Post-conflict retribution and functioning of post-conflict communities are among the most relevant issues in the current world. The aim of this project was to contribute in a timely manner to fill a gap in research on formation of national identities of refugees and migrant communities, their memories of conflict and its impact on ties to their former homelands. This was achieved this by looking at the cross-border aspect of individual search for retribution for crimes committed during the Second World War in East-Central Europe, focusing specifically on the immediate post-war response of Jewish pre-war Polish citizens to wartime norm-violating behaviours. In the project I claim that the notion of attempting to carry out both retribution and physical revenge was a key element of the emotional landscape of the immediate postwar world and included also Holocaust survivors.As Polish Jews left Poland and settled abroad, it thus crossed the traditional historiographical post-war divide between “West” and “East”, showing how people moved between the two zones just before the Iron Curtain came down, how they dealt with their memories and how they would go on to build what we refer to, following the conceptual framework developed by Barbara Rosenwein, as emotional communities defined by social affiliation and shared memories. As such, this project contributed both to writing an integrative, multi-ethnic history of post-war Poland and to the global history of rebuilding of shattered society post-conflict.
The Overview Research Objective of the project was to understand the transnational qualities of post-war history of pre-war Jewish citizens of Poland and the formation of migrant communities using their search for justice and revenge as a prism. Through this, I looked at formation of national identities of refugees, their memories of conflict and its impact on ties to their former homelands. In order to reach this goal, I established the following objectives:
To examine affective forecasting and plans for revenge during the war (1939-1945);
To study the individual search for justice in the immediate post-war years (1945-1950) in three layers, specifically: regional in Poland, in transit, and after migration;
To use data from post-war trials to analyse social and spatial networks among migrant community.
This was the first research project to discuss in depth how in the immediate post-war years, the search for justice was linked to the trans-territorial quality of the post-war Polish Jewish community. It thus filled an important gap in scholarship on both transnational and transitional justice, developing a new methodology integrating legal history and history of emotions with digital humanities into research on the micro level of community building and the history of migration.
