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tossing them down wells, only for Polish survivors to carry out gruesome revenge attacks of their

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own.

The extent to which we believe that developments before 1939 mattered depends on how we

explain the violence that characterized life here under both the Soviets and the Nazis. Historians are

now much less likely to be satisfied with the explanation that two ideological juggernauts crushed

prewar Polish society beyond all recognition, an approach that erroneously led some scholars to play

down the significance of local contexts and continued a trend of seeing the Holocaust as a solely

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German event that happened to be carried out in eastern Europe. Inspired by the sociologically

grounded work of Jan Gross, historians began to pay closer attention to the microhistories of the

Holocaust and other acts of mass violence in eastern Europe’s borderlands, grounding atrocities in

the physical and human places where they occurred and taking prewar regional histories into

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account. While dynamics in any given community were always governed by the nature of the

occupying regime, understanding the period before 1939 constitutes an important part of reinserting

local agency, acknowledging deeper histories of violence, coexistence, and indifference, and pushing

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against what Gross referred to as Timothy Snyder’s “colonial” history of the “bloodlands.”

In the Volhynian case, I will add two additional conclusions. First, while September 1939

marks an important break, the narrative of Poland as a wartime victim of outside aggression should

not obscure the fact that second-tier actors in the Second Republic had been engaged for over twenty

years in their own civilizing missions to transform Volhynia, which increasingly spawned coercive

and radical policies. By 1939, various representatives of the Polish state, like their German and

5 Jared McBride, “Peasants into Perpetrators: The OUN-UPA and the Ethnic Cleansing of Volhynia, 1943-1944,
Slavic Review 75, no. 3 (Fall 2016): 646.
6 See Omer Bartov, “Eastern Europe as the Site of Genocide,” Journal of Modern History 80, no. 3 (2008): 557-593.
7 Jan Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (Princeton, 2001). For
another microhistory of mass violence, see Jan Grabowski, Hunt for the Jews: Betrayal and Murder in German-
Occupied Poland (Bloomington, 2013).
8 Jan T. Gross, “A Colonial History of the Bloodlands,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 15,
no. 3 (2014): 591-596.

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