First published in German as Polens Wilder Westen: Erzwungene Migration und die kulturelle Aneignung des Oderraums, 1945–1948 (2013), and soon after in Polish translation, Beata Halicka's much acclaimed book on “forced migration and cultural appropriation” in territories delegated to Poland in 1945 has finally appeared in an unchanged English translation. Conducted under Karl Schlögel at Frankfurt/Oder's Viadrina University, Halicka's research adds to a rich and ongoing post-1989 German, Polish, and Anglophone scholarly conversation. Back in the Solidarity era, Krystyna Kersten's pioneering analysis of Poland's communist seizure of power devoted considerable space to how forced migration fostered a lawless environment that ultimately predisposed uprooted settlers to reconcile themselves to communist rule.1 While still attentive to top-down perspectives, scholars including John Kulczycki, Katharina Matro, Zbigniew Mazur, and Grzegorz Strauchold have since focused on grassroots experiences by diverse Polish settlers.2 Alongside a range of regional studies,3 urban case analyses by Jacek Friedrich, Jan Musekamp, and Gregor Thum have respectively featured Gdańsk, Szczecin, and Wrocław, while Hugo Service has compared two smaller Silesian towns.4Entering into this crowded field, Halicka applies literary, memoir, and archival materials to explore immediate postwar grassroots interchange amongst the heterogenous Polish inheritors of the former German territories, including impoverished refugees from eastern kresy borderlands (annexed to the USSR), settlers from central Poland, communist administrators, and a “mafia” of plunderers. Like many scholars, Halicka strives to overcome the paucity of reliable sources for the Polish experience in the essentially lawless and enormously destructive environment during and after the flight and expulsion of Germans. Significant state and regional archival holdings were destroyed before Halicka could see them, and like the periodical press (absent in Halicka's work) often featured a top-down perspective. In addition to memoirs and published archival collections, Halicka draws Polish experiences from accounts submitted to competitions from Poznań’s nationalist West Institute, which were selectively published in 1957, 1966, and 1970.5 For German accounts, Halicka uses Theodor Schieder's politically motivated multivolume Dokumentation der Vertreibung (1954–1961) and broader collections from the Ost-Dok archive in Bayreuth, as well as recently published archival materials.Following an introductory chapter, Halicka offers ten overlapping chapters of differing length and structure that relate the political context behind the massive forced migrations, the chaotic flux of population exchange, and Polish settlers’ alienation from the lands they inherited. After chapter two surveys wartime and postwar forced migrations, chapter three explores Henryk Worcell's trilogy of novels (1959/1960/1965) about everyday experiences of settlers who tried to forge their own identity out of the German cultural heritage– proof that the expulsion of Germans was hardly a taboo subject in postwar Poland (p. 51). “Worcell depicts that which one may search for in vain in archival sources, official reports and administrative notifications,” Halicka infers, “namely the feelings and impressions of people, their everyday problems, priorities and hierarchies” (p. 58). It is a risky proposition, nonetheless, to rely on one man's fiction as an accurate portrayal of historical behaviors.After a fifteen-page recapitulation of Nazi brutalities in wartime Poland, chapter four recreates the flight and expulsion of Germans through the eyes of Polish forced laborers, who suddenly transformed from a slave class into the ones in charge. Drawing from West Institute reminiscences from the late 1950s, Halicka claims that forced laborers often felt “pity” for the Germans. Halicka also emphasizes “destruction carried out by Poles, a topic frequently passed over in silence. Reading the memoirs of Polish settlers provides sufficient evidence that even untouched or slightly damaged homes were torn down as the bricks were needed to rebuild other buildings,” especially Warsaw, under unclear auspices ranging from central authorities, local authorities, residents, and gangs (p. 112). After chapter five details graphic accounts of German expulsions, chapter six features Polish expulsions from the kresy amid attacks from Ukrainian nationalists, as well as the arrival of Polish forced laborers from western Germany. Chapter seven observes that settler memoirs seldom mentioned expelled Germans, and if so, they were “only as a side note, written from the point of view of a disinterested observer” as Germans were “assigned collective guilt for which they now had to do penance” (p. 183). Chapter eight, meanwhile, features more explicit Polish memoirs published by the 1990s, which recounted the “organized business” of mafia marauders. Ultimately, “looting led to the unequal distribution of property and accommodation in the Western Lands, through which those disadvantaged comprised the weak and not-so-cunning settlers, or simply those who arrived too late,” while illegal trade and black-market activities supplied goods and services the state could not provide (p. 202). Archival fragments further substantiate fights over property, extensive turnover in state offices, and corruption amid severe shortages.Chapter nine, “the appropriation of one's space,” is by far the longest and theoretically sharpest section (pp. 211–299). Halicka uses the oft-applied German word “Aneignung,” which translates as “making one's own,” whether physically, legally, or spiritually, as adoption, appropriation, or even occupation. As early as the 1970s, Jan Józef Lipski had urged his fellow Poles to appropriate former German spaces, not in an exclusionary and mythological way, but accepting “German cultural goods as something of their own or as part of their own regional culture” and thus something to “manage.” As Lipski wrote in 1996, “a rich legacy has fallen to us of architecture and other works of art, as well as German historical heirlooms” which Poles should “in all conscience” safeguard “without falsification or silence in this area, to protect these treasures for the future, including our own” (quoted p. 213). As Robert Traba notes, Poles had become “co-heirs” of the material heritage that centuries of German culture had left behind (p. 213). To exhibit this practice, Halicka explores Głogów, an ancient Odra town annihilated in the war. Drawing from accounts including a 1973 collection of local memoirs and 2007 scholarly compilation, Halicka relates how settlers felt alienated from German things with which they had no connection. “Although the food was the same, it somehow tasted worse from those German pots,” one source noted, adding: “everything that we had transported from home, I treated as something sacred, even if it was ugly. German things were less valuable to me, even if they were prettier or better. But the Germans left many things” (quoted p. 226). Halicka records further alienation in her assessment of the region's schools and cultural associations. “In this new foreign world, Polish settlers were surrounded by the testimony of a German culture which they often hated,” she concludes, “thus, they were even more desirous that every cultural programme was closely connected with the Polish culture they valued” (p. 236). After a section on the Polish Catholic church's role in Polonizing the new territories, Halicka examines agricultural reforms, more accounts of German expulsions, and the 1946 referendum. Chapter ten showcases Poznań’s West Institute as a political organ devoted to proving the successful integration of settlers, whose diversity Halicka again features in vignettes based on archived West Institute competition submissions. In her epilogue, Halicka postulates that settlers took part in the competition to compile a written legacy for their descendants.Seeking to avoid nationalist readings of epochal forced migrations that altered millions of lives in the heart of Europe, Halicka compiles everyday interactions in Poland's immediate postwar Odra region. The extensive block quotes in particular should interest experts who wish to study cultural struggles and internal conflicts amongst diverse Polish settler groups. It is unfortunate that the often-stilted English-language translation cannot match the German original. One also finds a great deal of overlap between the chapters, especially in their repetition of contextual detail. This translation might have provided a more clearly structured and terse monograph incorporating the past seven years of scholarship. It is marvelous, however, that Halicka's rich source base is finally accessible to English-language specialists and classrooms, for it conveys many complexities of the grassroots human experience of forced migration.