Katharina Matro
Poland, Summer 2008
Thanks to a generous CREEES Travel and Research Grant, I was able to spend six weeks in Poland this summer learning Polish, traveling, and starting to get acquainted with those archives in Western Poland that I am most likely to use during future dissertation research. In the spring I had written a research paper on the expulsions of the German population from Poland’s Western Territories after World War II; but before I landed in Warsaw in July, I had never actually visited Poland. Without the time I spent learning the language, talking to Poles my age and to those who had lived through World War II, traveling to Polish cities, and visiting historical exhibits and archives, I would not have been able to do any additional serious research on Polish-German history
The telling of this history remains fraught and the Polish and German governments as well as interest groups on both sides continue to fight over its proper interpretation. The subject which most interests me – the development of Poland’s Western Territories in the three decades following the 1945 Potsdam agreement – cannot be understood without realizing the devastation the Nazi occupation wrought on Polish society. My most moving visits were those to Nazi concentration camps. I spent one afternoon at Majdanek, a camp outside Lublin in Eastern Poland, and two weeks later visited the Museum at Auschwitz-Birkenau in Upper Silesia. But in Warsaw, too, I realized that the memory of World War II was everywhere.
As a German, I was apprehensive about telling my Polish acquaintances of my research interests or about beginning even a superficial conversation about the war. But those worries were unfounded. Wherever I told people about the research I had already conducted, they were sincerely interested in what I had discovered. Often they gave me suggestions for further research, local archives to visit or recently published Polish books to consult, or offered to put me in touch with people who they knew had settled in the Western Territories after having themselves been forced out of what is today Ukraine. In these conversations I learned that one way to avoid the tedious tit for tat that has recently poisoned the Polish-German relationship was to tell the story of the expulsions and the subsequent resettlement of Western Poland as a story of every-day lives in Poland’s Western Territories. “A family who loses their home and all their belongings and is forced to re-settle in a foreign environment – everyone should be able to relate to what that means,” the husband of my Polish professor told me.
Some of the most vivid accounts of every-day life in Western Poland after the war were collected by researchers at the Instytut Zachodni (Western Institute) in Poznań between 1957 and 1970. The Institute was originally founded to promote the study of the ancient Polish history of the lands Poland acquired from Germany after World War II. The institute was also used by the Communist regime to disseminate anti-German propaganda as well as to counter those German publications insisting on the illegitmacy of postwar Poland’s territorial gains in the West. Today, the Institute houses a sizeable library and an archive documenting the history of Poland’s Western Territories in the 20th century.
Towards the end of my Poland trip, I had the chance to look at some of the more than 1,000 eye-witness account of Polish settlers in the Western Territories archived at the Institute. In three separate writing competitions, the Institute’s sociologists had asked these settlers to submit accounts of their lives in the first few years after their arrival and initial settlement in Western Poland in the late 1940s. I looked through about 200 of these accounts (and hope to look at the remainder during a longer trip next summer) and was surprised by the level of detail and frankness I found. I had expected the writing to be ideologically skewed and overly optimistic, glossing over hardships suffered, injustices inflicted on the local population, and dwelling more on the successes of the settlers. To be sure, many writers did not betray compassion for the German expellees and had written their accounts in a tone of triumphant pioneers who had valiantly “re-Polanized” ancient Polish lands. The teachers’ accounts in particular were written in this pioneer spirit. Many others, though, wrote painstakingly about their difficult everyday lives: troubles with the state authorities responsible for their re-settlement, their doubts about moving into formerly German homes, their difficulties in obtaining foodstuffs, and tensions between new arrivals and the native Polish population (the so-called Autochthones) about whom I may write my second research paper this year.
Overall my six weeks in Poland was a wonderful introduction to a country that I intend to visit many times over the next few years. My visit to the archive in Poznań was especially rewarding and gave me a much better idea of where to take my research in the next few quarters. I thank CREEES for giving me this wonderful opportunity so early in my PhD career at Stanford.