Overcoming the Past: Experience, Memory and the Present

Abstract

Given the background of Action Vistula, the Ukrainians in Poland are confronted not only with the fact of resettlement and adjusting oneself to a new cultural environment but also with the handling of this experience or memory within the present social context. In the Polish context this means that the experienced event of Action Vistula – in other words, the memory of the individuals in Cohort One – is confronted with the wave of historiography that has been allowed officially with the fall of communism in 1989. The oral accounts of those who witnessed the event have been accompanied by a new public discourse within a new institutional system. Thus, while Action Vistula stained the minority’s perception of homeland and belonging, it also became the object of reflection, interpretation and memory. The moment of resettlement and its perception by Cohort One has been discussed in the previous chapter as a disruption of everyday life, as an end of one life and the beginning of another. This chapter, however, stresses the meaning that is ascribed to this event.