Page 296 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

in what had been prewar eastern Poland also reported that they “continued to feel like foreigners in

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the regions for a very long time.”

With the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, the area that had constituted the interwar

Volhynian province became part of the independent state of Ukraine, and it now sits in the

northwestern corner of that state, divided between two administrative units—Volyn’ (Volhynia)

oblast’, with its capital in Luts’k (prewar Łuck), and Rivne (prewar Równe) oblast’, with its capital

in Rivne. These towns are inhabited almost exclusively by people who consider themselves to be

Ukrainian and whose parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents made the postwar migration from

areas further east or from the surrounding, largely Ukrainian-speaking, countryside. But if Ukrainian,

not Polish or Yiddish, is heard on the streets, an observant visitor to Volhynia can see that certain

traces of prewar life persist in the present-day towns, just as they can navigate the streets with a

prewar map in hand. Physical places associated with communities that no longer exist still dot the

landscape of western Ukraine, however much their meanings have been erased from official

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memory. The yellow building in the old Jewish area of Rivne, anonymously located behind the
high street and now used by the town’s population as a gymnasium, was once a synagogue. In the

same town, an unkempt and neglected Jewish cemetery of crumbling headstones marked out with

faded Hebrew text sits just a stone’s throw away from the city archive and is unmarked on maps.

Signs of Polish national history also remain, from Lubart’s castle in the Old Town of Luts’k to the

peeling facades of the town’s former colony for state officials.

While these places exist in bricks and mortar beyond Poland’s state borders, their meanings

have been shaped to fit with dominant political narratives in Poland itself. With Volhynia and the rest

of the prewar territories that became part of the Soviet Union after the war having been something of

22 Cited in Jan M. Piskorski, “Polish mysl zachodnia and German Ostforschung: An Attempt at a Comparison,” in
German Scholars and Ethnic Cleansing, 1919-1945, edited by Ingo Haar and Michael Fahlbusch (New York, 2013),
266.
23 Omer Bartov, Erased: Vanishing Traces of Jewish Galicia in Present-Day Ukraine (Princeton, 2007).

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