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Series Editor’s Preface

THE GLOBAL AND REGIONAL conflicts and the convulsive social, economic, and technological changes that racked the twentieth century took a huge and gruesome human toll. In addition to the casualties of war and the victims of genocide, the events of the century produced legions of refugees and displaced persons, altering their lives forever.

In The Exile Mission: The Polish Political Diaspora and Polish Americans, 1939–1956, Eastern Connecticut State University historian Anna Jaroszyńska-Kirchmann provides the first full treatment of the compelling story of Polish displaced persons and refugees during and after World War II. Uprooted by the Nazi and Soviet invasions that ravaged their homeland at the outset of the war and by its postwar subjugation as a Soviet satellite, the displaced Poles commenced a journey that had two equally formative parts. In refugee camps in Europe and elsewhere, the displaced Poles first resolved to carry on their country’s struggle against foreign domination. Subsequently, as part of a worldwide postwar Polish political diaspora, the displaced Poles remade the demographics, ideology, and politics of prewar Polish immigrant communities and took up a growing leadership role in the West’s Cold War struggle against Soviet communism.

Jaroszyńska-Kirchmann’s volume complements a growing body of historical work on refugees and asylum seekers and will be of interest to scholars and students of the Cold War period, historians of immigration and ethnicity, policymakers, immigration law specialists, and social service professionals whose practices put them in contact with contemporary immigrants not unlike the author’s subjects. But this book will hold especial salience for Polish displaced persons and their families, who for fifty years have awaited a serious examination of the Polish “DP experience.” Jaroszyńska-Kirchmann has written a book that not only resonates with memory but offers comparative insights relevant to our own times. In the words of one scholar, “It is well documented, objective and properly respectful to various points of view that emerged following the encounter between the DPs and those who helped them find asylum in the USA.”

The Exile Mission: The Polish Political Diaspora and Polish Americans, 1939–1956 is the fourth volume in the Ohio University Press Polish and Polish-American Studies Series. The series revisits the historical and contemporary experience of one of America’s largest European ethnic groups and the history of a European homeland which has played a disproportionately important role in twentieth-century and contemporary world affairs. The series publishes innovative monographs and more general works that investigate under- or unexplored topics or themes or that offer new, critical, revisionist, or comparative perspectives in the area of Polish and Polish-American Studies. Interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary in profile, the series seeks manuscripts on Polish immigration and ethnic communities, the country of origin, and its various peoples in history, anthropology, cultural studies, political economy, current politics, and related fields.

Publication of the Ohio University Press Polish and Polish-American Studies Series marks a milestone in the maturation of the Polish studies field and stands as a fitting tribute to the scholars and organizations whose efforts have brought it to fruition. Supported by a series advisory board of accomplished Polonists and Polish-Americanists, the Polish and Polish-American Studies Series has been made possible through generous financial assistance from the Polish American Historical Association, the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America, the Stanislaus A. Blejwas Endowed Chair in Polish and Polish American Studies at Central Connecticut State University, and through institutional support from Wayne State University and Ohio University Press. To this list of funders, with this volume we are especially pleased to add Madonna University and the Piast Institute, which graciously stepped in to fill the void left when our former funder, St. Mary’s College, ceased operation last year. Our heartfelt thanks go to Sister Rose Marie Kujawa, CSSF, president of Madonna University, which absorbed the St. Mary’s students and programs, and to Dr. Thaddeus Radzilowski, president of the Piast Institute, for their enthusiastic support of this publication endeavor. The series meanwhile has benefited from the warm encouragement of a number of persons, including Gillian Berchowitz, M. B. B. Biskupski, the late Stanislaus A. Blejwas, Thomas Gladsky, Thaddeus Gromada, James S. Pula, and David Sanders. The moral and material support from all of these institutions and individuals is gratefully acknowledged.

John J. Bukowczyk