Exile And Identity: Polish Women in theSoviet Union During World War II [Hardcover]

History is usually written by the well-off, the politically placed, and the victors. Here, Jolluck (history, Stanford Univ.) undertakes to write it from the woman's perspective, examining the forced exile of hundreds of thousands of Polish women to the Soviet Union during the early years of World War II. On August 23, 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union signed a nonaggression treaty, which included secret clauses providing for the partition of Poland between them. The Soviets used forced exile to break the will of Polish resistance and allegiance, which was inculcated in the family setting. This book relates these women's subsequent loss of family, culture, religion, and dignity, a story of deprivation and wanton behavior by the Germans that Cynthia Simmons told in Writing the Siege of Leningrad: Women's Diaries, Memoirs, and Documentary Prose with a much better focus. Jolluck's work sparks interest when showing the tensions that resulted when early Polish feminists encountered the Soviet Union's forcible removal of the gender gap. But it suffers from overwriting, with some themes repeated over and over. The narrow topic makes the book a useful addition only to comprehensive World War II collections.
Harry Willems, Southeast Kansas Lib. Syst., Iola
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Exile and Identity focuses on the experiences of hundreds of thousands of Polish women forcibly transported deep into the USSR as prisoners or "special settlers" after the Soviet invasion and annexation of eastern Poland in 1939.

Using firsthand accounts ranging from the briefly factual to the intensely personal, Katherine R. Jolluck reconstructs the daily lives and attitudes of Polish women based on reports collected upon their amnesty and evacuation from the USSR. These moving stories provide a clear and detailed picture of the conditions in which these women were forced to live, and examine how those victimized interpreted and coped with their daily traumas.

In exile, Polish women found little that resembled their former homes. Loaded into cattle cars, women, children, and the infirm were transported to prisons, labor camps, or collective farms where they faced perilous living conditions and brutal treatment. Jolluck recounts how Polish women endured physically debilitating conditions, often working eighteen-hour days to support families suddenly separated from fathers and husbands. Given their meager payment, even this role was beyond their means. Mothers were forced to give up their own children to Soviet orphanages or, worse, watch helplessly as they starved to death. Some women faced sexual abuse or the prospect of forced prostitution for survival.

Almost as painful to these women were the attempts to deprive them of their nationality, culture, and religion. Enduring insults, efforts at reeducation, and the prohibition of the practice and transmission of their religious and national customs, they faced a constant struggle to maintain their identities not only as Poles, but as Polish women. In response to the chaos and trauma of total dislocation, issues of loyalty to the Polish nation and notions of "proper" womanhood emerged as foremost concerns. Jolluck contends that Polish females struggled against the loss of identity in a foreign land by trying to impose the coherence of home and community, in the image of the traditional family, on themselves and the collective. Moreover, the reclaiming of the ideal of the Polish woman in the midst of tragedy offered a strategy for survival.

Exile and Identity offers a ground-level view of Polish nationalism and demonstrates that gender is central to conceptions of nationality. Both a harrowing account of cruelty and suffering and a clear analysis of civilian experiences in wartime, Jolluck’s work expands the history of World War II far beyond the military battlefield.

Katherine R. Jolluck is a senior lecturer in the department of history at Stanford University.