and Russia in the second part of the nineteenth century. As a result of the political and economic changes in Poland at that time, “members of the ‘déclassé’ fraction of the landed nobility, seeking to maintain in an urban environment their traditional style of life, had to separate themselves from the ‘bourgeois’ middle class.”21 They were united in sharing a specific set of values, beliefs, moral attitudes, and political behaviors formulated by a group of intellectual leaders. Among the most significant values and goals of the intelligentsia were humanistic education and creative activity. Moreover, the members of this “charismatic stratum” saw their fundamental social role in the leadership of the nation “to its destiny.” Accepting the call to serve the nation as their credo, members of intelligentsia adopted a number of national causes, including the struggle for independence and social work for the benefit of the lower classes.22 By the end of the interwar period, the intelligentsia included urban professionals, such as doctors, lawyers, and government employees, as well as teachers, scholars, intellectuals, writers, journalists, artists, and the higher ranks of the military. They continued their traditional political and cultural leadership, replete with strong patriotic and nationalistic accents.
The changes of the interwar period influenced both those Poles who were born during the partition but then experienced twenty years of freedom, and the younger generation that was fortunate enough to grow up in an independent Poland. They witnessed the social, economic, and spiritual rebirth of the nation and participated in its growth, however uneasy and troubled it was at times. For decades afterward, émigrés were inspired by their memories of Polish modernization and its accompanying spirit of patriotism, optimism, and unrealized potential.
The war that began on the morning of September 1, 1939, ended this brief period of Polish independence. Wartime brought renewed suffering and loss. The country was again divided between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, and Polish citizens everywhere faced unparalleled terror. Poles suffered under the extermination policies of the German oppressor, including prisons, concentration camps, prisoner-of-war camps, slave labor, and indiscriminate killing. The Polish nation responded with a widespread resistance movement that culminated in the Warsaw uprising in 1944. In the Soviet occupation zone, Polish citizens, deprived of any legal protection, were harassed, imprisoned, and deported into brutal labor camps in Siberia. The population movements that took place in the Polish territories were unprecedented. In addition to prisoners, slave laborers, and deportees, there were civilians who crossed the Polish borders in search of safety. Polish armed forces formed in the West and later in the Middle East. All in all, about 6 million Poles remained outside Polish borders in 1945. Wherever the polskie drogi (Polish roads) led the refugees, they established communities and tried to repair the torn fabric of their lives. They also planned for the future, keeping Polish culture alive and taking care of the education of their children.
The war became a turning point for an entire generation. The Polish post-war diaspora had already become a reality during the war. Although emigrants did not commonly invoke the term diaspora, other Polish phrases in common use expressed a similar meaning.23 Emigracja wojenna, emigracja walcząca, or emigracja niezłomna denoted wartime emigration, characterized by a fighting and indomitable spirit. The emigrants embraced notions of an organized transnational community deriving from a common historical experience and of the exile mission that guided and motivated this community.24
Polish sacrifice and contribution to the Allied war effort did not secure an independent Polish state after the war. In 1945, at the international conference at Yalta, the West agreed to abandon Poland to the Soviet sphere of influence. Hundreds of thousands of Polish veterans, refugees, deportees, and prisoners faced a difficult choice: should they return to the communist-dominated homeland or embrace exile? Most did return, but many others waited in the refugee camps, displaced persons (DP) camps, or in exile communities established during the war. International efforts slowly got under way to permanently resettle a million so-called unrepatriables from various nations. About four hundred thousand Poles were resettled in four dozen nations of the world, although some displaced Poles faced hardship and despair in the DP camps for as long as nine years. During that time Poles established communities that aided everyday survival in many ways, and, more importantly, they used the DP period to install the framework of the postwar Polish diaspora and adopted the exile mission to guide them.
After the international resettlement action had dispersed the refugees into many countries on many continents, they either joined older existing Polish communities, for example, in the United States, France, Austria, and Argentina, or built their own communities nearly from scratch, as in Australia and Great Britain. Although separated by space and borders, Polish refugees still felt a strong bond to the entire postwar diaspora. They eagerly participated in debates about international events, inspired by press reports and personal letters and contacts. Veterans associations, scouting groups, and other organizations with membership in different countries cemented ties developed during and after the war. The Polish government in exile in London provided the most important political point of gravity by claiming to represent the only legal continuation of prewar authority.
Immigration and Naturalization Service statistics indicate that about fifteen thousand Polish quota immigrants were allowed into the United States during World War II (1939–45). About seventeen thousand more came within the next three years. As a result of the enactment of the 1948 Displaced Persons Act and its 1950 amendments, close to one hundred forty thousand displaced persons born in Poland, including Polish veterans from Great Britain, arrived in the United States between 1948 and 1952. All in all, between 1940 and 1953, 178,680 quota immigrants born in Poland arrived in the United States.25 Most of the statistics for this period (including those of the Displaced Persons Commission, or DPC, a federal body responsible for the resettlement of DPs in the United States) classified immigrants on the basis of their place of birth or last residence. Therefore, the population of immigrants born in Poland usually included Ukrainians and Polish Jews as well as ethnic Poles. According to some estimates, nearly forty thousand of the new arrivals were Polish Jews;26 it is unclear how many were Ukrainians.27 The ethnic Polish Christians (predominantly Roman Catholics) who are the focus of this study joined roughly 6 million Polish Americans—first-generation immigrants and their offspring born in the United States—according to the 1940 census.28
The group of Poles who immigrated to the United States between 1939 and 1945 included an exceptionally high number of intellectuals, artists, politicians, and people representing the Polish prewar professional middle class, or inteligencja. Most often they settled in large urban areas, especially in New York and Chicago, forming active émigré communities for the duration of the war. Polish refugees who immigrated after 1945 were usually part of a nuclear family unit, with Polish spouses and children born (usually) outside of Poland. Polish organizations in displaced persons camps in Germany and Austria, from which most of the refugees to the United States emigrated, estimated that members of the inteligencja made up only 5 to 10 percent of the Polish DP population. Farmers comprised some 70 percent of the group, and the remainder was divided between skilled and unskilled workers. A sociological study conducted in 1971 described these emigrants as rather young (the average age was about twenty-four to thirty-five years) and fairly well educated, the majority having at least some high school and close to one-third having a university degree. Some 92 percent claimed Roman Catholicism as their religion, and a majority indicated political reasons for their emigration.29
Polish exiles arriving in the United States during and immediately after the war joined a generation of Polish Americans who recently had gone through significant changes. In the 1930s they had come to accept a double identity, one both Polish and American. The process is best illustrated by the relationship between American Polonia and the World Union of Poles from Abroad (Światowy Związek Polaków z Zagranicy, or Światpol). Światpol was an international organization formed in Poland with the aim to unite and coordinate the activities of Polish communities abroad in the interest of Poland and its government. In 1934 Światpol organized a congress in Warsaw attended by representatives of Polonia from all over the world. To the dismay of the organizers, the American delegation to the congress,
