Chapter 8 UNRRA and Animal Politics in Poland
Polish media covered news of the arriving general UNRRA cargo and the UNRRA animals with considerable interest. The frequently used term “Auntie UNRRA” (Ciocia or Cioteczka UNRRA) reflected gratitude and affection across the political spectrum.1 There were plenty of reasons for people to shout, “Hip, Hip, U(N)RRA” (“urra” sounds like “hooray” in English or hura in Polish).2 Charles Drury estimated that Auntie UNRRA supplied the urban population with 1,100 of the 1,500 calories that they consumed daily in the immediate postwar period. It was UNRRA dairy cattle that provided Poland with significant volumes of milk, and it was UNRRA horses that facilitated the cultivation of agricultural fields.3 This was real value under the circumstances.
The Communist-dominated government likewise celebrated the American-dominated UNRRA. It was UNRRA aid, after all, that permitted people’s basic needs to be met, and this in turn contributed to a public perception of the new regime as competent, responsive, and engaged. Even The Republic (Rzeczpospolita), a Communist daily, contributed initially to creating a positive feeling for UNRRA and its American backers when it itemized the enormous volume of aid that flowed into Poland.4 Very early on in the life of the UNRRA program, in November 1945, the Communist leader Bolesław Bierut delivered an enthusiastic speech praising UNRRA’s aid efforts in Poland and affirmed that the aid would “forever remain in the grateful memory of the Polish nation.”5 When UNRRA Director La Guardia visited Poland less than a year later, in August 1946, he met with Bierut in Warsaw and accepted the Order of Polonia Restituta (Order Odrodzenia Polski).6 Whether feelings of gratitude and affection were genuine or uncomplicated does not diminish the impact of the aid.
Forward Lower Silesia (Naprzód Dolnośląski), the daily of the Polish Socialist Party in southwestern Poland, also celebrated UNRRA’s contributions and its concrete positive impact on Polish citizens’ lives: “Even a baby in a cradle, sucking milk that comes from an UNRRA can, knows that UNRRA exists in the world. Older children think that UNRRA is a pseudonym of Saint Nicholas, and still others think it’s an angel revealed.”7
Similar messages were delivered by the Polish Military Film Production Agency (Wytwórnia Filmowa Wojska Polskiego). Some of the agency’s short films featured the goods and the animals that UNRRA delivered to Poland. In one 1946 film, the narrator praises Auntie UNRRA for her animal gifts: “More than tinned food and powdered eggs,” the narrator tells viewers, Auntie UNRRA also sends “real, living—and even very alive—horses.” These “noble” four-legged animals are big and fast and healthy-looking, and, we learn, some of them even resemble mustangs, the famed wild horses of the American west. The viewer watches as dozens of such horses gallop away and show off their speed and physical fitness—and, by extension, the prosperity and goodwill of America.8 The symbolism is unmistakable: UNRRA has ridden to Poland’s rescue.
Optimism and gratefulness are further reflected in another state-produced short film, also from 1946. We see peasants working their new fields in the Recovered Territories, the region that received more horses from UNRRA than did any other part of Poland. The voice-over reminds us that the future prosperity of Poland depends on farmers’ labor; farmers ensure that every Pole will have bread in the coming year. The camera pans to the farmer husband who is taking a break from his work while he holds his baby; the two share a glass of milk that had just been handed to him by his farmer wife.9 On Polish farms (and not just Polish ones) it was typically the responsibility of women and girls to care for the family cow(s)—another female of its species—and to ensure that there was enough milk for everyone. Women also used surplus milk to make assorted dairy products that the family would eat or that could be sold for a profit on the open market.10
Private market sales of milk and dairy products were especially important during a period of postwar rationing when the agricultural population (estimated to be about eleven million people out of a total population of twenty-four million) did not qualify for ration cards but was instead supposed to provide for itself while also delivering a quota of milk plus grains, meats, and eggs to the state for provision to other (urban) population groups.11 In the scenario described above, the farmer wife smiles as she watches her husband and baby share the nutritious glass of milk. This moment largely reflects her efforts as well as those of her daughter, who moments earlier was shown carrying the milk, food, and the baby to her parents working in the field. In the last scene, we see a foal suckling milk from its mother.12 Here milk represents maternal nourishment for all species (human and nonhuman), postwar recovery, and stability. There is enough milk, the film tells us, for every living being, and all animals will be nourished by it.
In important ways the film reflects some older patterns in Polish literature that accentuate cows’ high status in peasant households and use cows as symbols of hope for a more prosperous future. The film also reflects what scholar Sabina Brzozowska, in an analysis of Władysław Reymont’s turn-of-the-century novel The Peasants (Chłopi), has called an “interspecies parallel” between cows and women.13 In The Peasants it is the presence of a cow that consoles the character Veronka in the immediate aftermath of a violent storm that has destroyed her cottage. As the local priest tells Veronka, the Lord God spared her life and the lives of her children, and he also left her a pregnant cow: “A good milker, no doubt: loins as straight as a beam.” Veronka understands that the family’s fate rests with the cow as life giver and provider (żywicielka) and that it is her job to care for the animal: “We owe our lives to her alone.”14 In another section of The Peasants, Hanka, overwhelmed by poverty and by her husband’s refusal to work, runs off to the barn to weep. In a display of empathy and affection, Krasula the cow starts to lick Hanka’s head and shoulders. The cow’s attempts to offer comfort only increase Hanka’s lamentations, however. Hanka knows that her husband, Antek, has arranged to sell Krasula for slaughter. “Was it for this, Krasula, that I fed you so well, and cared for all your wants,” Hanka asks as the two Jewish buyers are about to begin their negotiations for the animal. Both Krasula and Hanka, two females of their respective species, are powerless to stop fate.15 The scene in which Reymont describes the Jewish men taking possession of Krasula, recently cleaned and milked by Hanka, reflects the woman’s and the animal’s resignation. Krasula “made resistance,” pulled against the rope that held her, and “burst into long plaintive lowing,” but to no avail. For her part, Hanka is “seized with an unbearable pang,” and, like her children, she too “burst out crying, unable to do more than watch.”16 Hanka’s grief is directed at the animal’s destiny no less than the family’s: without Krasula, Hanka knows, “there would be nothing for them to eat.”17 And yet even as she is led to the slaughterhouse, Krasula fulfills her role as provider; the money from her sale will keep the family going for at least a short while. And hope remains, too, in the single remaining heifer; with this young female animal on the verge of calving comes the promise of a little milk and thus a better tomorrow.18 So valued were cattle in peasant households that families even shared with this species the traditional Christmas Eve wafer (opłatek). Reymont writes in another scene, “Yagna broke an altar-bread into five pieces, made the sign of the cross over each cow between her horns, and laid the thin bit of wafer upon her broad tongue.”19 Horses were not included in this ritual because they were not present in the manger at the birth of Jesus.20
Both the UNRRA livestock program and the Heifer Project understood cows similarly, as the most important life providers, both literally and symbolically. For the purposes of the government’s short propaganda films, it did not matter that in reality some of the UNRRA animals were sick, weak, or ill-suited to Polish farmers’ immediate requirements. It also did not matter that milk production in Poland continued to lag and could not meet national needs.21 UNRRA estimated that Poland’s urban milk deficit for 1946/47 was still significant at 160 million liters; large numbers of additional dairy cattle were needed to make up the shortfall.22 Nevertheless, it was in the government’s best interest, especially while UNRRA was at the height of its activity, to celebrate both what UNRRA was able to provide (even if it was insufficient) and what Poles were able to accomplish with these infusions of aid in such a short time (like rebuilding the national dairy industry).
Not surprisingly, in its own advertising UNRRA also reflected optimism and positivity about the effects its aid program were having. UNRRA managed the image it projected of itself, both at home and in its target countries, very carefully. Part and parcel of this image-making was constructing a visual narrative that provided evidence of how useful its work was. By featuring recently brutalized people now safe, well fed, productive, and perhaps even happy, UNRRA celebrated the allied nations that were working cooperatively to achieve desired results. The “UNRRA angle,” as it was called, showed the successful delivery of aid marked with the letters U-N-R-R-A from a benevolent America to grateful recipients while it also sparked a visceral emotional reaction to suffering and, especially, to suffering relieved.23
UNRRA photographer John Vachon was expert in showing the UNRRA angle.24 Vachon was in Poland, as we have seen, to produce visual documentation of UNRRA’s successes, and arguably his best-known work from the UNRRA period shows the three children on the dock in Gdańsk drinking milk from a freshly milked cow.25 The children’s faces are mostly obscured by the large drinking cups, and this is, in a sense, precisely the point: the aid—the solution to the problem of postwar hunger—is the focus here and not the hunger itself. This is the UNRRA angle. This style of messaging was arguably more modern and optimistic than showing (or reading about) “the hungry millions,” the desperate and the downtrodden, and the daunting task that confronted the United Nations.26 In a related photograph (see fig. 13), also by Vachon, we see three other young children lined up beside a woman milking a cow outside a barn. One child is drinking her portion of milk while another one holds her mug off to the side, and the third, the youngest, waits. Again, it is the cow and her milk—the solutions to postwar hunger—that animate this photograph, create the UNRRA angle, and bring hopefulness to the scene.
Figure 13. Milking a recently arrived UNRRA cow on a farm near Gdańsk, May 1946. UN photo by John Vachon. UNRRA 4652, from the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration Collection, United Nations Archives.
“The Administration of Unfair Distribution of American Goods”
The success of the UNRRA angle was ultimately short-lived, however. In America it was the perception that UNRRA aid was inadvertently benefiting the Soviet Union and the Communists during emerging Cold War tensions that undermined public faith in the organization. In Poland it was frustration with inadequate quantities of aid and a feeling that Poland ought to be given even more considering what it had been through. Not everyone who required a horse or a cow—arguably the most high-profile and coveted “relief items” for rural people—was lucky enough to get one through UNRRA, as need far outstripped supply.27 Criticisms of UNRRA from Poles themselves also had a lot to do with the Communists’ messy and sometimes unfair distribution practices.
Complaints about UNRRA aid distribution came from would-be recipients—the peasants who needed the animals to farm and survive—but also from bureaucrats at various levels. There was a range of criticisms. Some said that distribution methods were quite simply corrupt and that people who had the right connections (but perhaps not the most critical need) were first in line for relief animals. Others said that distribution was just badly organized and that the rules about who qualified for UNRRA aid were unclear and confusing and were too easily misinterpreted as information made its way down to local levels from the Ministry of Agriculture. There were grievances that certain regions hardly received any animals at all, despite evidence that showed need, while others received what looked like more than their fair share. Some regions resented that their special circumstances were not considered seriously. Farmers in Olsztyn, in the eastern Recovered Territories, complained, for example, that because of a cooler climate and a growing season that was a month shorter than in western and central Poland, their work was generally harder. The low horse (and tractor) numbers in this part of the country complicated agricultural production further still. Regional representatives felt Olsztyn ought to have had priority over areas where physical and climactic conditions were more hospitable for growing, and yet these arguments tended to fall on deaf ears.28
Others grumbled about broken promises or sloppy accounting. Agreements to send a specific number of UNRRA animals to a particular region, some critics said, had sometimes gone unfulfilled and unexplained. Others pointed to a shortfall in the number of animals delivered. The numbers recorded as having been sent did not always match the numbers received, suggesting either that the counts were wrong to begin with or that animals had been stolen or had died along the way. In any event not everyone who was expecting an animal in fact got one.
Individuals sometimes also felt personally aggrieved about how UNRRA aid distribution was handled. Some believed that their own individual case for an animal was simply stronger than their neighbor’s, that they could do more with the resources available, or that they were more deserving. One farmer from Sieradz county in the province of Łódź was incensed that “an ethnic German” had received an UNRRA animal ahead of some local ethnic Poles.29 The Lemko population in southeast Poland also complained that they were being routinely passed over for UNRRA aid of all kinds, and not just animal aid. The Ministry of Agriculture even had to defend itself to UNRRA directly in late 1946 to dispel these specific accusations, as discrimination on the basis of racial, ethnic, or religious identity in aid distribution contravened UNRRA’s rules.30
Moreover, poor communication led to misunderstandings and frustration on the part of various parties over who exactly made decisions about animal distribution and how. The Provincial Land Office in Warsaw, for example, was annoyed that farmers were showing up at its offices asking to be given a horse. The bureaucrats needed to explain that decisions about distribution of UNRRA animals were not made at the Provincial Land Office and that anyone interested in getting an animal needed to follow established procedures and had to apply formally through the Ministry of Agriculture. The encounters were both time-consuming and a waste of office resources—as well as farmers’ energy, time, and money.31
One damning article in The People’s Daily (Dziennik Ludowy) from August 1946 refers bluntly and ironically to the “secret” rules of horse and cattle distribution that left citizens thoroughly confused about how to get an animal. The author charged that personal relationships with the right people were more important than the completion of the proper forms and a rational assessment of needs. Competition for animals was fierce, and farmers tried all kinds of strategies to make sure their application was successful.32 Some farmers admitted that it was possible to bribe the right person (including state officials and railway workers) and thereby to bypass the established rules altogether.33 One settler to Szczecin province named Mieczysław Kaczmarek described being able to buy a horse “for two liters of spiritus.”34 This kind of black-market trading in UNRRA animals had many implications, one of which was that it led to obvious discrepancies between the number of animals promised to a region and the number received. It threw off statistics and made accurate reporting challenging. Arguably, too, it hurt UNRRA’s reputation while it also raised questions about the trustworthiness of the Polish government.35
Staff at various government offices retorted that they, too, were left in the dark about essential elements of the livestock program. The district or local levels said that the information they received from the provincial authorities about when a livestock-carrying ship was due to arrive was unreliable, meaning that the locals sent to pick up the animals could wait days or even more at the ports for the incoming ships.36 This was, again, a waste of time, and an expensive one at that. If ships missed their advertised arrival date by quite a bit, the pickup person or crew had to go home empty-handed.37 This happened despite procedures that were meant to guard against such outcomes. M. E. Hays, the chief of UNRRA’s Agricultural Division in Poland, regularly communicated with the chief of the Foreign Section in Poland’s Ministry of Agriculture and provided lists of what type and number of animals were due to sail on specific ships and dates. But as we know, there were many factors that could delay departure and arrival times. Whenever necessary UNRRA purportedly updated the Polish Ministry of Agriculture by telegram to revise schedules, but this information was difficult to deliver to all relevant parties in a timely fashion. Moreover, an unpredictable number of animals, as we have also seen, died during the sailings or just after, and many others had to be placed immediately in a veterinary hospital before they could be considered for placement. Animals died at the veterinary clinics too. All of this necessitated constant last-minute revisions to distribution plans.38
At other times information about an arriving shipload of animals came at the very last minute, leaving districts with too little time to make the trip to the ports along inadequate transport networks.39 Given the poor state of the roads and of infrastructure generally, it was no small accomplishment for both human and nonhuman animals to move around the country. Long periods of transport at this end of the journey were stressful for the animals, and, given that the waiting often happened in crowded conditions, the animals’ chances of getting sick became greater with each passing day; illnesses spread easily. The waiting meant, too, that births sometimes happened unattended aboard in-country train wagons; the newborns did not often survive, and sometimes the mother died as well.40 This was yet another factor that led numbers to change at the eleventh hour and that had a cascading effect on distribution plans right down to the local level. Sometimes allocations from one shipment needed to be adjusted to make up for shortfalls in a previous one as well, but this only led to new shortfalls in other places.41
One strategy to deal with the unpredictability and chaos was developed at the local level: districts sent out what were called “wild teams” to the piers with nothing more than hope and a vague plan to try to swoop up as many animals as possible when a ship finally arrived, using whatever means possible. Sometimes, too, district officials in the Recovered Territories, tired of feeling “molested by settlers” who had shown up at their offices looking for animals, issued special certificates that bypassed the established application procedures and seemingly allowed individuals to make all the arrangements to buy an animal right there at the ports. When it became clear at the ports that the district authorities had promised farmers too much and that these special certificates would likely not work as hoped, the disappointed would-be buyers returned home full of criticism of UNRRA and various levels of the Polish government.42 The growing cynicism about the nature of distribution methods was reflected in a manipulation of the initially sympathetic term “Auntie UNRRA.” Instead of recalling a kindly older woman that delivered presents to her favorite young nieces and nephews, the letters U-N-R-R-A came to stand for “the Administration of Unfair Distribution of American Goods (“Urząd Niesprawiedliwego Rozdzielania Rzeczy Amerykańskich”).43
Not surprisingly, the Polish government initially claimed that its handling of UNRRA animals was smooth and that all of the livestock was being dispersed fairly and efficiently, with only minor irregularities that, given the circumstances, had to be expected. Like UNRRA itself when it was faced with criticism, the Polish government argued that certain issues were simply beyond their control and had to do with the inescapable challenge of moving thousands of live animals (and millions of pounds of food, clothing, and other essential items) across an ocean as quickly as possible and then distributing everything just as quickly.44 Though there were specific cases of mismanagement, both UNRRA and the Polish government agreed that these were isolated instances rather than evidence of systemic problems.45
It is quite likely that the Polish government wanted in fact to eliminate unauthorized animal deliveries and rogue decision-making related to humanitarian aid as a way of exercising its own control not just over incoming shipments but, ultimately, over society. There was perhaps also some political advantage that could be wrested from rumors of theft, corruption, bribery, and mismanagement; the rumors, that is, provided an excuse for the authorities to monitor and silence people under the guise of taking decisive action against fraud and incompetence. And that is exactly what the government did.
From the start, a variety of bodies ostensibly protected UNRRA goods that entered Poland. Naval patrols and armed military troops worked in the port areas, and then in March 1946 the Polish government formed the UNRRA Guard (Straż UNRRA).46 The guard consisted of hundreds of functionaries operating under the direction of the Ministry of Shipping and Foreign Trade (Ministerstwo Żeglugi i Handlu Zagranicznego). Its members were tasked with preventing theft in the port areas and then with ensuring that the incoming goods made it from the ports to their final destinations, wherever those may have been.47 It is not clear if the guard ever accompanied the animals—who were in the hands of private transport companies as soon as they landed—but livestock-related goods (like feed, hay, and agricultural tools) were part of the general UNRRA shipments that were protected by the guard. At any rate, because of their size, will, and ability to vocalize, animals were obviously more difficult to steal and conceal than, say, the inanimate contents of a crate. But the rewards associated with stealing animals were that much greater too. There were even reports of guards themselves taking the cargo they were employed to protect.48 The Communist Security Police (Urząd Bezpieczeństwa) was rumored to be stealing UNRRA aid as well, even though it too had a responsibility to protect public property and state interests.49 Corruption, plus the fact that lines of authority and responsibility overlapped or were unclear, made the overall goal of protection and theft prevention complicated and difficult.50
In November 1946, in anticipation of the fully Communist post-UNRRA era, the Polish government created a new body, the Maritime Guard (Straż Morska), to further extend its ability to monitor incoming UNRRA aid, other aid shipments, and, generally, deliveries of other kinds of goods too. Operating until the end of 1947, this new guard was given greater authority to find and fight what it called corruption and theft.51 The guard was answerable to the Special Commission to Combat Fraud and Harm (Komisja Specjalna do Walki z Nadużyciami i Szkodnictwem). This well-known commission had been created in 1945 to target instances of corruption, fraud, looting, and supposed economic sabotage against the state. In reality the commission, which existed until the 1950s, was part of the repressive Communist security and judicial framework that was being developed in postwar Poland.52
The Special Commission prosecuted cases of allegedly illegal UNRRA livestock placements, favoritism, bribery, and other kinds of corruption. It reported finding eighty-five cases of UNRRA aid fraud in 1946 and twenty-nine in 1947 that, in its estimation, justified the most serious penalty of forced labor. These numbers account for approximately 6 percent of the total number of cases that went before the commission in 1946 and in which forced labor was the penalty, and just under 1 percent of the total number of forced-labor sentences handed out by the commission in 1947. The other major offenses with forced-labor sentences fell under the vague categories of “creating economic damage,” speculation, and administrative crimes.53
The most common UNRRA-related offenses that the commission investigated were related to requests for bribes. According to the commission, horse handlers sometimes expected to be paid under the table before they agreed to distribute the animals that were in their care. In one typical case presented by the commission, Wacław Karczewski took an illegal payment of 4,000 złoty for his “help” in obtaining the best animal for a farmer. Accused persons like Karczewski defended themselves by saying that “everyone” did the same thing and that it was common knowledge that without the extra payments at this last stage in the process taking possession of an animal was extremely difficult. Farmers often calculated that it made sense just to pay the bribes without fuss, get their animals quickly, and be on their way. The Special Commission to Combat Fraud and Harm showed little sympathy for Karczewski, and he was sentenced to two years of forced labor for his actions; his offense was misusing UNRRA goods and therefore harming the state.54
In other cases, the commission prosecuted people for giving false testimony on their applications about the amount of land they possessed or for misrepresenting their needs and their potential to contribute to the nation’s agricultural economy. Upon investigation, the recipients were found not to have any land at all, or to already have too many horses for the size of farm that they possessed. The commission also found that some farmers promptly sold off their animals shortly after receiving them in an effort to earn a little profit. Alternatively, farmers gave away their UNRRA animal to a family member who already had animals and therefore would have been ineligible for an additional one under the normal rules.55 Sometimes the men who were in charge of the convoys that brought the animals to their destinations swapped out some of the best animals for sick or weak horses and delivered those instead. They then sold the healthier animals for personal profit.56 Branding UNRRA animals at the piers had been intended in part to guard against this kind of animal switching, but of course this was no guarantee.57
The commission also leveled corruption charges against bureaucrats who they said were at fault for not monitoring UNRRA aid distribution adequately and for allowing all sorts of irregularities to happen. In one case it was an employee at the Inspection Bureau of the Ministry of Agriculture that was held to task for not properly collecting payments for the animals.58 In another case Anatol Dobrowolski, a Polish Ministry of Agriculture liaison for UNRRA affairs at the ports of Gdańsk, Gdynia, and Szczecin, was condemned for “blanket incompetence” and “a lack of supervision” that resulted in sloppy recordkeeping. Charges of financial mismanagement were useful to the Communists and were employed regularly. Dobrowolski was held accountable for the financial losses that resulted, apparently, from his lack of vigilance and for his inability to regulate distribution better. This, the commission documents state, was ultimately a waste of valuable animal resources, and it meant that regions did not get the animals they had been promised by the ministry (or that they got them much later than anticipated). This jeopardized agricultural renewal, and, ultimately, it slowed down the work of building the new Poland. Even in 1948, many months after UNRRA had quit Poland, some provinces still could not say with certainly how many animals they had received.59
The purpose here is not to trace the veracity of each detail in these briefly noted cases pursued by the Special Commission to Combat Fraud and Harm. Instead, the intention is to show that the Polish Communists used rumors and evidence of corruption and fraud to their advantage. Blaming unethical railway workers and livestock handlers as well as incompetent administrators and greedy farmers for chaotic aid distribution preserved the government’s rhetorical commitment to protecting principles of fairness and the good of the collective. It also absolved the government of any overall responsibility for mismanaging the aid program to begin with.
Moreover, distribution-related fraud subtly sullied both the aid and its American donors despite broad agreement on the objective value of the aid. UNRRA’s gifts were complicated, to say the least, and even if Auntie UNRRA was not the one making choices about who got what and when, her very presence in Poland could be disruptive as well as helpful; the perception of unfairness, inequality, and a rigged system stuck to her. At the extreme, having an UNRRA animal (or being part of the system that determined to whom the animals would be distributed) could ruin lives with political charges and forced labor. For some regular Polish farmers, the only free cheese was indeed in the American trap.
Through the commission’s investigations, the Communists effectively flexed their power. This power had grown all the more secure and complete after the January 1947 elections in which the victory of the Communist-left Democratic Bloc (Blok Demokratyczny) had been arranged through corruption and intimidation. UNRRA-related investigations were yet another way for the Communists to neutralize what they perceived to be internal enemies and to signal to the rest of the population that the state was watching all animals (human and nonhuman) and monitoring their every action—albeit for the collective good.
Communist Animal Welfare and the New Humanitarianism
The discourse about UNRRA animal aid, and UNRRA aid generally, evolved along with the emerging political situation in revealing ways. We have seen that in the beginning Poles—the people and the government—celebrated the UNRRA animals. And if and when they remarked on the poor health of some of them, this was not intended to impugn the UNRRA program as a whole or the Americans specifically. Like UNRRA, Poles accepted that animals’ poor health reflected long periods of immobilization and crowded conditions on the ships, stale air, and drafts.60 These were all unavoidable factors. Quite simply, animals bore the physical costs of the world’s greatest and fastest humanitarian relief effort that followed on the heels of a disastrous war. This was just the way it was.
As we move closer to 1947, however, by which time the Communists were more confident in their control, attitudes toward the United States were changing, and so was the analysis of the aid that UNRRA sent. Americans were sending Poland their very worst animals, Poles now claimed, and many of them were already sick before they set sail for Poland. In this reading, the UNRRA program was just a way for Americans to get rid of animals that had no value in the United States anyway; it was an insult to the years of suffering Poland’s people had endured under Nazi occupation. The chief of the Foreign Section of the Polish Ministry of Agriculture, Ł. Witkowski, was matter-of-fact about the incoming animals’ poor quality in a February 1947 letter to T. A. Pato, the chief of the Agricultural Division of UNRRA’s Mission to Poland: “The horses sent to us lately from the U.S.A . . . are in very bad condition. Most of these horses are ill. The farmers refuse to accept them.”61 It was left to the Polish government to care for these animals in its veterinary clinics, and this became an additional burden from both a financial and resource perspective while it also complicated distribution plans down to local levels, as we have seen.62 What value, really, did these animals give Poland?
Or sometimes, the Polish government charged, Americans sent what they knew were the “wrong” kind of animals for Polish agricultural needs. This included horses that were too young (just a few years old) and unsuited in terms of temperament and previous work experience to the conditions of daily labor on farms.63 Other critics claimed that the wild horses that had been plucked only recently from the vast open ranges of the American west—the once-celebrated mustangs—were useless in the short term because they were not broken and did not know how to work the farms; these animals would not earn their keep, and, again, no farmer would want them.64 According to this way of thinking, it was absurd to claim that UNRRA was committed to Poland’s agricultural renewal; the UNRRA animals’ worth was mostly just theoretical.
Criticism of the arriving animals is reflected in a May 1947 short film from the Polish Military Film Production Agency; this was the same unit that had created the earlier positive films about UNRRA aid. The viewer is hit immediately with the news that a recently arrived UNRRA ship has delivered a load of tremendously sick animals to Poland. The sailing itself is described as having been especially hard and unbearably long—three months—and as having resulted in 320 deaths out of the approximately 1,400 horses on board; this was a loss rate of almost 23 percent. The ship is not named in the film, the specific date of its arrival is not indicated, and it is not certain that the statistics provided are accurate or that they even refer to an actual sailing. Over a dozen ships arrived in Poland in the first month or so of 1947 alone. It could be that the example featured in the film refers to SS Mount Whitney, which was the only ship capable of carrying 1,400 horses and which had in fact sailed to Poland in early 1947; its posted loss rate, however, was under 7 percent. Or it could have been a reference to SS Beloit Victory. This ship, however, carried only 750 horses on its February 1947 sailing to Poland and posted a loss rate of over 35 percent. There were other possible contenders, too, like SS Lahaina Victory, which lost 125 (or 22 percent) of its 787 horses. Regardless, what is clear is that difficult winter conditions in early 1947 lengthened and complicated all the ships’ sailings, and, indeed, loss rates on these trips were particularly high.65 The film exploited that for effect. We are told by the film’s narrator that upon arrival five hundred horses were sent to the veterinary clinic for urgent care because their conditions were so precarious. The camera lingers on specific individual animals to show viewers just how worn out and sick these American animals were.66 Auntie UNRRA was giving nothing valuable to Poland; in fact, the film implies, the American-dominated UNRRA was an animal abuser.
Suggesting, even subtly, that the Americans were animal abusers introduced a new and powerful element into the contemporary discourse about UNRRA. This in turn reveals a great deal about changing conceptions of animal welfare, humanitarianism, and civilization in early Communist Poland. Polish animal welfare organizations had formed in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and had remained active until the outbreak of World War II. During the busy years of the Second Republic, organization members popularized a link between high animal welfare standards—which they understood to be part of a broad humanitarianism—and “civilization,” a set of ideas, habits, and practices that at the time were associated with western Europe. Interwar Polish animal protectionists argued that Poles would cement their place in (west) European civilization only by transforming their relationships with nonhuman animals and adhering to strict animal protection measures. It was a matter of a relatively poor agricultural nation rising to the level of the west and changing how it treated nonhuman animals.67 For the middle- and upper-class women and men of interwar animal protection societies, this often meant targeting the urban working poor and rural people, social groups who they assumed had the most cruel interactions with animals; these were the people that needed to be civilized and taught modern standards of animal care.68
The reality after the war was very different. Arguments that had worked in the prewar period, and which reflected class-based assumptions about “who” was cruel to animals, no longer made sense in the context of the new workers’ utopia of Communist Poland. The party line shifted, as it were, and now it was the “civilized west,” with its shipments of sick and suffering animals, that were the animal abusers. The end of the war had laid the groundwork for this reversal. As Tony Judt has written in a more general sense, after the Third Reich the concept of a “civilized west” became a chimera, the “grandest of all illusions.”69 This opened a space for the Polish Communists to imagine a new and different relationship between civilization, humanitarianism, and animal welfare, one in which it was the greedy, unethical, and capitalist Americans that did the most damage to animals.
Ultimately, animal welfare during the Communist period would be rooted less in abstract sentiments about animals’ inherent moral value or in arguments about animals’ ability to feel pain than in ideas about maximizing animals’ social and economic value and not wasting animals’ potential; animals were, after all, a national resource. The purpose of animal welfare standards in post–World War II Poland, from official perspectives, was entirely instrumental: it was about maintaining the physical fitness of draft animals so that they could work productively as long as possible, safeguarding public health by providing “meat and milk of high quality,” and preventing zoonotic diseases from taking root.70 This was the new Communist humanitarianism, a humanitarianism focused on ensuring that animals met human needs.
This new approach was partially reflected in the quick action that the government took to regulate horses’ working conditions. As early as the fall of 1945, the Main Command of the Citizens’ Militia distributed flyers across construction sites warning against “using up” the horses too quickly. There were too few of these valuable animals as it was. People were reminded that the 1928 animal protection legislation still applied in these earliest days of the postwar period and included a provision for protecting work animals: abusing a valuable working animal carried a potential fine of 2,000 złoty and/or three weeks in jail.71 The prewar animal welfare legislation was used selectively by the Communists when it suited their purposes. It was not invoked because of nostalgia for the Second Republic or because of sentimentality and a desire to save animals from experiencing pain. The goal, rather, was to minimize waste and preserve a productive animal labor force that would facilitate the rebuilding of the country as swiftly as possible.72 The rhetorical shift was slight but important. Horses were an investment in the collective, and everyone had an obligation to ensure that “their” animal would remain fit for work on behalf of the nation.
Poland’s animal welfare activists were quick to sense the changing winds and new emphases. The Society for the Protection of Animals (Towarzystwo Ochrony Zwierząt), which was Poland’s oldest animal welfare organization, was formally reconstituted in 1945 under the leadership of Tadeusz Matecki, a key activist from before the war. Under Matecki’s direction the postwar society turned its attention to livestock and working animals rather than to companion animals or pets—the animal type that had received a great deal of attention during the interwar period.73 It took some time for the society to get up and running, however, and so it was not until 1947 that it resumed its prewar system of animal inspections on building sites and slaughterhouses. In this capacity the society gave out hundreds of tickets every month, especially for overloading horses and hitting them over the head to make them work harder and faster.74 Treating animals in these ways, the society said, was counterproductive and would result in a waste of precious national resources.75
In the new era, animal welfare would need to be justified differently, in ways that echoed the priorities of the Communists. To abuse the nation’s animals was to risk national goals, as only fit and well-cared-for animals could be expected to contribute to rebuilding the country’s destroyed cities or to producing the high agricultural yields that Poland needed to feed its people. Abused and sick animals also produced inferior or maybe even “bad” milk and meat, and this posed a direct threat to human health.76 A vocabulary of “rational animal management”—and the attendant collective social good that was presumed to follow from this—thus replaced a broad “animal welfare” agenda that relied on ethical arguments or sentimentality and that invoked the imagined ideals of western civilization.77 Communist animal protection was about maximizing animals’ usefulness.78
Ultimately, however, there was little room for even a modified animal welfare in Communist Poland. The Polish Stalinists had come to believe that anything that an independent animal protection society did could be better done by the Veterinary Department of the Ministry of Agriculture. Moreover, by the late 1940s the Communists were shutting down all independent groups, and not surprisingly this included the Society for the Protection of Animals, too. The government manufactured an excuse that made it easy: it accused the society of financial mismanagement and corruption. At issue were four Ford trucks that, the Communists said, the society had purchased with borrowed money that it could not later pay back. For its part the society argued that the trucks had been a donation from none other than UNRRA. Nevertheless, the government’s forensic accounting found evidence of financial incompetence and, worse yet, misappropriation of state resources for private purposes. The government ordered the closure of the society in 1951.79
Pausing here to consider the short-lived postwar activism of the Society for the Protection of Animals is revealing. It reminds us that “animal welfare” was (and is) a malleable concept with different definitions, histories, and trajectories. In the pre–World War II period, animals’ utility and their economic value to the Polish people were not central to animal protectionists’ explanations of their activism. After the war, the ethical and sentimental reasons for animal welfare that had predominated in the Second Republic vanished from the society’s statements so as to better align with Communist priorities. For everyone, animal welfare in postwar Poland came to be defined in terms of extending animals’ value as laborers, whether that involved work on agricultural fields or as milk providers. As we have seen, this was familiar terrain for both UNRRA and the Heifer Project too.
The Society for the Protection of Animals perhaps understood better than most just how complicated the relationship was between animal welfare and humanitarian aid programs. It was not until 1947, just as the last UNRRA livestock ships were arriving in Poland, that Matecki looked into relief animals’ transport conditions. He went to the docks—in an unofficial capacity only—and was upset by what he saw.80 In a letter to the International Humanitarian Bureau, a Geneva-based coordinating and advisory body for animal welfare groups, Matecki described the arriving horses, with their hanging heads and a sad indifference to everything around them, as resembling “concentration camp victims.”81 This is an early example of the comparison made occasionally in subsequent years between the mistreatment of animals, on the one hand, and on the other the exceptionally cruel abuse and murder of human beings under the Nazis. Yet ultimately there was not much that Matecki, the Polish Society for the Protection of Animals, or the International Humanitarian Bureau felt could be done to help these animals. Like UNRRA, the Heifer Project, and the American animal welfare group, they concluded in the end that sailing great distances was simply hard for animals to bear.82 It was indeed just an inescapable reality.