The Void Communities: Towards a New Approach to the Early Post-war in Poland and Ukraine

Introduction

When Oleksa Voropai, a Ukrainian born in the Odessa Oblast, came to the little town Lutowiska near Krosno in April 1943 (Ukr. Lutovyshchi, part of the Second Polish Republic until 1939, part of the Ukrainian USSR in 1939–1941, and belonging to the District of Galicia in the General Government in 1943 ¹ ), he was astonished to note in his diary:

Why would they call this village a town? What’s urban about it? I walked around and looked: a wooden Orthodox church, a brick church, two-three buildings that belong in a town, and that’s it, and the rest—typical village cottages. . . . The town has 2150 inhabitants, 37% of which are Ukrainians, 24% Poles, and 39% Jews. Actually, this piece of information is outdated, it’s from 1936, and now there are no more than 1000 inhabitants, as I was told by the agronomist Z. And they call this a “town”! ²

What Voropai saw in 1943 was a deserted town, whose wealthy Polish and Ukrainian inhabitants (and the Jewish refugees from the German occupation zone) had been deported by the Soviets to Siberia, and whose Jews had all been murdered by the Germans and their local collaborators, the Ukrainian auxiliary police in particular. But the worst was yet to come: while some of the local Ukrainians—mostly working in the civil administration under the Germans—had escaped to the West in 1944 with the withdrawing German occupiers, the remaining ones were deported immediately after the war to the Kherson Oblast in the USSR. The town has not recovered from this collapse and is now a village with only a few hundred inhabitants.

There are many towns on the Polish–Ukrainian border such as that at issue or, more broadly speaking, in Poland and Ukraine: the majority of small communities in this part of Europe experienced war destruction, degradation, and re-ruralisation. Their fate can be placed within a framework of various historiographic paradigms describing the war and the early post-war period: the experience of genocide and ethnic cleansing, ³ the destruction and reconstruction, ⁴ long-term consequences of the war, ⁵ or post-war resettlement. ⁶ The aim of this article is to provide a new perspective on the early post-war period in Poland and Ukraine, focused on the issue of the disappearance of large parts of the members of local communities—various groups of Others. According to Jonathan Kaufmann,

Much has been written about what the Holocaust did to Jews. But little has been said about what it did to Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland—how it deprived these countries of generations of artists, scientist, writers, entrepreneurs; even more, of an entire worldview. ⁷

While Kaufmann discusses the eradication of the Jewish intellectual elite and its consequences for East European societies, my intention is to investigate a more general and also more local phenomenon—the disappearance of neighbours who used to perform specific roles in these societies. After the war, communities such as Lutowiska became “Void Communities,” deprived not only of Jews but also, depending on the location of the border after 1945, of Poles and Ukrainians, as well as the Germans who used to live in this part of Europe in concentrated colonies for centuries.

In this article, all kinds of “missing neighbours” are conceptualised collectively as “Others.” Despite being murdered, deported, or displaced due to various reasons, and regardless of their fate, the most important aspect associated with them for the local communities was that they were gone after the war.

Istvan Deak argues that the disappearance of legally, economically, or culturally privileged minorities that came from the West (e.g., Poles in Ukraine, Germans in Romania and Russia, Hungarians in Romania, and Jews everywhere) brought about more significant changes than the emergence of national ideologies of fascism or communism. As a consequence of the Second World War, the local peasantry finally succeeded in removing the Others from towns, mansions and colonies. ⁸ It would perhaps be easiest to describe the void after the disappearance of the Others in ethnic terms, but not in all cases was ethnicity the reason for murder, deportation or escape, and absence of a neighbour of a given nationality was not necessarily the most painful experience after the war. While Jews were murdered as a result of the racial criteria invented by the Nazi Reich and eagerly adopted by their local collaborators, ⁹ the Soviets deported them as a “bourgeois” or unproductive elements (which in fact saved them from being murdered during the Holocaust); and Poles and Ukrainians were sent to Siberia because of their wealth, a government position, or support for the national movements. Finally, the gentry—usually Polish—was expropriated, expelled, and murdered by the Soviets in 1939, and by the Polish communist authorities after 1944 because of their class origin. Hence, the “Vanished Others” are not only Jews, Poles, and Ukrainians but also landowners, pharmacists, shoemakers, or traders who had disappeared to some extent.

Of course, the suffering of the deported ones is incomparable with the fate of the exterminated. While, as a general rule, the decimated Polish and Ukrainian communities managed to rebuild after the war (albeit sometimes elsewhere and in fact anew), the Jewish communities simply ceased to exist in the part of Europe under study. While the fate of all victims of these processes—Jews, Poles, Ukrainians, non-Jewish displaced persons of various nationalities, and the gentry—has become the subject of many research works, there are still no studies focused on what happened to those who remained in the wounded and deserted towns and villages. The post-war void not only was physical but it had various aspects and time frames; on some levels it ended after a few days, while on others it lasts until today. The present article aims to define the Void as a means of describing the post-war reality. What did the disappearance—resulting from murder or displacement—of neighbours mean for those who stayed? It meant more than a physical absence of a group of people. What happened to their property? Who took over their economic and professional positions? Or did these positions cease to exist? How have everyday life, festivals, religious traditions, and local culture changed? Did the disappearance of the Others influence social norms and values?

The objective of this article is to conceptualize the notion of Void and Void Communities on the above-mentioned levels. The source material primarily consists of personal documents: diaries, memoires, testimonies, and oral history recordings—Polish, Jewish, and Ukrainian—that were contemporary to the events or were produced later. I will refer to archival records less often because I intend to present the subjective aspect of the ongoing changes and the way they were experienced by social actors. The second important source comes from field research that I conducted in 2017–2019 with my team in Polish and Ukrainian Galicia, which resulted in a collection of more than 150 interviews with the oldest inhabitants of small towns in the region, born in the 1920s and 1930s. ¹⁰ The fieldwork and archival search were conducted in Galicia; hence my investigation focuses primarily on this region. However, I also refer to ego documents from other districts of the General Government (e.g., Kielce region) providing that they shed light on specific problems under study and that regional specificity does not play a major role.

Vanished People: The Scale of Destruction

Oleksa Voropai was a good observer and had a unique opportunity to study Lutowiska immediately after the greatest of the disasters it suffered, namely, the murder of its Jewish inhabitants. However, nothing says as much about this process as the testimonies of the people who lived in the destroyed communities. The present article often treats the category of “Others” or “Neighbours” collectively. However, at the same time, it acknowledges the internal division of this category, associated with the fact that its representatives were targeted for various reasons and whose suffering ranged from declassing to death.

The interregnum period of September 1939 began in Eastern Galicia with spontaneous neighbourly violence directed against Poles and Jews; ¹¹ however, when it came to systematic, state-directed activity, the Polish gentry were the first to disappear. The objective of the Red Army was to destroy the Polish national and administrative elites, and to quickly Sovietise the eastern territories of the II Polish Republic that had been annexed by the USSR: The gentry were thus the first victims of this policy. ¹² The entering Soviet troops arrested landowners and transported them to an unknown destination; for instance, the NKVD took Władysław Świdrygiełło-Świderski from Barysz (Barysh) from a peasant cottage, where pre-war manorial farm workers had hid him, and murdered him in Kharkov in 1940. ¹³ Sometimes, landowners were murdered on the spot, demonstratively, in front of the peasantry. This is how Bruno Daszewski from the estate Załuże near Rohatyn (Zaluzhzhia near Rohatyn’) died, forced to dig his own grave and shot in his own garden. ¹⁴ In most cases, the families of the arrested and murdered were sent to Siberia during the first deportation operation from February 1940. Some of them managed to escape—to a larger city, such as Lwów or Tarnopol, where they were able to conceal their class origin for some time (this was the case of Aniela Cieńska from Osowce near Buczacz [Osivtsi near Buchach], who left behind “a mansion packed with refugees and pilots, and airplanes hidden in the forest,” and traveled with her daughters in a peasant disguise to Lwów ¹⁵ ), they reached the German occupation zone of Romania and continued towards the West. B. S. Arsen recalls that in his home village Cześniki (Chesnyky) near Rohatyn, a group of people fleeing towards the Romanian border “were joined by the owner of the manorial farm, Maliński, his family and closest circle. His nightly disappearance caused excitement and all sorts of comments in the village.” ¹⁶ Few decided to stay close to their properties and not to leave the Eastern Borderlands until 1944: Janina Kamińska from Kurzany (Kuriany) moved to the nearby Brzeżany (Berezhany) and waited there until the end of the war. ¹⁷ Nevertheless, in September 1939, Polish gentry ceased to exist as a social class in the Borderlands.

The next group were Polish colonists, or Poles (mostly from Central Poland) who bought the land obtained as a result of allotment of great land property in the Borderlands in the interwar period, as well as military settlers (who received land from the state, mainly in Volhynia). ¹⁸ The Soviets transported them to Siberia, together with their families, during the first deportation on 10 February 1940. Entire villages and towns suddenly became deserted when all its inhabitants had been deported. Dmytro Kupiak from the village Jabłonówka (Yablunivka) near Kamionka Strumiłowa (Kam’ianka Strumilova, former Lwów voivodeship) recalls the destruction of the nearby Polish colony that was established several years earlier:

At sunrise there was not a living soul in the colony. About sixty Polish families were brutally driven out of their homes, taken to Krasne [Krasne] station and then to Siberia. . . . While Ukrainians and Poles had their own disputes, everyone was shocked by the terror used by Moscow sadists against innocent people. ¹⁹

Polish teachers, officials, policemen, foresters, Ukrainians involved in the national movement, wealthy industrialists (of all nationalities) and refugees (mostly Jewish) who had come to the region from the German-occupied territories were deported in this and subsequent deportations (in April and May 1940, and June 1941). ²⁰ Likewise, Galician Germans also disappeared—in 1940 the decision was made to resettle them in the German occupation zone:

In the Kałusz district there was a village called Landestreu, a German colony where Germans had lived for almost 150 years. When it belonged to Poland, it was called Mazurówka. During the population exchange in 1940, the Germans took in their own people and the Bolsheviks deported the Poles who remained in the village. ²¹

When Germans entered Galicia in 1941, the village was resettled with Volksdeutsche and Germans from the interior of the Soviet Union. In 1944, they were evacuated West. Ukrainian partisans set the village on fire in 1945 “with the intention to prevent any more uninvited guests from coming to the village,” ²² and after a while, only a church and a school had remained, to eventually disappear as well.

Certainly, the most dramatic change was caused by the Holocaust. Jews died in ghettos and extermination camps, but half of the Jews from the District of Galicia perished in mass executions near their place of residence. During the Shoah, Germans and their local collaborators murdered around 3 million Jews in all of Poland, and at least 550,000 in Eastern Galicia alone. ²³ In this area, the share of Jews who survived the German occupation varied, depending on the district, with the lowest survival rate of only about 3% in the Ternopil Oblast. ²⁴ Aniela Kowalska (née Belin), a member of the Polish gentry, describes the situation after the liquidation of the ghetto in Radomsko as follows:

A settlement that loses 85% of its population in just a few hours, becomes a ghost town. The Catholic church in Brzeźnica was closed a long time ago and the priest was sent to a concentration camp several months ago. The vicarage is brightly lit, because a high official from Reich has taken up residence there. On the main road Radomsko-Strzelce-Łódź I saw few lights in peasant houses, at the doctor’s house and one at the pharmacist’s. They do not have any patients to treat within a distance of many kilometres. ²⁵

Towns and the countryside had become empty and quiet. A Polish memoirist from a village in the Kielce region described the time after the murder of the Jews and the members of a group of Gypsies that would typically move into the village for the winter: “A deadly silence fell on the village. People were afraid to meet each other; they were even afraid to go to a store. They executed every German instruction precisely and immediately.” ²⁶

The next victims were Poles and Ukrainians. The Polish–Ukrainian conflict that took place during World War II (the ethnic cleansing of Poles perpetrated by Ukrainian nationalists in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia, and the bloody retaliatory measures by Poles) resulted in the death of about sixty to hundred thousand Polish civilians, and between several and several-dozen thousands of Ukrainian civilians. ²⁷ The survivors left voluntarily or were deported after the war: Poles from Eastern Galicia to Poland, Ukrainians from Western Galicia to Soviet Ukraine and (in 1947, as part of the “Vistula” operation) to the Polish “recovered territories.” Exactly half of the inhabitants of the village Deszno near Rymanów (Rzeszów region) were displaced—the Ukrainian half. All Polish inhabitants of Usznia near Złoczów (Ushnia near Zolochiv), equally ethnically mixed, left in 1945 (my interviewee of Polish–Ukrainian descent recalls many years later: “We cried so hard when they left, so hard.” ²⁸ )

The deportations from Western Ukraine, now under the Soviet rule, continued beyond the previously established ethnic pattern on the large scale: More than 150,000 Ukrainians, mostly women and children, were deported to the interior of the Soviet Union between 1944–1952. The majority of the deportees were accused of supporting the Ukrainian nationalistic underground, UPA (Ukrains’ka Povstans’ka Armiia [Ukrainian Insurgent Army]) or of being related to their supporters. In fact, various economic reasons, including the need to provide workforce, lay behind the decisions to conduct mass displacement operations. ²⁹

Finally, the landowners from territories that had been occupied by Germans until 1944–1945 were expropriated, expelled from their mansions, arrested (some died as a result of prison conditions), and finally they were forbidden to be in the radius of several dozen kilometers from their former places of residence. They ceased to exist as a social and economic class. A small fraction of them emigrated, while the majority, declassed, tried to adjust to the new circumstances. ³⁰ Obviously, one should not equate political situation in communist Poland and Soviet Ukraine. After 1945, Poland and Ukraine were divided not only by the new border but also by the level of oppressiveness of the ruling undemocratic regimes.

Locals who spent the war elsewhere provide the most penetrating descriptions of the “post-catastrophe” community. They would return to their family town or village and be unable to recognize it. Maria Gaczoł, born in Nowy Wiśnicz in the Kraków region, who had left in 1939 and returned in 1946, recalls:

It was just . . . not there . . . just like that. These Jewish houses were either occupied by Poles or destroyed. And the Germans burned a part of the Jewish settlement. So, at that time there was nothing left. The synagogue was gone, the Jews were gone, everyone was gone, but the Poles, the Catholics. ³¹

Maria Grodzicka’s (temporary) return to her family estate, from which she had been relocated by the Germans in 1939, was a one big list of losses: “We find out who survived and who died, who was displaced and who did not live to be displaced. All Jews were murdered, they disappeared, as if they would have vanished from the face of the earth, even their cemetery ceased to exist.” ³²

The losses were enormous. It would never be the same again.

Immediate Dysfunction, Indirect Degradation

Lutowiska is a town that simply ceased to exist in its original shape, as a result of the processes described in this article. However, most settlements experienced a partial process of destruction instead of a total annihilation. If a community, as argued by Katerina Clark, is a kind of a social organism, then every significant interference with its (proper) functioning results in a temporary or permanent dysfunction. ³³ What ceased to “function” in Void Communities?

It certainly depended on the character of a given community and on who disappeared. What is most striking in the source material are changes in the exchange of goods. Obviously, it was not only Jews who participated in trade, and Jewish stores in towns were more or less smoothly taken over by non-Jews. Changes predominantly affected rural areas and small towns. When Jews were locked in ghettos, they lost their freedom of movement and door-to-door selling died out: there were no Jewish traders anymore traveling from village to village, offering their goods or buying agricultural produce from peasants. In Szczerzec (Shchyrets) in the former Lwów voivodeship, nearly all stores closed under the German occupation, since Jews had constituted more than half of the town’s over a thousand inhabitants, and they had owned most of the trading stalls. ³⁴ In Stratyń (Stratyn) near Rohatyn, there was a bakery before the arrival of the Germans; then, according to a woman born in the town, “the Jews were killed and the bakery was gone.” When asked whether the bakery reopened after the war, she replied with astonishment: “But who would have run it?” ³⁵ In Wiśniowczyk (Vyshnivchyk), a village in the former Tarnopol voivodship which until 1939 had a separate central part called the “town”—the centre of social and economic life, with shops and stalls, after the war “you could not buy even [vodka]. There were no stores, nothing. There was nothing. You couldn’t even buy diapers when a baby was born. There was nothing left.” ³⁶

These changes had a more or less permanent character. The character of door-to-door selling in villages changed irreversibly—it moved to towns (“and later, when Russia liberated us, the Jewish mobile trade ended.” ³⁷ ) Necessities still had to be bought, but one needed to go further than before the war to get them. Also, as a rule, the not-the-most-indispensable services also became scarce; in pre-war Stratyń, bread could have been baked at home or bought from a Jew—after the war, it had to be baked at home, and some years later, bought from a state-owned store in the village. Before new sellers and buyers emerged, the void had been overwhelming: Lev Savchyns’kyi, a resident of Stary Sambór (Staryi Sambir) in former Lwów voivodeship who kept a diary in 1944–1946, noted on 15 February 1946: “Once again, the market failed to open, there was no one to trade with. No Poles, no Jews, no Muscovites.” ³⁸

The post-Holocaust Galician communities were also missing doctors and pharmacists, because these professions had been dominated by Jews. In Przemyślany (Peremyshlany), a rather typical Galician small county town, where Jews constituted 44 percent of the pre-1939 population, they were the majority among doctors. During the occupation, Jewish doctors were among the last members of the Jewish community to be exterminated, ³⁹ and soon the ordinance prohibiting the treatment of Aryan patients by Jewish doctors was conditionally lifted—there were simply no medics left after the deportations of Polish and Ukrainian intelligentsia carried out by the Soviets in 1940-41. ⁴⁰ In the village Szabelne (Shabelne) near Rawa Ruska (Rava Ruska, former Lwów voivodeship) one of the four local Jews was a veterinarian who provided services for the entire area; when the Germans arrived, the locals tried to protect “their” vet by writing appeals—but unsuccessfully. The village was left without a vet. ⁴¹

After the war, Void Communities were left without anyone to treat not only animals but, above all, people. Baruch Milch recalls that when he emerged from hiding after the liberation of Tłuste (Tovste, Ternopil Oblast) by the Soviets in 1944, patients, who had been deprived of medical help, besieged him. ⁴² Vira Holinach, born in the village Angelówka (Anhelivka) near Tarnopol, remembers that shortly after the war, her mother suffered from a leg wound that would not heal, but they were unable to find a doctor. ⁴³ Finally, a Soviet army feldsher from a unit that was passing through the village saved the woman from amputation. In Bibrka (Bóbrka, Lviv Oblast), a town of similar size as Tovste, which had five doctors before the war, in November 1944 there was a district hospital with sixty-five beds, staffed by one physician, four nurses, and one obstetrician (for the entire raion). ⁴⁴

Teachers, lawyers, notaries, and other representatives of the intelligentsia and free professions were also targeted. Most notably, they were among the 90% of the Jews who perished during the Holocaust. Nonetheless, Germans also murdered and persecuted many representatives of the Polish intelligentsia, and the Soviets deported Poles and Ukrainians who had free professions. After the war, the absence of teachers was the most notable: the report of the People’s Commissar for Education of the Ukrainian SSR concerning the reconstruction of education in the western districts of the USSR from 23 February 1945 emphasized a dramatic lack of personnel. ⁴⁵ It is hardly a surprise, considering the fact that in September 1939, from 14,203 public school teachers in Western Ukraine, 10,125 were Poles who, by 1945, had either been resettled far into the USSR or murdered by Ukrainian nationalists, or were about to depart West. ⁴⁶ An interviewee from Perenivka (Pereniwka) near Rohatyn recalls: “Just after the war, in 1945, there were no professional teachers, since they either had left or had been wiped out.” ⁴⁷ On the other hand, in Eastern Galicia, immediately after the war, Poles still dominated the industrial sector, particularly the higher positions: after their departure there was no one to substitute for them and factories were not operating, despite the inflow of workers from the interior of the USSR. ⁴⁸

It is much more difficult to find direct information in personal documents about how noticeable was the post-war absence of representatives of the intelligentsia other than doctors and teachers, but this may be explained by the post-war transformation of the hierarchy of needs. In the situation of extreme post-war poverty, the disappearance of a district court, newspaper, or cinema from a town could have had little significance; it was more important to satisfy the most basic needs. Nevertheless, degradation was progressing. After the war, many small towns lost their pre-war status and municipal rights: after the loss of half or more of a town’s population, various municipal institutions such as courts, hospitals, or secondary schools were not reconstructed and towns underwent secondary ruralisation. The population of Koropiec on the Dniester (Koropets, former Tarnopol voivodship) decreased after the war by more than a half. The situation was similar in Nowy Wiśnicz, which had additionally lost its municipal rights, restored only in 1994. The residents of Nowy Wiśnicz portray the immediate post-war period in oral history interviews as a time of total downfall. In 1946, a Ukrainian diarist describes Felsztyn, which used to be a Jewish-Ukrainian-Polish town before the war (now Skelivka, Lviv Oblast): “once a town, today empty.” ⁴⁹ Felsztyn was repopulated after the war with Ukrainians from the other side of the river San, but it never regained its urban character and municipal rights. An interviewee from Ushnia near Zolochiv recalls: “[After the war] Ushnia used to be very . . . all houses were empty, nothing remained. There were no people because previously there had been many Poles.” ⁵⁰

In the immediate post-war period, the majority of Galician towns were simply empty—with no Jews (no Poles nor Ukrainians), but also with no traders, craftsmen, doctors, teachers, or lawyers. Nikita Khrushchev, then the first secretary of the Ukrainian SSR, wrote to Stalin in July 1944: “There are almost no people left in towns.” ⁵¹

Overcoming the Void: Economical and Professional Structure

Although the first period after the catastrophe—irrespective of whether it was the deportation of Ukrainians, extermination of Jews or relocation of Poles—was always characterized by emptiness and dysfunction, this state could not have lasted forever. The positions that had been previously fulfilled by given ethnic and social groups were being gradually taken over by other groups. It was the quickest and easiest to take over trade that had previously been in the Jewish hands, because it did not require specific qualifications. Although it was not usually an appropriation (Germans were not eager to share Jewish property, and private property had already been abolished in Eastern Galicia occupied by the Soviets in 1939–1941), the consequences were unambiguous: the Poles and Ukrainians replaced the Jews. This fact was noted with particular bitterness by Jewish authors of testimonies: Zelda Mechlewicz-Hinenberg came to Sokal in 1942 and noted: “Catholics are in charge of Jewish shops.” ⁵² Even the representatives of the beneficiary group wrote about the Christian takeover of trade. In a work submitted to a memoir competition in 1955, a peasant memoirist from the Strzyżów district in Podkarpacie region wrote about “the element recruited from the nationalists” that cooperated with the Germans because “they profited from the extermination of Jews, as they took over the Jewish stores in towns and the countryside.” ⁵³

Some changes spread over time. Some economic niches remained unfilled for a while or changed character. A part of Piekarska street in Rymanów, which used to be filled with Jewish stalls and shops before the war, had been deserted for a few years until a sewing facility was created there several years later (headed by Poles, since there was no one else left in Rymanów at that time). ⁵⁴ A Ukrainian woman from Khodoriv (Chodorów, Lviv Oblast) recalls that small wooden objects used to be manufactured at her home before the war, for example, spoons and toys that would later be sold at Jewish stalls. After the war, this practice had ceased for some time and was only renewed when Ukrainian points of sale emerged (“Later, our people opened them, but only Jews had their warehouses before.” ⁵⁵ ) Regardless of the chronology of taking over trade, the universal nature of participation in this process certainly influenced the attitude of Poles and Ukrainians towards the Jews. The famous report of the Government Delegate for Poland from July 1943 regarding Polish attitudes towards the Jewish inhabitants stated that despite the condemnation of the German terror against Jews, “the social, and particularly the economic isolation of the Jewish element is widely approved. This is associated with the fear (especially in the merchant circles) of the possible return of the jews [sic] to reclaim their dominant position in economic life.” ⁵⁶

The most sought-after were management positions, previously held by privileged minorities—the Jews, in the case of the entire General Government, and also by the Poles in the case of Eastern Galicia. Stepan Kasiyan recalls that after 1941, Ukrainians took over most of such positions (“We didn’t allow Jews anywhere and we removed Poles from their former positions”): they would become, for example, managers of land estates turned into Liegenschafts (replacing the Soviet directors of kolkhozes who in turn had replaced the Polish owners in 1939). ⁵⁷ Sometimes, a new person was given a management position, while the one who had been in charge until then became an informal assistant holding necessary qualifications (up to a certain point). This situation took place many times in the first months of the Soviet occupation, when industrial facilities were being nationalized, but former owners managed them in lieu of incompetent Soviet officials. The model repeated under the German occupation: in Koropiec, a pharmacy that used to belong to a Jewish woman named Kronberg was taken over by a Ukrainian woman, Justyna Moroz; however, Ms. Kronberg remained in the pharmacy as an ordinary employee and was, in fact, in charge. ⁵⁸

It was more difficult to fill the void left by the Others in other areas of the economy that require higher qualifications, but “neighbours” were doing their best. Becoming a craftsman requires considerable training, but spirits were high. ⁵⁹ A peasant memoirist from Siedlce county (Central Poland) wrote shortly after the war that when Jews were locked in ghettos and there was a shortage of craftsmen, Polish youth began to learn craft on a mass scale (“6 boys from our village are training to be tailors, and 4—to be shoemakers” ⁶⁰ ). In the village Gilowice in Żywiec county (Kraków region), the people from the surrounding villages “replace the murdered Jews in crafts, shoemaking, tailoring, carpentry, woodwork, etc., it was a ‘sweet life’ for some of them.” ⁶¹ The gradual filling of the void left by the Jews in artisan professions is well described in another memoir written just after the war:

Before 1939 and during the occupation trade was concentrated only in Jewish hands, so when the Germans took them to Treblinka, almost all inhabitants of Parysów were worried and complained: “What is going to happen with trade when the Jews are gone.” . . . However, life went on, history took its course and today no one could dare to claim that Poles have no predisposition towards trade. ⁶²

The most complicated situation concerned the professions that require the most effort to learn—it is difficult to become a doctor or pharmacist on the spot. Sometimes attempts were made to speed up a promotion or shorten the education process—as in the case of express courses for teachers in post-war Poland. Failed efforts were also undertaken in medical professions; for example, the National Feldsher Congress in Poland submitted a proposal to the Ministry of Health immediately after the war to allow feldshers to work as physicians. ⁶³

However, it is more often the case that these roles were taken over by newcomers. After 1939, a multitude of Polish refugees expelled from the Poznań region (which had been directly annexed by the Reich) arrived in Radom and Kraków districts in the General Government; most of them were qualified specialists, agronomists, engineers, and doctors. The source materials from this area repeatedly mention doctors from the Poznań region taking over Jewish practices. Maria Brzezińska recalls that in 1942 her sick husband was looked after in Szczawnica (Kraków region) by doctors from the Poznań region and from Lwów. ⁶⁴ A female doctor from the Poznań region opened a dental practice in Rymanów, supported by a local Polish doctor. ⁶⁵ In Ukrainian Galicia, Ukrainians and Russians sent from Eastern Ukraine and other Soviet republics took up the positions of kolkhoz directors, teachers, and doctors on a mass scale after 1944, and particularly after 1946 when the repatriation of the Polish population ended. ⁶⁶ In pre-war Brzozdowce (Berezdivtsi), there was a Polish doctor, Lityński. After his departure in 1945, the Soviet authorities established a clinic in the former Catholic vicarage, which was staffed at first by a Russian doctor, then an Azerbaijani, and many years later—by a feldsher from Western Ukraine. ⁶⁷

Soviet teachers were present in almost every school in Galicia, not only to replace the deported, relocated, and murdered ones but also to reinforce the Sovietisation of Western Ukraine. ⁶⁸ Teodor Svintsitskyi from Podhajce (Pidhaitsi) remembers Russian female teachers from post-war school that were very keen to learn Ukrainian and were commonly appreciated. ⁶⁹ It has not always been so idyllic; in many places teachers sent from the East, “the easterners” (skhidniaky) similarly to other newcomers from the USSR, had been branded as “Soviet agents” and suffered acts of violence committed by the post-war Ukrainian underground. In the village Kutuziv (Kutuzów, former Tarnopol voivodeship), the UPA murdered a female teacher from Chernihiv in a forest and desecrated her body. ⁷⁰ Post-war reports of Soviet secret services are full of accounts describing attacks on civilians perceived by nationalists as representatives of the authorities: teachers, nurses, kolkhoz directors, and party activists. ⁷¹

Property Transfer: State and Power

The deported and fleeing rarely were able to take their belongings with them; the banished took little with them, the murdered died as beggars. While in some cases, their property, regardless the size, was destroyed, it usually changed hands. If the main perpetrator was the state, then it seized the assets left by the Others. However, for those who remained, it was more important if this property could stay as well and how to make it stay.

The means for seizing the property that belonged to the Others fall into a gradation of violence. ⁷² A lot could have been purchased from the authorities perfectly legally in the light of applicable laws, although the prices were suspiciously low and the ethical status of the transactions was questionable. The first to go were things: clothes, furniture, and everyday household objects. Germans sold the belongings of murdered Jews—unless they were valuable enough to be taken to the Reich. There was a special store in Podhajce where selected groups of people (e.g., Volksdeutsche working in the German administration) could exchange coupons for Jewish clothes. ⁷³ Arnold Szyfman, the director of the Polish Theatre in Warsaw, who was hiding in the villages in Kraków and Kielce regions during the war, noted:

In Brzesko Nowe the auction sale of Jewish items and furniture begun in a great hurry, on 11 November [1942], only on the second day after the deportation of the second batch of Jews . . . The local rabble and peasants rushed to participate in the auction with such greed and with such voracity, that their eyes popped out and their mouths dried up. . . . With enormous joy they carried, dragged and carted away bug-infested sofas, Art Nouveau beds, grotesque wardrobes, mirrors in plush frames, tacky cupboards, chairs with three legs and dirty clothes. ⁷⁴

The authorities also sold or gave away houses and apartments free of charge. In the Polish part of the General Government, Germans confiscated Jewish property that had greater value and usually kept them until the end of the war, ⁷⁵ but in the Galicia district, the Ukrainian administration collaborating with the Germans freely disposed of the Jewish property. The most common practice was selling Jewish houses located in the countryside for building materials. Aaron Wilf from Skole wrote in his journal on 24 May 1943: “the city council has sold Jewish houses to Ukrainians for the price of 10 packets of tobacco. They are dismantling the houses, taking all the valuables the Jewish owners had hidden and then they rebuild the houses in their villages.” ⁷⁶

Soviet authorities continued the above practice after taking over Galicia in 1944. The father of Teodora Kanak from Osivtsi (Ternopil Oblast) wrote a petition to the silrada (village council) to be given the plot of land where a Jewish hut used to stand (the building itself, like all others in the village, had been destroyed in the fire in 1943) and built a new house for his family there. ⁷⁷ A woman from Khodoriv (Lviv Oblast) stated candidly: “Of course, all of these houses are theirs, we live in their [Jews’] homes. . . . The Muscovites gave us houses.” ⁷⁸ In the western part of the General Government, the authorities distributed Jewish property after the war: In Nowy Wiśnicz, wooden Jewish houses were sold for firewood, and the municipality sold the better houses to the locals. ⁷⁹ In Rymanów, as recalled by Michalina Śliwka, “one could buy a [Jewish] house.” ⁸⁰ Ms. Śliwka’s friend bought a ground floor apartment in a tenement house in the market square; she lives there to this day.

There were also houses left behind by the deported and relocated Poles and Ukrainians. One of the Ukrainian interviewees remembers a resourceful chairman of the village council in Rydwanówka (Rydvanivka), who had persuaded the post-war regional authorities to let him take over a farm that used to belong to a relocated prosperous Pole, while a group of fire survivors, who were to receive the building in the first place, were given the chairman’s old farm instead. ⁸¹ The houses of Ukrainians deported to Siberia in 1946 from the Peremyshlany district were given to the families of war veterans. ⁸² Similarly, in the Rzeszów region, houses of Ukrainians who had been relocated to the USSR were given to locals: peasants from the village Nowotaniec were given permission to deconstruct Ukrainian buildings in the nearby Wola and then rebuild them on their own land. ⁸³

Besides houses, also plots of land in the countryside lost their owners. Already in 1939, Soviet authorities in Galicia divided the land taken away from Polish gentry between peasants. In Sanniki (Sannyky, former Lwów voivodeship), “the village council divided the fields even before the sowing. The equipment was taken away on the very first day.” ⁸⁴ Ivan Yakymenko from Wiśniowczyk remembers, “It was the time of harvest. And so, piece by piece, everyone [was given a piece of land]. Everyone would reap, mow and bring it back home. And so did I, I mowed, loaded it up and brought it to my house.” ⁸⁵ However, the plots were small, and collectivization soon began and whatever was given away as private property had become state property. ⁸⁶

In post-war Poland, the state divided the land left behind by the Ukrainians, Jews, and the landed gentry. A memoirist from the Jarosław county recalls: “[after the liberation] I received a 0.67 ha piece of land that used to belong to Jews; I was hoping that it would be sufficient for the two of us, me and my wife, to make a living, so we gladly got to work.” ⁸⁷ In the Trzciana municipality (Kraków region), the local administration accepted the “request submitted by Tadeusz Dziedzic and Jan Sowiński to be given land previously occupied by Jews—Rahela Stahl and Schyfra Flaster, located in Trzciana and covering the area of about 5 morgen,” and many other requests, with similar content. ⁸⁸ In post-war Poland, all Jewish assets became national property, under the virtue of the act on formerly German assets and abandoned assets; hence the municipalities usually found the requests for transfer of ownership of land left behind to be reasonable. The division of the “master’s” land looked somewhat different: The land that used to belong to landed gentry and that had more than 50 ha was partitioned under the virtue of the directive of the 1944 agricultural reform of the Polish Committee of National Liberation: ⁸⁹ It took years for the landless and smallholder peasants to pay for the land they were given.

Property Transfer: The Neighbours’ Initiative

A neighbour’s property was also acquired directly from that neighbour. In many cases, the procedure took place with the consent of both parties, it was possible to reach an agreement, to cut a deal somehow satisfactory for both sides. Poles who left Galicia and headed West were unable to take their entire property with them, hence, as long as they were not in conflict with their Ukrainian neighbours, they sold some of the furniture, house equipment, and livestock. ⁹⁰ It was different in the case of Jewish belongings. The voluntary nature of transactions was debatable: Under German occupation, the Jews, starved, dehumanised, and deprived of any rights, agreed to anything to receive some food. Although Germans had strictly forbidden it, trade flourished: Peasants exchanged food products for clothes, furniture and everyday items, often at much cheaper prices than the real value of the possessions. (“Every Jewish house was a separate marketplace where peasants were able to get anything they needed for a few potatoes, beets, meat, milk, eggs, etc.” ⁹¹ ) Yosifa Fedorovych from Vyshnivchyk remembers that her cousin used to carry potatoes to the Podhajce ghetto and return with a dress, or a pair of shoes. ⁹² Sometimes, the lucrative nature of the trade came to light many years after the war: A memoirist from Białka in Kraków region comments on the trade with the Jewish population during the occupation: “The wealthiest farmers improved their situation in this exchange. They pulled out furs and other expensive things only after the war.” ⁹³

Jewish belongings were also given to Poles and Ukrainians for safekeeping. ⁹⁴ But most Jews never returned to retrieve them, and those who did often learned that the items had been stolen, lost, or got damaged. Samuel L. Tennenbaum from Złoczów, a wealthy entrepreneur, gave his movables to several of his Ukrainian employees for safekeeping; however, only one of them returned it to him after the war. ⁹⁵ The boundaries between trade, safekeeping, and robbery were fluid and were often crossed.

The theft of the Jewish property perpetrated by neighbours started right with the outbreak of the war. When the Reiss family from Brzesko (Kraków region) returned from their escape to the East in September 1939, they found their shop plundered by the “Polish people.” ⁹⁶ The situation repeated after the Germans had entered Galicia in 1941. In Bóbrka, “large groups of Ukrainian civilians equipped with clubs attacked Jewish houses, and there were many small houses and tenements, and beat people, while women took away their belongings, quilts, pillows.” ⁹⁷

Looting and violence accompanied pogroms committed on Jews by the local non-Jewish inhabitants, quite often inspired by the OUN (Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists [Orhanizatsiia Ukrains’kykh Natsionalistiv]) that swept across Galicia in the summer of 1941. ⁹⁸ Plundering repeated after the liquidation operations in ghettos (although in those cases the looters usually waited for the Germans to fall back and did not resort to direct violence). After the liquidation of the Brzesko ghetto, peasants from nearby villages packed their wagons with Jewish belongings. Residents of nearby villages came out onto the road to look at the endless line of these wagons leaving Brzesko, including ten-year-old Urszula: “People stole everything that could have been stolen from these wagons; we got a small box. I was afraid, I asked myself—what’s inside? It contained very nice cutlery.” ⁹⁹ However, people from Brzesko also got their share, for example, the father of Franciszek Kostrzewa brought a tin tub from the ghetto. ¹⁰⁰ An interviewee from Usznia, who was a teenager in 1942, went to her friend’s house after the deportation of the local Jews to Złoczów, and took a red metal milk jug (she has it to this day). ¹⁰¹

The neighbours (or, more generally speaking, “neighbours”) murdered Jews because they wanted to seize their belongings or were unwilling to return them. A Pole and a Ukrainian who lived near their hiding place murdered Baruch Milch’s wife and sister-in-law because the two suspected that the women were hiding money. ¹⁰² In Mielnica Podolska (Melnytsia Podil’s’ka), Poles murdered three Jews who, immediately after being freed, had requested that the items given for safekeeping be returned. ¹⁰³

The locals were progressively looting the remains of the Jewish property, especially in smaller towns. They ripped out woodwork, floors, and stoves: Czesław Krzyżanowski recollects that he regularly visited the ruins of the Brzeżany ghetto in the winter of 1943–1944 to get parquet floorboards for firewood. ¹⁰⁴ In Bóbrka, “children went, boys went [to the ghetto], they searched, someone got a small harmonica, someone got a pot, you could find just about anything there.” ¹⁰⁵ In Nowy Wiśnicz, people continued to visit the “Jewish huts” in search for treasures for a long time. ¹⁰⁶

But it is not just the Jews who were robbed; looting was a universal response to social instability—also caused by the disappearance of certain social groups from the social structure. Even before the Jewish pogroms began, the property of the Galician Polish colonists deported to Siberia was being looted. When the women in Delatyn (Deliatyn), selected for deportation, had returned home from the train station to get their belongings, they found their Ukrainian neighbours already carrying their entire property out of the house. ¹⁰⁷ Sometimes, plundering began even before the Poles had been deported—the colonies were attacked and looted, either completely unlawfully, or under the virtue of the act of the self-proclaimed committees formed by the poor from the neighbouring Ukrainian villages. ¹⁰⁸ Although the looting of Polish colonists certainly had significant ethnic background, it is pertinent to note that belonging to the same national group did not protect from the greed of one’s neighbours: In May 1940 priest Józef Anczarski described the plundering of belongings of Ukrainians deported to Siberia: “People momentarily looted the property of the deported families. The human beasts started plundering in front of the poor victims.” ¹⁰⁹

Generally speaking, people also stole everything that belonged to “masters,” irrespective of whether the master and the peasant were of the same nationality or not. In September 1939, when the Goetzs (gentry family of German origin, fully polonized), the owners of a brewery and palace in Okocim in the Kraków region, fled from the estate for fear of Germans, the locals robbed the mansion of everything they could carry out, despite the fact that Baron Goetz was commonly liked and had good relations with his employees. ¹¹⁰ In Eastern Galicia, September 1939 brought a complete collapse of Polish mansions and palaces. Looting began in the period of interregnum, before the Soviet rule. In Koropiec on the Dniester,

the inhabitants of the neighbouring villages, as well as many locals, realized that there were no authorities present and that the count had also left. They broke the door and the plundering of the [Badeni palace] began. They took everything they were able to carry. ¹¹¹

Baruch Milch indicates Ukrainian peasants as the main culprits (“they rushed to rob and murder, particularly on Polish farms. They stripped the farms and brutally murdered the owners who did not manage to escape” ¹¹² ); however, it seems that the class difference between the looters and the victims was the key component there: Zofia Skała from Bóbrka, in her description of the devastation of the estate Wodniki (Vodnyky) near Bóbrka, recalls, “the local urban poor—Poles and certainly Ukrainians.” ¹¹³ Everyone plundered—Poles, Ukrainians, women, and children. A woman from Rohatyn, who was a teenager in 1939, remembers the treasures brought by the village kids from the plundered Polish farm in Stratyń—antlers; a decorative jewel case; a vase; and a cactus in a pot. ¹¹⁴

Neighbourly robbery proceeded in almost the exact same way, and was similarly barbaric and thoughtless, regardless of who was being plundered. In the autumn of 1939, the peasants from the village Kurzany near Buczacz “ripped out electrical installations and wires from the walls, tore out windows with frames and knobs, and chopped up wood panelling.” ¹¹⁵ In Trembowla (Terebovla), the Poles and Ukrainians who were plundering the ghetto after its liquidation, “moved around and tossed equipment in rooms, removed any food they found, sorted through it and chose more valuable items, while stomping and destroying the remains of Jewish property.” ¹¹⁶ After its owners had been expropriated, Planta—a palace in the Kielce region that belonged to the Morawski family before the war, was literally stripped down by the locals, whose houses are decorated with the manor’s doors, windows, or pieces of furniture to this day. ¹¹⁷

The disappearance of the Others is an opportunity for taking over their property, regardless of whether the process is accompanied by class or/and ethnic reluctance or hatred, or not. Marcin Zaremba, in his description of the “fever of looting” in war-time Poland, clearly indicates that one of the reasons for the commonness of this practice was social instability and lack of state power. ¹¹⁸ The longer the war lasted, the less scruples people had to rob. Priest Anczarski, who provided one of the most insightful analyses of the social changes in 1939–1945, bitterly noted in his journal in August 1941: “Plundering is sweet and the times of plunder are sweet. May these times never end. May there always be someone to rob: a Polish colonist, a Bolshevik, or a jew. Their eyes glow with wolf-like greed.” ¹¹⁹

Anatomy of Social Disorder

Although the absence of the Others brought about significant profits, it also meant (much less tangible and more difficult to define) social disorder. For the sake of this article, I define social disorder as a multidimensional social aberration present during liminal situations. It includes dissolution of social structure, rapid changing of social hierarchies, as well as suspension of norm-regulating social life and expiration of authorities, also in the moral dimension. On the most elementary level, it was preceded also by a material disorder. In one village, from which Ukrainians had been relocated from in 1945,

there was only damage left, fences were destroyed, houses were missing doors and windows that had been deliberately destroyed by the Ukrainians. The soil, which had not been cultivated in autumn, turned into fallow land, and there were no new owners yet. Additionally, various thieves roamed the night, stealing the remaining windows and even tin furnace sheets, and whatever else was left. ¹²⁰

The wartime and immediate post-war Void Communities were filled with despondency and fear, partially resulting from the concern that one wave of relocations could be followed by another, and other groups of people would be murdered. The final number of fatalities was different for various groups of victims, and Jews were the only group that experienced total annihilation; however, at times, members of almost every group were exposed to death. People feared to become associated with one of the targeted and attacked groups—it was dangerous to have hands insufficiently damaged by physical labour (because they could indicate bourgeois origin, and landlords were shot dead by the Soviets in 1939), too black and curly hair (because one could be a Jew, and Jews were being murdered during the entire German occupation), too hard pronunciation (because one could be a Lechite and not a Ukrainian, and get slaughtered by her or his own neighbour of different ethnic background). In Delatyn at the beginning of July 1943, “they dug out fresh pits at the Jewish cemetery. People are nervous because there are no Jews left in the town, unless they catch someone who is in hiding. There are rumours that the pits are meant for beggars, old people and the weak.” ¹²¹

Signs of trauma or, using terms from another discipline, of symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, can be found in many source materials, whose authors witnessed ethnic cleansing; memoirists also describe witnesses who had fallen mentally or physically ill. An older man from Chmieliska (Khmelyska) near Tarnopol, forced to bury fifty local Jews alive in July 1941, died of a heart attack the following day. ¹²² Zbigniew Kubas from Bóbrka, a thirteen-year-old who witnessed the liquidation of the local ghetto, wrote in his diary (in which he usually recorded information about homework and what was for dinner) on 8 December: “I had a headache for the entire day, I do not know if it was because they were shooting, or because I saw so many corpses and it affected me this way. I haven’t studied for the whole day.” ¹²³ No one knew who would be next. A sentence popular among Galicians that is attributed to the Jew sentenced to death: “they will make leaven out of us and dough out of you [Ukr. namy rozchyniat’, a vamy zamisiat’]” contributes to the common fear and the feeling of the extreme situation. ¹²⁴

The disorder also has a moral aspect. Not the war itself was responsible for the change of moral standards, but the mass character and the proximity of the extermination of people who used to be neighbours, and the volatility and discretion of the criteria that sentenced it. Michael Meng argues that in the case of the Holocaust in Central and Eastern Europe, bystander’s neutrality was a fiction—mass killings happened too close; in Galicia practically in front of the local community, at the fingertips. ¹²⁵ It is also undisputable that in many local communities Poles and Ukrainians participated in the genocide—to various extents. Thus, the very term bystander is problematic and had to be replaced. Other terms were found: Michael Rothberg’s “implicated subject,” Elżbieta Janicka’s “participative witness,” and Roma Sendyka’s “outsider.” ¹²⁶ Trauma is just one side of the coin; the change of moral standards is the other. The very same boy who had a headache after looking at dead Jews, plays “round-up” with his friends during the break (no one wants to be the German). During the German occupation, children across Galicia commonly played “execution of Jews”—children of the manor servants at the landowners’ estate as well as children of wealthy peasants (“Behind the stable we would place [the crows] one next to the other. And then me, Józek, and my brother shot at them with slings. They were the Jews, and we were the SS. We hid the killed ones in the stable and covered them with gravestones of sand and lime. We made crosses with sticks.” ¹²⁷ ) Children witnessed mass shootings of the Jews committed by the local auxiliary police, sometimes recruited among their fathers and brothers, but they also saw desecrated bodies of the Poles and Ukrainians killed during ethnic cleansing. In Kuriany, now in Ternopil oblast, several elderly Ukrainian interviewees remembered spending an entire morning in 1945 staring at the bodies of their Polish neighbours—raped and then burned alive by the UPA. ¹²⁸ Witnessing violence and the impunity of the perpetrators increased the society’s acceptance of violence. Szymon Turkel (who spent the war near Grzymałów [Hrymailiv] in Galicia) described in his journal the discovery of a Jew hiding in crop by a group of peasants in the summer of 1943:

The Jew says: “What gives you the right to kill a human being? Do you have no mercy?” The peasant responded: “You [Jews] can be killed.” And he slit his throat with a sickle. People gathered at the scene of the accident. Some expressed their appreciation, others nodded. No one condemned the peasant with a single word. It was forbidden.” ¹²⁹

Józef Anczarski described how, in October 1942, rural teenagers tortured an old Jewish woman who wandered into the village, and then murdered her in front of the entire community; with none of the grown-ups making a comment. What is important in these examples is not just the cruelty and the animal-like behaviour, but the social acceptance of them, resulting from a suspension of moral norms.

This suspension affected not only the value of human life, but also more down-to-earth issues and pragmatic issues. The theft of the property belonging to certain groups of people, in line with the occupational “law” teaches that ownership is relative. What was unthinkable before the war became a desirable norm. ¹³⁰ One can steal from a Jew, one can steal from a Polish colonist, one can steal from the occupant, and one can steal from anyone who does not belong to one’s own group. A memoirist from the Kraków region describes the situation that took place in his village during the war:

The spiritual condition of the village began to transform into two characteristic varieties—life for oneself and life against the enemy. This duplicity has become necessary to maintaining one’s position and was a self-defence strategy protecting against the physical and biological destruction of the community. ¹³¹

Jan T. Gross accurately states that wartime and post-war expropriations in Poland create a logical chain of events, and that each of the events prepares the society for the next ones: if one can take away Jewish property in 1939, one can take it away from the gentry in 1944, from the Germans in 1945, and finally, from any “enemy of the working class.” ¹³²

Furthermore, social disorder means broken social ties. One can survive without a pharmacist, a shoemaker will soon be replaced by a new one—who may even make better or cheaper shoes—but who can replace a neighbour that one has been talking to over the fence for forty years? Or the murdered friends, or half of one’s family that crossed a very well-sealed border? A Ukrainian woman from Rohatyn says after seventy years: “Our entire family is gone. My mother’s sister left with her husband, and Stach, and Władzio, and Maniuśka, and the youngest, four children.” ¹³³ Of course, the “vanished Others” had been replaced by new people. They filled not only the economic and social void but also the empty physical space—empty houses, colonies, and districts. They built new relations with those who remained and who remembered their former neighbours.

Two largest groups participating in the transfer were Poles and Ukrainians—almost two million people were relocated in total. In Galicia, Poles who had been murdered by Ukrainian nationalists, or had been deported to Siberia by the Soviets or had been forced to resettle in the new Poland shortly after the war, were replaced by Ukrainians and Lemkos resettled from the Podkarpacie region into the then Soviet Ukraine in 1944–1946. Kateryna Tymets, a Ukrainian woman deported in 1945 from Nadsanie region, arrived with her mother in the village Zhelekhiv (Żelechów) in Lviv Oblast and received from the village council a Polish house with bare walls. After a while, she was given a house that used to belong to local Ukrainians who had been deported to Siberia. ¹³⁴ Józef Paliwoda, a Pole relocated from the village Bajkowce (Baikivtsi) near Tarnopol after the war, visited his family village in 1967 and found all formerly Polish houses to be occupied by Ukrainians resettled there from Poland. ¹³⁵ Poles from the Borderlands were sent to the Podkarpacie region, from which Ukrainians and Lemkos were deported in 1944–1946. Maria Dyląg from Rymanów remembers displaced people from the East, “good people,” who were given a house in Posada Dolna (now part of Rymanów) left by the relocated Lemkos. ¹³⁶

The process of replacing former neighbours with new ones did not always go smoothly. In some cases, those who remained were relieved, as they had been in conflict with their former neighbours, or they felt burdened by the emptiness:

[after the relocation of the Lemkos] the village became almost empty, there were only Poles left. The Ruthenian huts were deserted, and many of them stood open. The village was sad and quiet, but when the Repatriation Office had sent Polish repatriates here, it filled with joy.” ¹³⁷

However, usually the process of building new social ties was tedious and not without conflict. The displaced people—Poles and Ukrainians—did not believe that they would stay in the new places of residence, they would not unpack for a long time, and sometimes at first they would neglect the houses and farms given to them. A memoirist from the village Łosiniec in Tomaszow region (Lubelskie voivodeship) complained that the repatriates who arrived in 1945 taught the local peasants to make moonshine and did not want to work: “They chopped the remaining fences and logs from the ceilings in barns and stables for firewood. When someone asked them why would they destroy it, they replied that it was not theirs, so they did not care, because they will not stay here, but return home in the spring.” ¹³⁸ Another memoirist (from Lesko in Podkarpacie region) stated with envy that after the war repatriates were in a better situation than the locals because they received help from the state. ¹³⁹ While it does not prejudge the question who was in a better situation, it shows that the reconstructed communities were seething with antagonisms.

New neighbours were constantly compared to the former ones, and judged. We like them because they are “our own” (Ukrainians in Ukraine, Poles in Poland), but on the other hand—they are so different. Although the factual differences were slight, to this day people continue to say that the newcomers were different; they spoke differently, ate differently, and celebrated differently. Moreover, for a long time it mattered what group one belonged to, whether one was a local or a newcomer, and a marriage between representatives of the new and the old group were considered “mixed,” just like Polish–Ukrainian marriages in the past. A Ukrainian woman from Ushnia recalls: “My husband was a displaced person, I did not have a boy from Ushnia.” ¹⁴⁰

As I attempted to prove, social disorder has many faces. On the individual level, there is psychological trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder. The situation could also be assessed with reference to a community as a whole. People who stayed in the postwar Void Communities suffered from the classical Durkheim’s state of anomy present wherever World War II affected civilians. Marcin Zaremba accurately describes the society of post-war Poland as a society of the “Great Fear,” damaged morally and materially, an atomized set of individuals, whose general response to the seven years of war was not only the extended practice of looting, but also abuse of alcohol, emotional problems and psychological instability, and a common feeling of uncertainty. ¹⁴¹ This miserable condition was in part a result of being not only a victim but also a perpetrator during the neighbourly violence. The state of uncertainty was not unique to the Void Communities, but it was even harder to overcome there. Additionally, to the above-listed difficulties, post-war Void Communities faced two more burdens that made the process of healing and reconstruction extraordinary difficult. Firstly, a considerable part of the violence witnessed by these communities during the war was committed against the members of the very community, and by them. Their own Jews, Poles, and Ukrainians were killed or expelled not only by Germans and Soviets but also by their own people. This caused not only the horror of witnessing violence as such, but also led to long-lasting complex and often contradictory feelings of guilt, remorse, longing, and satisfaction. Combined with the multidimensional lack, void, and absence described above, it meant that the Void Communities needed to be rebuilt on many more levels than average settlements ruined by the warfare. Members of these communities had to reconstruct the buildings, administrative structure, and schooling facilities, as well as an entire social structure, the system of values, and moral coherence. They had to imagine themselves anew without the people they had lost.

The last aspect of the immaterial changes that affected the Void Communities, indicated in this article only tentatively, is the gradual evolution of the local culture. After the disappearance of the Others, religious events were celebrated differently, free time was spent differently, people spoke differently. The biggest novelty was the reinforced monoethnicity, particularly significant for communities that used to be Polish–Ukrainian–Jewish. The double liturgical calendar, previously common in Galician countryside, was no longer necessary. ¹⁴² The custom of carol singing changed—in the pre-war Osowce in the former Tarnopol voivodship, local boys would sing a folk carol [shchedrivka] by the window of a Jew named Mendel, that begun with the words “To our Chajunia Jews would come, as our Chajunia was liked by Jews;” ¹⁴³ while it is difficult to establish when people stopped singing it, there was no longer a Chajunia or a single Jew in post-war Osowce. The harvest festival was also celebrated differently as the lord—the integral part of the trinity “lord, voit and parson” was no longer there (in Ukraine the parson had also disappeared). Before 1939, the harvest festival was inherent to the manor, both in Polish and Polish-Ukrainian communities; the owners of the manor would symbolically welcome the farm workers carrying collected crops, and then sponsor the festival. After the war, in a communist Poland, harvest festivals were still held at manors, but they were organized by local authorities. In the village Wodynie in the Siedlce county, the communal harvest festival in 1947 was organized, as usual, at the manor’s yard, but the officials from the county authorities and the representatives of the Peasants’ Self-Help from Siedlce replaced the landowners at the porch, while the rural youth greeted them with a folk song: “Oh, our lords from the county office, they did a good job/ They divided the properties of our lords/ But here they only made it worse/ na na na.” ¹⁴⁴ Finally, along with the gradual disappearance of multiethnicity, linguistic competences faded out—communities that used to be proficient in two languages and were able to understand a third one (or those using a local dialect and, if necessary, switching to the standard Polish or Ukrainian language) began to use only one language or dialect, while the passive knowledge of other languages diminished in the following generations. The death of the once multicultural Galicia, that culturally and politically started already after World War I, was finally and irreversibly accomplished with the next war.

Conclusions

In a conversation recorded in 2017, an interviewee born in Pereniwka near Rohatyn in 1922, stated: “It turned out that the Germans beat the Jews, our boys beat the Poles and finally, our villages, our towns have become Ukrainian.” ¹⁴⁵ This short passage emphasizes the essence of the change that occurred in Void Communities in Poland and Ukraine. The Others had disappeared in a number of ways: an oppressive government usually served as the catalyst for a spiral of escapes, deportations, murders, and departures, but neighbours also had their role in the process. ¹⁴⁶ The scope of their direct responsibility is a separate topic. The purpose of this article was to analyze in detail the direct consequences and to shed light on the long-term consequences of this change for those who remained in the Void Communities. It seems that if we put aside spontaneous neighbourly theft and the psychological consequences that are difficult to investigate, the results of these changes were very similar for those who participated eagerly, those who remained passive despite their various emotions, and for those who tried to help and save those in need.

The consequences were enormous. The Others’ possessions—regardless of whether they were pillows or tenement houses—would largely end up in their neighbours’ hands, directly or via (occupational or communist) authorities, with or without violence. This process turned out to be more or less permanent: in Ukraine, Polish/gentry’s plots were given to the peasants and then taken away from them even before Germany’s attack on the USSR from 1941, or at the end of 1940s the latest. In Poland, the majority of Jewish craftsmen’s workshops were taken over by Poles, but then they were nationalized during the so-called battle for trade in 1947–1949. However, the land acquired by Polish peasants after the agricultural reform remains in their hands to this day (while the reprivatisation of property—Jewish, gentry, or urban—still remains a highly controversial issue in Poland). Research shows that the Holocaust was a rather positive phenomenon for neighbours in financial terms; ¹⁴⁷ it seems that this argument could be extended onto other categories of the Others. The prevailing pauperization of societies associated with the war that occurred in this part of Europe certainly makes it harder to formulate more general conclusions: although much of the neighbourly property changed its owners, it was a drop in the ocean of post-war poverty.

While at first the neighbour’s property seemed to have the primary significance (to the remaining neighbours), the replacement of Others in their professional and economic positions was more important from the perspective of time. This argument is most fully developed by Jan T. Gross, who stated that the disappearance of the Jews meant that Poles repossessed Jewish property, but also took over their former social roles—this was welcomed by wide parts of the society (and the communist authorities). ¹⁴⁸ This practice also concerned other groups of Others, both ethnic and class, to a lesser degree—Poles, Ukrainians, landowners, and entrepreneurs. While Gross wrote about Poland, the sources analysed in this article show that the situation in the Ukrainian part of Galicia was very similar. The disappearance of the “privileged Others” served as the catalyst for the social advancement of the locals on an unprecedented scale: only in this context one can fully understand the success of the post-war economic and political reforms (or revolutions) both in Poland and in Ukraine. ¹⁴⁹

The other face of this process was a civilizational and cultural degradation: some vacancies left by the unwanted Others proved impossible to fill. The secondary ruralisation of small towns, the cultural degradation of the provinces that is visible to this day brought about by the elimination of the (national, intellectual, and economic) elites, and forced monoethnicity are just a few signs of this degradation. To return to the words of the interviewee quoted at the beginning of this section, Galician towns and villages finally became Ukrainian, but at an enormous cost. This cost included not only losses stemming from the inability to rebuild social structures on various levels. It was also associated with witnessing the Holocaust, neighbourly violence and brutality of the authorities. This experience changed the inhabitants of Void Communities. After the war, they became different people—some of them had Jewish pillows and a manor mirror at home, some wore a suit that used to belong to a Polish colonist, some replaced a deported Ukrainian at work, but many of them were suffering from twofold trauma. First, the more sensitive members of the Void Communities reacted with individual psychological trauma to the violence they witnessed (or, in part, committed). Second, the Void Communities experienced the collective trauma of losing community members, benefiting from that loss, and suffering because of it. As Kai Erikson stated, collective trauma is “a blow to the basic tissues of social life that damages the bonds attaching people together and impairs the prevailing sense of communality.” ¹⁵⁰ The post-war Void Communities were damaged, impaired, and disintegrated by the loss they had experienced.