Page 108 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

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people per month, despite the fact that it was only equipped to handle a tenth of that number. The
following summer, the crisis remained unresolved, with a League of Nations report sent to the

Minister of Public Health in June 1922 suggesting that basic mistakes were still being made. During

a visit to Równe, the League of Nations inspector noted that repatriates who had been deemed clean

departed from the same railroad platform as the dirty repatriates who were only just arriving. Others

evaded the cordon altogether. By making their way “through woods and marshes,” they were able to

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“escape any sanitary control.”
The outbreak of typhus and the influx of refugees who carried the disease into the new state

also provided elites with an opportunity to frame Poland as a Western European nation and to label

Bolshevism as a political disease, an equation that was simultaneously being made by German

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authorities further west. As they had done in 1919-20 and on many occasions prior to the First
World War, Polish elites used a sanitary border that divided a “healthy” West from a “diseased” East

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as a useful propaganda tool in order to garner support from their western European counterparts.
Most vocally, representatives of Poland blamed the Bolsheviks for the high death rates among

returning refugees, thus linking a defective (Eastern) ideology with poor governance and sanitation

and putting the Poles on the side of the modern and politically stable West. “The reason for the fatal

state of the staging hospitals, of the enormous death rate and the penetration of these ill people

against the backdrop of repatriations,” a January 1922 report to the Council of Ministers stated, “was,

and to some extent still is, the complete lack of consideration among Bolsheviks for the third

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paragraph of the Treaty of Riga, on the basis of which ill people should be detained in Russia.” In

16 Letter from the Commissioner of the League of Nations (Norman White) in Poland to the Minister for Public
Health (June 26, 1922), AAN MOS 90/47.
17 European Health Conference, held at Warsaw from March 20th to 28th, 1922 (Lausanne, 1922), 16.
18 Annemaire Sammartino, The Impossible Border: Germany and the East, 1914-1922 (Ithaca, 2014), 138. On the
broader phenomenon of equating disease with Bolshevism, see Paul Weindling, Epidemics and Genocide in Eastern
Europe, 1890-1945 (New York, 2000).
19 M.A. Balinska, “Poland: cholera to typhus, 1831-1950,” Bulletin De La Société De Pathologie Exotique 92, no. 5
(1999): 349-54.
20 “Sprawozdanie na Rady Ministrów” (January 30, 1922), AAN MOS 90/34.

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