Poles in Galicia during the Second World War: experience and remembrance

Abstract

Based on biographical interviews coming from different collections of the Oral History Archives of the KARTA Center Foundation and the History Meeting House, the text highlights three main elements of biographical experience which make the narrations of Poles from Galicia different from those of their Ukrainian and Jewish neighbors. These were: the Red Army entering the Eastern Borderlands and Soviet repressions, the Polish-Ukrainian conflict, and departure from the Eastern Borderlands. For most speakers the following topics constitute the base of their identification with a national group understood as the community of remembrance. The text shows the difference between memories of people who stayed in the Ukraine after 1945 and those who left the Eastern Borderlands – “repatriates”. It also analyzes dependencies between individual and social memory and the influence of different cultures of memory on shaping biographical narration.

Keywords

• oral history
• galicia
• second world war