The Exile Mission. Anna D. Jaroszyńska-Kirchmann
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niezłomna denoted wartime emigration, characterized by a fighting and indomitable spirit. The emigrants embraced notions of an organized transnational community deriving from a common historical experience and of the exile mission that guided and motivated this community.24
Polish sacrifice and contribution to the Allied war effort did not secure an independent Polish state after the war. In 1945, at the international conference at Yalta, the West agreed to abandon Poland to the Soviet sphere of influence. Hundreds of thousands of Polish veterans, refugees, deportees, and prisoners faced a difficult choice: should they return to the communist-dominated homeland or embrace exile? Most did return, but many others waited in the refugee camps, displaced persons (DP) camps, or in exile communities established during the war. International efforts slowly got under way to permanently resettle a million so-called unrepatriables from various nations. About four hundred thousand Poles were resettled in four dozen nations of the world, although some displaced Poles faced hardship and despair in the DP camps for as long as nine years. During that time Poles established communities that aided everyday survival in many ways, and, more importantly, they used the DP period to install the framework of the postwar Polish diaspora and adopted the exile mission to guide them.
After the international resettlement action had dispersed the refugees into many countries on many continents, they either joined older existing Polish communities, for example, in the United States, France, Austria, and Argentina, or built their own communities nearly from scratch, as in Australia and Great Britain. Although separated by space and borders, Polish refugees still felt a strong bond to the entire postwar diaspora. They eagerly participated in debates about international events, inspired by press reports and personal letters and contacts. Veterans associations, scouting groups, and other organizations with membership in different countries cemented ties developed during and after the war. The Polish government in exile in London provided the most important political point of gravity by claiming to represent the only legal continuation of prewar authority.
Immigration and Naturalization Service statistics indicate that about fifteen thousand Polish quota immigrants were allowed into the United States during World War II (1939–45). About seventeen thousand more came within the next three years. As a result of the enactment of the 1948 Displaced Persons Act and its 1950 amendments, close to one hundred forty thousand displaced persons born in Poland, including Polish veterans from Great Britain, arrived in the United States between 1948 and 1952. All in all, between 1940 and 1953, 178,680 quota immigrants born in Poland arrived in the United States.25 Most of the statistics for this period (including those of the Displaced Persons Commission, or DPC, a federal body responsible for the resettlement of DPs in the United States) classified immigrants on the basis of their place of birth or last residence. Therefore, the population of immigrants born in Poland usually included Ukrainians and Polish Jews as well as ethnic Poles. According to some estimates, nearly forty thousand of the new arrivals were Polish Jews;26 it is unclear how many were Ukrainians.27 The ethnic Polish Christians (predominantly Roman Catholics) who are the focus of this study joined roughly 6 million Polish Americans—first-generation immigrants and their offspring born in the United States—according to the 1940 census.28
The group of Poles who immigrated to the United States between 1939 and 1945 included an exceptionally high number of intellectuals, artists, politicians, and people representing the Polish prewar professional middle class, or inteligencja. Most often they settled in large urban areas, especially in New York and Chicago, forming active émigré communities for the duration of the war. Polish refugees who immigrated after 1945 were usually part of a nuclear family unit, with Polish spouses and children born (usually) outside of Poland. Polish organizations in displaced persons camps in Germany and Austria, from which most of the refugees to the United States emigrated, estimated that members of the inteligencja made up only 5 to 10 percent of the Polish DP population. Farmers comprised some 70 percent of the group, and the remainder was divided between skilled and unskilled workers. A sociological study conducted in 1971 described these emigrants as rather young (the average age was about twenty-four to thirty-five years) and fairly well educated, the majority having at least some high school and close to one-third having a university degree. Some 92 percent claimed Roman Catholicism as their religion, and a majority indicated political reasons for their emigration.29
Polish exiles arriving in the United States during and immediately after the war joined a generation of Polish Americans who recently had gone through significant changes. In the 1930s they had come to accept a double identity, one both Polish and American. The process is best illustrated by the relationship between American Polonia and the World Union of Poles from Abroad (Światowy Związek Polaków z Zagranicy, or Światpol). Światpol was an international organization formed in Poland with the aim to unite and coordinate the activities of Polish communities abroad in the interest of Poland and its government. In 1934 Światpol organized a congress in Warsaw attended by representatives of Polonia from all over the world. To the dismay of the organizers, the American delegation to the congress, led by Francis X. Świetlik, the grand censor of the Polish National Alliance, declined membership in Światpol.30 “Regarding ourselves as an inseparable component of the great American nation,” the statement of the American delegation announced, “we take an active and creative part in every walk of American life, thus contributing to boosting the name of Poland in our country.”31 After returning to the United States, Świetlik further justified his position: “Polonia in America is neither a Polish colony nor a national minority but a component part of the Great American Nation, proud, however, of its Polish extraction and careful to make the young generation love everything Polish.”32 Miecislaus Haiman, a prominent Polish-American historian, summed up the controversy provoked by American Polonia’s refusal to become a part of Światpol: “In the eyes of the Poles in Poland and in other countries we are still only Poles while in fact we are already Americans of Polish extraction.”33
The Great Depression hampered to some extent the process of assimilation by blocking social mobility and forcing the second generation back into the old ethnic neighborhoods, where Polish Americans, “cut off from the homogenizing influences of a consumption society, . . . once again clung to their cultural forms.”34 First and foremost, the depression meant hard times, unemployment, and social turmoil. Second-generation Polish Americans responded to adversity by pooling community resources and relying on family economic units, but they refused to be mere victims. In 1935 Polish women in Hamtramck, Michigan, took their protest against skyrocketing meat prices to the streets. Others actively participated in strikes and union drives, which produced a number of Polish-American union leaders, such as Leo Krzycki, Stanley Nowak, Bolesław Gebert, and Stella Nowicki. The radicalizing impact of the depression was demonstrated also by the growing membership of Poles in the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). By the end of World War II, the CIO included about 6 million members, of whom approximately six hundred thousand were Polish.35 Finally, the New Deal cemented Polonia’s traditional adherence to the Democratic Party, even though the participation of Polish Americans in party politics remained limited.36 The assimilation process of the 1920s and 1930s affected the broad masses of working-class Polish Americans, resulting in their way of life being “‘made in America,’ just as the coal that they mined or the steel ingots that they rolled.”37
The outbreak of the war revived the Polish communities in the United States. American Polonia, although internally not homogenous, contributed generously to humanitarian causes, which included support for Polish refugees and prisoners as well as (whenever possible) for the Polish population in Poland. Polish Americans also took an interest in international matters that could affect Poland, and in 1944 they formed a powerful lobby: the Polish American Congress (PAC). After the end of the war, American Polonia worked for a change in immigration laws and for the admittance of European displaced persons to the United States. Polonia’s activism worked within the American framework to a greater extent than it had during the previous world war. For young Polish-American men and women, military service meant accelerated assimilation.38 After the war, taking advantage of generous veterans benefits and the booming economy, Polish Americans displayed noticeable upward social mobility. Greater numbers of second-generation Polish-American males moved into white-collar occupations, and women, who had entered the