Grasping the Pencil: Polish Memoirs of Childhood on the Eastern Front, 1914–1921

This article recovers the voices of civilian survivors of World War I in parts of today’s Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, and Poland. Drawing on a rare cache of retrospective accounts composed in 1930s Poland for memoir-writing competitions, it foregrounds the voices of peasants and poor people in villages and small towns at the front lines, particularly those who survived the war as children and young people. Surveying their narratives of violence, hunger, disease, and displacement, it asks how memoirists made sense of their wartime experience in an autobiographical context, considering the relationship between war, literacy, and knowledge, on the one hand, and trauma, “brutalization,” and resilience on the other. For all its horrors, the memoirs show that war could generate new mobilities, perspectives, and subjectivities; destruction and chaos could break open vistas of a wider world. The article concludes by considering how both nationalist frameworks and geospatial imaginaries have contributed to silencing this history of war from the margins. It argues that civilians’ experience on the Eastern Front should be centered not only in the history of World War I but also in the broader social history of twentieth-century warfare and state violence.