The International Refugee Organisation’s Resettlement Policy – A New Approach of the International Community to the Refugee Problem in Europe: A Case Study of DPs and Refugees from Poland

Międzynarodowa Organizacja do spraw Uchodźców (IRO) działała w latach 1947– 1951 jako wyspecjalizowana agencja ONZ. Praca IRO była kontynuacją akcji humanitarnych organizowanych wcześniej na rzecz przesiedleńców (DP, dipisi) i uchodźców przez UNRRA i IGCR. Celem artykułu jest analiza polityki przesiedleńczej IRO jako wyznacznika nowego podejścia społeczności międzynarodowej do postępowania z przesiedleńcami i uchodźcami na przykładzie osób tych kategorii z Polski, którzy stanowili największą grupę narodową objętą opieką IRO w Europie.The International Refugee Organisation operated between 1947 and 1951 as a UN specialised agency. The IRO’s work was a continuation of the humanitarian actions previously organised for displaced persons (DPs) and refugees by UNRRA and the IGCR. This paper aims to analyse the resettlement policy of the IRO as indicative of the international community’s new approach to handling DPs and refugees, on the example of DPs and refugees from Poland, who constituted the largest national group under IRO care in Europe

The care and assistance provided for Polish child refugees in Barcelona in the immediate post-WWII period

This paper examines the care and protection provided for Polish children living in the Polish centre in Barcelona between 1946 and 1956. The majority of these children originated from the Polish Silesia and the Łódź regions, which had been incorporated into the Reich, and most of them had been kidnapped by the Nazis during the War with the aim of Germanizing them. At the end of the confl ict, they were living in Displaced Persons camps, mainly in Austria, where they were found by offi cers of the 2nd Polish Corps. This text provides an analysis of the care and support these Polish children received in Barcelona, both from the Polish Government-in-exile and from the international community. Particular emphasis is placed on the care provided for these children from the International Refugee Organization (IRO). The role of the Spanish government (at that time under the authoritarian rule of Francisco Franco) in helping these children is also discussed. In addition, the 59 charges of the Polish centre in Barcelona who applied for IRO assistance in 1950 are analysed on the basis of documents from the IRO archives deposited in Archives Nationales, in France which have been used for the fi rst time in research on this topic

Activity of the international community in Europe after the Second World War within the scope of the International Refugee Organization as a model of the aid action towards refugees

The International Refugee Organization (IRO) was the first specialized agency created by the United Nations. It operated between 1947 and 1951 and had under its mandate the masses of displaced persons (DPs) and refugees remaining outside of their countries of origin in the immediate post-war context. The purpose of this paper is to describe the main fields of activity of the IRO and to point out those aspects of its action that could be an inspiration for the future activities of the international community towards the resolution of the refugees issue in a changed contemporary context of this problem. The author claims that as the activity of IRO was the suitable and efficient way to solve the DPs and refugees problem at the time of the crisis connected with the massive presence of refugees, it merits a deeper examination as a temporary instrument of the international community also nowadays, during such critical periods

Międzynarodowy projekt badawczy o ewakuacjach we francusko-niemieckiej strefie przygranicznej

The international research project about evacuations in the French-German border regionIn July 2012 the international French-German research project treating about the evacuations in the French-German border region during World War II was started up. The initiative is scheduled for the years 2012–2015 and realized by Université Paris Sorbonne – Paris IV, Universität des Saarlandes, Ruhr-Universität Bochum and Eberhard Karls Universität in Tübingen. The coordinators of the reseach team are: Prof. Olivier Forcade (Paris), Prof. Rainer Hudemann (Saarbrücken), Juniorprof. Fabian Lemmes (Bochum) and Juniorprof. Johannes Großmann (Tübingen). The project has obtained funding from the French Agence nationale de la Recherche and the German Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. The members of the both sides (French and German) research the processes of evacuations of civilian populations by the French Third Republic – from Alsace and Moselle, and by the totalitarian Nazi regime in Germany – from Saarland, Palatinate and Baden. The “management” of refugee populations from these border regions in the areas of their reception (particularly the French departments: Vienne, Haute-Vienne, Dordogne and Charente and the German states: Francony, Hesse, Lower Saxony and Thuringia) is also examined. The role of the NGOs, the International Red Cross and his national committees and of the local churches and religious associations is studied in the comparative aspect. The comparative perspective refers to the research in the French and German cases but also to the larger perspective of the comparison of the evacuations in the western and middle-eastern Europe, especially in German-Polish border regions. The investigations of members of the project team result in one or two post-doctoral works, four PhD dissertations, a few M.A. thesis prepared under the supervision of the coordinators of this research project and in a number of research articles of all the members of project group. Furthermore, two expositions will be organized: in 2014 in Saarbrücken and probably in 2015 in Paris

Poles in the communist resistance movement in France

During the Second World War, the underground Polish organizations in France divided into those which acknowledged the authority of the Polish government-in-exile in London and those of pro-communist orientation. After the fall of France in 1940, the “language-speaking groups” of Polish communists in the Main-d’Œuvre immigrée became active, initially within the occupied France. A critical moment for the communist resistance in France was the German aggression on the Soviet Union in June 1941. In 1943, the French communists’ accession to the Conseil National de la Résistance coincided with the hitherto internationalist poetics being replaced with patriotic slogans also among the Polish communists. In April 1944, the Polish Committee of National Liberation in France was formed. In northern France most of the Polish immigrants identified themselves with the Polish government-in-exile in London. The communist influence was visible among the Polish workers in southern France, and it was the biggest in Paris and the whole pre-war Paris consular district

Analysis of basic terms related to the history of immigration (the case of France)

The aim of this paper is to explain the terminology used in the field of history of immigration and for referring to foreigners, by means of defining the terms, studying the relationship between them and identifying essential factors that differentiate their meanings. The studied terms are: emigration, economic and political emigration, foreigner, émigré, immigrant, foreign worker, refugee, exile, stateless person, asylum seeker, displaced person, repatriation. The analysis refers to the case of France – which, from the historical perspective, was the first European country of immigration and not of emigration - in the interwar and immediate postwar period and to the case of the large Polish immigrant community settled in France since the interwar period. The practice of application of each of the above mentioned terms was inscribed into a logic of the politicization of the issue of the presence of foreigners. Nowadays, the situation at this point seems to be the same