Page 107 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

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about border security. By November 1921, the fledgling Volhynian provincial authorities reported
that Bolshevik agitators were demoralizing local populations, prompting the Polish military leader in

charge of guarding the border to report that it had become a place of “bribery and all types of moral

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corruption.”
In such circumstances, medical and biological concerns flourished. In the winter of 1921-22,

the dire humanitarian situation in Volhynia, and across what had recently become eastern Poland,

was exacerbated by the outbreak of famine in Russia and Ukraine, an event that led to a further influx

of refugees from the east. Many of these men, women, and children had typhus, a lice-carried disease

that medical professionals linked to the unsanitary conditions prevailing on the Eastern Front during

the First World War and one that had become endemic among civilians during the subsequent

Russian Civil War. Since containing typhus required people to be quarantined and disinfected, the

Polish government, with the assistance of the burgeoning League of Nations, attempted to set up a

cordon sanitaire along the eastern border.

This was no easy task, as Polish authorities at the transit camp in the Volhynian town of

Równe would soon find out. The camp, which processed people arriving from the east, struggled to

cope with the influx of diseased civilians who crossed the border en masse. In November 1921, the

head of the Polish government’s Chief Extraordinary Commissariat for the Battle with Epidemics

reported that the camp at Równe had inadequate facilities for washing repatriates, meaning that

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typhus was being transmitted into the interior of the new state. As the bitter Volhynian winter set

in, conditions only got worse. By January 1922, the hospital in Równe found itself unable to process

the high number of infected people who arrived on Polish territory, apparently receiving up to 6,000

13 Jerzy Kumaniecki, “Repatriacja Polaków po Wojnie Polsko-Radzieckiej w latach 1921-1924,” Przegląd
Wschodni 1, no. 1 (1991): 145. In 1921, 39,082 people in Volhynia were registered as having been born “beyond the
boundaries of the state.” However, since many people (especially non-Poles) did not register for fear of being
deported, the actual number was probably much higher. See Mędrzecki, Województwo wołyńskie, 67.
14 “Rokaz ogólny Nr. 2 Dyspozycyjny. Część I” (Łuck, November 5, 1921), DARO 147/1/2/129.
15 “Sprawozdanie dla Sejmowej Komisji Zdrowia” (November 29, 1921), AAN MOS 90/12.

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