Memory of Lost Local Homelands: Social Transmission of Memory of the Former Polish Eastern Borderlands in Contemporary Poland

Abstract

Memories of violence that individuals and societies in Central and Eastern Europe experienced include displacement on a massive scale. As a result of World War II, millions of people were forced to leave their local homelands. Among them were also people from territories of the former Polish Eastern Borderlands (called Kresy),1 which after World War II became a part of the Lithuanian, Belorussian and Ukrainian Soviet Republics (Ciesielski, 2004; Piskorski, 2011). After World War II many Poles from those territories were resettled to the new Polish state; as of 2015, about 5 million of their descendants live in Poland. During the period of communism, ‘the memory of the Kresy’, as it is commonly called in the literature, was successfully pushed back into the margins of social life, but after democratic changes started being introduced in Poland we have been able to witness an ‘explosion’ of this memory of the Kresy (Kolbuszewski, 1996; Handke, 1997; Szaruga, 2001; Kasperski, 2007), as well as of other memories repressed in communist times. The present volume offers various approaches of this topic, for example Zessin-Jurek’s chapter dedicated to the Polish Siberian deportees. ‘The memory of the Kresy’ has manifested itself mainly in a large number of published memoirs, novels, documentaries, albums, and in the emergence of many organizations of persons who were displaced from the Kresy as well as of their descendants.