Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with worldwar2

Poles from Lviv/Lwow - emigration or forced resettlement?

mdonley — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 13:21:04 -0800

At the end of World War II, would a Polish-ethnicity girl/young woman and her family from Lwów/Lviv have been given the option of moving west of the Curzon line to post-war Poland, or would they have been forcibly resettled? On a train from Warsaw to Bydgoszcz today, I met a woman in her seventies or eighties who was telling me about her childhood. Like many older people in the western part of what is now Poland, her roots go back to the areas which belonged to Poland between 1919-1939 and no longer do.

My Polish wasn't good enough to pick out much more than this:

• She was born in Lwów/Lviv.
• "In the 1940s", according to her, she moved to what is now Poland. Soon after this, she went to university in Gliwice, near Katowice, perhaps at the Silesian University of Technology (my own guess - she didn't say, but their Wikipedia page turned up that many of Lwów/Lviv Polytechnic's professors and curricula ended up there.
• She met her husband after she left Gliwice, while they were both studying in Szczecin.
• She now lives in Bydgoszcz.

While I've consulted the Wikipedia article on the Repatriation of Poles (1944-1946) here and found this book (which, from the title, seems perhaps less than objective?), I don't have much in the way of English-language sources for what it was like for those moving/being moved.

I realize this is a really specific question, but any additional information you can provide would be amazing. Thank you!

The Best of WWII Lit

Autarky — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 09:56:50 -0800

I've always been fascinated by war, and recently I've been on one of those kicks that seems ephemeral at first but just won't go away. I am particularly fascinated by WWII. I want reading suggestions. This thread is quite helpful, but it seems mostly limited to broad histories of the war. That's certainly something I'm interested, but you only need to read so many of them if you choose good ones. (I just ordered Keegan's.)

What I'd like are more topical books. Once I've read a few books on the war as a whole I'd like to branch out into narrower aspects. Specific battles or campaigns, particularly good biographies/autobiographies, and narratives about particular countries (I'm imagining a book like "Japan in the Second World War" or something) are especially welcome.

I'd like to stick with non-fiction, though if there are any film gems off the beaten path I'd be interested in hearing about them. I'm reasonably well read on the Holocaust, though if there's anything especially good that's welcome as well.

I'm not intimidated by length, so don't let that be a factor.

Why did the West allow West Germany independence after WWII?

shivohum — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 11:09:29 -0800

Why did the allies permit West Germany sovereignty after World War II (admittedly only in 1955) rather than keeping control in their hands? Were they not at all suspicious of Germany after its role in the first two world wars?

Are there any good English-language sources on dissent in World War II era Japan?

Kattullus — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 11:10:33 -0800

Are there any good English-language sources on dissent in World War II era Japan? I recently met a Japanese woman who grew up in a dissenting household during World War II. I also learned that some Buddhist leaders were jailed for dissent by the Tojo government. Now, if I had thought about it I'm sure I would've realized that dissent was just as widespread in Japan as it was in Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia. However, I never thought about it because I don't remember ever seeing it mentioned before. Can anyone point me towards good English-language books, articles or websites about dissent in WWII-era Japan? Or, in a pinch, summarize non-English sources?

What long-term effects did the Second World War have on Europe's wildlife and environment?

mdonley — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 03:48:07 -0800

What long-term effects did the Second World War have on Europe's wildlife and environment? I was leafing through the first few pages of Absolute War yesterday and read that a wave of rabies which spread across western Europe in the 1960s had started when wolves and other animals had fled west, escaping the Soviet advance in the last years of the war, but had been halted somewhat by the descent of the Iron Curtain.

What other effects did the war have on flora and fauna? Did the scale of destruction in some areas pave the way for a rearrangement of the species and environment in the area? How much of a problem was leftover ordinance? And what, if any, effects can still be seen today?

Sexual humiliation by the Japanese Army in WWII

Rash — Wed, 05 Jul 2006 22:01:26 -0800

How did the Japanese force unwilling Chinese men to rape their own family members? Was actual intercourse involved, or has history been exagerated? Stories about the Rape of Nanking always include this detail:

Japanese troops forced families to commit acts of incest: sons were forced to rape their mothers, fathers were forced to rape daughters. Monks who had declared a life of celibacy were forced to rape women for the amusement of the Japanese. Instances of Chinese men being forced to commit sex with corpses were not unheard of.

- source: Wikipedia

So how did this work, actually? If enemy soldiers insisted that I have sex with them watching, I certainly wouldn't be able to comply, 'specially with my mother.

Identify this novel about Jewish family during WWII

gentle — Mon, 19 Dec 2005 18:30:18 -0800

Identify-a-novel-filter. My girlfriend remembers reading a novel about ten years ago recounting the experiences of a Jewish family before, during and after World War 2. She remembers very little of the plot. She thinks it is set in Germany. It remembers it as bein mainly concerned with the father character, who at one point is either tortured by Nazis, or is hiding from the threat of torture; she remembers some kind of physical abuse/prolonged torture involving a wooden board. And finally, she thinks the family name or novel's title begins with "B". Unfortunately, she has no details about the author (might be German), original language (ditto) or indeed anything else other than that it's not Anne Frank or The Tin Drum.

Pacific Theater in WW2: Why Would Americans Use Pounds? Why Did Water + Stomach Wound = Death?

COBRA! — Mon, 04 Oct 2004 12:22:23 -0800

I have a couple of nuts-and-bolts questions about the Pacific theater in World War II. I've been reading the Naked and the Dead (if you haven't read it, it's Norman Mailer's semi-autobiographical account of serving in the Infantry on a Pacific island during the war), and a couple of incidental details along the way have me scratching my head. To wit:

1. Several times in the book, characters conduct transactions in pounds. What's the deal with this? They're Americans, so why aren't they using dollars? Was there some sort of internal Army currency called pounds during the war?

2. After a character is shot in the stomach, a big deal is made of the fact that no one can give him any water, because drinking water with a stomach wound will kill him. Why is that? What's so dangerous about water?

I suppose #2 isn't very Pacific-specific. Oh well.