Displacement
Migration describes the movement of people away from their area of usual habitation, which can be transnational (across an international border) or internal (within a state or area). Compared to migration, displacement is often the forced movement of persons who have been made to flee their homes or places of residence, in particular, because of armed conflict or violence. In 2022, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees estimates that 108.4 million people worldwide were forcibly displaced because of oppression, war, violence, rights violations, climate changes or ecocide among other crises. In modern times, transnational migration, and the displacement of people caused by wars, has shifted borders and changed the demography of countries in East-Central Europe. Our Educational Platform offers a range of resources that shed light on the history of migration, property looting, mass deportations, stories of return, and evolving concepts of home. Migration and displacement have always existed and will continue to exist, but history can help us to understand how the movement of groups of people have shaped the world in which we are living now.
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Primary Sources
Excerpt from Chone Gottesfeld’s travelogue ‘My Trip to Galicia’, dedicated to Ternopil (1937)
This excerpt is taken from a travelogue of impressions and experiences by the renowned journalist Chone Gottesfeld of the New York Yiddish-language newspaper Forverts (Yiddish: פֿאָרווערטס, English: The Forward), published in New York in 1937. In it, the author recounts a journey to his hometown of Skala, which he had left in 1907. At the time, Skala was an atypical Galician town that had flourished during the Austrian period due to the large number of Hasidic pilgrims visiting local tzaddikim in nearby Chortkiv. However, the town fell into decline during the interwar years. Gottesfeld, known for his humorous newspaper stories and for plays performed in both New York and Warsaw, offers in this...
An excerpt from Chone Gottesfeld’s travelogue ‘My Trip to Galicia’, dedicated to Lviv (1937)
Chone Gottesfeld, a well-known journalist for the Yiddish-language newspaper Forverts (Yiddish: פֿאָרווערטס [Forward]) in New York, visited Galicia and documented his impressions in a detailed travelogue, My Trip to Galicia, published by the Association of Galician Jews in America in 1937. His journey was a return to his native land, which he had left three decades earlier, in 1907. The travelogue offers a rich tapestry of comparisons between social life during the Austrian and Polish periods, based both on Gottesfeld’s personal memories and the testimonies of those he encountered. This excerpt also sheds light on the formation of collective memory among Galician Jews during the interwar period. It explores how they recalled the...
Testimonies of Ihor Kostetskyi’s Fate under Nazi Rule
Ihor Kostetskyi was just one example of several several million individuals who were taken by the Nazi Army from occupied eastern European territories and had to work as Ostarbeiter in the German war industry. Before the war, Kostetskyi was involved in several cultural, artistic, and creative projects and initiatives. Born in Kyiv, he made little declaration of his Ukrainianness until Carpathian Ukraine started to seek independence in 1938. When he was mobilized into the Red Army at the start of the German invasion in 1941, he was in the process of changing his real name, Ivan Merzliakov, to the pen name, Ihor Kostetskyi. This is the name he would use in the future....
Testimonies on the Material Situation of the Culturally Active Ukrainian Emigration in Germany, 1946-1951
The Ukrainian DP journal KHORS was initially planned to be quarterly. However, the first KHORS edition in 1946 was also the last. The following documents provide insight into the reasons for the failure to publish subsequent issues and interesting evidence about the financial situation of the Ukrainian diaspora in the American occupation zone in general. The second and third issues of KHORS were planned to be published shortly after the first. A handwritten list of the planned content for these two issues confirms this thesis. It was written in an old document form of the German Air Force from the Second World War. These forms were distributed to the residents of the DP...
Principles and Future Aims of the DP Journal KHORS, 1946-1951
The Ukrainian DP journal KHORS focused on culture, arts, and cinema. It was published by a small team around the writer Ihor Kostetskyi. In its statutes, KHORS was not only displayed as a journal. Instead, it would be somewhat of a worldwide movement that people could join or leave, as they wish, in the future. The overriding principle was to accept the “primacy of the artistic form,” art for art’s sake. Every artist who shared these postulates was allowed to belong to KHORS “regardless of race, nationality, confessional or political convictions.” Only one group was excluded, the communists because “their ideology does not acknowledge the primacy of form.” Kostetskyi dreamed that in the...
Reviews of Film Art as an Instrument of Independence by the Ukrainian DP Journal KHORS, 1946-1951
The Ukrainian DP journal KHORS was planned as a quarterly about art and culture. It was published by a group of editors headed by writer Ihor Kostetskyi. Although the second issue was never published, the editorial notes and pre-written articles ready for publication in the planned second issue speak a lot about the potential inherent in the project. In its statute, KHORS resolutely distanced itself from communism and the Soviet Union. The reason for this position, among other things, was the Soviet ideologization of art. For Ukrainian DPs in the Western occupation zones of postwar Germany, such criticism was not only commonplace but almost expected. However, KHORS went one step further. One of...
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Title Pages of Never Published Editions of the DP Journal KHORS, 1945-1951
The idea of the Ukrainian DP-creation KHORS as a movement and a journal was kept alive for many years, even though the journal’s publication, initially planned as a quarterly, could never be realized beyond a first edition in 1946. The title pages listed here were never published, but they can provide interesting insights into the senses put into KHORS by its creators, its design, and the materials used. In 1945, immediately after the war, Ukrainian artist Halyna Mazepa drew the first cover with simple paint on a piece of cardboard. Its design was intended to reveal the idea of the future edition. The journal’s title is written in wheat, an important symbol in...
“Jewish Grandmother”, photo by Lewis Hine
Lewis Hine (1874-1940) was an American photographer who tried to draw attention to social issues such as migration or child labor. He took two series of photos on Ellis Island, an island near New York City that was the first stop and gateway for new arrivals. Photos of Lewis Hine are trying to show the identity of migrants, who were often exoticized and othered in the American press. The Jewish woman in the photo is dressed in clothes that do not distinguish her from other migrants from Eastern Europe. However, although Jewish migration was often also motivated by economic motives, in the public discourse and historiography of the early twentieth century, it was...
“Slavic Mother”, photo by Lewis Hine
Lewis Hine (1874-1940) was an American photographer who tried to draw attention to social issues such as migration or child labor. He took two series of photos on Ellis Island, an island near New York City that was the first stop and gateway for new arrivals. Photos of Lewis Hine are trying to show the identity of migrants, who were often exoticized and othered in the American press. The name of the photo "Slavic Mother" shows that Eastern Europe for Americans was still a space, which differences and nuances they hardly noticed. Hine perceives the woman in the photo as a person who left Europe forever, taking along all her posessions, and having...
Galician Migrants, Quebec, about 1911
The photo shows a group of migrants from Galicia, probably Ukrainians in Canada. Despite the information that before emigration, peasants bought urban clothes, in this photo we see people in traditional attire, which is different from the Canadian environment. Attitude towards Eastern European migrants was arrogant. In particular, clothing would often become the basis for otherness. Thus, the process of successful integration involved “dressing up” in Western clothes. In the photo, we can see a large family, because often the first migrants who were young men and women, later transported their children or older parents.
Advertising leaflet of Zofia Biesiadetska’s bureau
Zofia Biesiadetska's office in Oswiecim in Western Galicia was organizing transportation to America. The promotional leaflet offers tickets for steamboats to America and Canada. The transport revolution in the 19th century proved to be one of the most important factors that enabled mass intercontinental migration. Transport was relatively convenient and fast, as well as relatively inexpensive. With the beginning of mass migration, networks of agents developed, like Zofia Biesiedetska's bureau, who helped with the organization of the trip. This facilitated the migration of people from villages or small towns. At the same time, agents were often accused of lack of integrity and profiteering on migrants. Biesiadetska Bureau was one of the most respectable...
Grine kuzine (Green Cousin), song about emigration, 1921
The song, with a debatable authorship, was written for a Jewish theater. It was performed both in Europe and in the United States, and it became one of the most popular migrant works. The word “green” was an ironic definition of new immigrants who did not navigate well in American reality. The song “Green Cousin” raises the issue of disappointment of migrants in America, where hard work exhausts new-comers and does not bring the expected profit. The “Columbian state” appears not as a dream country where dreams come true, but a society of inequalities. Despite the hilarious music and satirical plot, the song shows the anxiety of emigrants due to the lack of...
A brivele der mamen (A Little Letter to Mama), song about emigration, 1907
The song was written by a Belarusian composer and singer, Solomon Smulewitz (1868-1943) in 1907. The author also had experience of migration to the United States. The song became very popular. In particular, it was used as a basis for a theatrical production and a film in Yiddish. The work raises the issue of migration caused separation of families. While the son who went to America has a successful life and a new family, his mother feels abandoned. Before her death, she asks her son not to forget to read Kaddish, a memorial prayer for her. The problem of separated families remained common to all migrants, but in this text the Jewish prayer...
“Goldene land” (Golden land), song about emigration, 1889
The song was written by a Lithuanian Jewish poet, Eliakum Zunser (1840-1913) based on his own experience of emigrating to the United States. The song "Golden Land" touches on the issue of new migrants, whose high expectations fail. The American city turns out to be a space full of dirt, noise, and poverty. Although jobs are available, they are poorly paid and dangerous to health. America is also not a place of social equality, because like in Europe, there is a disproportion in the distribution of wealth. This is an urban experience that was shared by many Jewish migrants who found work in the textile industry, or like Zunser himself, in the printing...
This module by literary scholar Olha Petrenko-Tseunova tells the story of Kateryna Biletska-Kandyba, the wife of Oleh Kandyba (known by the literary pseudonym Oleh Olzhych), a poet and member of the Ukrainian nationalist underground, head of the cultural and educational department of the Leadership of Ukrainian Nationalists (PUN) and the Revolutionary Tribunal of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) (1939-1941), and her WWII experience and post-war emigration.
The end of the 19th century through the beginning of the 20th century is known as the period of mass migration from Europe to other continents, when more than 55 million people changed their place of residence. In particular, this process captured the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires, where a difficult economic situation, job shortages, and persecutions stirred various groups of the population to leave. Such groups included both Ukrainian and Polish peasants, and Jews from urban centers who were small-scale craftsmen or workers. Most often, they moved to the United States, Canada, Argentina, and Brazil, where labor was needed at factories or farms.
East-Central Europe played a vital role in the global history of mass migration and experienced an enormous variety of mobility processes in the long 19th and short 20th centuries. For instance, mass emigration from the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires and the Soviet Union, human trafficking, labor migration, forced migration during WWI and WWII, refugee crises and asylum, travel, and professional mobility. The voluminous scholarship on this chapter of migration history has lots of gaps and, notably, is almost absent from history curricula. This introductory course broadens our lens to examine the role of migration and mobility for the places where it occurred as well as the experiences of migrants, displaced persons, refugees, and...
Our main focus in this class will consist in Jewish experiences with cities in the twentieth century. Geographically, our center of attention will be Central and Eastern Europe (with our main – but not exclusive – emphasis on territories that, at one point or the other, came under Soviet rule); chronologically, we will concentrate (unevenly) on the period between the end of the First World War and the end of the Soviet Union. In particular, the Holocaust and the Second World War were events of central and terrible importance for this period and area. Accordingly, we will pay special attention to them.
This course covers the period from the partitions of Poland through the Russian and Habsburg Empires, the Soviet Union and interwar Poland. Students will familiarize with the geopolitical results of Russia’s westward and Austria’s eastward expansions and will focus among other overarching themes on the shtetl, the unique East European Jewish habitat; on Hasidism, a Ukraine-born popular movement of religious enthusiasm; on the interaction between Zionists and Ukrainian nationalists in Galicia; on the development of Ukrainization and Yiddishization (or Ukrainian and Jewish korenizatsiia) in the 1920s and the situation of Jews in Poland in the 1920s; on the Holocaust and its aftermath; on Ukrainians and Jews in the dissident movement; and on Jewish-Ukrainian...