3 - Integrating without a Host Society

Summary

Wartime destruction and postwar redrawing of borders sparked a refugee crisis in Poland massive in dimensions and very particular in character. Two million ethnic Poles, driven out of the territories annexed by the Soviet Union at the end of the war, had to find new homes in the German territory ceded to Poland in 1945. The refugees did not encounter a “host society” per se, as the region’s former ethnic German population had been expelled, nor did they settle entirely unpopulated land. Some 2.5 million other Poles had migrated from the war-torn towns and villages of central Poland to the country’s new west shortly before the refugees’ arrival. These groups of Poles were joined by 200,000 Polish Jews who had survived the Holocaust, 200,000 Ukrainian-speakers forcibly resettled from southern and eastern Poland in 1947, and 1,000,000 so-called autochthones in Upper Silesia and Masuria, former German citizens allowed to stay in Poland because of their presumed Polish background. This essay explores strategies used to integrate this diverse population and the long-term consequences of forced migration.