Suchergebnisse

Ukrainians displaced by the current Russian invasion frequently turn to family memories of a previous war to understand and cope with their situation. In an oral history project, Ukrainian refugees often compared Russian actions to World War II–era war crimes perpetrated in Ukraine by Nazi Germany—and many assert that the Russians today are worse. These experiences have fueled an intense hatred of the Russians, even among Russian-speakers. For these Ukrainians, the idea of the Russkii mir, or "Russian world," binding post-Soviet countries in a common civilization, has been discredited.

This article examines the advantages and limits of late non-Jewish witness testimonies in Holocaust research. Grounding my conclusions in more than 150 biographical interviews conducted in small communities of contemporary Western Ukraine (historically Eastern Galicia) in 2017–2019, I dwell on the specificity of such sources and offer guidelines on how to work with them. As I show, late witness testimonies typically consist of multiple layers that can only be understood when analyzed within the wider life story of the interviewee, and when read against a deep knowledge of local history. When following these introduced guidelines, late non-Jewish witness interviews can be an extremely valuable source, especially for rural communities where no Jewish testimonies are available. This source allows us to further examine the complexity of identity and belonging, estrangement and intimacy, in ethnically mixed communities during World War II and immediately after, but also memories of the nonexisting world today.

Abstract
This article is a micro-historical study of the collectivization of agriculture carried out by the communist authorities in Central and Eastern Europe after 1945. Using the example of the village of Gierczyce in the Kielce region (Central Poland), it shows under what conditions collectivization, resisted in most of the Polish countryside, was able to succeed, and it traces the long-term effects of this process on Gierczyce's social structure and social relations. It also analyzes this rural community's contemporary memory of the emergence and functioning of the production cooperative. Thus, it critically engages with, and questions, the "resistance paradigm" dominant in studies of collectivization. Enriched with a broader regional and national comparative context, the article is based on the analysis of archival material from central and regional archives, personal documents, and extensive field research.

Niniejszy tekst analizuje pamiętniki konkursowe oraz przeprowadzane współcześnie wywiady biograficzne jako źródłem do badania chłopskiego doświadczenia reformy rolnej PKWN przeprowadzonej na mocy dekretu z 6 września 1944 r. Biorę pod uwagę trzy konkursy: "Opis mojej wsi" (1948), "Nowe pamiętniki chłopów" (1955) i "Mój rok 1944/1945" (1969), zestawiając je z 69 wywiadami, nagranymi w latach 2017-2019. W przypadku pamiętników pokuję, z jakiego rodzaju autorami mamy do czynienia, jak wyglądają pamiętniki pod względem formy, jakie tematy były w nic poruszane, a jakie nie, i dlaczego nie są one wystarczające jako materiał do badania tego tematu. Zastanowię się nad specyfiką pamiętników jako narracji wywołanej i przedstawię możliwości krytycznego podejścia metodologicznego w ich analizie. W części drugiej pokazuję, w jaki sposób wywiady uzupełniają materiał pamiętnikarski.

Abstract
Utilizing a variety of evidentiary sources, this article identifies and applies three different levels of narrative of the history of Operation Reinhard in the District of Galicia, revealing the potential benefits and limitations to each approach. Level one applies a macro-historical narrative that looks to broader statistical and data-driven trends. The second level identifies common shared experiences and general conclusions derived from individual experiences, and level three explores the microhistories of particular towns, families, and individuals. The author suggests a better way to comprehend the range of victim, bystander, and perpetrator experiences, and to more fully depict the scope of a major genocidal operation.

The present article offers a new framework for understanding the early East European post-war that introduces and conceptualizes the idea of "Void Communities." The core of the argument is that the disappearance of various groups of Others—ethnic, religious, and class—was one of the most important consequences of the Second World War for Central and Eastern Europe, and particularly for Poland and Ukraine. The Void left by those who had disappeared could be described on several levels, such as physical absence, social and economical dysfunctionality, transformation of the social structure and stratification, property transfer, decline of moral values and norms, and changes in local culture and traditions. Based on an extensive oral history research (of more than 150 interviews) and in-depth reading of ego documents, the article prioritizes the first-hand perspective of witnesses and centres on those who remained in the post-war Void Communities after their neighbours had been murdered, deported, resettled, or encouraged to leave semi-voluntarily. While the paper primarily focuses on the historical region of Galicia, now divided between Poland and Ukraine, the source material used to analyze the framework for Void Communities includes documents associated with the entire pre-war Polish Second Republic.

This text contains a comparative analysis of gentry and peasant narratives about the agricultural reform conducted in Poland on the basis of the Polish Committee of National Liberation's decree of September 6, 1944. The author sought these narratives in personal documents such as diaries, memoirs, works sent to memoir competitions, and oral history interviews. An analysis of the documents revealed, above all, an asymmetry between the narratives of the gentry and the peasants. For the former, the reform was a key biographical event, while in most of the peasant narratives it was marginal, particularly in the context of other elements of the experience of war and occupation. The points of convergence, in terms of what members of the peasantry and gentry write or say about the reform, are few. Moreover, while the peasants always appear in the narratives of the gentry, the gentry appear much more rarely in the narratives of the peasants. The narratives of the gentry are fairly cohesive and it would seem that they have become the basis for the creation of a collective memory of the gentry as a group. The peasant narratives are quite diverse. Their shape is the outcome of factors such as the narrator's social and economic status before the war; the fact of being, or not being, a beneficiary of the reform; the narrator's political engagement; the narrator's party affiliation at the time of the reform; and the period of Poland's postwar history when the narrative was written or spoken. The author's findings reveal what image of the agricultural reform has been preserved in Poles' memory.

This article analyzes the status of difficult historic events in Ukrainian collective memory. Difficult elements of collective memory are defined as those which divide society on basic matters, such as identity and national cohesion, and events which are being actively forgotten because of the role of Ukrainians as perpetrators. Three such issues were analyzed: World War II and the role of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), the Holocaust, and the ethnic purge of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia in 1943–1945. Utilizing data from quantitative and qualitative studies, the author showcases the significance of these issues for contemporary Ukrainian identity and Ukraine's relations with its neighbors. In particular, the evaluation of World War II and the role of the UPA in Ukrainian history polarizes Ukrainian society to a great degree. At the same time, this element of national history is used to construct a common, anti-Russian identity. The difficulty of relating to the memory of the Holocaust and the ethnic purge in Volhynia is of a different character. These events are problematic for Ukrainian collective memory because they demand a painful settling of accounts with the past. At present, only Ukrainian elites are willing to work on these subjects, and only to a limited degree, while the common consciousness either denies or ignores them altogether.

The aim of this text is to present the internal differentiation of Ukrainian social memory. The author concentrates on vernacular memory of three issues that are essential in regard to Ukrainian identity: the Second World War and the conflict between the Ukrainian Insurgent Army and the Soviet authorities, Holodomor, and the Holocaust. Her analysis is based on her own research conducted in Galicia and Central Ukraine, searches in oral history sources, and also on the published and unpublished results of qualitative research by other researchers and public opinion surveys. Her main conclusions involve the unconsonant nature of different memories with differentiations of regional populations, the unifying nature of memory of the Holodomor, the strongly polarizing memory of the UIA as a potential factor of social conflict, and the problematic nature of memory of the Holocaust.

Celem artykułu jest analiza metodologicznych aspektów prowadzenia badań w obcym kulturowo środowisku, w sytuacji różnic językowych i różnych identyfikacji narodowych badacza i rozmówcy. Analiza problemu podjęta została na przykładzie badań terenowych zrealizowanych przez polską badaczkę na Ukrainie. Staram się odpowiedzieć na pytanie, czy odmienna narodowość ma w takiej sytuacji wpływ na interakcję z rozmówcami oraz otrzymywany materiał, czy jest ona obciążeniem czy zaletą, a także w jaki sposób można ten wpływ kontrolować. Interesuje mnie kwestia kontaktu z rozmówcami i interakcji podczas samego wywiadu oraz różnego rodzaju przypadki modyfikowania narracji przez rozmówcę ze względu na odmienną identyfikację narodową badacza. Prezentację poszczególnych problemów pojawiających się w toku realizacji badań i analizy materiału ilustruję fragmentami nagranych w ramach badań wywiadów.

The author tries to analyse the picture of a German as emerging from biographical interviews with the oldest generation of the new inhabitants of an ex-German town (Krzyż, German Kreuz Ostb.), the first post-war settlers in the "recovered territories". The author shows how people coming from the Polish Eastern Borderland, Great Poland and Central Poland remember their pre-war German neighbours, the German invaders and the Germans expelled from Krzyż. The reason for the predominantly favourable picture of a German may be found in the experiences of the interviewees' lives, who during the war and in the post-war period suffered the greatest wrongs not on the part of the Germans, but the Soviets. It is also noteworthy that the repatriates from the Eastern Borderland perceive a similarity between the fate of the Poles and Germans expelled from their homes, though they do not deny the Germans' guilt and responsibility for starting World War II.