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Abstract

Displaced memory. The image of Ukraine and Ukrainians in the consciousness of the inhabitants of the village Jugow in Lower Silesia The article is one of the results of the oral history project Memory and Oblivion. Sociocultural post-war change of Hausdorf/Jugow in the Owl Mountains, provided by three NGO’s: The Women’s Foundation (Krakow), Integrationswerk RESPEKT (Berlin), Gender Information and Analytical Center KRONA (Kharkiv), and sponsored as a part of the funding programme Geschichtswerkstatt Europa with grants from the foundation Remembrance, Responsibility and Future. The project concerned the forced displacements after the II world war. Jugow (previously called Hausdorf), the village in the Owl Mountains, was one of many places where the replacement of the population took place after 1945. The majority of German inhabitants were gradually displaced – to their houses came the displaced Poles, Ukrainians who escaped from the territory connected to the Soviet Union, and economic Polish re-emigrants from France. The history of the post-war displacements and escapes concerned above all women and children (men were still in army). The official history is written mostly by men. The women’s experience was not noticed. Highlighting women’s perspective may play a sociotherapeutical role: it can heal the trauma and show how the trauma continues in next generations. The fates of inhabitants of Jugow who lived on the territory of Eastern Poland (nowadays Western Ukraine) before the war were very difficult and traumatic. They were the minority among Ukrainian inhabitants of this region, especially in villages. The national conflicts between Poles and Ukrainians, noticeable before 1939, errupted during the war. The Ukrainian partisans from UPA underground army killed Poles in villages and the Soviet occupation authority deported part of the Polish inhabitants to Syberia. After the war Poles from Syberia and Western Ukraine came to the so called Recovered Terrains – German territory which was connected to Poland. They had to settle down in the displaced Germans’s houses. In spite of Germany being their enemy, the inhabitants of Jugow felt compassion for the displaced civil Germans, analogically to their own fates – the loss of their homeland. They expected to return to their own houses but it was impossible. They had to create the new community and new homeland in the foreign territory. The numerous quotations show their problems with self-identity, their memories of the past and the vision of Ukraine and Ukrainians.