‘Postwar’ Relief to Wartime Poland: The ARAEFC and Poland’s Battle Against TB, 1919-1923

• In Event: Disease and the Transition from War to Peace in Europe, 1918-1923

Abstract

This paper uses efforts to mitigate Poland’s postwar public health crisis as a lens to show how hunger and disease shaped both international priorities and those of Poland’s state authorities in the wake of the Great War. After the armistice of 11 November 1918, a fledgling Poland faced an existential crisis ushered in by years of malnutrition and sustained by ongoing violence. In 1919, the Polish military mobilized against the Bolshevik Red Arm while Poland’s civil authorities worked alongside international agents to deliver food to hundreds of relief kitchens across the country. These relief kitchens served as the front-line in a concurrent battle against the mounting incidence of endemic diseases—most significantly, tuberculosis—that had begun during the war and continued to surge into the “postwar” years. Poland’s Prime Minister, Ignacy Paderewski, and Herbert Hoover, head of the American Relief Administration (ARA), argued to international observers that without humanitarian assistance, hunger, and its handmaiden, disease, would precipitate political collapse. Examining the partnership between Poland’s social welfare institutions and the ARA’s European Children’s Fund, this paper shows how friction between Poland’s civil and military authorities bedeviled relief efforts at a time when the movement of food was as important as the maneuvers of troops. More broadly, the paper considers how alimentation fit into expanded notions of postwar public health and straddled separate national and international efforts to restore peace and food security to Europe.

Author

• Paul Niebrzydowski, Ohio State University