Abstract

In April 1940 hundreds of freight cars carrying thousands of Polish citizens were running off from the recently annexed territory of what is nowadays western Ukraine and Belarus to the territory of the Kazakh SSR. Involuntary passengers of these trains were "class enemies." The territory to which they were being deported to was deemed by the high modernist Stalinist state as “wasted space” that was in desperate need of rationalization because the steppe from an aerial view looked rather empty. So in that sense both the land that was to be peopled and the people that were to people the land both were placed on a rather low tier in both spatial and societal hierarchies.

The people who were deported, however, did not think of themselves as “low-value.” They were usually of higher economic of social standing, educated, and even sometimes were willing colonizers at the eastern “outskirts” of the Second Polish Republic before they become colonizers against their will in Kazakhstan. This category of deportees produced many autobiographical volumes and published ego-documents created at the time of the deportation. Their publications impacted the teleological Polish national historical myth of martyrdom that led to the creation of the Polish independent state.

This narrative is omnipresent in Polish language scholarly literature, the deportees are seen as martyrs going to the Polish Golgotha, the annexed territories of the Second Polish Republic are seen as a paradise lost. This lack of a more nuanced perspective on the deportations also causes accounts of the deportations of Polish citizens to Kazakhstan to portray the land and the people who inhabited it to be reduced to mere orientalist background of this episode in the long history of Polish martyrdom. This makes the view of the steppe and its inhabitants of the Stalinist state and the Polish deportees if not synonymous than at least complimentary. The image of an empty barren land devoid of life can be applied to both imaginaries.

This imagination y will be the topic of this essay. It will look at how the history of the deportation was/is portrayed in Polish historical comic books as it is both a visual and a textual media and how the comic books are influenced by the preexisting narratives about the deportation. The essay will be split into two parts: one describing the historical event and the other looking at the representation.