Kingdom of Barracks: Polish Displaced Persons in Allied-Occupied Germany and Austria by Katarzyna Nowak (review)

Reviewed by: Kingdom of Barracks: Polish Displaced Persons in Allied-Occupied Germany and Austria by Katarzyna Nowak Jadwiga Biskupska Nowak, Katarzyna – Kingdom of Barracks: Polish Displaced Persons in Allied-Occupied Germany and Austria. Montréal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2023. 343 p. Following the robust scholarship on humanitarianism in the wake of the First World War by historians like Bruno Cabanes and Kimberly Lowe Frank, Katarzyna Nowak's Kingdom of Barracks asks about the role of nationalism in the post-war fate of Polish refugees. Nowak's book enters a crowded field that examines the post–Second World War tribulations of different communities, especially Holocaust survivors and the Vertriebene, ethnic Germans who fled or were expelled from eastern Europe at the end of the war. How was the Polish experience distinct, and where does it fit in one of history's key moments of human movement? This uchodźstwo—exile—separate from but contextualized against earlier Polish economic and political migrations, is Nowak's story. Her subject is the hundreds of thousands of ethnic Poles (broadly speaking; initially including Polish Jews) who ended up in Allied-occupied Germany and Austria in 1945, a heterogenous group of Holocaust survivors, former foreign and slave labourers, released concentration camp prisoners, prisoners of war (POWs), and others. This group was heavily male and faced a complex problem that their peer Belgian, Italian, and French displaced persons (DPs) did not that makes their case a fascinating test of humanitarian bureaucracy in the unfolding Cold War: the state keen to repatriate them—the new Polish People's Republic (PRL)—was socialist, under Moscow's control, and not in the same place on the map as the interwar Second Polish Republic where they had been born. For many DPs, including POWs who had fought in the Polish Army (WP) and members of the Home Army (AK) imprisoned in Germany, life under socialism meant enormous scrutiny, and could mean prison or the Gulag. A portion did not want to "return" to a country where they had never lived, originally from territories seized by the Soviet Union. Others simply wanted a post-war life in the West, and some, of course, were keen to return to a state that was very much their home. Technically on German or Austrian territory, these dipisi were thus managed by a coalition of occupying states and contested between two governments—the London Polish exiles, derecognized by the Western Allies in summer 1945, and the new Polish People's Republic, keen to claim bodies to settle its war-denuded territories and rebuild its shattered economy. (The Germans and Austrians were not a factor—this is not a book about the agency of central European states.) The Allies recognized some vague DP right or privilege to determine their lives but were also keen to pass off the burden of their maintenance and get them settled somewhere, running the story into the touchy subject of early Cold War immigration policy. The Polish DPs thus found themselves in a bureaucratic labyrinth they had to navigate on an uncertain timeline of foreign goodwill. Nowak traces their experiences from 1945 to 1952 in thematic chapters in a bottom-up cultural and social history that includes and is sometimes able to showcase DP perspectives, even workmen and peasants of limited education. What allows for this is a source base of oral history interviews with the former DPs held in collections where they eventually settled, a robust [End Page 216] Polish-language memoir literature from the same, publications written for and by the DPs, and the library of material produced by the states, committees, and NGOs that aided, observed, and propagandized them as they settled across the globe. Infelicities of translation and phrasing are inevitable from such writings and crop up frequently. Most of these DPs, as the author highlights, were not people who had held positions of social, cultural, or political influence in interwar Poland, but were of humbler origins and far outside the purview of previous institutional history. One exception is the writer Tadeusz Borowski, well known for his Auschwitz short story This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen and who ended the war...

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