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kresy from a place of Russian “backwardness” into one boasting modern towns, infrastructure,

industry, and agriculture. “In all the towns, even the small ones,” its author stated, “electric light and

modern sanitation systems were introduced, pavements laid, parks opened and flower beds set and

many attractive buildings for schools, hospitals, cultural institutions, theatres, cinemas, offices, and

17
so on erected.” The rhetorical invisibility of Jews, who had constituted the majority population in

the prewar towns, mirrored Volhynia’s new Judenfrei status.

Even at the end of the war, with the borders of Poland reconfigured once again, the

comparative civilizational framework that Poles had used to understand their relationship to

Volhynia persisted. Undoubtedly, much had changed. The new iteration of Poland lost its territorial

claims to the whole of the prewar Volhynian province (which became permanently absorbed into the

Soviet Union) and was compensated by the addition of formerly German territories in the west. With

the dissolution of the interwar borders and the lost appeal of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth,

the new communist government promoted a different myth—that the so-called recovered territories

constituted an “age-old Polish land” whose national heritage stretched back to the period of the

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millennium-old Piast dynasty. But much remained familiar. Indeed, the Polish communist

authorities encountered a series of challenges that were all too recognizable for those who had

worked in the interwar kresy, including quotidian material deprivation, the proximity of an unstable

border, and anxieties about both the transience of state power and the region’s true Polishness. Poles

again found themselves tasked with transforming a borderland region that had, until very recently,

been part of a different political and national entity. As they had done during the interwar period,

competing stakeholders came to see borderland territories—spaces “on the edge”— as battlegrounds.

17 Polish Ministry of Preparatory Work Concerning the Peace Conference, “The Eastern Provinces of Poland,”
London, March 1944, HIA MIiD 800/41/0/-/247/927-8.
18 Gregor Thum, Uprooted: How Breslau Became Wrocław during the Century of Expulsions (Princeton, 2011), 2.

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