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physical force and the retraction of democratically protected rights. In Hrynki, alarming rumors

circulated that only Roman Catholics could remain in the border zone, retain land and banking credit,

96
and avoid the burden of obligatory labor, while Orthodox peasants would be cut off from their land.
By the late 1930s, KOP was answering a question that had been debated throughout the interwar

years—was it acceptable to coerce the less “civilized” peasantry into “correct” behavior in a state

that nominally rejected imperialism? Their response was a resounding “yes.”

FIXING JEWISHNESS

As we have seen, a combination of Polish academics, politicians, and activists on the ground utilized

narratives about inclusion—however coercive—in order to push for more radical schemes to

assimilate the large Slavic populations of the east and to bolster the contingent of “Poles.” Spinning a

particular set of historical narratives, they supported the idea that populations whom Józewski saw as

Ukrainians were, in fact, either proto-national Ruthenians or Ruthenized Poles. But if they saw in the

Slavic populations a version of us, rather than them, it was becoming clear that the other large non-

Polish population in Volhynia—Jews—were always them and never us. As the idea of the “Orthodox

Pole” who needed to be returned to Catholicism was increasingly embraced, that of the “Jewish

Pole” was becoming less and less conceivable.

The increasing acceptance of radical right-wing anti-Semitism within mainstream political

discourse in Poland by the late 1930s has already been the subject of scholarly analysis. It was

demonstrated by statewide actions against Jews, which included boycotts of Jewish stores and

businesses, limitations on Jewish access to higher education, university policies that forced Jewish

students to sit separately from their Christian classmates on so-called ghetto benches, and a wave of

pogroms that swept Poland during the late 1930s. By 1939, hundreds of Jews had been killed or

96 Matwiejew, “Akcja “rewindykacji’,” 692.

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