Kresy

In the 17th century the kresy were a strip of frontier in the south-east of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. Wincenty Pol gave the word its broad meaning in his 1854 poem Mohort, and in interwar Poland it came to cover the voivodeships of Wilno, Nowogródek, Polesie, Volhynia, Lwów, Tarnopol and Stanisławów and the eastern part of Białystok. Poles, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Jews, Lithuanians and others lived there; in many districts Poles were a minority.

On 17 September 1939 the Red Army occupied the Kresy; the USSR annexed them and deported hundreds of thousands of their inhabitants. From 1941 to 1944 they were under German occupation, the scene of the murder of the local Jews and of the Volhynia massacres. At Tehran and Yalta the powers accepted a frontier on the Curzon Line, the lands became part of Soviet republics and most Poles were resettled westwards. In Poland the word remains emotionally charged; Lithuanians, Belarusians and Ukrainians see it as an exclusively Polish point of view.