The first volume compiles documents on wartime losses in Lviv and the surrounding region, based on reports from Soviet commissions investigating war losses during the German occupation from July 1941 to August 1944. The second volume documents losses to Polish forestry during World War II.
"These are materials that will certainly be used in the future to compile what's known as the eastern report", said Bartosz Gondek, the institute's director.
"These source materials don't just contain information about wartime losses on the Soviet front — there's also fairly significant material concerning the German side. We're focusing on the Soviet side, which is the least studied and least known, but we're not forgetting the western aggressor".
The "eastern report" refers to a comprehensive accounting of wartime losses suffered by the Polish state and its citizens in the country's eastern provinces, which became part of the Soviet Union under the Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam conference agreements.
The Lviv volume publishes documents produced by the Extraordinary Commission for Investigating Losses Caused by German-Fascist Occupiers and Their Collaborators, a body staffed by senior Communist Party officials, Red Army officers, lawyers, doctors and other experts and answerable directly to the Soviet government.
The volume's editor, historian Damian Markowski, said the Soviets counted losses in Lviv — which they had occupied since 1939 — as losses to their own state and citizens. Read critically, he said, the documents nonetheless open access to a range of sources, accounts and photographs covering losses in Lviv and surrounding counties, the destruction of Lviv's and eastern Galicia's Jewish population, and the structure of German occupation in the area. Markowski added that the documents show the Soviets attempted to attribute their own crimes to the Germans, including the killing of prisoners during the evacuation of summer 1941.
The forestry volume, edited by Iwona Bonisławska and Daniel Czerwiński, examines what Bonisławska described as an often-overlooked but significant dimension of Poland's wartime losses.
"Forests were a source of raw materials, an element of state security, support for industry, railways, construction and the military, and at the same time part of the natural environment and a space for social life", she said.
Before the war, Poland was among Europe's most forested countries, with 8.49 million hectares of forest in 1937 — nearly 22% of its territory — concentrated mostly in the eastern and southeastern provinces of Polesie and Stanisławów.
Poland's forests today cover 9.3 million hectares, or 29.6% of the country's area, but Bonisławska said the postwar territorial shift cost Poland its most valuable timberlands. Forests in the lost eastern territories yielded an average of 15-20% premium-grade pine suitable for fine carpentry, she said, while forests in the so-called Recovered Territories in the west yielded just 1-2%, except in East Prussia, where the figure reached about 10%.
"If we had to point to one central idea of this volume, we would say that Poland's forests were both a casualty of the war and a silent witness to the scale of losses suffered by the Polish state", Bonisławska said. "Poland lost a resource that couldn't be rebuilt in a few years or by a single administrative decision. Forests regrow over generations".
Two additional volumes in the "War Losses" series are expected to be published later this year.
(jh)
Source: PAP