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
Polish-Soviet Population Exchange: 1944 “Report on Mood”
This report, prepared by the head of the Lviv oblast party committee, and addressed to Nikita Khrushchev on 14 October 1944, offers an official assessment of Polish attitudes in the region one month after the signing of the Polish-Soviet population exchange agreement. Presented as a “report on moods,” it contains a series of quoted remarks attributed to local inhabitants. These very manifold moods highlight the complexity of the population transfer on the ground. Far from a smooth or unanimous process, the implementation of resettlement encountered hesitation, fear, ambivalence, and selective compliance. While the report depicts some readiness to leave, it also underscores that departures were often driven less by ideological conviction than by pragmatic considerations, security,...
Soviet Nationality Policy in 1944 Lviv
This memorandum, transmitted in Russian to the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Soviet Ukraine, Nikita Khrushchev, and signed by Kostyantyn Litvin (then deputy head of the Propaganda and Agitation Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine), Ivan Hrushetskyi (First Secretary of the Lviv Oblast and City Committees of the CP(b)U), and a third eastern Ukrainian party official is a party document. It reflects the nationality policy measures taken after reoccupation in Lviv. Dated 3 August 1944, just one month before the Polish-Soviet population exchange agreement, it sets out measurement to incorporate the city into the Ukrainian Soviet Republic and legitimize the new power. The document frames Lviv...
Post-war Resettlement of the Polish Population from the Ukrainian SSR: Organization
The materials in the archive file below document the organization of the resettlement of Poles from the USSR in late 1945–early 1946, as well as the specifics of its implementation in the Izmail Oblast of the Ukrainian SSR. On July 6, 1945, an agreement was concluded between the Soviet leadership and the Provisional Government of National Unity of the Republic of Poland, granting persons of Polish and Jewish nationalities—who had held Polish citizenship before September 17, 1939, and resided in the USSR—the right to renounce their Soviet citizenship and move to Poland. To implement this agreement, a Soviet-Polish joint commission was established, which developed and approved instructions on the procedure for accepting and...
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...
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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...