Tomasz Kosiek

The author of the article tackles the subject of Polish-Ukrainian mixed marriages in Poland. He shows the changes that have taken place concerning the scope of the marital models utilised within the Ukrainian community. He begins his musings looking at the Polish-Ukrainian borderlands in the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries. It comes to light that mixed marriages were at that time a common and accepted phenomenon in small, local communities. The end of openness towards mixed marriages was brought by the "Vistula" Operation, as a result of which historic Ukrainian and Polish-Ukrainian neighbouring communities from south-eastern Poland were destroyed, with the people making them up being resettled in the so-called Recovered Territories. In this new context, Ukrainian communities began to work out new marital models, according to which the aim was to enter into marriages within one's own group. In order to achieve endogamy on the one hand within Ukrainian families, clear pressure began to arise upon the marital choices of the young, on the other hand, the entire community had worked out a series of strategies aimed at helping to achieve the behaviour patterns expected by the Ukrainian group.

Poles and Jews from the Bieszczady and Pogórze Przemyskie in the Biographical Narratives of People Displaced in the Operation Vistula. Research Report

The article focuses on showing the representations of Poles and Jews in bibliographic narratives of people of Ukrainian origin displaced from areas of the Bieszczady and Pogórze Przemyskie within the Operation Vistula. Using the method of oral history, the author conducted several interviews. In each of them there appeared the “others” from the immediate neighbourhood, which are remembered as the participants of shared fun, family members, or the neighbours, with whom the most important holidays were celebrated. The author does not assess whether the remembered images correspond to contemporary reality, which ultimately, due to the war and ethnic cleansing, ceased to exist. He believes, however, that the strong presence of Poles and Jews in the memories of his interlocutors proves that these “others” were an important fragment of the lost world.