Chapter 7 Bovines, Equines, and Humans in Poland

The Cowboys’ First Impressions

The seagoing cowboys, or the morscy kowboje as they were called in Polish, were among the first civilians to see and experience postwar Poland. Sometimes the cowboys were ashore in Poland for just a very short time. Their length of stay in the country depended primarily on maritime schedules and on the sailing weather, and this was generally true for other destinations as well.¹² But whether their stay was long or short, most cowboys saw enough of Poland to carry lifelong memories of a country ravaged by war. The cowboys conveyed their understanding that Poland was a special victim of Nazi Germany and that its people had endured extreme suffering during the war.¹³ UNRRA thought so too. This understanding accounts in part for why Poland received more aid, including more animals, than any other country in Europe.

The unique scale of destruction along the Polish coastline and in the coastal cities had an immediate impact on the cowboys. The damage was evident already as ships approached the Baltic ports after having made their passage through the English Channel and the Kiel Canal. Cowboy Glenn Rohrer (who signed up for cowboy work after his time in the Civilian Public Service) described his first glimpses of Poland, of seeing “bombed docks and the tops of sunken ships” as he approached Gdańsk.¹⁴ The sea was littered with metal scrap and ship masts (though as the cowboys said, even these compromised waters did not stop some of them from enjoying a swim!).¹⁵

Incoming ships were greeted by hundreds of people. Art Meyer described in his diary the moment of his ship’s arrival: “All was a confused scene of excitement as the gangplank went down. The people look thin, ragged, unhealthy and sad. They are desperate for candy, food and cigarettes. It appears that the real medium of exchange is not money but cigarettes, which will buy most anything—cameras, binoculars, souvenirs, etc. The extreme poverty of these people shocks me. They appear to be much worse off than the Germans we saw along the Kiel.”¹⁶

These early impressions were reinforced by what the men saw in Gdańsk itself. According to cowboy Gerhard Friesen, “The wreckage and ruins in the port gave a sorry sight, but nothing compared to what we were to see later in the city of Danzig [Gdańsk] itself.”¹⁷ Friesen wrote about the “wrecks of cannon” that dotted the city, and he described abandoned war equipment strewn across what had once been busy (but were now largely abandoned) streets. Moreover, the Russians, Friesen said, picking up on early reports of the Red Army’s storm through the east en route to Berlin and then back again after the war ended, had stripped the city clean and had taken away everything and anything valuable. The Soviets had also taken agricultural equipment and livestock (including horses) back to the USSR, which further undermined Polish farmers’ ability to till fields; this exacerbated the humanitarian crisis further still. According to Friesen, Gdańsk was “a heap of ruins made so by the Russians ten days after they occupied it. It was pure vandalism or revenge, so we are told.”¹⁸

Mennonite cowboy Dwight Smith describes taking “an overcrowded trolley” from Nowy Port, where his ship had docked, to the center of Gdańsk. The city, he said, had been “totally levelled.” “Children were playing in the rubble,” Smith wrote, “and older people were sorting through the bricks to find wood that could be used for fuel.” Smith and his friends then found “a Polish boy” to show them a battlefield near the city. “We found wreckage everywhere. We crawled through wrecked tanks and armored cars, operated the guns, and searched for souvenirs.”¹⁹ When Smith and his friends stumbled across the corpses of two German soldiers, they “left in a hurry.”²⁰

Owen Gingerich and a few of his fellow cowboys had quite the scare when they happened upon a helmet with a skull still inside. They also found live ammunition lying about and were generally struck by the war’s ferocity as well as by the resulting poverty and desperation of the people. For Gingerich this cemented his pacifism: “It vividly reinformed my previously theoretical abhorrence of war and gave me great sympathy for the plight of the Polish people.”²¹ Other cowboys made similar remarks: that witnessing war’s destruction up close further deepened their convictions “concerning the way of peace.”²² Desperate conditions surrounded the men in Gdańsk. “It smelled of rotting garbage and acrid smoke,” Harvey Cox wrote in his autobiography.²³ “There is filth everywhere,” cowboy Yoder reported, and he explained that this was in no small part because sanitation and public water systems had been demolished. Yoder continued, “Hopeless! Can’t see what makes people go on living amid such ruin and despair.”²⁴ There was also at least one visit to the Stutthof concentration camp.²⁵

In rare cases men who hoped to see more of Poland still—or to continue on to other parts of Europe—could choose to “jump ship,” as it were, with little more than blind faith that UNRRA would arrange a spot for them on a later sailing. UNRRA was clear about not condoning these actions and told the men that it would assume no responsibility for getting them home if they missed their scheduled departure.²⁶ More typically, if the scheduled departure date was set for many days into the future, men could freely explore parts of the country away from the coast. For example, cowboy Kenneth Heatwole described in his diary traveling on a double-decker bus in 1946 all the way from the coast to the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto. Heatwole recorded his reactions: “My heart was nearly torn to pieces. . . . I was reminded of Jeremiah wailing over Jerusalem. . . . But not only was there not one stone left upon another the stones were broken & rent in twain. There were acres and acres of just bricks. No ruins were left standing at all. And where are the 350,000 Jews that lived there? . . . The Germans allowed no one to leave and then blew up the place!”²⁷

While some of the men were too distressed by evidence of violence to discuss what they had seen, others felt an obligation to share their reflections. Their communities back home in America were keen to listen to them. Part and parcel of affirming that the Heifer Project and the Brethren Service Committee—and of course UNRRA too—were doing good and useful work was in proving that the scale of human suffering had been mammoth and that the need for aid was great, too. There was a purpose to telling these stories. People’s misery warranted the men’s—and their communities’—time, effort, and expense. As such, some of the men (and again, provided there was time for this) launched into additional relief work as they waited for their return sailing. Warren D. Sawyer, for example, volunteered for three days with the Danish Red Cross serving food at a makeshift soup kitchen that operated from the back of a truck.²⁸ In this way some of the cowboys became more typical humanitarian agents, even if only very briefly, while they worked in-county and interacted with the locals. For most cowboys, however, encounters with locals were generally casual and incidental, occasioned, for example, by handing out small gifts, gum, or candy to children they met on the streets. Cowboys also met locals at restaurants or at street markets where they went to buy souvenirs.²⁹ Or, as happened in December 1945, men from a sailing on SS Morgantown Victory mingled with locals when they attended a Catholic mass on Christmas Day. Two men from that same sailing gave up the special Christmas dinner that was being offered on their ship and invited two local Polish children to take their place instead.³⁰ In some cases, and as we will discuss in chapter 9, seagoing cowboys were also taken on tours of animal holding barns and of some of the farms where both UNRRA and Heifer Project animals had been placed.

Whatever their specific experiences, many of the men were struck by what they regarded as the “moral” effects that the war had had on the Polish people. One cowboy reported being surprised by the gender role subversions he witnessed: young women in “long trousers and old coats [were] working where men should be,” and he marveled at the fact that “a good supply of sturdy stock of men just isn’t seen here.”³¹ Harvey Cox described the “oily pimps” that sidled up to him and his two friends on their walk through the rubble-filled streets of Gdańsk “whistling the way they had heard sailors do at women, describing the voluptuous shape of their ladies-for-sale with hand motions and gestures.” Cox could not stand the “charred wreckage, hungry children, sadness and chaos” and faked a hangover when his friends wanted to go ashore the next day too. “Was this the Europe I had looked forward to seeing?” he asked. Cox was tortured by what he had witnessed. “I sensed a new object for my disgust and revulsion: the war. The war had done this.”³²

For others the period spent in a port city far from home provided license to take risks and act like someone different. Cowboy Heatwole wrote frankly in his diary about what he viewed as the disturbing behavior of some of the other cowboys with whom he traveled: “Also most of the cattle boys came in with alcohol on their breath. Even, I’m sorry to say, the Mennonite boys. Everyone seems to drink Vodka (the most powerful liquor). The American Bar has almost become the embassy. The whore houses have been frequented by our number too. Why must men behave like brutes and devils when they get away from home.”³³

Of course, the Brethren Service Committee that had recruited the men warned against what it referred to as “un-Christian” behavior during the relief trips.³⁴ It is difficult to gauge how frequently these supposed moral transgressions happened among the cowboys, and not surprisingly the men who left accounts (and who are the focus of this book) do not describe their own experiences with drinking or sex. Instead, what do appear frequently are descriptions of the black market that thrived in every port town. The men knew that cigarettes were a valuable currency in the black market and that they could be traded for just about anything. Though the Brethren Service Committee associated smoking with immorality, temptation, and financial imprudence, a number of men describe packing cigarettes with them on their trips to trade for souvenirs like military medals and war-related materiel, for example, or relics from churches that had once belonged to the German Mennonites of the region.³⁵

For his part, cowboy supervisor Melvin Gingerich voiced his objections to this practice, reminding the men that they were on a service mission to “help” rather than to “exploit” desperate people.³⁶ For those that abstained, the enthusiasm that others exhibited for the black market, and that the locals in turn showed for the cigarettes they were being offered, made an enormous impression. “To see a people so sodden in the nicotine habit and in such a desperate condition economically, politically, and spiritually gives one a feelings of hopelessness,” a Mennonite cowboy reported after his trip to Poland.³⁷ Witnessing this desperation up close itself justified the humanitarian interventions the cowboys were making.

The Animals’ First Impressions

While the brutality of war was everywhere in evidence for the cowboys, back at the ports the animals, too, quickly felt the burden of having arrived in a war-ravaged place. Dozens of men were needed to unload the newly arrived animals: a single Victory ship required approximately one hundred stevedores. These numbers, however, were difficult to secure, especially in the earliest postwar months, and so labor shortages contributed to the overall chaos in the port areas.³⁸ Then when sufficient bodies could be found, the work was still slow, as the newly hired animal handlers were obviously weak and hungry, or they lacked experience with livestock and did their work inefficiently.³⁹ The infrastructure problems at the port made unloading more difficult still. At the Nowy Port dock area in Gdańsk, there were wet and muddy surfaces, which made it more likely that the newly arrived horses would slip and fall and possibly break a leg. In addition, there were scraps of steel and other debris strewn about, and there was inadequate fencing to keep the animals contained. Though the Polish authorities worked to address these problems, improvements took time.⁴⁰

At the extreme and during particularly busy periods, the unloading of the animals could take days, even though livestock had priority in the unloading order. One cowboy described the “ruined port buildings, tracks, cranes, and piers” as complicating what had once been relatively simple tasks.⁴¹ In addition, and especially with the earliest shipments, it was sometimes unclear who was responsible for caring for the recent arrivals (the government had ostensibly contracted private companies to do this work), and this meant that animals were too often left without proper care for long periods.⁴²

Even the ships’ captains and crews, who had no formal or direct responsibility for the animals aboard, understood very clearly that the already-fragile health of the cattle and horses was compromised further during the unloading period.⁴³ Master J. B. Oliver of SS Norwalk Victory was so outraged by the inefficiencies he witnessed that he wrote to UNRRA directly to complain. Oliver counted five horses who died after the ship arrived in Gdynia and another fourteen that were taken off “in sick and dying condition” because of the inadequate care they had endured on the docked ship. According to Oliver the animals were given insufficient food and water while the unloading process took place, and those of them on deck also faced lengthy exposure to the elements.⁴⁴

Animals were typically lowered from the ship in a wooden crate held by an “elevator” that swung high in the air. When the animals reached dry land after being released from these “flying stalls,” they were frantic with fear and eager to shake off their confinements. Others refused to leave the crate and needed to be coaxed out, gently or roughly as the situation demanded.⁴⁵ The language barriers between the animals and the Polish dock workers were felt immediately. One cowboy described the futile attempts of Polish handlers to corral newly arrived horses and to communicate with them: the Polish-language horse commands and standard Polish hand gestures could not be understood by animals who either had been wild until very recently or had thus far only heard and responded to English commands and American-style hand signals.⁴⁶ Americans typically used “woha” to command a horse to stop, for example, whereas Poles said “grrr.” The language barrier slowed down the entire process and contributed to a generally hectic environment.⁴⁷

Each newly arrived UNRRA animal was branded on its back with the UNRRA name; the branding, as one of the cowboys observed, was sometimes done by women.⁴⁸ Along with other cowboys, George Willoughby had the chance to watch this work. He wrote about it to his wife, Lillian, commenting that “miraculously ‘UNRRA’ was forever a part of that cow.”⁴⁹ The branding would advertise the UNRRA program for the short term and, as UNRRA hoped, would serve as a long-term reminder of the aid that had come to Poland from the United Nations.⁵⁰

There were some touching scenes on the docks at this point. Waiting cows needed to be milked, and this milk was distributed to the hungry people that always lingered near the ships.⁵¹ Sometimes women came with their children and milk buckets in anticipation of just such an opportunity.⁵² It happened occasionally that the women were even permitted aboard the ships to milk the cows themselves.⁵³ Then there was the moment when people met their newly arrived animal for the first time. Will Keller, the radio operator on SS Park Victory, described what he saw: “A ship’s boom swings up and out of a hold and over to the dock, lowering another animal container. Out staggers a sick cow, head hanging down, frothing at nostrils and mouth. Given extra injections by Vets. Old man and old woman waiting nearby come forward. Old man places rope around cow’s neck; old woman covers cow with blanket. Man leads cow away as old woman walks alongside hugging and petting cow.”⁵⁴ No doubt cowboys relished providing this evidence that the animals they had shepherded across the Atlantic were going to the neediest of the needy and that they were doing some good.⁵⁵ This, after all, was what the cowboys’ work was all about.

What was fortunate for humans was not always experienced in positive ways by the animals, of course. Animals that were obviously near death as they were removed from the ships represented a different kind of opportunity for the waiting crowds. One cowboy recalled a case in which one of the sick horses “went down” during unloading and proved unable to get up again. The “starved Poles” wasted no time: they “fell upon the hapless beast and within minutes had butchered and cleaned it.”⁵⁶ The flesh of an already-dead horse should not be consumed for food, and so the hungry people killed the animal themselves, drained the blood, and distributed the meat—even though chevaline was not a standard part of the Polish diet during normal times.

Cowboys also reported hearing rumors about recipients who slaughtered their newly received cattle as soon as they returned home to their farms. This was despite the fact that there were bans at specific times and in specific regions against the slaughter of animals for meat. UNRRA, too, did not intend for its animals to be turned into meat immediately.⁵⁷ Yet reasonably enough, keeping animals to work fields and to reestablish herds felt less pressing in the short term than feeding hungry families. “I suppose this is just natural,” wrote one cowboy in his reflections about this.⁵⁸ Though the animals were not sent as food, they nevertheless became food in some instances; the humanitarian programs’ intentions for the animals were secondary to people’s immediate needs.

Another cowboy who arrived in Poland with 750 horses describes witnessing the locals seize and kill a “mean-spirited” horse that had just been removed from the ship. They hit the animal between the eyes with a sledge hammer, cut it up, and, again, immediately distributed the meat.⁵⁹ The skins of recently dead animals like this one could then be delivered to raw leather processing facilities, and in this way the Poles would earn a little money.⁶⁰ These were rogue actions, to be sure, and they were possible only in moments like this, when routines were still in the making and oversight was limited or at least inconsistent. But these examples also remind us that locals did not hesitate to act in their best interests when given the opportunity. Though the horses that the locals slaughtered in these examples were not being used as intended, their bodies did, broadly speaking, deliver aid and offer relief.

Animal-State Encounters

That the reality on the piers was sometimes different from plans that UNRRA had made was not surprising. UNRRA focused its energies on getting the animals to the target countries, and for many reasons the organization was less able to determine what would happen to them once they arrived at their destinations. Formally, control over UNRRA aid, in all its forms and in all destinations, transferred to the receiving government from the moment it landed; this was standard practice and had been agreed to as a general principle from the earliest planning days. What this means is that responsibility for the aid shipments that arrived in Poland fell to the Provisional Government of National Unity, which was the result of a coalition-type agreement between the Communists and the non-Communists from the summer of 1945.⁶¹ It was the Polish government, and not UNRRA, that made decisions about how to collect and distribute incoming goods and animals. This arrangement made good logistical sense: relying on local governments and local people relieved UNRRA of the need to staff and organize the distribution and, more importantly, to determine what resources were needed where.⁶² The arrangement, moreover, provides a useful reminder of how much room there was in this postwar moment for national priorities and agendas to determine important details about international aid programs.

At the same time, however, UNRRA was supposed to ensure that all aid was being distributed in accordance with Resolution 6, which forbade discrimination based on race, religion, or politics; aid was also not to be used as any kind of political weapon.⁶³ UNRRA thus maintained the right to have observers and advisors in the recipient countries in order to confirm that its rules were being followed. As such, representatives from UNRRA were on hand when ships came to port (though their presence was limited to a monitoring role), and the representatives also had the right to conduct spot checks related to the distribution and use of UNRRA goods. They made visits to holding yards and toured recipient farms as well.⁶⁴

The first direct contact between all incoming animals and the Polish state came shortly after the animals’ arrival through Ministry of Agriculture veterinarians who greeted the arriving ships.⁶⁵ Each ship was required to produce a health declaration that would be filed with the ministry; the declaration included the name of the sailing ship; the number of animals that had arrived, divided by species and type; the inspection date; and the veterinarian’s attestation that all of the animals had been examined and declared healthy or unhealthy for specific reasons. It was these veterinary reports that determined where the animals would go next. The Ministry’s Representation for UNRRA Affairs at the Ports of Gdynia and Gdańsk (Przedstawicielstwo do Spraw UNRRA na Porty Gdynia i Gdańsk) attached a summary to the veterinarians’ inspection reports too. These summaries repeated some of the information that was in the veterinarians’ reports (the name of the ship and the number of animals that had arrived, most notably) and included a brief reflection on the quality of the incoming animal shipment as a whole: “healthy” or “in a bad state” or “average.”⁶⁶

The inspection process needed to be handled quickly so that the animals could be moved along to their next destinations. The pressure to work fast in turn led to objections from the Polish veterinarians, who argued that the considerable time pressures undermined their abilities to make accurate and confident assessments. Veterinarians complained, too, that the crowded and chaotic conditions at the ports meant that they could not really inspect every animal properly. Nighttime unloading compromised the inspections further still, as the darkness easily obscured some health problems (lights were eventually added to the port areas to improve visibility).⁶⁷ These problems with rushed inspections were already more or less familiar from the American context.

Cattle and horses that did not look like they could recover from whatever ailed them (some of the arriving animals were unable to walk, for example) failed these preliminary health inspections. Prognoses were reflected in the documents that the veterinarians filed with the ministry and could read, simply, “unsuccessful” or “unsuitable for work.” These animals were slaughtered. Some were directed to vaccine-producing plants; one such plant produced a vaccine for erysipelas, a common bacterial infection found in pig populations. Alternatively, the sick animals were sent to state veterinary facilities for use in teaching; the exact destination depended on the type of illness and needs at the moment.⁶⁸

Animals that did not pass the initial inspection but that looked like they had a reasonable chance of being nursed back to health were moved through the system in a modified fashion. There were a couple of main options. The first was to sell the animals to institutions (like schools, for example) that had the means to provide more complicated care and that did not desperately need either the labor or the milk (whichever the case may have been) of this one newcomer. In these cases, the recipient institution had to attest to the fact that the given animal’s health problems had been clearly communicated and that the institution would not hold the ministry responsible if the animal’s health status worsened or if the animal died. The receiving institution also had to provide a general care plan for the animal that included proper veterinary attention. For its part the ministry made medicines available to the new owners of unhealthy animals for a very low cost. The recipients also had to agree not to use sick animals for work until recovery was complete.⁶⁹

The second option for animals that did not pass the initial veterinary inspection was a stay at a clinic that was run by the Veterinary Department of Poland’s Ministry of Agriculture.⁷⁰ The veterinary clinic in Gdańsk opened in April 1946, on what is now called Haller Avenue, and clinics also opened in Gdynia, Szczecin, and Sopot.⁷¹ Between 10 and 12 percent of all arriving horses were sent to the Gdańsk clinic alone. As we know, Poland received many more horses than cattle from UNRRA, and horses ended up at the clinics more often.⁷² Some of the arriving animals were so sick that they died en route to the clinics, even though, in the case of Gdańsk, the distance from the port to the clinic was just several kilometers. Respiratory diseases were the number-one cause of equine death after landing, though horses also died because of fractures or severe wounds that could not be expected to heal properly. At the Gdańsk facility, according to the director of the veterinary clinic in Gdańsk, an average of seven animals, mainly horses, died every day.⁷³

The special veterinary clinics were stretched beyond capacity. One early 1946 report from the State Veterinary Institute to the Ministry of Agriculture complained about inadequate staff; there were shortages of veterinarians, pharmacists, veterinary nurses, paramedics, lab technicians, and office administrators. Even caretakers who provided the animals’ daily food and water were in short supply.⁷⁴ Though it was built to accommodate 400 to 600 animals at a time, the Gdańsk clinic ended up caring for as many as 1,700 at once.⁷⁵ UNRRA provided the clinics with veterinary supplies, including medicine and laboratory equipment, but these contributions were insufficient, and what might have been a treatable condition in other circumstances could prove fatal for animals in crowded conditions with limited resources and too few staff.⁷⁶ As it was, a disproportionate amount of time went toward treating the sickest animals, and this sometimes left the only moderately sick animals in a more precarious position than necessary. What this meant, for example, is that sometimes less critical cases were moved outdoors to make room indoors for the sickest animals, but this had the effect of jeopardizing the recovery of the least sick animals, especially during the coldest months of the year.⁷⁷

There were also the considerable financial costs involved in running the clinics (UNRRA donations of veterinary supplies and medicine notwithstanding). For example, the Szczecin veterinary clinic spent over 64,000 złoty on treating 1,287 horses during the three-month period from early September to early December 1946.⁷⁸ The especially busy Gdańsk clinic registered expenses of over one million złoty in a single month, August 1946.⁷⁹ This money came from Poland’s Ministry of Agriculture.⁸⁰ Complicating matters further still was the fact that veterinary reference manuals had been lost during the war, and animal care handbooks directed at animal owners and breeders were also gone. The process of republishing these, and then delivering the information to relevant parties, would take some time.⁸¹

These earliest hours, days, and weeks after the animals arrived in Poland were a delicate time. This period also underscores just how complicated it is to talk about “loss rates” in the postwar live animal aid program. The losses—the deaths—happened at various stages and in several places: from the point of purchase or donation in the United States en route to the ports, during loading, on the ships, during unloading, or in the period right after unloading. UNRRA itself claimed a 3.8 percent loss rate for its livestock shipments overall, as we have seen.⁸² On top of this, UNRRA estimated the loss rate for landed animals (animals that had arrived alive, were unloaded, and then died shortly after) to have been low at just 0.22 percent.⁸³ The reliability of this number is doubtful, however, and is contradicted in UNRRA’s own documents: another UNRRA report states that an estimated 2 percent of all horses died “upon arrival” and that 10 percent died within the first few months.⁸⁴ Here we come back to the fact that UNRRA’s insight into what happened to animals after arrival was ultimately limited because it simply had no jurisdiction in the recipient countries.

On the Road Again

The animals’ travels did not of course stop at foreign port areas, just as they did not start at the port of origin; overland journeys were (and remain) a significant part of maritime shipping. Once at the port of delivery, the animals faced in reverse what they had experienced at the beginning. In this next section, we focus on the animals that did what the aid program wanted: they stayed healthy throughout the various stages of becoming relief animals. These healthy animals were typically sent from the ships almost immediately to makeshift stables until the next leg of their trip could be arranged.⁸⁵ Some went from the port at Gdańsk to Wiślany Station, where there was room for approximately three thousand animals at a time. Enormous pyramids of pressed hay that had been removed from the UNRRA ships were stored at the station as well, as were donated oats and bags of assorted other types of feed.⁸⁶ Other healthy animals went to the major holding stable that had been established at the hippodrome in Sopot.⁸⁷

Private firms were hired to receive the animals from the ships and to provide food and care while they were in transit to the holding stables or to other designated locations.⁸⁸ Authority during this period, however, rested with the Central Office for Meat (Rolnicza Centrala Mięsna). The Central Office for Meat had been established in October 1945 to regulate Poland’s meat supply by balancing breeders’ and farmers’ needs with consumers’ needs.⁸⁹ In this case, it oversaw everything from building fences around designated UNRRA animal holding areas to preparing feed troughs and water stations. Its staff admitted that the conditions that they were able to provide for the animals were not always adequate given the numbers that arrived weekly, but as with so much at this time, expediency trumped quality.⁹⁰

From the temporary stables and holding centers, the healthy animals went on to destinations chosen by the Ministry of Agriculture, which had overall responsibility for incoming livestock. The animals usually traveled by train but sometimes, for closer distances, by truck; for very short distances, and only if the horses had been shod, the animals traveled by foot. Determining the final destinations was a long and highly bureaucratic process that started well before the animals’ arrival in Poland and that, in the end, confused just about everyone. It began ostensibly when each Provincial Land Office (Wojewódzki Urząd Ziemski) wrote to the Agriculture Office (Biuro Rolne) of the Department of Agriculture and outlined specific animal needs in its region. The Provincial Land Office based its requests in part on petitions it had received from people and institutions interested in having an UNRRA animal.⁹¹ The Agriculture Office reviewed these provincial assessments of need and determined how many animals and of which type (sometimes including which breed type) ought to be directed to worthy recipients in each province.⁹² These decisions were then communicated to the Provincial Distribution Commission (Wojewódzka Komisja Rozdziału), which was under the control of the Provincial Land Office. The decisions were also conveyed to the District Inventory Distribution Commission (Powiatowa Komisja Rozdziału Inwentarza), which included, among other bodies, representatives of Peasant Self-Help (Samopomoc Chłopska) and the District Agricultural Office (Powiatowe Biuro Rolne). The last layer of bureaucracy between people and their relief animals was the District Inventory Distribution Commission. The district level was the one to inform recipients that their UNRRA animals had arrived in the country and needed to be collected at a specified time and place, either in the port area or at some (more) convenient central location.⁹³

Ultimately, a majority of the UNRRA cattle and horses that Poland received—70 percent—went to small farms. Recipients were chosen based on defined need and on a perceived ability to maximize the animals’ potential as laborers, whether on fields or as providers of milk. Farms with no cattle and no horses had priority, and within this group military settlers and repatriates were privileged.⁹⁴ The general calculation was that one horse was required for every fifteen hectares of land (meaning of course that the smallest farms were not eligible to receive a horse). Another 20 percent of the incoming animals went to an agricultural school or center, an experimental farm, or a state farm. The remaining 10 percent went to other state-owned facilities and breeding lots.⁹⁵ Animals that went to breeding lots would be bred and then often moved on again; such animals in effect did double duty.⁹⁶ Though the number of horses sent for breeding was relatively small, a representative from the State Horse Breeding Department met every ship, surveyed incoming stock, and took several horses from some shipments and none from others.⁹⁷

All these decisions and allocations were happening while the government was working on national land reform. As early as September 1944, the Polish Committee of National Liberation had started seizing large estates, including those of ethnic Germans who were fleeing Poland; those estates were subdivided, and the smaller parcels of land were distributed among landless peasants and small farmers. The distributed land parcels varied in size but typically did not exceed five hectares per individual. Though the previous owners of the land were not compensated, the recipients did pay for their new holdings; the costs were low and payments flexible, however. Those entering these arrangements without any previous landholdings at all had the most favorable payment rates.⁹⁸ People on the newest land parcels were especially desperate for animals.

As an invaded country, Poland was not obliged to pay UNRRA directly for the animals or for most of the other relief that it received.⁹⁹ But recipients were generally obliged to pay the Polish government for what they received. There was nothing unusual about this.¹⁰⁰ While urgent food aid from UNRRA was initially distributed on a voucher system and for free, other types of aid, including some maintenance food rations and so-called luxury food items, plus animals, were generally sold by the receiving government to the people at favorable fixed prices that were adjusted as needed.¹⁰¹ The chief advantage of this arrangement for the receiving countries was that it provided a valuable source of income. As a result of these sales, the government secured some of the funds it needed to stabilize and develop different parts of the economy and to thereby fulfill broader rehabilitation goals. Moreover, it was expected that this arrangement would draw out hoarded cash and would thereby combat inflation. And lastly, as some argued, paying for goods would arguably prevent people from feeling like they were living on handouts; it helped normalize life generally. In the end, selling UNRRA goods earned Poland billions of złoty.¹⁰²

The selling costs of animals were set by Poland’s Ministry of Agriculture, with specific costs reflecting, as one might expect, the species, the health and physical fitness of the animal, and the animal’s suitability for work, either as a milk producer or as draft labor. The prices were fair and attractive, but it was the simple fact that UNRRA made animals available for purchase that was most important; there were no other options for purchasing or otherwise getting animals.

Who received an animal—whether an individual or an institution—did not affect the price, at least formally. Healthy horses sold for between 40,000 and 60,000 złoty, but this price could be higher if an animal was assessed to be especially valuable.¹⁰³ The ministry lowered the prices for UNRRA animals in November 1946, as UNRRA entered its final phase, such that healthy horses started to sell for between 25,000 and 50,000 złoty, with the exact price determined at distribution points by supposedly trained sellers acting on behalf of the government. These persons had a fair degree of latitude to determine the animals’ overall potential and value. In addition, the guidelines for cost categories overlapped. For example, “lightly sick” horses started at 20,000 złoty but could also fetch as much as 50,000 złoty, making the final price a matter of the appraisers’ personal discretion. Horses that needed to go to a veterinary clinic first cost around 9,000 złoty. The base price for cattle was as much as 45,000 złoty initially but dropped to between 18,000 and 38,000 złoty at the end of 1946. Heifers were cheaper at between 13,000 and 25,000 złoty.¹⁰⁴ In comparison, one personal advert placed in the classified section of The Voice of Pomerania (Głos Pomorski) in 1946 offered a young cow that was milking at twenty liters plus a pregnant heifer for 52,000 and 20,000 złoty respectively. This seller was also willing to contemplate a straight exchange of these two animals for a horse.¹⁰⁵

In addition to the base cost for the animal, recipients owed for animal feed and animal care, plus there were small administrative and transport costs. These sums ran about 3,000 or 4,000 złoty for a horse and a little less for cattle.¹⁰⁶ Recipients also owed money for the insurance that protected their animals against theft and death as they traveled from the ports en route to their new homes. The insurance was provided through the provincial branches of the General Mutual Insurance Institution (Powszechny Zakład Ubezpieczeń Wzajemnych). The coverage started as soon as the animals started their journeys to their final destinations, and it ended as soon as the animals reached these destinations. That the insurance ended at this point—once the animals were “home”—sometimes came as an unpleasant surprise to farmers (and even to provincial officials), who did not always understand the limits of the coverage that they were buying.¹⁰⁷

People were generally expected to pay in cash for all the costs associated with the animals, and loans were possible for certain categories of buyers. These included new settlers in the Recovered Territories, repatriates, anyone who had received a plot of land in the recent land reform, agricultural schools, and social welfare agencies and hospitals with agricultural properties. Applicants from the Recovered Territories and from bridgehead areas were given priority over the other categories.¹⁰⁸ Interest-free loans came from the State Agricultural Bank (Państwowy Bank Rolny), but the funds needed to be in place, in full, at the time of pickup. Loan agreements were for a specific amount (40,000 złoty for a horse, for example), meaning that to some extent the quality of the animal that an individual received was determined by the value of the loan that had been negotiated in advance. Loan applicants had to establish need, which was determined by the amount of land owned. Applicants also had to attest to the fact that they did not currently already own a horse or a cow.¹⁰⁹

The loan money needed to be repaid in three years, with the first installment payable in the first year. Nonpayment was a punishable offense.¹¹⁰ Some of the payment could be made in rye, with price per bushel established according to rates on the grain market or by the Chamber of Agriculture (Izba Rolnicza) for the given province.¹¹¹ In early 1946 one bovine cost between ten and fifteen quintals of rye (ten quintals is 1,000 kilograms or 2,200 pounds), depending on the quality of the animal.¹¹² The amount was manageable as long as the harvest was good, but the 1947 harvest was suboptimal, and so this made the payments onerous that year.¹¹³ Horses were worth more, from approximately twelve to twenty quintals of rye.¹¹⁴ Repayment was made to the Land Office (Urząd Ziemski) and was deposited into a special account set up specifically for UNRRA stock. The rye would be used in the region where it was produced. The full debt could also be wiped out if the owner of a cow gave the Chamber of Agriculture a “well raised” ten-month-old heifer or bull.¹¹⁵

If an UNRRA animal died within thirty days of receipt, the farmer needed to provide medical proof that nothing he or she had done had caused the animal’s death. The farmer also needed to provide evidence of payments already made. The Agricultural Bank could annul debts still owed with proof of death and attestation from a veterinarian that the animal did not die because of careless actions on the part of the new owner.¹¹⁶ Indeed, many animals died in the month after landing; the rate of insurance claims for animals that died during this period were high (but we must remember that not all animals were even insured during this period).¹¹⁷ According to one report written in 1948 by Szczecin authorities, the province received a total of over 15,000 horses and almost 2,300 cattle from UNRRA, and of these 291 animals died during the initial thirty-day period after receipt. An additional 460 horses died as a result of accidents during that time.¹¹⁸

If stock was still available, farmers whose initial UNRRA animals died (for reasons other than the farmers’ negligence) were entitled to a replacement animal at no charge.¹¹⁹ But in many cases, the cause of an animal’s death was unclear, and it was difficult if not impossible for a farmer to prove that there had been something “wrong” with the animal from the start.¹²⁰ There was really no documentation that could prove the point. This meant that debts were seldom wiped out; even into the late 1940s and early 1950s, farmers still owed for animals that were long dead.¹²¹

Horses and Cattle for Poland’s New “Wild West”

Though dire conditions in Poland’s rural areas were caused both indirectly and directly by the waging of war, the final sweep of the Red Army eastward through Poland back to the Soviet Union after the war had been won took an additional toll on Polish people, agricultural lands, infrastructure, and of course animals.¹²² The need for livestock was great all across Poland in the immediate postwar period, but the situation in the so-called Recovered Territories in the west and northeast was especially desperate. It was also there in Poland’s new Wild West that the hope for agricultural reconstruction was greatest.¹²³

The “Recovered Territories” refer to the lands that Poland received from Germany as part of the postwar settlement in an exchange, of a sort, for having renounced claims to the eastern territories occupied since September 1939 by the Soviet Union. These formerly German lands in the west of the new Polish state had quickly become depopulated in 1945 as ethnic Germans fled the advancing Red Army and later, once the war was over, as the formal expulsion of Germans from Poland (and elsewhere) took place. Ethnic Germans fled only with what they could carry. The few animals that had somehow survived until this late date in the war either were taken along with the fleeing farmers or, if the animals could not travel and were already sick, were left behind to die.

In using the term “recovered” or reclaimed lands (ziemie odzyskane), the Polish government conveyed that there was a clear historical basis for Polish control over this region. “We are returning to the Lands of the Piast dynasty,” one popular government slogan declared.¹²⁴ In addition, the northern- and westernmost parts of the Recovered Territories—the areas along the Baltic coast—were part of what the Polish Communists, during the 1946 Festival of the Sea, were already referring to as “the symbolic return of Poland to the sea.”¹²⁵ It was both fitting and meaningful that the animals—and all the other forms of humanitarian aid that were meant to help Poland resume normal life after the end of the war—arrived here, at the ports on the Baltic sea.

The Recovered Territories had been savaged by the war, frantically depopulated of their large ethnic German population, then chaotically repopulated, both by ethnic Poles from central Poland and by those who were expelled from the eastern provinces annexed by the Soviet Union. By 1945 almost half of the over two hundred milk kitchens that had been established in Poland to provide emergency food relief were located in the Recovered Territories.¹²⁶ The challenge that the Polish government had was to stave off hunger and despair in the short term in this vulnerable spot on Germany’s eastern border while also claiming this area for the long term in more than a legal and bureaucratic way.¹²⁷

The Voice of the People (Głos Ludu), the official newspaper of the Polish Workers’ Party, the Polish Communists, reminded readers that these recovered lands needed to be settled and “put into production” as quickly as possible.¹²⁸ For this to happen, for the Recovered Territories to become fully absorbed into postwar Poland, it was not enough just to provide emergency food relief. Agricultural capacity had to be reestablished, and people needed to be given a way to make themselves and the new lands productive; farmers needed to be able to feed themselves and the country.¹²⁹ The quick action on land reform in this area reflected this thinking. By the end of 1946, over a million hectares of land in the Recovered Territories had been seized and subdivided, and by the end of the decade almost half a million new farms had been established in the region.¹³⁰

Animals and animal labor were absolutely integral to goals for the region, to the process of western settlement and modernization, and to the affirmation of Poland’s new postwar borders. The presence of ethnic Poles and Polish-owned livestock in these territories would confirm Polish rootedness in the region and would buttress the state’s claims over it. The goal was to effect what we might call a “moral reconstruction” of the new west, to make it as “home-like” and “normal” as quickly as possible. This required working farms, with animals—and this is where UNRRA came in.¹³¹ This area could be fully absorbed into the new Poland only if the lands were populated by ethnic Poles and if the farmyards were stocked with Polish cows and horses. The horses would supply the labor required to produce the grain and cereal crops that were important to Polish cuisine and that would feed the other livestock animals, including the cows who produced the all-important milk. Alongside their tangible economic value, the animals’ presence in the Recovered Territories deepened and completed settlement. The animals offered emotional and symbolic value as well, and this, too, forms an important part of the story of resettling the west in the immediate postwar period.¹³²

The numbers reflect the importance of the west to the postwar animal aid program. In total, approximately one hundred thousand UNRRA horses and the majority of UNRRA cattle (about sixteen thousand) were distributed in the Recovered Territories; that amounted to about three-quarters of Poland’s total allocation.¹³³ Twenty percent each went to the provinces of Gdańsk, Western Pomerania, Olsztyn, and Lower Silesia, with 15 percent going to Lubusz and 5 percent to Upper Silesia and Opole.¹³⁴ Though these numbers were significant, they of course represented only a small fraction of the number of animals that had been in the area before the war. To cultivate all tillable land in the region, UNRRA estimates said, hundreds of thousands of additional horses (plus many more tractors) were needed.¹³⁵

The settlers were ready and eager to receive whatever animals they could get. Most settlers had traveled in difficult conditions from the eastern and central parts of Poland to the new west with whatever personal belongings they could manage to transport. If they were lucky enough to have an animal at their point of origin, the length of the journey to the Recovered Territories and the conditions they expected to encounter along the way often discouraged traveling with animals. Or sometimes, the animals that had nevertheless been brought along—horses, pigs, and cows (as we might expect, cows were especially prized for providing milk en route and, later, at the destination)—were abandoned or sold to a slaughterhouse somewhere along the way because the journey had indeed become too taxing and because there was scarcely enough food for the humans, let alone enough for animals that were often too old and weak to be of much use at the destination anyway.¹³⁶ The settlers therefore reached the Recovered Territories sometimes without any livestock or working animals whatsoever, or with animals that were in extremely poor health.¹³⁷

Indeed, the availability of good agricultural land—the potential to have a farm with animals—was part of the inducement for moving to the Recovered Territories in the first place.¹³⁸ In her analysis of memoir literature from the early years of settlement in the Recovered Territories, Małgorzata Praczyk argues that animals formed an important part of people’s narratives about leaving one home and establishing roots in a new one. Praczyk shows that the animals provided affective labor and that the inhabitants, in turn, talked about their animals in sentimental and affectionate ways. They mourned animal deaths too. Józefa Nogat (pseud.), for example, became especially attached to the cow that she had received from UNRRA: “I called her Saba, the Queen,” Nogat said, “she was a ‘wonder’ not a cow.” When Józefa had to sell Saba at some point, she says she became changed forever: “My love for livestock has been deadened because I once liked cows so much . . . they used to understand many of my words, and Saba along with me cried when she was being sold . . . with real tears . . . !”¹³⁹

Another western settler, one Stanisław Pawlus in Zielona Góra, was grateful for the UNRRA horse he had received despite the animal’s sorry state: the horse was skinny, untrained, and so weak that he fell several times on the walk home from the holding center. For a time the horse was unable to stand in his stall and had to lean against the barn walls; he remained sick with a cold and a cough for some time. But the animal ultimately regained strength, and the farmer was pleased and proud that they had come through the rough early period together, each as new settlers in a new land looking forward to better days. He only regretted that his father was no longer alive to see the success he had achieved by owning a member of this majestic species.¹⁴⁰

For the animals Poland marked the end of a long and often difficult journey and gave them a chance to settle into new lives as working animals on Polish farms. The animals’ presence in postwar Poland was extremely important to individual Poles, to the state, and to the idea of a new postwar Poland that had moved significantly to the west. There were many reasons for everyone to celebrate these UNRRA animals. Yet the animals’ arrival in Poland was complicated, and good outcomes were by no means assured. The arriving animals’ fates varied because of several factors, as we have seen, and their placement at their final destinations was subject to a great deal of bureaucracy. The next chapter begins by examining how the animals—and UNRRA by extension—were perceived and sometimes weaponized to meet evolving political goals in Poland. As the discussion unfolds, the perspective shifts from viewing animals primarily as functional creatures with defined roles to considering them as carriers of symbolic meaning. This shift supports the broader argument in the book that specific animal species were significant in postwar humanitarian work not just because of their contributions to agricultural recovery but also because of the ideas and values they embodied and conveyed to both donors and recipients.