The environmental dimension of post-war migrations to the “Recovered Territories”.

Migrations occurring after World War II in the territories of pre-war Poland (and existing within the current borders) were undoubtedly a significant environmental challenge. In the memories of migrants, the natural aspects of migration occupied an important, and sometimes even central, place. The aim of my presentation is to present how the relations of settlers in the “Recovered Territories” of post-war Poland were shaped with individual elements of nature preserved in the settlers’ memories. In their memories, they emphasized the importance of many elements of nature, which make up the environmental dimension of the migration experience. The most important of these are regret and fear of breaking the emotional bond with the lost natural environment; the natural environment perceived as a source of trauma – resulting from observing nature destroyed by war; the problem of settling in a new natural space associated with an emotional sense of alienation, reinforced by the memory of being uprooted from previously inhabited places; assigning new functions to encountered elements of nature and the mutual adaptation of various elements of nature and people. Analyzing settlers’ memories allows us to recreate the panorama of human-non-human relationships and discovers often surprising and unusual levels of these relationships.

Małgorzata Praczyk, PhD, UAM professor, historian, works at the Faculty of History of Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. She is the author of the book Environmental Memory in the Memories of Settlers in the “Recovered Territories” (Poznań 2018), which received an award for the best monograph on the issue of memory, and the monograph The Matter of a Monument. A Comparative Study on the Example of Monuments in Poznań and Strasbourg in the 19th and 20th Centuries (Poznań 2015), also published in English translation under the title Reading Monuments. A Comparative Study of Monuments in Poznań and Strasbourg from the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Berlin 2020). She is also the editor and co-editor of several books, including: Monuments in the Anthropocene (Poznań 2017) or Education – Migration. Intercultural Education in the Context of the Migration Crisis from the Perspective of the V4 Countries, with Emilia Kledzik (Poznań 2016). His research interests include environmental history, memory studies and postcolonial issues. He is a member of the board of the European Society for Environmental History.