“Polacy na Wschodzie. Historie mówione” (“Poles in the East. An Oral History”) – a meeting on the book by KARTA Center

Led by: Dr. Marcin Jarząbek

The stories of Poles living beyond the eastern border of Poland told in their own voices. This book is a montage of excerpts chosen from memoirs recorded during one of the largest documentary projects of oral history ever conducted in Poland: from 2006 until 2011 during trips to Belarus, Kazakhstan, Lithuania, Latvia, Russia, Romania, and Ukraine. The team of scholars from the Archive of Oral History of the KARTA Center and from the History Meeting House managed to record and archive stories of almost 1,100 people and to scan over 4,000 photographs and documents from family photo albums of the interviewees.

The interviewees speak about places in which they lived and events in which they participated or which they witnessed directly: the daily life in the interwar period, the deportations of Poles deep into the USSR interior from the terrains which were not part of the Second Polish Republic already before the Second World War, the Soviet occupation, the post-1939 deportations, the German occupation and repressions, the extermination of local Jewish communities, the changes of borders after the end of the Second World War in 1945, and finally, the reasons for which they decided to stay, where they were forced to move and their daily lives at these places: their families, their religious life, work, study, establishing kolkhozes (Soviet collective farms), the ideological pressure.

The texts are accompanied by photographs from the archives of the interviewees, qr codes which send the user to digital sound recordings of the excerpts of memoirs, and a broad foreword which describes the historic context of the stories of Poles living in the aforementioned countries.

Partner of the event: KARTA Center

In Polish.
Free admission.