioneers

moved and to what extent it was destroyed, pillaged or ‘evacuated’ by the Red Army. 93 In general, the

reactions of those peasants who settled in a relatively unscathed countryside (especially in the Lower

Silesia) were positive while those who visited East Prussia, Pomerania, larger towns and especially

Wrocław and Szczecin, were more skeptical and not infrequently terrified.

88 Dulczewski and Kwilecki, Pamiętniki Osadników Ziem Odzyskanych, 213.89 Ibid., 213.90 Ibid., 214.91 Ibid., 233.The accounts of the expelled Kresowiacy merit special caution – the fact that they could not entertain the option of return cannot be emphasized enough. There was also a severe limit to how openly they could talk about their past in communist Poland. For an insightful introduction to this topic, see a recent article by Prof. Jerzy Kochanowski entitled "Gordyjski węzeł zabużańskiego mienia" published in the Pomocnik Historyczny Polityki series, Kresy Rzeczpospolitej: Wielki mit Polaków, Nr 2/2015, 148-151.92 Barbara Chlabicz, Wyjście Na Prostą; Pamiętniki z Lat 1944-1969, (Warszawa: Czytelnik, 1973), 125.93 From an instruction by the Ministry of Industry to the Operational Groups sent to the RLs issued in March 1945: until the Red Army officially (by means of special commissions) transfers its property rights to the Polish state, the Red Army order no. 220172/S was to be executed, which meant that “all the assets […] were to be considered legitimate war reparations.” See: Jędruszczak, Upaństwowienie i Odbudowa Przemysłu w Polsce 1944-1948; Materiały Źródłowe, 147.

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The latter reaction emerges clearly in the collection of memoirs written by the first settlers in

Wrocław entitled The Difficult Days. One of them wrote: “When I think of our city in 1945, I can hardly

believe that tens of thousands of Poles were able to live and work here. Electricity, gas, water were

unavailable for months, so was public transport, food was scarce and public safety – especially at night –

was not good. Why didn't those people run away from the unfriendly and unapproachable ruins?” 94 On

the walls of the remaining buildings in Szczecin “one could see the German inscriptions: ‘Wir kapituliren

nie’ or ‘Tod den Bolschewiken’ and next to them in Polish and Russian: ‘Min nie ma’. 95 Even during the

second winter in Wrocław (1946/1947), “fat rats with long white tails, fearing no one, roamed the

streets and visited the settlers’ apartments.”96 The Promised Land looked more attractive in the

countryside, but not always.97

The frequently disappointed expectations provide evidence that the propaganda campaign had a

real effect. The goal was to put as many people into the RLs as soon as possible and the psychological

well-being of the settlers (especially of those from distant regions for whom it was difficult to return)

was a luxury. A settler from Przemyśl wrote about his first reaction to the destruction he saw in the RLs:

“We spent the second night on the train, sunk in the reflection about our situation and the conditions of those Reclaimed Lands from our dreams, which so far composed a gloomy picture of devastation. We understood how much effort awaited us before we rebuild these lands. […] Our disappointment came too quickly, at the very beginning of our move.”98

The last glance at the train “reminded [him] about the voluntarily abandoned hometown with our

families and friends.”99

4.3.National in Form, Socialist in Content

The impact of propaganda and various state supplied incentives provides only a partial explanation

for why there were so many pioneers willing to settle in the RLs in 1945. State propaganda efforts

addressed only a fraction of the concerns they faced. One area where the impact of the state does

emerge more decisively is the language through which the pioneers narrated their experiences –

94 Towarzystwo Miłośników Wrocławia. and Markowski, Trudne Dni : Wrocław 1945 r. we Wspomnieniach Pionierów, 199.95 Bolek, Wróciła Polska : Pamietniki z Pierwszych Lat Powojennych Na Ziemiach Odzyskanych, 95.96 Ibid. 103.97 Stanisław Bania, a village administrator in Pomerania who entered the RLs in March 1945, wrote: “I knew the village well and when I entered it - I could not recognize it. The village was right between the Polish and the German fronts for three weeks. I could not understand how I could start working here, how I will able to do everything I was told to do by the military [Red Army] commander to whom I promised to uphold my commitments”. Dulczewski and Kwilecki, Pamiętniki Osadników Ziem Odzyskanych, 447.98 Ibid., 101.99 Ibid., 376.

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through a very specific set of terms developed in the public discourse to frame the RLs project.

Discursive analysis is extremely difficult in this context due to a variety of extra-textual and politically

'delicate' issues affecting interpretation.100 This difficulty manifests itself also in the impossibility of

precise evaluation of the responsiveness of the pioneers to the patriotic call of duty. Below I present

several representative examples and discuss the emerging patterns, but more research, including source

criticism, is required to reach firmer conclusions.

Teachers emerge as a social group most receptive to the official rhetoric. They used the patriotic

phraseology extensively and mentioned affirmatively all kinds of arguments in support of the

reincorporation of the RLs put forward on the international arena. This observation is somewhat

perplexing since most of the Polish intelligentsia (especially on the local level) had a reputation for being

hostile to communism, which is reflected in the fact that only two hundred teachers had become party

members by 1948.101 With this consideration in mind, it is impossible to assess to what extent they were

in fact driven by the call to patriotic duty independently of communist propaganda and to what extent

some of the rhetoric they used was an instrumental and conscious insertion due to their awareness of

how to deal with the censors in communist Poland. Even if it was genuine in particular instances, the

question of representativeness cannot be neglected.

With all these reservations in mind, it is a fact that a number of teachers who settled in the RLs

wrote in the following vain:

“I’m going to the Reclaimed Lands! I have heard that there exists an acute shortage of teachers. And the Polish child, after so many years of Hitlerite violence, must study now. There has been no education available for the past five years and there is so much to make up. A Polish teacher cannot be missing where the Polish children await. I’m off!”102

Many similar accounts also explicitly juxtaposed this kind of motivation to economic, adventurist and

‘egoistic’ mindsets of other settlers. However, some of the stories follow the party line so closely that

doubts about their credibility cannot be neglected. For example, a teacher from Poznań who came to

Szczecin in July 1945 wrote that his desire to travel to Szczecin first occurred to him during the Christmas

100 The fundamental puzzle concerns intentionality. Some of the memoirs must have been written with the awareness that they might be surveyed by a censor, hence the question to what extent the content that could presumably appear as desirable to the censor was included consciously. This is a problematic issue that applies to a large part of the sources surveyed for this paper. It is mitigated by the fact that the main argument is precisely about the divergence and lack of correspondence between official propaganda and the reactions and behavior independent of it.101 Łach, Władze Komunistyczne Wobec Ziem Odzyskanych Po II Wojnie Światowej : Materiały z Konferencji, 326. Czesław Osękowski, Społeczeństwo Polski Zachodniej i Północnej w Latach 1945-1956 : Procesy Integracji i Dezintegracji. (Zielona Góra: Wyższa Szkoła Pedagogiczna im. Tadeusza Kotarbińskiego, 1994), 199.102 Dulczewski and Kwilecki, Pamiętniki Osadników Ziem Odzyskanych, 526.

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Eve of 1940. He made the following announcement to his family: “after the war, we will all meet in the

Polish Szczecin […]. The war will be long, but Szczecin will return to Poland.”103 His family called him a

dreamer and his words were met with smirks of unbelief, but his determination remained unchanged.

The same author also justified his preference for Szczecin over Poznań by his fascination with the Baltic

Sea. He wrote about “the drive to the sea and sailing voyages” running in the blood of “our sons and

grandsons […] inherited from their Slavic ancestors.”104 Similar meta-patriotic formulations such as the

claim that Szczecin was located in “the direction in which the first Piast knight teams headed ages

ago”105 were couched in the language emphasizing the “victory of epochal justice”106 and reunification

with the motherland and bear verbatim resemblance to the official rhetoric.

Countless examples of a similar phraseology can be found. Two more should suffice to demonstrate

the general trend. Franciszek Buchtalarz, a pioneer of Szczecin and a high school teacher from central

Poland before the war, justified his decision to resettle in the following way:

“Certainly, I could have led a peaceful life under normal conditions if I decided to stay in Poznań […] I have chosen Szczecin because that ‘something’ within me was stronger than reason, something that called to do the opposite. The dream of the Polish Piast knights driving toward Pomerania in order to unite the Slavic tribes with the motherland transformed itself into the now tangible fact - new teams of settlers, composed of the knights of labor, peasants, workers and intelligentsia; all of them willing to live, work and bury their tired bones in the primeval, Polish soil of Szczecin.”107

Jerzy Brinker from Warsaw, also a high school teacher:

“My first day in Szczecin was not over yet, but I already felt sympathy for this city. After all, it is our Polish Szczecin, which we will set up in our own, Polish way. It will serve Poland and the nation; it will soon become a major port and a window to the world. It will serve the southern and western Poland; the river Odra will assume a life-giving function of a communication artery. The future of Szczecin is ours – Polish.”108

Some pioneers went in their historic-patriotic zeal so far that they disregarded factual accuracy. The

streets of a Pomeranian town “cleaned by several sweepers with their usual German pedantry” could

not have “remembered the days of the Jagiellonians” as some pioneers believed, because they were

never a part of the Jagiellonian realm.109 It is not improbable that the verbatim copy of the propaganda

lines into a personal memoir was done to signal its lack of authenticity. For example, Tadeusz

Wojciechowski from Poznan wrote about his impressions from Szczecin and the Odra River. “On a wall

of a big, corner edifice – a plaque which said: The Chrobry Embankment. I stretch my historical memory. 103 Ibid., 370.104 Ibid., 372.105 Ibid., 373.106 Ibid., 370.107 Ibid., 415.108 Białecki, Z Nad-Odrzańskiej Ziemi : Wspomnienia Szczecinian, 69.109 Bolek, Wróciła Polska : Pamiętniki z Pierwszych Lat Powojennych Na Ziemiach Odzyskanych, 19.

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Yes, it is Bolesław, the son of Mieszko the First, who dug in the border poles here. And so it follows – it is

not an annexation of Szczecin, but its return [sic] to the motherland, or using the politicians’ language –

an act of historic justice.”110 Sarcastic or not, the point about the pervasiveness of official propaganda

language remains.

Similarly elusive (if less frequent) statements have been made by workers and peasants. When a

young pioneer and a member of a socialist youth organization was sent to the party’s ideological school,

she “experienced [it] as a demolition of [her] old views on how societies work [...]. They were destroyed

by the October Revolution, word after word uttered on a given subject.” 111 She continued: “the words of

the lecturer invaded my brain cells destroying the previous view of what the communist revolution was

really about.”112 Given the rich record of the workers’ resistance against the communist regime in Poland

and the circumstances in which some of the accounts cited in this paper were published (i.e. published

officially) it is safe to assume that some of the verbatim transplantations of propaganda into personal

accounts were meant as a ridicule - perhaps a reaction to its pervasiveness.

If such a complete reversal of one's worldview was nonetheless occasionally genuine, it was perhaps

most manifest in how the attitude of some Poles toward the western Allies had changed. Britain and

America were no longer allies in the right cause, but reactionary revisionists supporting the Nazis. In a

diary entry from April 5th, 1946, a young communist Feliks Siemiankowski wrote:

“Churchill’s speech from Fulton cannot leave my mind. He defends the Germans and says that Warsaw steals deep into their territory and throws out millions of Germans as if he did not know that the lands by the Odra and Nysa Rivers belong to the historic Slavic soil, their reincorporation is a modest redress for the sum of suffering and victims of our heroic nation.”113

In the final analysis, for the majority of the workers, peasants and youth settling in the RLs the term

‘Reclaimed Territories’ was unambiguous and unworthy of dwelling on its origins and significance at

length. They narrated their fate as a return to where their forefathers once tilled the land. Bronisława

Piotrowska, who was a ten year old girl from the Kresy in 1945, “frequently asked [her] mother why this

region is called the ‘Reclaimed Lands’”. The answer was that “the Reclaimed Lands are called this way

because they were taken away from the Germans, who had taken it away from us very long ago.” 114 In

many memoirs the issue is not explored beyond this statement, it is accepted as a fact of life.

110 Dulczewski and Kwilecki, Pamiętniki Osadników Ziem Odzyskanych, 363.111 Bolek, Wróciła Polska : Pamiętniki z Pierwszych Lat Powojennych Na Ziemiach Odzyskanych, 71. 112 Ibid., 71.113 Feliks Siemiankowski, Trudne Dni : Dziennik Aktywisty PPR, 1945-1948, (Poznań: Wydawnictwo Poznańskie, 1974), 32.114 Bolek, Wróciła Polska : Pamiętniki z Pierwszych Lat Powojennych Na Ziemiach Odzyskanych, 278.

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5. Conclusion

The propaganda campaign did not stop after the Potsdam Conference. It reached its culmination at

the Reclaimed Lands Exhibitions in Wrocław in the summer of 1948. It was both an exhibition and a

series of celebratory events commemorating the three years of reintegration. Under preparation for

over two years and visited by two million people, including such figures as Picasso or Huxley, it became a

benchmark in its own class of propaganda warfare.115 According to the Exhibition’s director, it had two

major components. The first one was a presentation of the progress in reconstruction, “an answer to the

revisionist German claims of the imperialist circles” who were trying to convince the world that the RLs

“were going to remain a desert in the heart of Europe”.116 The second was historic - a documentation of

“the ten centuries of the Polish-German struggle”. 117 In the words of a visitor, it made “a huge

impression […]. What really stuck in my memory was the Victory Rotunda. I stood in front of ‘the wall of

struggle’ and looked at the map of Poland AD 1000 and the current one. What I felt then cannot be

expressed.”118

The Wrocław Exhibition marks the peak of attention that the RLs project received as a national

cause. In the 1950s, the official policy was reoriented toward blurring the distinction between the RLs

and the old country. A new administrative division and a redirection of investment stream to other

regions were among the first signs of the general shift away from investing in the RLs. Parts of East

Prussia and Pomerania became the most impoverished regions in Poland, a process of reverse migration

began to be recorded by demographers and the entire region eventually began to be (mis-)called the

Ziemie Wyzyskane (not Odzyskane) – the Exploited Lands.119

A quantitative evaluation of the effect of propaganda on both the quantity of settlement and the

decision-making of those who did respond positively is impossible. The sample of people who decided to

record their experiences in memoirs was certainly not representative of the entire population, which

also explains the memoirists’ skepticism with respect to the motivations of co-settlers. This attitude was

summarized by Jan Jakubek, a teacher in the Vistula Estuary region:

“A couple of words about the population that has arrived to this region. I am acquainted with them very well. […] About 5 percent of them did manifest a complete devotion to reconstruction and administration.

115 For more details, see: Jakub Tyszkiewicz, Sto Wielkich Dni Wrocławia : Wystawa Ziem Odzyskanych we Wrocławiu a Propaganda Polityczna Ziem Zachodnich i Północnych w Latach 1945-1948 (Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Arboretum, 1997).116 Wystawa Ziem Odzyskanych, Katalog Oficjalny Wystawy Ziem Odzyskanych 1948 (Wrocław: Prasa i Wiedza, 1948), 12.117 Ibid., 13.118 Chlabicz, Grochol and Olszewska, Wyjście Na Prostą; Pamiętniki z Lat 1944-1969, 118.119 Ewa Frątczak et al., Demografia i Społeczeństwo Ziem Zachodnich i Północnych..., 518-519.

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They were the true pioneers about whom we can say that they were heroes and builders who did not arrive here to look for riches, personal happiness. All of their effort, health, talent and youth was dedicated to the fatherland in a moment which occurred in Polish history only once in a thousand years.”120

In the final analysis, the kind of methodology applied in this paper enables to appreciate the role of

individual agency and the ways in which it complimented and eluded state control. In the same way it

would be impossible to argue that the entire population exchange would have happened without state

assistance (and without states initiating world wars in the first place) it is misguided to apply the

totalitarian lens of analysis in which the population is a passive object operated upon by impersonal

bureaucratic forces. The high level of social dislocation apparent in this paper is an example of how

factors exogenous to the state were in fact conducive to the success of the resettlement operation and

how they influenced its ultimate course and outcomes. The high level of social dislocation contributed

considerably to the initially voluntary and spontaneous character of the resettlement operation.

Even if no definitive answer with respect to the impact of propaganda can be provided, the

complexity of the decision making framework faced by the pioneers emerges as a rich topic for further

study. Some of the psychological effect of wartime trauma can be traced to how they were subjectively

experienced by ordinary people. No words can capture the stunning complexity of those experiences

better than two episodes. On May 1, 1946 in Czaplinek - Tempelburg until 1945 - the residents organized

their first Labor Day parade. Most of them landless peasants from the Kresy, they marched through the

ruins of a German town to the accompaniment of a military orchestra playing both the Red Army’s

Katyusha and the Crying Willows [Rozszumiały się Wierzby Płaczące] – a popular song of the

underground Home Army still fighting in the forests at the time.121 Around the same time in Kostrzyń –

the Prussian Küstrin where Frederick the Great was imprisoned by his father – cadets from a socialist

youth organization (OMTUR) served as altar boys wearing “blue shirts and red ties under the white

surplices”.122 They did it because there was “not enough time for political reeducation” of their parents

and the boys wanted to let them know that the local priest had nothing against their red ties and thus

“no offense to the divine” was to be found under communism.123

The early pioneer days in the RLs were permeated by sharp paradoxes, bewildering uncertainty,

great fears and high hopes. Chaos, anarchy and might over right ruled supreme. A study focusing on

120 Dulczewski and Kwilecki, Pamiętniki Osadników Ziem Odzyskanych, 726.121 Bolek, Wróciła Polska : Pamiętniki z Pierwszych Lat Powojennych Na Ziemiach Odzyskanych, 195.122 Ibid., 244.123 Ibid., 245.

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official documents might lead to different observations – each bureaucrat involved attempted to impose

a degree of order on the messy reality to the best of his or her abilities. While this is perhaps universally

true – a study of personal accounts serves in this context as a corrective to the hitherto dominant state-

focused narratives of the early years in the Polish Wild West.

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