Mythologisation of the Lost Homelands in the Accounts of Resettlers from the South-Eastern Borderlands Living in Western Poland as an Element of Biographical Work

This article is concerned with the mythologised images of lost homelands in the memories of forced migrants from the south-eastern Borderlands (Kresy), living in western Poland after World War II. The source material consists of interviews, recorded between 1991 and 2006, with more than a hundred resettlers from eastern provinces of the interwar Second Polish Republic. After World War II, they were transferred from their home towns and villages to post-war Poland in its new borders, to areas that had belonged to Germany until 1945. The ways of mythologising the past and evoking arcadian images of the old homeland belong to the elements of so-called biographical work, relevant both to individual biographies and entire communities of resettlers.