The Exile Mission. Anna D. Jaroszyńska-Kirchmann

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      “All I have left is my free song”

      The Polish Community in the Displaced Persons Camps

      Formation of the DP Camps

      Thursday, April 12, 1945, was just another prisoner-of-war day, although there were rumors that parts of the wider area around us might be already in the Allied hands. . . . In mid afternoon, I left my barrack for a little while, and when I was coming back it happened. I heard bullets buzzing through the air and saw a bent figure in a khaki uniform running on the other side of the barbed-wire fence in the direction of one of the observation towers. It seemed that he had a machine gun in his hand. Then a huge tank rolled through the middle of the roll-call area, with an armored car at its side and we knew immediately what it meant. We were free!¹

      AFTER LONG MONTHS OF captivity, Leokadia Rowinski could rejoice with the other women of the Warsaw Uprising who were liberated from the Oberlangen POW camp along with her. The women sang, cried, prayed, and planned for the future. Soon, however, their happiness gave way to anxiety and even despair. As Leokadia and her friends pored over the suddenly available newspapers, they understood that “there was no place in the world for the likes of us. We had no country and no home to return to.”² The brutal and confusing reality of the Cold War thwarted the euphoria of freedom. The decision whether to repatriate to communist-dominated Poland or to embrace exile became the most difficult and painful choice that the refugees faced after the war. While waiting for repatriation or emigration, they stayed in displaced persons camps, which international organizations had created on German, Austrian, and Italian soil. For many of them, the sojourn in the DP camps lasted several months to several years.

      Map 1. Major DP camps with Polish population in the occupation zones of Germany and Austria, 1945–1951. Map by Emil Pocock, Department of History, Eastern Connecticut State University, and the author

      Poles were just a fraction of the approximately 10 million people who remained outside the borders of their home countries. In May 1945 “Europe was on the move.”³ Large numbers of refugees immediately undertook strenuous journeys home, either walking or catching rides on military transports, and the roads of devastated Europe filled with multilingual masses. Governments of western European countries promptly organized transport of their nationals, and the French, Danish, Belgians, Dutch, Norwegians, and Italians quickly found themselves on their way home. Among those who awaited repatriation were large contingents of Poles, Jews, Ukrainians, Russians, Bulgarians, Estonians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Czech, Slovaks, Hungarians, southern Slavs, and many other nationalities.⁴ Their homes were in a part of Europe that was changing dramatically before their eyes, while borders moved, new communist governments formed, and the victorious Soviet army reigned unchallenged.

      Before any transportation to central and eastern Europe could be provided, the destitute refugees needed immediate care: shelter, food, clothing, and medical attention. In the early period after liberation, care for the refugees was supervised by the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) Displaced Persons Branch.⁵ Shortly thereafter the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), an international organization created in the fall of 1943, took over SHAEF’s functions.⁶ In addition to relief work among the refugees, UNRRA’s main goal was the repatriation of the refugee population to their respective countries. Between the fall of 1945 and the end of 1946, UNRRA repatriated about 8 million people of different nationalities to their homelands. By June 1947 UNRRA had completed its activities,⁷ and at this time its responsibilities were taken over by the Preparatory Commission of the International Refugee Organization (PCIRO), a new international agency assigned to the task of resettling the remaining DP population. The International Refugee Organization (IRO) began its operations in July 1947 and completed them in December 1951.⁸ Since that time, refugee problems have been handled by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).⁹

      In May 1945 nearly 1.9 million citizens of prewar Poland were in Germany: about 1.2 million in the British, American, and French zones of occupation and seven hundred thousand in the Soviet zone.¹⁰ Over 90 percent had been slave laborers in the economy of the Third Reich. The remaining 10 percent included prisoners of Nazi concentration camps and prisons, former POWs, and Poles who had been slated for Germanization. In the last stages of the war, several thousand soldiers of the Holy Cross Brigade (Brygada Świętokrzyska) of the National Armed Forces (Narodowe Siły Zbrojne, or NSZ, a right-wing anticommunist military organization), who had left Poland under the pressure of the incoming Soviets, found themselves on the territory of Germany, as did inmates of concentration camps and prisons evacuated before the onslaught of the Red Army. Former Wehrmacht (German army) soldiers who had been forcibly conscripted from the population in Silesia and Pomerania were still in Germany, as was a smaller group of Poles deported from the territory annexed by the Soviet Union. Polish armed forces stationed in Germany in the spring of 1945 included about sixteen thousand soldiers and officers, representing the First Armored Division under the command of General Stanisław Maczek; the First Independent Parachute Brigade (Samodzielna Brygada Spadochronowa); Division 131 of the British Air Force of Occupation; and Polish land forces that had fought as part of the French army. Most of these units participated in occupation duties in various parts of Germany.¹¹ The ranks of Polish civilian refugees in the Western zones soon swelled with those who had escaped from the Soviet zone of occupation and escapees from Poland who had illegally crossed the border. These numbers increased further through the high birth rate among DPs.¹²

      Most Polish displaced persons, like those of other ethnic groups, lived in assembly centers, or camps, СКАЧАТЬ