The Oder–Neisse Line as a Place of Remembrance for Germans and Poles

Forced migration often becomes a central experience for an individual and thus becomes a significant part of their individual memory. ¹ In cases where forced migration affects large parts of society, it also becomes part of the collective memory ² and, under certain circumstances, transforms into a politically-charged national place of remembrance. ³ Such cases occurred in several countries in the twentieth century, particularly in the border regions of Europe. The Oder–Neisse line – the border drawn between Germany and Poland along the Oder and Neisse Rivers after the Second World War – became a symbol of the new European order after 1945 and, at the same time, a place of remembrance for both Germans and Poles.

Indeed, the establishment of the Oder–Neisse line during the Potsdam Conference in August 1945 brought about the split of historically cohesive regions which were enclosed by these two rivers. Primarily, this affected the former German province of Brandenburg, the eastern part of which now constitutes the Ziemia Lubuska, or the Lubusz Region belonging to Poland, along with those parts of Pomerania in the lower region of the Oder, which had also been split up at the end of the war. The regions of Lower and Upper Silesia, in the drainage basin of the Oder, as well as lands running along the Baltic Sea together with the southern part of East Prussia, also became Polish.

With the shifting of the border came forced population transfers. The regions that today are recognised as Western and Northern Poland, which became part of Poland in 1945, were the site of an almost complete population exchange. This had the consequence of ending one society and creating in its place one which was both new and different. In line with the policy of the victorious powers concerning ethnic conflicts after the Second World War, the Polish government made an effort to create a nationally homogenous state. In order to achieve this, a population exchange in Eastern Poland with the Soviet Republics of the Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania was agreed upon in 1944, under pressure from the Soviet Union. The circumstances surrounding the execution of this so-called exchange, however, resembled what one would more properly describe as the flight, expulsion or ethnic cleansing of populations. Equally, Germans living in the Oder region were forced to leave their homeland, which had now become the territory of the Polish state.

The historical concept of ‘memory’ is used in the plural to convey that remembering the year 1945 often takes on different characters for Poles and for Germans, and is usually treated separately. For Poles, the entire war was a traumatic experience while the year 1945 signified its end and a new beginning, frequently in a different, foreign world. Germans, by contrast, most frequently focus their memories on the last months of the war and their experiences after capitulation. Numerous contemporary witnesses give such accounts, most notably those published, for example, in the volumes of the publication ‘Documentation on the Expulsion of Germans from Eastern and Central Europe’. ⁴

This German Research of the East (Ostforschung) ⁵ must be considered in the context of the wider post-1945 geo-political situation. Throughout the time of the existence of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), any research concerning former Eastern German territories was made a taboo for political reasons. Research into the East at West German universities and research institutes were mostly limited to medieval and early modern history. During the first two decades of their existence, postwar debates were dominated by publications put together by federations of expellees and homeland associations, which successfully pressed a history which focused solely on the perspective of German expellees ⁶ onto contemporary historical research and journalism. This historical narrative left no room for the perception of other national perspectives. ⁷

Given this, the written memoirs of contemporary witnesses from the early 1950s are a valuable historical source. Research into the experience of war and forced migration faced a particular challenge after 1945 because of a fundamental lack of sources. For this reason, the German government decided shortly after the foundation of the Federal Republic of Germany to produce a comprehensive documentation of the process and significance of the forced expulsion of Germans from territories east of the Oder and Neisse in the form of a White Paper. The German government wanted to use conclusive and incontestable material about German victims of expulsion to proceed against the ‘injustice of Potsdam’, ⁸ that is, against the Oder–Neisse line set down by the allied powers as the German-Polish border. As it was hoped that the presentation of such factual material in future international court cases, particularly in the expected peace negotiations, would improve German bargaining power, this documentation was thus intended to be politically useful.

The result of this major research project, which was conducted in West Germany from 1951 until 1963, was the publication of ‘Documentation on the Expulsion of Germans from Eastern and Central Europe’ (hereafter shortened to ‘Documentation on Expulsions’), which mainly consists of five volumes of documents containing short reports of contemporary witnesses describing the fate, that is, the chronological process of ‘the flight and expulsion’, of the Germans. Each volume of documents has a regional focus. The first two volumes are concerned with the territories east of the Oder–Neisse, while the remaining three volumes cover the territories of Hungary, Romania and Yugoslavia. The originals of these autobiographical documents are accessible at a branch of the Federal Archives in Bayreuth (Lastenausgleichsarchiv) and comprise approximately 8000 descriptions of individual experiences, as well as 18,000 completed questionnaire reports concerning the process of flight and expulsion that took place in the area east of the Oder and Neisse.

Polish memories of the war and postwar years also became the subject of numerous enquiries on the part of historians and sociologists. Although some writers such as Stefan Banasiak attempted to publish work admitting that during the expulsions the Polish authorities had not adhered to international resolutions regarding the human rights of the expellees, most Polish publications from the period before the political changes in 1989–90 tended to write a one-sided success story of the resettlement of the region. ⁹ The acquisition and integration of the officially-termed ‘Recovered Territories’ gained a special position in the politics of the Communist governing party. This included an emphasis on the allegedly humane execution of the expulsion of Germans in line with international law, as well as attempts to downplay any doubt of the legality and historical legitimacy of the Polish and Soviet governmental measures. This research considered it best to completely exclude certain delicate sub-questions, such as Polish postwar antisemitism, the forced expulsion of Ukrainians or the whereabouts of the German minority, and to allow these issues to (hopefully) fall into historical oblivion. Only in the 1990s did some interesting publications appear which attempted to evaluate the process of settlement in a new way. ¹⁰ As in West Germany, memoirs and testimonies of contemporary witnesses since the 1950s had been collected in Poland in addition to politically-weighted research. Unfortunately there has been no critical evaluation of these sources since the fall of the Iron Curtain. Thousands of written memoirs have, in reality, all but been lost. Moreover, up to this day they have not been organized and catalogued and remain scattered in various archives and institutes. ¹¹

After the Second World War, various institutions (research institutes, but also cultural centres and newspapers) advertised competitions for the best settler memoirs from the ‘Recovered Territories’. Among the most comprehensive and interesting is a collection of so-called ‘memoirs to order’, which were the result of several competitions initiated by the Western Institute (Instytut Zachodni) in Poznań during the years 1957, 1966 and 1970 to reward ‘the best memoirs of new settlers in Northern and Western Poland’. The organizers were looking for contributions concerned with stories from before and during the war, with reasons for resettlement in the newly-gained territories, and with descriptions of the process of settlement and the first years of the settlers in their new homeland. While the memoirs from the 1960s and 1970s are dominated by propagandistic rhetoric, the texts written in the late 1950s, just after the so-called Polish October 1956 and thus under the influence of the political thaw, are marked by a more liberal treatment of individual experiences and contain critical remarks, as well as attempts to uncover reasons for mistakes that were committed.

The political situation in Poland, which remained de facto under Soviet occupation after 1945, made it impossible to have a public debate focused on coming to terms with the events of the war. Journalistic and literary works, as well as remembrance literature, came under censorship, with the effect that most authors either practiced self-censorship, wrote without hope of publication or only later looked for opportunities to publish their works abroad. Thus, very few memoirs were published in the early postwar years. Only with the political thaw of 1956 did many start to believe that they were able to write freely about their experiences. Because of this, the competition advertised by the Western Institute in 1957 for the best memoirs of new settlers was relatively unusual. Since it was one of the first of such initiatives, only 229 texts were submitted. During the following competitions on this topic in 1966 and 1970, 167 and 747 memories were collected, respectively. However, following the disappointment about unfulfilled promises regarding improvements in the settlers’ situation, these were again dominated by the laudatory tones imposed by official propaganda.

In Western Europe the history of the settlement of the ‘Recovered Territories’ incorporated into Poland in 1945 is little known. With the advance of the Red Army in the January and February of that year approximately 50 per cent of German inhabitants fled their homes while those who stayed on were expelled by the Polish army in June and July 1945 or evacuated by force over the course of the following months and into the early postwar years. Only those who were able to demonstrate Polish roots and who were ready to adopt Polish citizenship were allowed to remain. This group of long-established inhabitants became known as ‘autochthones’ (indigenous) and included communities with a mixed German–Polish heritage, such as Cashubians, Masurians and Silesians. In 1950 these individuals constituted 18.5 per cent of the population with most of them, however, living in former East Prussia and Upper Silesia. In other regions, the proportion of indigenous inhabitants was marginal; in the Oder region, for example, it amounted to approximately 3 per cent. ¹²

At the same time as the flight, expulsion and forced displacement of the Germans was taking place, Polish expellees from Poland’s eastern regions absorbed into the Soviet Union began to settle in the area, and soon comprised a third of the postwar population of the ‘Recovered Territories’. This process started even before such a policy of exchange was officially agreed upon at the Potsdam Conference. In early 1945, Poland had begun to take steps to solve the border problem discussed at the Yalta Conference in their favour, and thus aimed to present the victorious powers with a fait accompli. Immediately after the Red Army had passed through, with the approval of the Soviets, Polish local and regional administration departments were established in the German areas and German inhabitants who had not escaped were expelled. These explusions happened without the endorsement of the Western powers and were later termed ‘wild expulsions’ (‘wilde Vertreibungen’) in the historiography, since they were mostly disorganized and infringed on human rights. Moreover, both during the period of ‘wild’ and organized expulsions, Polish settlers and looters, who were intent on securing the property of the newly-termed ‘Recovered Territories’, often chased out local Germans and indigenous people on their own initiative without securing any official sanction from the local Polish authorities. Indeed, these authorities, seeing Polish settlers as the unofficial agents for the government’s policy of ‘de-Germanization’, frequently encouraged such acts or, at the very least, turned a blind eye to them. ¹³

Because the Polish Committee of National Liberation had received all administrative powers in the conquered territories up to the Oder–Neisse line from Stalin, the organized settlement of the region with a Polish population could begin. The postwar Polish government is frequently accused of having acted too rashly in employing expulsions to repopulate the territories west of the Reich’s 1939 border. Critics argue that they should have waited until the Potsdam Conference. However, one should not forget that the Polish government of the time was completely reliant on Stalin, and that the Polish state, which had already been robbed of 46 per cent of its territories in the East, was being used as a tool in the wider reshaping of Europe’s borders as part of the Allied drive to effect, as Churchill put it, ‘a clean sweep’ of ethnic minorities in order to create more stable nation states. Thus, over the course of a few months, the Polish population was forced to leave the territories east of the Curzon line in ‘exchange’ for Ukrainians, Belarusians and Lithuanians living in Poland who were duly transported to the Soviet Union. Officially, the process was called ‘repatriation’, a term which in no way applied to the circumstances, since it denotes the return to the homeland after an absence abroad. Instead Eastern Poles were forced to leave their ‘homeland’, and it thus seems more appropriate to speak of an expulsion, or forced displacement in this case. The swift execution of this ‘population exchange’, very quickly turned out to be impossible, since there were far more Polish expellees than Ukrainians, Belarusians and Lithuanians ready to leave Poland and ‘return’ to these Eastern areas. This imbalance resulted in the problem of overpopulation in the now much-reduced Polish territory. As a result of this situation, the premature settlement of the regions west and north of the Polish border of 1939 appeared to be the only solution, and was the one supported – or, rather, demanded – by Moscow.

Already in 1945, long before the border by the Oder and the Neisse was defined, the Polish government had started a propaganda campaign to promote the settlement of the territories which it claimed. The transfer of the population from Eastern Poland, as well as the recruitment of people from Greater and Central Poland, to settle by the Oder and by the Baltic Sea, was initiated under pressure from the Soviet Union and was undertaken without appropriate preparation. ¹⁴ Detailed plans were pushed aside in favour of improvisation and arbitrary on-the-ground decisions. Consequently, thousands of people suffered material, psychological and physical losses; considerable numbers perished as a result of the ordeal. The chaos which prevailed during the first months resulted in a high crime rate, in particular large-scale robbery. It also meant that the population fluctuated wildly.

Even though the expulsion and forced resettlement of the Germans often occurred parallel to the new settlement of Poles, they are usually described separately: it is either a German or a Polish story. ¹⁵ An exception to this is the remembrance volume ‘Expulsion from the East. Germans and Poles remember’, ¹⁶ in which the aggrieved parties are treated on an equal level, with their memories reflecting the fortunes of both Polish and German displaced persons. Between 2009 and 2011 I conducted the project ‘My house by the Oder – migration in the Oder region in the years 1945–48’, financed by the German–Polish Research Trust, the results of which comprise the following section of this article. ¹⁷ My research approach was based on the idea of exploring memories not from a national point of view, but instead, by focusing on a region – here the Oder region – and investigating the memories of the local residents. The central theme of my research project was thus both the memory of forced migration and the appropriation of the region, as well as the consequences of the population exchange for the new residents and the region. The investigation was conducted from below – in other words from the viewpoint of the individual, the ordinary citizen, whose personal destinies were explored by means of written memoirs or testimonies.

The consultation of both German and Polish testimonies was, however, not intended to demonstrate the asymmetry of the memories of the two national groups. However, in one case memories are dominated by the notion of ‘leaving’, while in the other case ‘arriving’ is prevalent, and therefore the perspectives from which experiences are reconstructed must be different. Although both groups found themselves in the same reality, they tried to come to terms with it while carrying with them totally different sets of baggage. Indeed they had diametrically-opposed emotional attitudes to the places in which fate brought them together. Within a short space of time, however, everyday survival forced them to deal with very similar problems. ¹⁸ For this reason, the problems of everyday life play an important role in this research. Germans, as well as Poles, had to reconstruct their livelihoods anew in the Oder region during the difficult postwar years. Frequently they had to struggle for mere survival and face confrontations not only with political but also with natural elements, in order to eventually satisfy their spiritual needs.

The comparison of different cultures of remembrance is intended to allow us to take a look at the mosaic of reality. During the search for sources most suited for this project, particular care was taken to make sure the source material had been created within as short a space of time as possible after the original events. This condition was to promise a certain authenticity which arises only from immediacy, and which seemed most likely to capture the way of thinking, the fears, delights and sympathies of the people who lived in the time and space in question. For this reason, I chose the oldest of the German and Polish biographical documents, the diaries, memoirs and testimonies originating in the late 1940s and the 1950s.

By contrast, texts which recount experiences 50 or 60 years later, or stories which are told with a much greater temporal distance, are usually affected by later experiences, such as the perception of history conveyed by the media or school books. Thus, these ‘memories’ are constructed anew while the time interval also allows for a certain distance from what were frequently traumatic experiences. ¹⁹ Moreover, memory is by nature subjective and tends to idealize one’s childhood to some degree as time passes. At the same time, as all memoirs and testimonies are only a part of the story which the subject personally witnessed, they need to be compared not only with other memoirs, but with various historical sources in order to check their veracity. One extreme example of the reinterpretation of events is an interview in which a contemporary witness recounts her traumatic experiences during the flight at the time of her childhood as a kind of adventure, 65 years after the event:

In Küstrin we crossed the Oder. There we had a lot to laugh about once again. The bridge was made from wood, one of those improvised kinds. And it was so bouncy, and then you have to imagine, so many refugees, all on this bridge, with the handcarts and next to them these tawny coloured cows, hundreds of thousands, which the Russians were driving eastwards. And in the middle of this bridge, our handcart broke. This woman with a machine pistol screamed at us to hurry up, because behind us everything was slowing down of course. But what were we supposed to do, the handcart broken – take everything in our hands? I mean, we couldn't even hold on to it so fast, and then my mother looked across the bridge and said ‘The best thing is to just jump in right here’. And I said: ‘Look, mummy, there's not even enough water’. ²⁰

To avoid toned-down reinterpretations such as these, it seems advisable to return to ego-documents of earlier dates, and to search them for content that was more likely closer to reality.

The Oder–Neisse line often appears as a kind of watershed in the memories of German refugees and displaced persons, the crossing of which promised security. In many cases, however, the life awaiting the German population in the West was not easy, at least not in the early postwar months. The testimony of Otto Baumert from Lauterbach in the district of Görlitz, written in 1952, is particularly interesting in this context. The author narrates his expulsion in July 1945, as well as his return to his hometown:

We were taken to the Neisse and left there to cope by ourselves. Görlitz was a town of c. 100,000 residents; when we arrived, there were already c. 100,000 refugees in addition to this. … Because the Poles needed German workers, they demanded some from Görlitz. With a hunger crisis in Görlitz, a large part of the population returned to Lauterbach on 14^th July 1945 in order to work. ²¹

While the memories of Germans are primarily focused on the circumstances surrounding their flight and expulsion, as well as on the period under Soviet and Polish administration, Polish memoirs instead focus on the whole war-time experience, on acts of war, the German and Soviet occupation, the Holocaust, forced labour and underground activities. They talk about pre-war Poland as a multi-ethnic state, whose various ethnicities found themselves in the newly-incorporated territories after the end of the war, and who were now supposed to define themselves explicitly as Polish, living in what was perceived as a nationally homogenous state. They talk about the long journey of forced migration, the various places of transit that were passed through during the war and after its end until a place to settle down was finally found. The arrival into the West, and the first days spent there, is described in a very colourful and emotional way, as is this new, impermanent society. In the testimony of Stanisław Jędrzejowski from Szczecinek (Neustettin), these first impressions are captured as follows:

The destruction left by the war in this area was immense. Ruins and rubble and the walls, where still standing, were blackened by smoke. The streets and cobbles were torn up by bullets or trenches and the pavements were buried under debris. … Life had come to a halt in the full meaning of this word and began to awaken again only a couple of weeks later. The residents who had remained in the town returned to the streets after a couple of days. The first signs of new life after the Soviet Army had passed through on its way west were the newly arrived settlers from Central Poland. The majority of these were so-called looters who were not afraid of anything and acted on the principle to take everything that wasn't nailed to the ground, to rob everything and bring it away. … All of this happened at a time when there were still no civilian administrative bodies. Life was uncontrolled and there was a lot of injustice. Delinquent acts were committed without inhibitions, and everything could be bought for self-made schnapps and vodka. Soviet soldiers were selling the horses and cattle they were driving eastwards. … At the time each street offered a peculiar sight. People moved quickly and furtively… and there were no children to be seen on the streets. ²²

During the transition period, Germans and Poles lived next to each other – that is, with each other – for weeks or even months. During the population exchange, everywhere in the Oder region dramatic scenes were to be witnessed. Lawful owners of property (especially Germans, but also the so-called autochthones or indigenous, i.e. Silesians with Polish origins, Germanized Poles etc.) were humiliated, had their property expropriated and were then frequently expelled a few months later. This is mostly left out of the memoirs of Polish settlers, or it is only mentioned in passing, from the viewpoint of a disinterested observer. Germans were seen as bearing collective blame, for which they now were to pay. Many Poles thus watched without any pangs of conscience the manner by which Germans were removed from their flats in order to make room for Polish settlers. Although in the villages German homeowners were mostly allowed to remain in their houses, they were asked to hand over most of their living space to the new settlers, as well as being forced to work for them. A German resident of Zetthun in Pomerania described the newly moved-in Poles as follows: ‘They took little care of the farm management and left this to the actual owners, while they took up trading and sometimes even robbery’. ²³

In other German testimonies, the behaviour of Poles was portrayed in very different ways, but harassment and looting, being forcibly moved out of apartments (to some Germans this happened several times), and the abuse of power are always mentioned. The texts collected as part of the documentation of the expulsion show what the German population felt when the Polish administration took power. Even though there were also examples of helpfulness and humane treatment of Germans – many were glad to offer accommodation to Polish officials because this meant protection from robbery and attacks and helped them to earn a living – most reports are still dominated by a negative attitude to the new occupiers:

Gradually the Russians began to pull out and the Poles arrived. This meant we were out of the frying pan and into the fire. The Russians at least left us our land and apartments, as long as they didn't need those. The Poles demanded all the land and every inch of housing for themselves. They even took the field crops that we had grown with great effort, they took the remains of our furniture, even our underwear and clothes. The only exception seems to have been the Polish farmers from the Lemberg area who had been driven away by the Russians. They worked on the land together with the Germans and gave them the bare necessities from what they grew. Unfortunately the number of Poles like them was small. ²⁴

The group of Polish farmers from the Lemberg area, who the writer refers to as an exception, was certainly an example he was familiar with, and one which can roughly be applied to the total collective of more than 1.2 million Polish expellees from the East. Of course one cannot say that all Eastern Poles were honest and hard-working people who treated the German population well, just as one should not claim that all other Polish settlers came to the Oder region for looting. Among the settlers there were also a considerable number of such people who wanted to start a new life and work honestly. The difference in attitude towards the Germans, however, was based on the fact that Eastern Poles had suffered more under the Soviet than under German occupation during the war, and because they themselves had been expelled from their homes, they were more compassionate and understanding of the situation of the German population in the Oder region. Poles from the territories of the former General Government and from the Polish territories joined to the ‘Third Reich’ had experienced the cruelty of the German occupiers throughout the war. Many had participated actively in the fight against the National Socialists or had suffered for years in concentration camps or as forced labourers with the hope that Germans would one day have to pay for their crimes. The idea of the collective responsibility of the Germans was widespread in Poland at the time of the end of the war and it remained so until at least the 1960s, when a public debate on the issue was introduced. ²⁵

In the memoirs of Polish settlers written in the late 1940s and in the 1950s, however, there is a clear distinction between the subjects’ certainty about collective blame on the one hand, and, surprisingly frequently, sympathy with the fate of individual, personally-known Germans, on the other. Julian Bazgier had compassion and admiration for three young German women who were struggling for their existence and were running a clean and well-kept café in Świdnica (Schweidnitz). However, he could not understand the arguments of a German worker who tried to prove his innocence in relation to Nazi crimes. Although this worker blamed the German rulers for the war and recognized the injustices committed against Poland, he regretted that ordinary German farmers and workers had to suffer for this now, reportedly saying: ‘I know that we are going to be expelled. But is this going to be just? We are going to leave our homes with tears in our eyes and a curse on our lips. And against whom these tears and this curse are going to be directed?’ However, to this question the Polish settler answered:

Lament and curse your Hitler. Lament and curse yourself for having believed in him when he promised you world domination. You say, you are workers and as such you did not want the war. But what has your whole working class done? Why did they not resist Hitler? Why did it not listen to your noble labour leaders, why did you allow for them to be imprisoned and murdered? What did you do with Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg? Have you forgotten about that already? If you have forgotten that, the world will not forgive you for it. ²⁶

The above testimony shows how emotionally charged confrontations between Germans and Poles were. A lot of the time they were not able to communicate across linguistic divides, but even when language was not an obstacle, communication was difficult. Both sides had suffered heavily during the war and blamed each other for the hardship experienced. Luckily the Germans had not offered much resistance in 1945 after their experience of violence at the hands of the Red Army. Resigned and defeated they obeyed the orders of the Polish administration. Otherwise the number of violent and vengeful acts on the part of the Polish side would have been much higher. The passive attitude of the German population evoked either repulsion or compassion in Poles, but usually not violence. Moreover, the moral aspect of the appropriation of German possessions and the latter's expropriation should also be regarded from this perspective, and not from a modern viewpoint.

As already mentioned, the subject of the appropriation of German possessions was left unmentioned in most Polish memoirs, as it remained a taboo in Polish society for a long time (in fact, until today). Memoirists also silenced themselves because many of them were conscious of their complicity in the injustice committed against German civilians but could see no other option than to take over the German farms, since they had no possessions themselves. However, many considered this situation as a transition period during which it was necessary to find some form of arrangement with the Germans. In Wrocław (Breslau) a housing shortage developed quickly because many houses had been destroyed and many Germans lived in the ones that were still in good condition. Zbigniew Żaba had the choice to renovate a destroyed villa – which he didn't have the means to do – or to share a flat with a German family. Due to good will on both sides, the second solution turned out to work well:

Right in the beginning we had separated the flat into a Polish and a German part – two rooms for each nation. There were no fights. It became apparent that one could live together peacefully even under such conditions. Our part was lacking mattresses, curtains, sheets, glass in the windows and everything else, because the former resident had taken everything with him and had left a note saying that no one should steal ‘his’ property. I was therefore forced to organize everything by myself by searching through other abandoned buildings. ²⁷

In the memoirs studied, there are frequent examples of sympathy with the fate of individual Germans and moral qualms about the appropriation of their property. Aleksander Bernakiewicz from Lemberg was searching for a flat in Darłowo (Rügenwalde) in late summer 1945. As soon as something suitable had been found, a municipal official arrived with a sheet of paper bearing the order to leave the flat immediately and told the resident, an old German woman, that she would have to move out within a few minutes. After the official had done his duty, the author was left alone with the German woman. With tears in her eyes she packed up her things, took the pictures of her children and her husband off the wall, wiped them, kissed them and talked to them. Aleksander Bernakiewicz could not understand what she was saying, but he could clearly see what she was feeling and what she was lamenting. What happened to her had happened to him a couple of weeks earlier in his hometown. At this point follows an extensive explanation in which the author makes clear his views. Today, sympathy with this woman seems natural to us and we would even expect him to do something to help her. Less than 60 years ago, however, the attitude in Polish society was completely different, and those who sympathized with Germans or helped them could be accused of treason or ‘revisionism’.

Because of this, Bernakiewicz felt the need to explain his position in his memoirs in 1956:

I am writing down my memories during a time in which the Polish language is regaining its true freedom. For this reason, I want these memoirs to contain everything I think and feel, everything about which one could not have written until a short time ago.

In addition we learn that the author is not against the Oder–Neisse line and not for the revision of the Polish Eastern border. Although he loves his home in the East just as much as the Piast region in the West and is ready to give his life for it, he accuses rulers who have their own land at their disposal and leave it to decay:

This crying German woman, when she left her home later, did not know that the tragedy and the odyssey of a part of the German people were the result of the mistakes made by the former rulers, who, without thinking of future generations, had reached out for foreign countries and took them by force; the right of compensation for this is now given to us by the law of history. This I wanted to tell her when I saw her cry, but I could not find a language she could understand. As far as I am concerned, I myself lack clarity and I share this with millions of others. Where is the true story of our borders in the East in this case? We were told that those were our territories, but through several separations our country had become smaller and smaller. … I am not asking for the revision of our Eastern borders, but in the act of remembering I am asking for the true story of our home. ²⁸

Many people had asked themselves questions like these in 1945 and thereafter, especially the Poles coming from the East. They had to wait a long time for a reply if they did not want to believe the propaganda of the postwar years. Just after the settlement, however, most of them were busy with every-day life, often with the bare struggle for survival in ‘the Wild West’.

By analysing the numbers of people migrating within or to Poland in the years 1945–9, it becomes clear that the common division of settlers in Polish historiography into three large groups – the so-called Eastern Polish ‘repatriates’, the ‘pioneer’ settlers and the indigenous – omits certain key realities. According to the most recent research, around 2.9 million Polish settlers had come to the newly-joined territories from Greater and Central Poland by the 1950s. In addition, the number of expellees from Eastern Poland is estimated at approximately 1,282,000 people (not including about 250,000 later ‘repatriates’ arriving from the Soviet Union during the years 1955–9). Furthermore, an immense group of about 2,171,000 people was comprised of forced labourers and other migrants who moved to Poland from Germany, but also from other Western European countries and (to a very small extent) from countries outside Europe. ²⁹ This population group had its origins in the East, as well as in Greater and Central Poland. In the statistics assembled by the People's Republic of Poland, these people were assigned to one of the three large groups (settlers, expellees or indigenous) based on their geographical origins.

As we have seen, during the early years of Polish postwar settlement, the central and lower parts of the Oder region that fell to Poland in 1945 were unofficially often described as ‘Poland's Wild West’ by the new Polish inhabitants. The term refers on the one hand to the prevailing chaos and the application of the principle of ‘might makes right’. On the other hand, however, it expressed the possibility of creating something completely new in this frontier region. It also manages to convey the ambivalence of these times: the tragedy of people moved around like objects, but also the vitality of the settlers, who did not surrender to such difficult circumstances and who succeeded in making a new beginning. Thus, a region in the middle of Europe, as a result of the devastating Second World War, was destroyed and depopulated, and turned wild. ³⁰ Nor was it only Germans and Poles in the Oder region who were caught up in the almost total exchange of populations, but other nationalities and ethnic groups such as Ukrainians, Jews and even a small Greek minority.

The toing and froing of hordes of settlers continued for a long time, since many were disappointed by the difficult living conditions they found, and kept looking for new flats, jobs and environments. A feeling of apprehension thus dominated. With time, however, the number of those who had found their place grew. The displaced Eastern Poles, however, had no means to return and were therefore forced to accept their fate and settle down. Indeed, in looking at the processes of re-settlement in Western Poland in the year 1945, the uneven distribution of the population is immediately striking. While opportunities for settlement in Opole Silesia were nearly exhausted by the end of the year, more than half of the farms and houses in the Western Polish Ziemia Lubuska (the Lubusz Region) remained unoccupied. Although, the situation gradually improved over the next few years, according to the first reliable data from the population census of 3 December 1950, some districts were still heavily under-populated five years after the end of the war (when compared to the number of Germans who had lived there before the war). ³¹ Moreover, the population distribution for the whole of the ‘Recovered Territories’ of Northern and Western Poland was as follows: 48.9 per cent were settlers from the region of Greater Poland (centred on Poznań) and from Central Poland; 27.7 per cent expellees from former eastern Polish territory annexed by the USSR; 3.8 per cent re-emigrants (mainly from Germany and Western Europe) and 19.7 per cent so-called autochthones or indigenous. ³²

With such a variety of Polish backgrounds flowing into ‘the Wild West’, Aleksy Lapander, who had been a secondary school teacher before the war and then a prisoner at Stutthof concentration camp, gave a clear expression of the pioneering spirit and the enthusiasm of these times:

Personally, I was full of pride, since I had fought for this legacy for years and in certain moments the thought overwhelms me, the fear – hopefully we will not let all of this go to waste. This peasant worry relies on the critical attitude towards our mentality. We will fight for religion, ideology and philosophy, but not for the economy. ³³

One could therefore ask how did the Poles manage to safeguard this legacy? How much could be saved, what was lost? What was down to the mentality of people, what to particular circumstances and political power? What was the aim of the communist rulers, what were the aims of ordinary citizens? What did they share with those who governed, and what separated the two? These and many further questions can be answered by analysing German and Polish ego-documents. These also constitute the core of my research about ‘Poland's Wild West’, in which I try to reconstruct the processes linked to forced migration and cultural appropriation, which took place in the territories east of the Oder–Neisse line in the years 1945–8.

As the quoted memoirs and testimonies show, these events took a central place in the biographies of most contemporary witnesses. The agreement on the new border between Germans and Poles by the Oder and the Neisse, the crossing of the river on departure and the arrival in ‘the Wild West’ – as far as the Oder and the Neisse – was a significant moment in the lives of the old and new inhabitants. This experience is preserved differently by Germans and Poles and is handed down differently in families. However, it is important that both sides have the opportunity to exchange their experiences and talk about the fact that they are sharing this place of remembrance of the Oder–Neisse line. Polish elites of the 1990s have recognized the injustice committed against the German civilian population by means of the expulsion, and they have publicly expressed their regret. ³⁴ It would be desirable to have this attitude shared by the whole of Polish society. The German side, on the other hand, is slowly becoming aware of the fact that most Poles were not the initiators of the expulsion of Germans, but that they were themselves victims of the war started by the Germans and forced migration.

The equally-forced resettlement of the newly-joined and heavily destroyed region posed a great challenge to Poland. Its reconstruction and cultivation required a lot of energy, commitment, and all too often, the sacrifice of those building this new society. However, the political system in Poland and the central Communist regime controlled by Warsaw was an obstacle to the region's development rather than a help. For this reason, the new Polish settlers often only managed to establish roots and to consider the Oder region as their home in the second or third generation:

Sixty years after the end of the Second World War we are not only administrators of the German cultural heritage in this region, but heirs of these cultural traditions. This is shown clearly by the fact that we are at home here, that this region has become the landscape of our home, it has become a close, existential concrete thing, which cannot be replaced by anything else. ³⁵

Thus, the process of cultural appropriation of the Oder region by Poles has been going on for more than half a century and is still not quite complete. Although some former German inhabitants of this region still mourn the loss of their homeland, what remains is mutual respect and sympathetic memory, which can unite people despite their differences.