MK: So people uprooted from their land and those who had to share their land were living in the same region. That’s a very difficult situation.
EG: These different groups approached each other with deep distrust, which, in addition, was being fuelled politically. Trains would arrive here with Lemkos, who were displaced as a result of Operation Vistula. Victims of war deportations and Stalinist repressions were brought here from different regions of the Soviet Union. One could say that basically everyone here had been traumatised by war. Political propaganda attempted to stigmatise various groups, such as the previously mentioned Lemkos, spreading the view that they are ‘suspect’ people who would at some point murder and burn their neighbours. Before they started to organise and find each other, Lemko families were ‘thrown’ into local communities individually – they were deliberately dispersed. Whether and how a given family settled into a new place was dependent on the decency of their neighbours. Everyone knew they were ‘strangers’, even though the Lemkos, after all, tried not to demonstrate their otherness – although their dress and certain festive rituals confirmed it. People’s accounts suggest that usually they themselves didn’t know whether it was better to merge into the background, not to stand out, or to do quite the opposite, since then they could recognise ‘their own’.
MK: People have always migrated and moved around. How was this specific case different?
EG: These relocations weren’t voluntary or motivated by the desire to see the world or to improve one’s financial situation. People were subject to a huge political manipulation, to social engineering on an enormous scale. What’s more, all this was taking place immediately after a several-year-long, highly destructive war. They were being dispersed across the whole of Europe. It was often the case that the fate of a given family depended on the mere whim of a drunken commander, a commission head or a local party hack who couldn’t even read and write properly.
MK: In the case of Pomerania, this was planned.
EG: Yes, although the organisation of these relocations was not well thought out. It is unlikely that anyone could have been able to plan all that out in a reasonable and consistent way on such a scale. In my personal approach to fieldwork, I’m a listener to particular people first – I get to know their life stories and believe their version of ‘the larger’ history. It’s only then that I reach for historical overviews and juxtapose these two sources of knowledge. It’s currently difficult to avoid certain stereotypes when we look at the reality of that time and place. The common notion is that all of those who arrived in the western lands – and not only the incomers from the poorest parts of the Kielce or Radom regions or the Eastern Borderlands – were coming from poverty, from wooden huts with no plumbing, having worked their fields with their bare hands, with no machinery. And that these people were suddenly confronted with a highly developed level of civilisation and farming technologies. That they moved into houses with beautiful chinaware, carpets, clocks, running water and taps they didn’t know how to use.
Of course, the quality of life was much higher in the West than it was in the East, but, after all, it’s not about whether someone can use a tap. Rather, it’s about a person’s overall attitude to the home, how one understands the notion, whether one holds the conviction that home is something one reveres by virtue of its being the heart of the family, the kernel of one’s identity – and it’s about a person’s general attitude toward the idea of property and human dignity. One of my interlocutors, a 97-year-old woman born near Minsk, Belarus, came from a fairly wealthy home, although a peasant one. They had a large farm, hiring people to work on it. Their neighbours were surprised that they were leaving, even though kolkhozes were being set up there, and the owners of large estates were the first ones to be ‘on the chopping block’. This woman, who came to Pomerania as a teenager, said:
It makes me angry to hear that we supposedly came to such unimaginable riches. It’s a harmful stereotype that prior to that we were simpletons who ate only dark bread. We had a beautiful, comfortable, nicely furnished house; the food was plain, but no one went hungry. We didn’t have tap water, but we had crystal-clear water in our well.
MK: What kind of food did these people take to eat on the way?
EG: A cow, which would provide them with food for the journey – if they had one and were able to take it with them. Additionally, food that wouldn’t go bad: rusks, lard in a stone pot, groats, potatoes, some vegetables and fruit in autumn, more rarely dried fish and meat. Sometimes there were places in train carriages for preparing warm meals, but usually it wasn’t until they stopped along the way that they could build fires and set up makeshift kitchens. People made do however they could. The following sentence is a recurrent motif in elderly people’s accounts: ‘When my mother found out we would be going away, she immediately started making rusks’. I talked to Mr Roman, who was a child in 1940 when they were deported by the NKVD. He came to Western Pomerania from Kazakhstan with his mother and siblings in the spring of 1946. He mentioned that they had managed to kill a goat to sustain them on the way. They kept the skin and dried the meat in the sun. They had a dozen or so kilos of rice, which they boiled in water, adding the dried meat, piece by piece. ‘We arrived without experiencing any hunger’, he summarised. But such stories are uncommon.
MK: Food is also associated with holidays, festivities, celebrations. I would guess that people returned to their traditions after settling down?
EG: Food carries meaning. Korovai, which is a ceremonial wedding cake from the East, had to be well-risen and richly decorated – not in order to impress one’s neighbours, but rather for ritual purposes. The plumper and more beautiful it was, the better the luck it would portend for the newlyweds, their future wealth, the fertility and health of their animals, and the abundance of all of nature around them. The cake is made with yeast, and yeast transforms matter – it makes something grow, ripen, it’s simply indispensable, in the symbolic sense as well. I asked my oldest interlocutors from the East whether they made korovai after the war. The women would frequently respond: ‘We came here because of hunger. We dreamt of a handful of flour that wasn’t mouldy – we weren’t thinking about cakes’. Besides, there would have to have been someone in the family who had passed on the knowledge of the meaning of korovai. What’s also indispensable are the right circumstances and a community of people for whom it matters, who recognise the symbolism, the code, who believe in the magical agency of the ritual. Food is a carrier of meaning on the level of identity. In these communities, it was through common, everyday food that one could most quickly recognise ‘one’s people’. It was immediately clear who was ‘from our parts’. The Eastern Borderlanders (Kresowiacy) continue to stick together there, maintain solidarity, cherish and preserve their traditions. After the war, right after the resettlement, a person from the Kielce region wouldn’t just drop in as a guest to the home of a family from the Eastern Borderlands. But if they went there and saw that a Borderlander was eating potatoes with fried pork rinds for breakfast, they would think they were having some great celebration in the family. My grandparents, who spent their entire life in the Kielce region, would eat the previous day’s bread in the morning, crumbling it into milk. On Sundays, more elegantly, there’d be drop noodles instead of bread. They’d have chicken soup for Sunday dinner, but during the week they’d often have, for instance, sauerkraut thrown into boiling water, so-called zarzutka or zalewajka, or simply potatoes with curdled milk.
MK: After the war, people started to raise pigs, since the authorities supported the breeding of livestock.
EG: Pig slaughter is also a gauge of historical changes. My grandparents would do their best to cure all the meat and process it so that it could sustain them through the following months. I remember my grandfather and grandmother each eating a piece of sausage on Easter and Christmas, and I never heard from their mouths a word of complaint that they didn’t have meat on a daily basis; they simply weren’t used to it. My parents, on the other hand, would prepare large amounts of cold meats and ham after the pig slaughter, to eat over the next few weeks rather than months.