Page 292 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

Volhynia’s diverse inhabitants also appeared to disintegrate quickly, a fact suggesting that prewar

political experiments, including Józewski’s regionalist project, held little appeal under the conditions

of war. Considering that this iteration of Polish Volhynia was just twenty years in the making and

had emerged from a complicated post-imperial situation, the story’s ending is perhaps not surprising.

After all, societal bonds also collapsed in places across Hitler’s Europe where there had been more

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time to create a robust sense of civic identity and common purpose.
At the same time as the interwar period can offer us some of the answers to wartime

developments, however, it cannot provide all of them. As Jared McBride’s recent research has

shown, those Ukrainian civilians who participated in massacres against Poles after 1943 were not

necessarily drawing on deep nationalist political leanings from the prewar period. Wartime violence,

McBride contends, was less spontaneous jacquerie from below and more highly coordinated

campaign of ethnic cleansing, with many of the Volhynian peasants who targeted their neighbors

being devoid of either prior experiences in killing or long-standing attachments to a genocidal

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ideology. Moreover, the commonalities in language between Polish, Soviet, and Nazi claims to
transform Volhynia were not matched by continuities in personnel. On entering the region in 1939,

the Soviets deported prewar state actors and members of the local Polish intelligentsia, including

teachers, administrators, foresters, military settlers, and regional activists, rather than have them carry

out the tasks of the new regime (it was on the night of February 10, 1940, for instance, that NKVD

agents appeared at Jakub Hoffman’s door and shortly thereafter that he was put on a train to a

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“special settlement” in the Soviet north). Similarly, while the Nazi occupiers were willing to both
stoke native anti-Semitism and draw upon prewar Polish racial theories, they did not systematically

employ these second-tier actors to carry out their own genocidal schemes. If we seek to place the pre-

11 Emily Greble, Sarajevo, 1941-1945: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Hitler’s Europe (Ithaca, 2011).
12 McBride, “Peasants into Perpetrators,” 653.
13 On the social profiles of those deported, see Katherine R. Jolluck, Exile and Identity: Polish Women in the Soviet
Union during World War II (Pittsburgh, 2002), 3-20.

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