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There were other reconfigurations of prewar dynamics too. A discursive framework centered

on a narrative of (re)integration, for example, persisted across the supposed rupture of the war. If the

question that people had asked after 1918—who precisely would integrate whom?—was again

falling from the lips of Polish elites, its significance was recast within a new political, social, and

geopolitical context. In communist Poland, the issue of who was foreign became bound up with

competitions between Poles from geographically disparate areas, each of which drew on the layered

histories of the partition, interwar, and wartime periods. As James Bjork has shown, while postwar

Poland was a much more nationally homogenous state than its interwar incarnation, it faced its own

challenges in attempting to integrate regional populations whose experiences had diverged prior to

19
and during the war. It became useful again to consider prewar kresy inhabitants—a disproportionate
number of whom moved to the recovered territories—as less “civilized” and less “Polish” than their

fellow citizens. When Polish communist officials, Germans who remained in the “recovered

territories,” and incoming Poles from central Poland sneered at these men and women for their

everyday habits and expressed doubts about their genuine Polishness, they were echoing prewar

20
language. The Volhynian expellees certainly felt that they were looked down upon as backward and

insufficiently national. A letter from an incoming settler read “Dear!, the people here are very strange

21
and mean, they do not think that the people from Volhynia are Poles.” Other people who originated

19 James Bjork, “Bulwark or Patchwork? Religious Exceptionalism and Regional Diversity in Postwar Poland,” in
Christianity and Modernity in Eastern Europe, edited by Bruce R. Berglund and Brian Porter-Szűcs (New York,
2010), 129-158.
20 See Czesław Osękowski, Ziemie odzyskane w latach 1945-2005 (Zielona Góra, 2006), 45; Thum, Uprooted, 101-
102; Katharina Matro, “Postwar in No Man’s Land: Germans, Poles, and Soviets in the Rural Communities of
Poland’s New Territories” (Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University, 2016).
21 Cited in Jerzy Kocahnowski, “Gathering Poles into Poland: Forced Migration from Poland’s Former Eastern
Territories,” in Redrawing Nations: Ethnic Cleansing in East-Central Europe, 1944-1948, edited by Philipp Ther
and Ana Siljak (Lanham, MD, 2001), 147.

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