Page 110 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

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borderland cities were “filled with Jews” and that “the percentage of Jews is immeasurably great.”
Another similarly minded parliamentarian added to such concerns, stating that Jews created a human

“traffic jam” in Poland, acted as a seedbed for Bolshevism, and damaged the health of the national

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body. As his comments showed, Jewishness and the influx of infectious diseases were easily
equated—“in addition to Jews,” he declared apocalyptically, “typhus, cholera, and other plagues

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come across the border.” Other concerns revolved around the idea that Jews were especially skilled
at transgressing the border clandestinely and aiding others in such acts. At a meeting of the provincial

governors of the eastern provinces in Warsaw in June 1922, Volhynia’s governor argued that bandit

raids were less of a problem in his province than the “mass influx of Jews” who, he stated, had a

completely free passage into Poland and stocked up on false passports that allowed them to stay in

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the country illegally. Those who were not deemed to be of the Polish nationality, most notably
Russians, Jews, and Ukrainians, were also put under increased state surveillance and, if suspected of

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crossing the border illegally, risked expulsion.
But national debates in Warsaw and on the international stage, which emphasized the

nightmare scenario of non-Polish hordes making their way westward into the Polish nation-state,

were simply one way of articulating a much more mundane set of problems: state officials in

borderland communities found that they had neither the resources nor the experience to control vast

movements of people. Indeed, over the course of the early 1920s, it became increasingly clear that

the Polish central authorities were simply unable to secure the border in a place where no border had

24 Sprawozdanie stenograficzne z posiedzenia 286 Sejmu Ustawodaczego z dnia 17 lutego 1922, 54. The politician
in question was Karol Mierzejewski.
25 Ibid., 62.
26 Ibid., 61.
27 “Posiedzenie popołudniowe zjazdu wojewodów kresów wschodnich z dn. 13 czerwca 1922 r.,” AAN MSW
(dopływ) 1001/19a-20.
28 Konrad Zieliński, “Population Displacement and Citizenship in Poland, 1918-24,” in Homelands: War,
Population and Statehood in Eastern Europe and Russia, 1918-1924, edited by Nick Baron and Peter Gatrell
(London, 2004), 98-118. In a report from November 1921, the military inspector of the eastern border of Volhynia
proposed that “undesirable elements” be cleared from the borderlands. See Inspektor Wojsk Granicy Wschodniej
Województwa Wołyńskiego, “Rozkaz Ogólny Nr. 2 Dyspozycyjny” (5 Nov 1921), DARO 147/1/2/12.

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