The Epilogue of the War ID: 257

Story

The theme was prepared as a part of the program The Complicated Pages of Common History: Telling About World War II in Lviv.

They went through the war, through two or, actually, three occupations — Soviet, German and then Soviet again. There were various people among them: those who rescued others and those who denounced Jews. Among them, there were traitors, heroes and ordinary dumb performers, masters of trade, masters of cunning, masters of prayer, goodness or cruelty. Now they were meeting each other on the same street, and they certainly knew a lot about each other, but they generally did not pass that knowledge on to others. They survived by chance or miracle, through providence or at a terrible price. Each of them had their own secret, astonishing or touching. A few diaries have covered the fate of some of them, but in general all this secret reality of memory has disappeared without a trace: the reality of interrogations, searches, camps, escapes and incredible cases...
(Adam Zagajewski, Dwa miasta)

At the end of the war, Lviv was a city where Jews were almost completely exterminated. Poles and Ukrainians continued to live under the Nazi occupation in a city, which each of these communities considered their own. As the Red Army approached, expectations of an end of the war were uncertain. The question of whether the Soviet rule would return and what it would be like worried many Lviv residents. The Polish-Ukrainian conflict and the fear of possible Soviet repression were the motive for leaving the city before the end of hostilities.

Millions of Europeans were deprived of their homes as a result of flight, evacuation, deportation, resettlement or emigration during World War II. Millions of Soviet citizens were relocated through government programs or forced deportations to sparsely populated regions of the country. After World War II, the victorious nations legitimized the forced displacement of the population, in particular national minorities, as a necessary precondition for a long-term peace in Central and Eastern Europe. The Polish-Ukrainian border was a place of destructive and bloody interethnic conflicts. The resettlement, which was first called "evacuation" and then "repatriation", was to ensure stable coexistence within the new borders. While Poland lost its former eastern regions, which became part of the Ukrainian, Belarusian and Lithuanian SSRs, it gained the former German regions of Silesia and Pomerania. Poles were forced to leave Galicia and Volhynia, which no longer belonged to Poland, and settled in the ex-German "Recovered Territories" (Ziemie Odzyskane), while Ukrainians were forced to leave the San river basin, Podlasie, and Lemkivshchyna, where they had lived for centuries.

 The epilogue of World War II was a new wave of forced and voluntary migration, and Lviv was at the epicenter of these processes. As a result of military losses, the Holocaust, repression, deportations and Soviet national policy, the population of Lviv in the 1940s-1950s changed dramatically, according to some estimates, by 80%; this is illustrated by the following graph representing ethno-demographic transformations in the twentieth century.

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