Choices in Postwar Poland: Trials, Religion, and Displacement

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, Poles (as well as those legally classified as Polish) and those inhabiting former and contemporary Polish lands were all faced with a series of choices. The ‘violent peacetime’ from 1944 onwards was characterised by shifting borders, displaced populations, and reckonings for those who had committed mortal, or national, sins throughout the war. This panel brings together three papers on how the choices of those often left powerless in the postwar chaos were not only representative of the very real consequences of wartime, but were shaped by individual and community agency during the postwar maelstrom. Displaced Polish children actively sought better futures by choosing to ‘vote with their feet’ and leave postwar Poland for pastures new, but as children their agency was not recognised as legitimate. The persecution of those who belonged to the Byzantine Ruthenian Church similarly had to decide where their futures lay: in the former Nazi territories of northwest Poland or further east into the Soviet Union, and into the unknown. Their choices would change the landscape indefinitely. Lastly, how and why some Poles who were considered ‘traitors to the Polish nation’ for their active role in the Nazi machinery at Auschwitz were tried while others were not. What led to the choice to persecute or excuse them as the nation attempted to rebuild. Each of these groups, although marginal, adds to the postwar histories of Poland and highlights the diversity of experience within the chaotic postwar landscape.

Sub Unit

• History: 1945-1990

Chair

• Jamie Blake, Capital U

Papers

• The Grey Area: Former Polish Auschwitz Prisoners Tried in Postwar Trials - Alina Nowobilska, Independent Scholar

• Bleeding on the Bellflowers: The Persecution of Lemkos and the Byzantine Ruthenian Church in Post-War Poland - Karen Lin Uslin, Stockton U / Defiant Requiem Foundation

Discussant

• Jamie Blake, Capital U