Michał Turski

Zentrum für Historische Forschung Berlin der Polnischen Akademie der Wissenschaften

Social and Geographical Mobility during the Second World War in the Light of the Postwar Memoirs Contests (1945–1947) of West-Institute in Poznań

Recently, the phenomena related to the German occupation of the Polish territories in 1939– 1945 have become more relevant in the social history in Poland. Topics regarding everyday wartime life and forced resettlements have been finding more place in the contemporary Polish historiography. My conference paper is the first attempt to analyze the forced and voluntary social and geographical mobility of Poles in West and Central Poland under the German occupation. Memoirs contests (in Polish: pamiętniki konkursowe) have been gaining more interest of Polish historians, which also leads to the methodological reexamination of egodocuments. In the early post-war period, the West-Institute in Poznan as a result of memoirs contests collected ca. 200 memoirs of authors from West and Central Poland. All the contestants wrote about their wartime social and geographical mobility. Both phenomena were strictly related to each other, and were caused by the German occupation policy. The goal of my paper is to demonstrate the preliminary results of a project initiated by the Institute for History PAS, the Center for Historical Research Berlin PAS, and the University of Warsaw