Indifference to Monolith? Polish identity in the interwar eastern borderlands and the Polish community in post-war Britain

Josef Butler

The 1951 UK census identified 162,339 Polish-born individuals settled permanently in Great Britain.[1] Of this cohort, 99,000, 60% of the national community, had been associated with the Polish II Corps.[2] This grouping had come to post-war Britain via a circuitous route that began with deportation from the interwar eastern Polish borderlands to the USSR, and included Central Asia, the Middle East and Southern Europe. This border region, occupying much of what is now western Ukraine, Belarus and southwestern Lithuania including the cities of Vilnius and Lviv, is sometimes referred to as Kresy Wschodnie. This term is rooted in nineteenth-century Polish ethnolinguistic nationalism that emphasises the Polish characteristics of a region that hosted a wide range of ethnic and religious identities.[3]

Fig. 1. Border changes in history of Poland.

Source: Wikimedia Commons.

The borderlands have been incorporated into the literature of national indifference, the state of lacking a strong and consistent national identity. Mixed Polish and Ukrainian populations often self-identified as being of the “Catholic” nationality or simply tutejsi, literally “people from here”.[4] However, the Stowarzyszenie Polskich Kombatantów, (Polish Ex-Combatants Association), the most influential Polish organisation in post-war Britain, stated that their primary focus was “to maintain the identity and national distinctiveness of the Polish community in exile”, suggesting a monolithic view of Polish ethnic identity within the community.[5] Did this monolithic view represent a shift from interwar indifference, or does it reveal another facet of national identity in the interwar borderland?

 As part of my PhD project, I have interviewed twenty-two individuals associated with the Polish community in wartime and post-war Britain. The interviewees reflect the varied experiences within the community, with different genders, generations and regional sub-communities represented. Several interviewees expressed a monolithic position on identity, and self-identified unequivocally as Polish.

John Mordarski, who was born in Lublin before settling in post-war Scotland, recalled his family “were very suspicious of the so-called Poles” who had been part of the II Corps, thinking many had been “Romanians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Ukrainians…a strange mix.”[6] This viewpoint is not necessarily grounded in the interwar borderland, but in post-war British politics. Polish veterans were entitled to economic support as part of the Polish Resettlement Act that was not offered to other groupings, which led to suspicions of infiltration into the community.[7] There was a discrete area for ethnic Ukrainian members of the Polish Army in a resettlement camp in Gloucestershire, and there were violent episodes between Poles and Ukrainians in Doddington, Cheshire.[8] The European Voluntary Worker scheme recruited 13,367 labourers identified as “Polish-Ukrainian” from Central European Displaced Persons camps.[9] Polish officials often did not allow for such ambiguity. A screening officer for the Polish Consulate in Italy in 1946 recalled encountering Ukrainians attempting to relocate to Britain, who he argued “weren’t Polish. They didn’t speak Polish. They always say, ‘I am from Lwów’…But I said, ‘in Lwów, what colour trams were there’?”[10]

Helena Danielczuk, born in post-war Britain to parents from the borderlands, recalled a “conflict between Ukrainian identity and Polish identity” in post-war Britain informed by ethnic violence in the 1940s.[11]An estimated 120,000 Poles were killed by Ukrainian nationalists in the borderlands between 1943-1945.[12] This was mirrored by the conflicts seen between ethnic Poles and Ukrainians in 1940s resettlement camps, likely inspired by conflict in the former borderlands. Irena Godyn was fourteen when she was deported from the borderlands to the USSR, and her family were among the victims of the 1940s ethnic violence. However, she continued to identify as “from around here”, rather than unequivocally Polish.[13] Danielczuk refers to a degree of ambiguity, noting that her mother was baptised in interwar Lublin in an Orthodox Church with a Ukrainian name.[14] Some gentry families, like that of Irena Protassewicz, had long roots in the borderlands. Protassewicz's diaries highlight the connection between social class and Polish identity in the region, but include fond memories of Ukrainian Cossacks who served Polish aristocrats in the region.[15] Jerzy Giedroyc, another aristocratic Pole from the borderlands who later founded the influential Kultura magazine, promoted a vision of a federalist, ethnically diverse Poland that contrasted with the monolithic view espoused by many Poles in Britain.[16]

In 1997, Instytut Pamięci Narodowej found that 320,000 individuals were deported from interwar Polish territory to the USSR by the NKVD between 1940 and 1941.[17] Much like in the coterminous Katyń massacre, “anti-Soviet elements” of the interwar society were targeted, such as the intelligentsia, the military and civil servants. These groups were seen as the bulwark of Polish identity in the region.[18] Kathryn Ciancia describes how “second-tier actors”, cultural and political elites from the interwar Polish metropole, had travelled to the borderlands on a civilizing mission following the Polish-Soviet War to bring modernity and Polish national identity to a region where census data showed Poles often represented less than 20% of the local population.[19]

Several recorded testimonies describe families being rewarded for military service with land in Volhynia, a region in the borderland that is now part of Ukraine, with individuals self-identifying as “settlers”.[20] Danuta Gradosielska describes Volhynia as a “difficult and primitive” place that was economically and culturally transformed by the work of ethnic Poles, while Stanisław Kwiatkowski describes Volhynia as “impoverished” when the Poles had arrived, and suggests that Poles had restored law and order.[21] This contrasts with Protassewicz or Giedroyc, individuals with deeper roots in the borderlands. The newer arrivals to the region, many of whom were deported from the borderlands and settled in Britain, had recently arrived in the region seeking to spread Polish national identity in the east.

By 1945 Polish society and demography had changed irrevocably, because of the Holocaust and border changes. Much of the interwar borderlands lay on the eastern side of the new Polish frontier concocted at Potsdam, meaning that 60% of the Poles who settled in Britain had no home in Poland to which to return.[22] While ethnic conflict in the 1940s was more destructive, evidence of ethnic conflict can be found in the interwar borderlands and legacies of this conflict lingered. For example, during the 1930s as part of a policy of “national assimilation” minority languages and ethnic political parties were suppressed.[23] An example of how this manifested across the geographic and temporal divides of the interwar borderlands and post-war Britain can be seen in the positionality of Jewish Poles. 20% of those deported from the eastern borderlands were Jewish, however it is estimated that only 900 Jews who had experienced this forced migration from the wartime borderlands resettled in post-war Britain.[24] Many Jewish soldiers, including future Israeli Prime Minister Menachim Begin, were discharged from the II Corps in Palestine. Polish organisations in post-war Britain strenuously denied accusations of antisemitism, arguing that a combination of Zionism and a lack of assimilation in the borderlands had motivated Jewish Poles to leave the army.[25] This lack of assimilation was in part caused by antisemitic policies pursued during the 1930s, such as the exclusion of Polish Jews from governmental positions and trade unions.[26] However, individual Poles have acknowledged antisemitism both in the interwar borderlands and in the II Corps.[27] These descriptions of conflict, between ethnic Poles, Jewish Poles, and other groups, which predate the ethnic violence of the 1940s, call into question the ubiquity of the tutejsi identity.

While national indifference was present in the Polish interwar eastern borderlands, its pervasiveness is challenging to quantify. It seems likely that many ethnic Poles whose migrant journey took them from the eastern borderlands to post-war Britain, via Soviet labour camps and Middle Eastern military camps, would never have identified as tutejsi. Many were second-tier actors, who had themselves migrated to the borderlands as evangelists of Polish identity. They held a monolithic view of Polish identity, that was preserved in post-war Britain via organisations like the SPK. However, the SPK’s membership peaked at 10% of the national community in 1951, and fell by 50% by 1968.[28] The Polish community in post-war Britain was diverse in terms of gender, generation and social class, and individuals like Godyn, Danielczuk and Protassewicz reflect the legacy of national indifference in the interwar borderlands.

Josef Butler is a PhD researcher at King's College London. His research interests relate to identity in the Polish community in wartime and post-war Britain. He is particularly interested in the intersection between the formation of Polish refugee communities and the history of migration in post-war Britain. He also focuses on expressions of Polish identity outside of formal diasporic settings, with an emphasis on exploring the identities of female émigrés, second generation Polish émigrés and communities outside of London. His current project is titled Polskość in Britain: Polish identity in Great Britain, 1940-1974.  

[1] Keith Sword, The Formation of the Polish Community in Great Britain, 1939-1950 (Caldra House, 1989), 452.

[2] Jerzy Zubrzycki, Polish Immigration in Britain: A Study of Adjustment (Martinus Nijhoff, 1956), 56.

[3] Tomasz Kamusella, “The Russian Okrainy (Oкраины) and the Polish Kresy: objectivity and historiography,” Global Intellectual History, 4, no. 4 (2019), 354-355.  

[4] Kate Brown, A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 33.

[5] Zubrzycki, Polish Immigration in Britain, 110.

[6] John Mordarski in discussion with the author, July 1 2022, 5. 

[7] Sword, The Formation of the Polish Community in Great Britain, 247

[8] Jordanna Bailkin, Unsettled: Refugee camps and the making of multicultural Britain (Oxford University Press, 2018), 92-93.

[9] Diana Kay & Robert Miles, Refugees or Migrant Workers? European Voluntary Workers in Britain 1946-1951 (Routledge, 1992), 43.

[10] Michelle Winslow, War, resettlement, rooting and ageing: An oral history study of Polish emigres in Britain (PhD thesis, University of Sheffield, 2001), 90-91, https://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/6127/.

[11] Helena Danielczuk in discussion with the author, October 27 2022, 7.

[12] Grzegorz Hryciuk & Zbigniew Palski, Proceedings of the conference on the 65th anniversary of the extermination of the population Poland in the Eastern Borderlands committed by Ukrainian nationalists (Instytut Pamięci Narodowej, 2010), 17-20.

[13] Olga Topol, Forgotten Force: A Journey of Memory (Józef Piłsudski Institute, 2020), 19. 

[14] Danielczuk, 7.

[15] Irena Protassewicz, A Polish Woman’s Experience in World War II: Conflict, Deportation and Exile (Bloomsbury, 2019), p. 130.

[16] Timothy Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1596-1999 (Yale University Press, 2003), pp. 218-220

[17] Piotrowski, The Polish Deportees of World War II: Recollections of Removal to the Soviet Union and Dispersal Throughout the World (McFarland, 2004), 5.

[18] Katarzyna Utracka, “The Katyn Massacre – Mechanisms of Genocide”, The Warsaw Institute Review, 2020, https://warsawinstitute.org/katyn-massacre-mechanisms-genocide/

[19] Kathryn Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge: A Polish Borderland in the Interwar World (Oxford University Press, 2021), 11.

Anna Radziwiłł & Wojciech Roszkowski, Historia 1789-1871 : Podręcznik dla szkół średnich (Wydawnictwo Szkolne PWN, 2001), 278.

[20] Helena Kalicki (nee Miluk), Kresy Family, https://www.kresyfamily.com/family-histories.html 

[21] Danuta Gradosielska (née Mączka), Kresy Family. 

Kwiatowski Family, Kresy Family. 

[22] Piotr Eberhardt, "The Curzon line as the eastern boundary of Poland. The origins and the political background". Geographia Polonica, 85 (1), 2019, 20. 

[23] Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations, 65-66 & 150-151.

[24] Piotrowski, The Polish Deportees of World War II, 5.

Zubrzycki, Polish Immigration in Britain, 214-215. 

[25] Peter Stachura, The Poles in Britain, 1940-2000: From Betrayal to Assimilation (Routledge, 2004), 52. 

N.C.W.C. bulletin, June 1944, the Mitchell Library, SR9 Box 1/10 (Scottish Polish Society), Glasgow.  

[26] Yisrael Gutman, “Anti-Semitism and Jews in Poland, 1918-1939” in Herbert Strauss (eds.), Hostages to Modernization: Studies on Modern Antisemitism, 1870-1933/39 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2011), 1059.

[27] Stefan Waydenfeld, Kresy Siberia, https://kresy-siberia.org/wall-of-tribute/entry/145490/

Andrew Syska, Kresy Siberia, https://kresy-siberia.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Syska-Andrew_Recollections.pdf

[28] Tadeusz Kondracki, Historia Stowarzyszenia Polskich Kombatanow w Wielkiej Brytanii (SPKWB, 1996), 56 & 80.