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Двадцатый век часто называют эпохой беженцев. В начале века в Европе волны миграции были связаны с этническими чистками и попытками создать однородные государства. К концу века основным фактором вынужденной миграции стал крах коммунистической системы. Между этими двумя кризисами по всей Европе перемещались миллионы беженцев, ссыльных и изгнанников.
Ян М. Пискорский, профессор истории в университете города Щецин, написал замечательную книгу о них, рассматривая не только крупнейшие миграционные движения ХХ века, но и судьбы людей, оказавшихся в этих движениях. Автор показал феномен изгнания не только как исторический факт и статистический процесс, но и как вопрос выживания отдельных личностей, объединяя биографический подход, исторический дискурс и мемуары. Именно литературный талант Пискорского делает эту книгу уникальной.
Специфику XX века в истории беженства определяют вовсе не только цифры, с которых обычно начинают. Правда, масштабы поражают и давно вышли за пределы вообразимого, хотя все оценки приходится считать весьма приблизительными: точных данных чаще всего нет. Во-первых, вплоть до рубежа XIX и XX веков беженцев вообще никто систематически не считал. Во-вторых, их число во многом зависит от принятого определения, то есть от того, кого именно мы относим к категории беженцев. Многие вовсе выпадают из статистики, особенно внутренне перемещённые лица, которые формально не считаются беженцами, поскольку не пересекли границу собственного государства. Исторический пример — миллионы ссыльных в России; современный — около двух миллионов курдских беженцев в Турции, живущих преимущественно в городских трущобах после уничтожения их деревень в Восточной Анатолии турецкой армией, применяющей тактику выжженной земли в борьбе с Рабочей партией Курдистана (РПК).
Не вдаваясь в подробности, можно сказать, что одна только Европа XX века породила не менее восьмидесяти миллионов беженцев — без учёта миллионов экономических эмигрантов, уехавших в страны Нового Света. Немалая часть последних не преуспела и вернулась: по оценкам, обратно уезжал в среднем каждый четвёртый. Сегодня число иммигрантов, то есть людей, живущих не в странах своего происхождения, оценивается примерно в 180 миллионов, или три процента населения мира. Число вынужденных мигрантов в современном мире оценивают примерно в 50 миллионов, причём более половины составляют внутренне перемещённые лица. В Европе распад Югославии породил свыше четырёх миллионов беженцев, и, как считается, лишь половина смогла вернуться туда, откуда бежала или была изгнана. В Чечне новые наступления российских войск выгнали из домов не менее 800 тысяч человек; поскольку чеченские мужчины, становившиеся объектом облав, зачастую не видели иного выхода, кроме как взяться за оружие, среди чеченских беженцев женщины и дети составляли около 95 процентов.
Polish“THE EXPELLED: Forced Migration and Refugees in Twentieth-Century Europe”
THE EXPELLED
Forced Migration and Refugees in Twentieth-Century Europe
The twentieth century is sometimes described as the age of refugees. In Europe, already at the beginning of the century, waves of people fled ethnic cleansing that accompanied the creation and consolidation of homogeneous nation-states. Toward the end of the century, the collapse of the communist system became the principal cause of forced migration. Between these two turning points, millions of refugees, deportees and expellees moved across Europe.
Jan M. Piskorski, professor of history at the University of Szczecin, has written a fascinating book about them without omitting any of the most important migratory movements of the twentieth century. He presents expulsion not only as a historical and statistical fact but also as an experience lived by individual people, weaving biographical and memoir material into the historical discussion. Combined with his literary talent, this is what makes the book exceptional.
THE EXPELLED
Forced Migration and Refugees in Twentieth-Century Europe
The twentieth century is often called an era of refugees. At the beginning of the century in Europe, waves of migration were connected with ethnic cleansing and attempts to create homogeneous states. By the end of the century, the collapse of the communist system had become the principal factor behind forced migration. Between these two crises, millions of refugees, deportees and expellees moved throughout Europe.
Jan M. Piskorski, professor of history at the University of Szczecin, wrote a remarkable book about them, examining not only the major migration movements of the twentieth century but also the fates of the people caught up in those movements. He presents the phenomenon of expulsion not merely as a historical fact and a statistical process, but as a question of the survival and experience of individuals, combining a biographical approach, historical analysis and memoirs. Piskorski's literary talent is precisely what makes the book distinctive.
Reviews
Cuadernos de Historia Contemporánea, 2011, vol. 33, pp. 311–351
[The preceding review concludes:] The clearest example is the recurrent inability of the republicans, and more generally of Bilbao's secularist left, to create a stable secular school in the city. Likewise, only one republican club survived continuously over time, while others appeared and disappeared sporadically. It is also true that the republican elite had in the El Sitio society a complementary space in which to share experiences with other liberals of the city.
In conclusion, that publication fills a gap and demonstrates that there are still many incomprehensible historiographical voids in the contemporary history of the Basque Country. Free of the presentism into which, consciously or unconsciously, the great majority of Basque social scientists fall when dealing with the Basque question — and the characterization is never innocent — specialists in the period will have to consult that volume if they do not want their explanations to limp. Biscayan republicanism is no longer in the shadows, and we can therefore break with old explanations accepted uncritically, such as the view that portrays Basque politics as a simplistic triangle of liberalism, socialism and nationalism.
We may also hope that the forthcoming publication of the results of another dissertation recently defended at the University of the Basque Country, on Álava, and the preparation of a similar study of Guipúzcoa will contribute still further to revitalizing studies of republicanism in the region. Basque republicans were not a minor aspect of modern Basque politics, even if it has taken us far too long to discover this.
Piskorski, Jan M. Wygnancy. Przesiedlenia i uchodzcy w dwudziestowiecznej Europie [The Expelled: Population Transfers and Refugees in Twentieth-Century Europe], Warsaw, PIW, 2010, 344 pp.
Reviewing a book written in a language that most potential Spanish readers will be unable to read only makes sense if the book is important enough that drawing attention to it seems indispensable. The book presented here fully meets that condition. Moreover, since a German translation is due to appear this year, there is reason to hope that it may eventually be published in Spain as well. Its author, Jan Maria Piskorski, is a professor at the Polish University of Szczecin and is well known in Central European historiography, especially in Germany. Several of his articles have appeared in Spain in journals such as L’Avenc and Ayer.
The Expelled is an audacious attempt to summarize, condense and explain the processes of population transfer, mass expulsion, flight and exile that occurred in Europe during the twentieth century. Although Piskorski's chief expertise concerns the processes that followed the Second World War in Central Europe, he has nevertheless undertaken the titanic task of reconstructing the main lines of the policies that produced mass expulsions from the Balkan Wars, through both World Wars, to the Yugoslav wars at the end of the century. It is true that the book concentrates above all on the period 1914–1956, but in one way or another the entire twentieth century is examined.
The material is divided into five chapters, as well as an introduction and an epilogue. Both the introduction and the epilogue are of central importance, because one of the book's most essential and original features is that it is interwoven with fragments of the author's own family experience. His family — like those of millions of Poles — suffered expulsion from its local homeland, the eastern regions of Poland annexed by the USSR and today parts of Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania. The city in which the author lives and works, Szczecin, the former German Stettin, belongs to a region whose original inhabitants were likewise expelled and replaced by others — Poles — many of whom had themselves lost their homes.
Thus in the introduction and final chapter, the history of the family and the author's own experiences is intertwined with the historical research developed in the rest of the book, especially in the fourth part, devoted to the expulsions of the Second World War and their consequences, where the author is able to draw on particularly deep knowledge of the subject.
What is fascinating is the way Piskorski manages to interweave dozens, perhaps hundreds, of small personal stories — drawn from memoirs, archives and personal interviews — with his description of the labyrinths of high politics and the course of the wars and conflicts of the century. In some respects the book could be placed within what has been called “ego-history,” were it not for the paradoxically emotional coolness with which the author inserts personal and family experiences, treating them merely as one element — at times a metaphor — through which to understand more fully the enormity of the tragedy of mass expulsions and population transfers.
The book can be criticized for giving insufficient attention to expulsions before 1914 and for its perhaps somewhat obvious treatment of the expulsions associated with the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. Yet even when compared with the most important recent publications on the subject — for example Norman Naimark's Fires of Hatred; Philipp Ther's Redrawing Nations; the collective volume People on the Move, published by Berg in 2008; or the Lexikon der Vertreibungen by Brandes, Sundhausen and Trobst — Piskorski's book stands out as a work written with passion and literary skill while at the same time being well documented and based on solid scholarship.
One can only hope that a Spanish publisher — among those that have no difficulty publishing much less significant works by Anglo-Saxon authors — will take on a book intended not only for an academic readership but for everyone interested in understanding why today's Europe rests on a foundation of tragic expulsions which, together with the Holocaust, the violence of wars and colonialism, and dictatorships of both right and left, form part of that unresolved and traumatic past which in one way or another concerns every country on the continent.
José M. Faraldo
Complutense University of Madrid
jm.faraldo@ghis.ucm.es
Fragment
Introduction
The Keys to the House in Wałcz
On 26 March 1942, a week before the unusually early Easter that year, while it was still winter — “frost and snow” — about twenty German and Lithuanian soldiers appeared early in the morning at the gate of the Visitation Sisters and demanded the keys to the enclosure. The superior initially refused, but when she understood that this time “she would not be able to save the Congregation,” she handed them the keys [through the appropriate opening in the door] so that they could open it themselves.
The sisters were loaded onto a truck and taken to Łukiszki. “From then on our wandering life began,” Aunt Tosia said. In her account she emphasized that the sisters not infrequently encountered kindness from Lithuanians and sometimes also from Germans. One of them, a young German soldier who was clearly ashamed of driving the sisters from the convent, helped them climb into the truck and even ventured the dangerous confession: “Oh, if only I could do what I cannot do.”
Aunt Tosia was convinced that he was a good Catholic and submitted to the harsh commands of authority only because he was forced to. She still belonged to a world divided not only by nationality but, at least to the same degree, by confession; and Catholicism, even if it was no longer (perhaps) an indispensable condition of salvation for her, certainly made salvation much easier.
A Century of the Uprooted and Homeless
The Twentieth-Century Intensification of Refugee Processes
It is by no means the numbers, with which discussions usually begin, that determine what is distinctive about the twentieth century in the history of refugee movements. It is true that the figures are staggering, for they long ago exceeded the bounds of imagination, even if all of them must be treated as very rough approximations because in most cases we do not know the real numbers. First, until the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries nobody counted refugees. Second, the number of refugees depends to a considerable extent on the definition adopted — in other words, on whom we include in the category of refugees.
Many escape all statistics. This applies especially to internally displaced people, who in the formal sense are not refugees at all because they have not crossed the border of their own state. A historical example would be the millions of deportees in Russia; a contemporary one is the two million Kurdish refugees in Turkey, most of whom live in urban slums after their villages in eastern Anatolia were destroyed by the Turkish army, which has used scorched-earth tactics in its struggle against the separatist Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK).
Without entering into details, it can be stated that twentieth-century Europe alone produced no fewer than eighty million refugees, not counting the millions of economic emigrants who left for the countries of the New World. A substantial proportion of the latter did not succeed. It was not only “Mr. Balcer from Brazil,” the hero of Maria Konopnicka's moving poem — published, not coincidentally, in 1910, when one million Europeans a year were leaving for the United States — who returned. Millions of others returned with him, according to estimates: on average one quarter of emigrants.
Today the number of immigrants — people living outside their own countries — is estimated at 180 million, three percent of the world's population. The number of forced migrants in the contemporary world is estimated at fifty million, more than half of them internally displaced persons, amounting to about one percent of humanity. These figures, however, are very unevenly distributed.
In Europe, the breakup of Yugoslavia produced more than four million refugees, and it is estimated that only half of them were able to return to the areas from which they had fled or been expelled. In Chechnya successive attacks by Russian forces drove at least eight hundred thousand people from their homes; because Chechen men in practice had little choice but to take up arms, since they were themselves subjected to roundups, women and children made up 95 percent of Chechen refugees.
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