Who, what, to whom and on what language speaks? Polish-Ukrainian borderland in the 1940s: from the history of a family

Abstract

Polish-Ukrainian borderland is commonly associated with Austrian Eastern Galicia. The river San marked the western border, and the river Zbruch marked the eastern one. It was multiethnic and multicultural land. At the beginning of the twentieth century Eastern Galicia acquired an exceptional symbolic meaning, becoming the place of collision of two state projects - Polish and Ukrainian. The complex relationship between Ukrainians and Poles was escalated by the Second World War. The problem of national minorities was to be solved by resettlement, that took place from 1944 to 1946. So during and after World War II, this region lost their traditional multiethnic character. Poles, Jews, and smaller numbers of Germans were replaced by Ukrainians from those territories that became part of the new Polish state. From this period Eastern Galicia became the part of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic. This article centers on the question of what were the essential features that delimit the identity of Poles and Ukrainians in the mid-1940s? For answering on this question, I have chosen unpublished memoires of a man who was born in 1913 in Austrian Galicia, lived in Lviv voivodeship of the Second Polish Republic and died in Soviet Ukraine; I also use oral conversations with his children. Methodologically this paper is based on the work of Frederick Barth and Iver Neumann, who concluded that the most effective way of studying identity is to investigate the significant markers of identity that delimit the culture of this group from the culture of the «Other». Thus, it has been noted by many authors, identity is a very complex subject, that is difficult to study. The historical sources used in this article, shows that identity of the Polish-Ukrainian borderland population is ambivalent, blurred. The most significant marker of ethnic identity - language - does not «work» for the population of the Polish-Ukrainian borderland due to the widespread bilingualism. Difficulties arise with another markers - differences in denomination affiliation and the territory.