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Pioneers of the Wild West, 1945-1948:Propaganda, Myth and Memory in the Polish ‘Reclaimed Lands’Draft: do not cite without the author’s permissionTomasz Blusiewiczblusiewicz@fas.harvard.eduHarvard UniversityThe Polish ‘Reclaimed Lands’ in 1945 – an overviewThe ‘Reclaimed Lands’ (Ziemie Odzyskane) was a term first coined in Poland to refer to the territory incorporated at the expense of Czechoslovakia on October 1, 1938. The contested Cieszyn Silesia region was a source of tensions between the two states after it had been split after the 1920 plebiscite and then annexed by Poland while the world’s attention focused on the Sudetenland crisis. It is questionable whether the addition of approximately 230 000 new citizens and 800 km2 of the Zaolzie area was worth the reputational damage that the country has suffered as a willing accomplice of Hitler’s aggression. Nonetheless, the annexation was hailed as a historic victory and exploited for propagandistic legitimacy purposes domestically. President Ignacy Mo?cicki proudly 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 they had been waiting for Poland to return for the past six hundred years.The Zaolzie returned to Czechoslovakia in 1945 and Poland faced new ‘Reclaimed Lands’ - now on a much grander scale. More than 100 000 km2 of prewar German territory has been awarded to Poland at the Yalta and Potsdam conferences. The transfer of this territory was officially presented as a just compensation for the Polish eastern Kresy borderlands that the Soviet Union invaded in agreement with the provisions of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and kept after 1945. It was a necessary ‘living space’ for the several million Poles who were about to be expelled from their homeland and ‘repatriated’ west. The historic task of reintegrating the Reclaimed Lands (further in the paper: RLs) had been transformed into a propagandistic cornerstone of national mobilization by the new regime. 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 in Poland. Succinctly put by the communist Vice Prime Minister W?adys?aw Gomu?ka - “the Western territories will tie the nation to the system.” Stalin thought along parallel lines – Poland will not be able to stand on its own feet without Soviet support because it will be threatened too severely by the prospect of German revanchism.An unprecedented propaganda machine was assembled and 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 not seen as a problem. Why did the communists consider it necessary to make as wide an audience as possible sympathetic to the cause of making the RLs permanently Polish? Most importantly, it was agreed at the Yalta Conference that some eastern 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 at the peace conference. The Lublin Government could count on Stalin’s support in pushing the border all the way west to the Oder-Neisse line, but at the time it was not yet evident that Stalin’s support was all that was required to secure such an outcome. The American and British (in particular) positions were ambiguous and increasingly pro-German. In addition, the London Government in exile 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 conference. The first ‘settlers’ followed literally hours behind the Red Army as it approached Berlin in the final months of the war.Domestically, the RLs were exploited as a nation-unifying cause to win popular support for the Lublin Government and the Soviet supported Polish Workers’ Party (PWP). Friendship with the now brotherly USSR was explicitly presented as the sole guarantor of the new border and the PWP as the sole political party that could foster such friendship. The abandoned German property and land in the RLs offered an opportunity to proceed rapidly with the communist policy agenda – nationalization of industry and trade and agricultural collectivization, initially euphemized as ‘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 tactically undesirable initially. Furthermore, the anti-German sentiment was a convenient card to play. The reunification with ‘the cradle of the Slavic peoples’ was a project that no patriotic Pole could oppose. The Lublin Government, by portraying itself as the sole guarantor and executioner of the historic mission, was waging a battle for the hearts and minds of the Polish society. It was a difficult battle in a country were communism had negligible grassroots support, a country invaded and occupied from the east in 1920, 1939 and 1944, with its elites either buried in the Katyń forest, Kazakh steppe or Syberian taiga and the lucky survivors on their long way back from various parts of the Eurasian landmass.The reintegration of the RLs before the peace conference was extremely difficult to carry out in practice. The biggest city of the region – Breslau – was turned into a fortress not to be surrendered until May 7, 1945. Stettin and Die Pommernstellung were among the most bitterly defended parts of the Reich since they were the gateway to Berlin. Furthermore, out of approximately 9 million people living in the RLs in 1939, at best 1 million could be considered to some degree Polish. The Polish officials estimated that about six million Germans who lived in the RLs in 1939 had either perished or escaped in direct consequence of military operations. It meant that there were still about three million that “would have to be removed”. The transport capacity at hand was extremely limited with most of the rolling stock either destroyed or operated by the Red Army. Most major bridges and strategic railway hubs linking Central Poland with the RLs were gone. The imposition of communist rule in Poland was not a foregone conclusion until 1948. In this context, organizing the greatest single population transfer in history was not an easy task. As it was put by a prominent communist Edward Ochab, initially put in charge of the operation, it had “gigantic proportions” that would pose a challenge for any government in any country even under more peaceful conditions.The pioneer myth and a historiographical intervention In 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 around 1.7 million ‘settlers’ found themselves in the RLs by the end of 1945. How did they get there? To answer this question in detail one would have to describe each individual 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 extremely scant knowledge of one’s destination. In general, the first wave of settlement was based on a voluntary, spontaneous and individual decision of each person or family to go and remain in the RLs. In other words, while the government launched a massive propaganda campaign to encourage Poles to settle in the RLs already in the early months of 1945, it lacked the resources to centrally plan, conduct and secure on operation of dimensions so vast. It had to rely on each person’s private willingness and initiative to leave his or her home, embark on a risky journey and settle in a foreign no-man’s land.The veracity of the context sketched above is confirmed by a speech by Boles?aw Rumiński, an official from the Ministry of Industry, in the Krajowa Rada Narodowa - the provisional parliament. On 5th May, 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 of it, 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.”All those who followed similar appeals were soon to be immortalized in the so-called pioneer myth. The word myth does not dismiss the reality of the endeavor, to the contrary – the evidence of this paper makes the heroic nature of the pioneers’ experience manifest. But the main focus is slightly different. I examine the deliberation process that preceded the pioneers’ decisions to move to the RLs. What motivated them to make it in the context of all the serious risks that it entailed? Where did they find the courage to sustain it? What were the most common reasons for and against considered and which among them were decisive? These questions combine into the central problem 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 aggrandized 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 investigation 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, hitherto largely neglected in historiography, to light. The impact of propaganda’s language on how people narrated their stories of the early pioneer days in the RLs is well visible and quite specific. The official rhetoric provided a fa?ade of patriotic phraseology, historic and epic causes behind which a diverse set of existential reasons rooted in the dramatic postwar conditions emerge as more plausible explanations 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 volunteers. All kinds of actions undertaken by the state encouraging to settle in the RLs might be perceived as attempt to channel the grassroots mobility potential, but not 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 new Poland of 1945.The thesis developed above might appear too intuitive to be worth arguing. The enormous amount of destruction and dislocation in Europe and in Poland in particular has never been seriously questioned. However, there are several reasons why it is useful. First, there exists a tendency in the historiography of communist Eastern Europe to transpose the ‘totalitarian’ lens developed to understand the Stalinist period (1948-56) onto the immediate postwar years as well. The totalitarian perspective leads to a conceptual mistake of comprehending the entire Polish-German-Soviet population exchange process as initiated and executed exclusively by the state in which the importance of government control and orchestration was paramount. Such a view is misleading because it minimizes the role of individual agency and spontaneous social organization and movement. It also exaggerates the actual degree of control that the new Polish state possessed. Terms such as ‘forced migration’ or ‘population transfer’ widespread in literature should be, I argue, used with caution and precise qualification. My research focuses on propaganda also because in the early postwar years the authorities were often not equipped with resources beyond ink, paper and words. Furthermore, most of the resources available were deployed in the literally existential struggle to establish a communist monopoly of power. A more nuanced view should thus be adopted in which conceptual distinctions between voluntary/involuntary and organized/unorganized population transfers are seriously observed. These distinctions are necessary not only for an adequate understanding of what happened in postwar Europe, but also because the unorganized and voluntary 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.Furthermore, among those historians who do divide the resettlement operation in the RLs into distinct phases, there is a tendency to attribute a decisive role to the effects of state incentivization - from purely verbal, through material, legal and existential – as an explanatory factor behind the initial pioneer stage as well. Some historians argue that the impact of information circulating in private networks could not have rivaled state propaganda in its scale and impact. Such a conclusion could originate from the focus on the content of propaganda without a careful study of 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.Last but not least, 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 e.g. the American West, but other such as political instability (two opposing governments), ambiguity surrounding the final shape of the border or the communist revolution 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. Propaganda? Information?Several book-length studies dedicated to the issue of propaganda surrounding the RLs are available. Its basic outlines are mentioned in the opening paragraphs. 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, in addition to the Red Army’s support, legitimate historical and legal claims on the RLs as well. All of the RLs were to varying degrees linked with Polish statehood, especially 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. The RLs were also claimed on moral grounds – as retribution for war damage; on economic grounds – the industrial areas of Lower Silesia required uninhibited access to the Baltic Sea for export purposes; on geopolitical grounds – as the shortest border running along two big rivers making the next German aggression unlikely, weakening the German war capacity and dealing away with the traditional breading ground of Prussian Junker militarism. 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 officially questioned the finality of the Oder-Neisse border settlement.On the domestic level, all the big causes mentioned above were also present, but they were connected to more practical visions encouraging settlement in the RLs. The chief target audience of the campaign – landless and poor peasants – could hardly be reached by mass media and thus direct agitation such as village rallies and door-to-door visits were organized instead. “Lectures toured the villages and described the government settlement plans for the newly acquired territories in the west.” “Gigantic posters”, proclamations and appeals were attached to city walls or electricity poles in the villages. In the main town square in Kraków - a map vividly presenting the opportunities waiting for the pioneers - the shipyards of Szczecin and the rolling wheat fields of East Prussia – could be seen. The government used 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 the sense that it would be difficult to find a conscious adult citizen in the entire country who would not know about the RLs project.Initially, special reconnaissance missions were organized by the authorities into the RLs to obtain information about local conditions. Boles?aw Drobner, a socialist activist and the first Mayor of Wroc?aw, 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 a memoir. The group was composed of “the ideological thirteen” – journalists, engineers, technicians, officers and artists – plus ten drivers and fifteen heavily armed policemen. Furthermore, “because [the] team had a remarkably propagandist agenda and was supposed to enter the ‘unknown country’” – three photographers and two radio reporters were added to the crew. Drobner’s team reached Wroc?aw on April 14, yet the rearguard units of the Red Army stopped them at the outskirts. Festung Breslau was still a scene of heavy fighting. But it did not discourage the journalists from sending reports back home, soon to be printed in national newspapers. One of them, from April 20, read: “We are entering Wroc?aw. One does not think of the dangers. Joy fills our breasts. The Polish authorities finally made it back to Wroc?aw, after seven hundred years.” 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 by the authorities to quicken the population flow into 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. Many German farmers left in a hurry as the front approached with livestock now roaming untended and no one to harvest the grain. That is why the bureaucrats insisted on settling as many farmers as possible as soon as possible in order to prevent waste and hunger during the next winter and spring. The peasants were promised land ownership and reminded of their misery under the landowners (panowie) of imperialist Poland. 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.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 Wroc?aw or the ports and shipyards of Gdańsk and Szczecin were advertised in the press as vacant and waiting for the new employees. 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. In contrast to the ‘old’ Poland - where nationalization took place later - all non-agricultural assets were taken over by the state immediately in the RLs, 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 visions, the communists were not hesitant to play the old nationalist, anti-German card. W?adys?aw Gomu?ka, imprisoned for his ‘nationalist-rightist deviation’ in 1949, led the nationalist choir. As the 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. Historians spoke of the long-awaited reversal of the misguided early modern Jagiellonian conception of eastward colonial expansion. Poland now returned to the original, natural and rightful boundaries established in the tenth century. A once-in-a-national lifetime window of opportunity was open and had to be used quickly to secure a permanent, rightful 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 homogenous, industrial and egalitarian Poland. Equality and fair distribution of wealth were emphasized rather than socialism; the word ‘collectivization’ was in fact prohibited. Only it 1946 was the idea smuggled under the heading of ‘settlement-parcelization cooperative societies’. The historic territorial shift westward was presented in parallel to the equally historically just and long-awaited arrival of a People’s Republic, yet no one dared to speak of communism openly until 1948. The idealism of the early days is reflected, for example, in a report by Dr. Zygmunt Chrzanowski, a delegate of the Western Association [Zwi?zek 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.” 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 read about 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, knowledge that the early settlers could rely on was fragmentary. One often heard widespread “nebulous, fairy-tale news”, “the most horrifying stories on how Poles are mistreated there” and “gossips circulating even during the journey [to] the Reclaimed Lands that what awaits us is a huge desert and that our new life […] will have to start from erecting a clay dugout.”In words of the pioneersIn trying to understand the nature of the impact of propaganda on decisions and 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 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 analytic scheme.4.1. The Wild West and the Great EscapeThe most prominent common thread unifying a great majority of personal accounts is the notion of the ‘Wild West’. Usually put in quotations, it was an unambiguous reference to what Poles imagined to be the American ‘Wild West’ as they knew it from literature and films. The ubiquitous 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 others presented it as a source of fascination. The Wild West picture run contrary to the official picture of the land overflowing with milk and honey and it was a more veritable representation of what was seen as a Hobbesian state of primeval anarchy and lawlessness. A gun or at least a grenade was a necessity (it was not hard to find) and travelling alone was considered silly. For example, the first organized train from Warsaw to Szczecin in September 1945 was assaulted twice by organized gangs of robbers, two settlers were killed and several wounded. The term Wild West was also commonly used to describe the travel conditions of 1945. Bogus?aw J?drzejec, coming back to Poland in May 1945 from for forced labor in Germany, wrote: “I’m looking at the platform. Real hell! A passenger train to Katowice is about to depart. Just then 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.”The pioneers travelled either in coal or cattle cars. They dubbed their trains ‘cattle-express’ [bydl?cy-po?pieszny]. There was no schedule, the route was changed along the way and the passengers often had to organize alcohol (the only recognizable currency 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 admitting it was what drove most of their travel companions. Not all the pioneers intended to settle permanently and the distinction between infamous szabrownik, the person who was in the RL to scavenge the abandoned property, and the pioneer remained fluid. Some memoirists concluded that “the Klondike gold rush” and “Eldorado” were metaphors 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 fee captured in the following ditty:In the Wild West / Na Dzikim ZachodieAll sorts of wonders you find / Wszelakie sa cudaA girl a day / Dziewczynka na co dzienVodka and binge… / Koryto i wóda…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.” These 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.” Szyndler’s account of the Wild West is valuable also because it demonstrates the process-like nature of the entire resettlement operation and its gradual evolution. This important characteristic escapes a historian’s attention when the lens of forced migration is adopted. He 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].” 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.”The notion of the Wild West was an allure for many and a worry for most, but it was something that was both virtually not conveyed by official propaganda and the number one factor that each settler had to take into account when making the decision. A similarly important reason 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”. 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 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’.” 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 that they had to be informed about was that there existed a place that promised a new start.The dilemma of choosing between staying in the ‘old’ Poland and resettling was well summarized by Stanis?aw Dulewicz, a high school teacher from Kraków, who was deported to a small Pomeranian town for agricultural labor in 1944. Just after the war ended in May 1945, he noticed a collective “split personality syndrome” experienced by his compatriots. On the one hand, the prospect of staying in Pomerania “created a prospect of prosperity and social advancement in the near future, which would not be the case if we went back home.” Dulewicz’s family house was destroyed, those “who were in need of our hearts were now lying in their graves” 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 the 30-50 new settlers coming to his town from central Poland each day. “Even for the strongly decimated population”, the number of remaining intact houses and apartments was not nearly sufficient there.While only implicitly conveyed in the memoirs written in, after all, communist Poland with its extensive censorship apparatus, the uncertainty with respect to the political future of the country was literally 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 sa[id] that that 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.” The ‘new ones’ tried to foster a sense of security among the settlers by putting posters glowing with patriotic imagery. But just below the captions – Zofia wrote – that said “’the Western Lands always ours’ immediately after they appeared someone wrote: ‘Never!’” Anxiety about ‘reactionary German revisionism’ did not end after the Potsdam Conference. In fact it intensified 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.”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 the way to get there and that we will be forced to sign up.” It was equally difficult for them to believe in the promised land reform and for a good reason – very similar promises were often made and virtually unrealized in interwar Poland. “It was hard to believe in land for free and in the participation in governance, but we did believe in the Reclaimed Lands.” As there was less arable land to be distributed in central Poland than in the RLs, some peasants left after it became apparent that they would get little where they lived but could count on more if they resettled.Those peasants who did trust the new rulers of Poland were stigmatized by their neighbors who disregarded the 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.” Most importantly, however, they were “leaving their patrimony and their folks behind to embrace the unknown.” 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 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.” In other words, the decision to resettle was not merely a decision where to live. 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.’” 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 dear Austria” 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.”There was one other important aspect of the postwar Polish society which was not addressed by the official propaganda directly. With the war over in May 1945, it had been suddenly released from prison-like conditions which often reduced life to a struggle for survival and left no space for cultural expression in the public sphere. The RLs project provided new space to express the accumulated, long suppressed 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.” 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]” The allure of a place where the sky was the limit found reflection in many memoirs written by the younger pioneers.A close analysis of 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 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 to god-knows-where.” 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.” “Reliable news of an eyewitness” – received by Jerzy Brinken of Warsaw in June 1945 was “a most lucky circumstance” especially since it was brought by his sister from Szczecin “full of greenery [with] free apartments to choose from and a job.” The issue of public trust is a critical one 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 thecommunists 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 manifest 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.” 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” 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.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.” 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.” 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”. 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.” The economic dimension of official propaganda emerges as quite convincing in the accounts of the pioneers. The first encounters with German architecture and rolling hills provide a vivid confirmation: “…we have crossed the old Polish-German border. From a boundless plain we entered a rolling landscape full of 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.” 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. In general, the reactions of those peasants who settled in a relatively unscathed countryside (especially in Lower Silesia) were positive while those who visited East Prussia, Pomerania, larger towns and especially Wroc?aw and Szczecin, were more skeptical and not infrequently terrified.The latter reaction emerges clearly in the collection of memoirs written by the first settlers in Wroc?aw 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 did those people not run away from the unfriendly and unapproachable ruins?” 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’. Even during the second winter in Wroc?aw (1946/1947), “fat rats with long white tails, fearing no one, roamed the streets and visited the settlers’ apartments.” The Promised Land looked more attractive in the countryside, but not also not always.The frequently disappointed expectations provide evidence that the propaganda campaign had a tangible 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 Przemy?l (south-east Poland) 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.”The last glance at the train “reminded [him] about the voluntarily abandoned hometown with our families and friends.”National in form, socialist in contentThe impact of propaganda and all kinds of state orchestrated 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. Where the impact of the state emerges more clearly is the language through which the pioneers narrated their experiences – through a very specific set of terms developed in the public discourse to frame the RLs project. Rhetorical analysis is extremely difficult in this context due to a great variety of extra-textual and usually political issues affecting interpretation. 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, needs to done 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 been party members by 1948. 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 please the censors in communist Poland. Even if it was genuine in particular instances, the question of representativeness cannot be neglected. With all the reservations in mind, a number of teachers who settled in the RL 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 for the last five years and there is so much to make up. A Polish teacher cannot be missing where the Polish children await. I’m off!”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 come to Szczecin first occurred to him during the Christmas Eve of 1940. He announced 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.” 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.” Similar meta-patriotic formulations like the claim that Szczecin was located in “the direction in which the first Piast knight teams headed ages ago” were couched in the language emphasizing the “victory of epochal justice” 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 in 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, which 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 tangible fact of new crews of settlers, composed of 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.”Jerzy Brinker from Warsaw, also a high school teacher:“My first day in Szczecin was not over yet, but I already felt sympathetic 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.” 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. 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: Chrobry Embankment [Boles?aw Chrobry was the first king of Poland]. I reach back to my historical memory. Yes, it is Boles?aw, the son of Mieszko the First, who dug in the border poles here. And so it follows – it is not an annexation of Szczecin to Poland but its return [sic] to the motherland, or using the politicians’ language – an act of historic justice.” Sarcastic or not, the point about the pervasiveness of official propaganda language remains valid.Equally 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 party’s ideological school, she “experienced [it] as a demolition of [her] old views on the lives of societies and [her] own. They were destroyed by the October Revolution, word after word uttered on a given subject.” She continued: “the words of the lecturer invaded my brain cells destroying the previous view of what the communist revolution was really about.” 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.If such a complete reversal of a worldview was nonetheless occasionally genuine, it was most manifest in how the attitude of some Poles toward the western Allies had changed. Britain and America were no longer allies in a just 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 does not want to leave my mind. He defends the Germans and says that Warsaw steals in deep into their territory and throws out millions of Germans as if he did not know that the lands by the Odra and Neisse Rivers are the historic Slavic soil, their reincorporation is a modest redress for the sum of suffering and victims of our heroic nation.”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. Bronis?awa Piotrowska, who was a ten year old girl from 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 took it away from us very long ago.” In many memoirs the issue is not explored beyond this statement, it is accepted as a fact of life.ConclusionThe propaganda campaign did not stop after the Potsdam Conference. It reached its culmination at the Reclaimed Lands Exhibitions in Wroc?aw in the summer of 1948. It was both an exhibition and a series of celebrations and events commemorating the three years of reintegration. Prepared 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 weapons. In the words of the Exhibition’s Director, it had two major components. The first one was a presentation of 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.” The second was historic - a documentation of “the ten centuries of the Polish-German struggle”. The Exhibition occupied a prominent spot in public memory. In the words of one of its visitors, 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.”The Exhibition symbolizes 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 rest of Poland. 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. East Prussia and Pomerania became the most impoverished provinces in Poland, a process of reverse migration began to be recorder by demographers and the entire region became known as Ziemie Wyzyskane (not Odzyskane) – the Exploited, Abused Lands.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 write about their experiences in memoirs was certainly not representative of the entire population, which also explains the memoirists’ skepticism with respect of the motivations of other 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 got acquainted with them very well. […] About 5 percent of them manifested complete devotion to reconstruction and administration. 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.”In the final analysis, the kind of methodology applied in this paper enables to appreciate the role of individual agency and how 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, or without states starting 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 the evidence 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, undesirable and unfortunate as it was, contributed considerably to the initially voluntary and spontaneous character of the resettlement operation and this fact had profound consequences for the future not only of the RLs, but also of Poland, Polish-German relations and the entire Soviet Bloc and the Cold War world.Even if no definitive answer with respect to the impact of propaganda can be reached, 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 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 – a popular song of the underground Home Army still fighting in the forests at the time. 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”. 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 the red ties and thus “no offense of the divine” was to be found under communism. 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 official documents might lead to different observations – each bureaucrat involved attempted to impose some 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.ADDIN RW.BIBBibliographyPrimary sources: Documents, Memoirs, Diaries and CorrespondenceSchaff, Adam. Próba Podsumowania. Warszawa: Scholar, 1999. Bary?a, Tadeusz. Warmiacy i Mazurzy w PRL : Wybo?r dokumento?w ; Rok 1945. Olsztyn: Os?rodek Badan? Naukowych Im. Wojciecha Ke?trzyn?skiego, 1994.Bia?ecki, Tadeusz. Z Nad-Odrzańskiej Ziemi : Wspomnienia Szczecinian. Poznań: Wydawnictwo Poznańskie, 1974. Bolek, Zdzis?aw Jerzy. 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Olsztyn: O?rodek Badań Naukowych im. Wojciecha K?trzyńskiego, 1995. Ther, Philipp and Ana Siljak. Redrawing Nations : Ethnic Cleansing in East-Central Europe, 1944-1948. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001. Tyszkiewicz, Jakub. Sto Wielkich Dni Wroc?awia : Wystawa Ziem Odzyskanych we Wroc?awiu a Propaganda Polityczna Ziem Zachodnich i Po??nocnych w Latach 1945-1948. Wroc?aw: Wydawnictwo Arboretum, 1997. ................
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