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and post-1939 periods within a single story, then, perhaps the most promising answers lie in

extending the wartime microhistories that have been undertaken by, among others, Gross and

McBride, back into the prewar period and in tracking the roles of particular individuals, groups, and

communities as they adapted to rapidly changing local circumstances. Omer Bartov’s recent longue

durée history of the ethnically and religiously heterogeneous town of Buczacz in eastern Galicia

14
(now Ukraine) moves us in this direction.

***

The language of civilization did not disappear easily. As the violence of the Second World War raged

in the borderlands, and even as the concept of civilization was itself transformed in the international

system, elite Poles continued to draw on deeply entrenched motifs and stories from the prewar

15
period. When they prepared materials for a peace conference that would never happen, Poles in
London justified the inclusion of Volhynia within the state’s postwar borders by highlighting not

Polish demographic preponderance, but prewar civilizational achievements. The author of a 1944

document on Poland’s postwar right to Volhynia, for instance, admitted that the majority population

was not Polish and denied that there were serious ethnic frictions in the region (a rather ironic

statement, considering the bloody conflicts that were being waged in the name of the Polish and

Ukrainian nations). Most important, however, was the idea that the prewar Polish state had ushered

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Volhynians—Poles and non-Poles alike—into the modern world. Another document, which was
issued in the same year, emphasized the Second Republic’s accomplishments in transforming the

14 Bartov, Anatomy of a Genocide.
15 Mark Mazower, “The End of Civilization and the Rise of Human Rights: The Mid-Twentieth Century
Disjuncture,” in Human Rights in the Twentieth Century, edited by Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann (New York, 2010), 29-
44.
16 “Wołyń: Opracowanie na temat przynależności Wołynia do Polski” (London, January 1944). HIA MIiD
800/41/0/-/247.

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