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Before August 1914, electricity generation in Warsaw was almost entirely de- pendent on supplies from Zagłębie Dąbrowskie, the coal-rich basin neighboring German Upper Silesia, which came under immediate German attack and then oc- cupation. The disruption of Warsaw’s supplies of coal crippled factory production in the city, which forced municipal authorities to look to the distant Don Basin as a potential long-term supplier. 81 Satisfaction of Warsaw’s energy needs proved im- possible, even as the city became completely dependent on supplies from the east Ukrainian coalfields, which quickly became subject to transportation difficulties. The first consignment of 50 wagons of Donbas coal arrived only on September 23, and even then it took the combined efforts of the Warsaw Citizens Committee and the Magistrate’s Office to secure it. 82 In 1913, Warsaw consumed approximately 160 freight cars of coal on a daily basis; by the end of September 1914 it was receiving only half that amount from the Donbas. By that time, the Distribution Commission of the Citizens Committee expected supplies to increase eventually to 110 freight cars,
83 but this optimistic estimate never came close to being realized.
As a consequence of the energy shortfall, factory production declined precipi- tously, leading to mass unemployment. Already by early October it was estimated that more than half the city’s labor force had been deprived of work and wages, which matched the decline in electricity consumption. In thirty-one larger factories for which data are available, working hours for those who remained employed had been reduced to 35% of the norm. 84 As the war progressed, massive unemployment grew further. According to data collected by German occupation authorities in early 1916, 77,809 industrial workers were employed in Warsaw’s factories before the war, about half of Warsaw’s working-class labor force. By early 1916, the total number of industrial workers in Warsaw had dropped to 14,632, less than 19 percent of the prewar total. 85 Unemployment outside Warsaw’s industrial sector among artisans and craftsmen, office workers, and the salaried intelligentsia also rose to unimagin- ably alarming proportions.
Thus unemployment was recognized as the most serious and painful social problem confronting the city even in the war’s first weeks, as the Warsaw Citizens Committee opened employment agencies (giełdy pracy), which immediately received 81. APW KOMW 1, protocol no. 28 of August 23, 1914. 82. “W sprawie opału,” Kurjer Warszawski 264 (September 24, 1914, morning ed.): 3. 83. “Węgiel dla Warszawy,” Kurjer Warszawski 270 (September 30, 1914, afternoon ed.): 2. 84. “Gaz i elektryczność wobec wojny,” Nowa Gazeta 442 (September 22, 1914, afternoon ed.): 2; “K.O.m.W,” Nowa Gazeta 465 (October 5, 1914, afternoon ed.): 2. 85. AGAD, Szef Administracji przy Generał-Gubernatorstwie w Warszawie (hereafter, SAGGW) 5, Vierteljahrschaftsbericht des Verwaltungschefs bei dem General-Gouvernement Warschau fur die Zeit, January 1, 1916, to March 31, 1916, appendix III. TPR 59_4 text.indd 37 3/12/15 11:37 AM This content downloaded from 141.211.155.157 on Mon, 18 May 2015 21:31:13 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
38 The Polish Review hundreds and then thousands of aspiring workers. As a result of the conscription of adult males from the rural labor force into the army, the giełdy pracy were initially successful in finding work for Warsaw’s unemployed as seasonal field workers, where they toiled digging potatoes outside the city. 86 While demand for farm labor- ers remained high throughout the early fall, especially in the Russian interior, low wages and uncertain conditions of employment hindered recruitment. Although the Citizens Committee’s rural employment agency had sent over 800 to Kursk province by the end of September with plans to send hundreds more, it was unable to satisfy Russian demand for field labor. 87 By early October, the farm workers employment office of the Citizens Committee had found work for over 2,500 individuals in the Polish Kingdom and the empire in practically equal proportions, 88 after which demand for rural labor dropped off with the end of the harvest season.
Before the first month of the war had ended, the Warsaw Citizens Committee and the Magistrate’s Office collaborated in the creation of new public works projects designed to employ 1,250 people. 89 Those numbers would continue to rise, and in early 1916, after the city had come under German occupation, some 12,000 were employed by the city in public works, 90 only slightly less than the number employed in industry. Otherwise, Warsaw’s unemployment crisis, which affected hundreds of thousands in working-class families, could be alleviated only by labor migration from the city.
Figures reported on a regular basis by the giełdy pracy of the Warsaw Citizens Committee reveal the scale of that migration. By mid-September 1914, the Commit- tee’s agencies had found employment for 918 people as farm workers and for 1,079 factory workers and 929 skilled craftsmen, mostly outside the Polish Kingdom. 91
Approximately three weeks later, the giełdy found work for 5,505 individuals who had sought their assistance—791 in the city, 2,249 in the provinces, and 2,466 in the empire. Actual demand from the empire, however, was estimated at over 18,000 workers, as rail fares presented the main obstacle to labor migration from Warsaw, an issue that was not resolved until the following spring. 92 Nonetheless, their numbers continued to rise, from over 10,000 in mid-November, to 17,729 at the beginning of the new year, to 24,412 by the last week of February 1915, by which time the greatest 86. APW KOMW 1, protocols no. 4, 8, and 17 of August 6, 8, and 13, 1914, respectively; protocol no. 8, of August 8, 1914; “Giełda pracy,” Kurjer Warszawski 229 (August 20, 1914, afternoon ed.): 3. 87. “Z giełdy pracy rolnej,” Kurjer Warszawski 263 (September 23, 1914, morning ed.): 3; “Giełda rolna,” Kurjer Warszawski 272 (October 2, 1914): 2. 88. “Z giełdy pracy,” Kurjer Warszawski 274 (October 4, 1914): 5. 89. “Nowe roboty miejskie,” Nowa Gazeta 397 (August 28, 1914, afternoon ed.): 2. 90. Herbst, “Działalność społeczna i samorządowa,” 311–312. 91. “Giełdy pracy,” Kurjer Warszawski 256 (September 16, 1914, afternoon ed.): 3. 92. “K.O.m.W,” Nowa Gazeta 465 (October 5, 1914, afternoon ed.): 2; Herbst, “Działalność społeczna i samorządowa,” 296–297. TPR 59_4 text.indd 38 3/12/15 11:37 AM This content downloaded from 141.211.155.157 on Mon, 18 May 2015 21:31:13 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions warsaw’s transient populations 39 demand was for coal miners due to the labor shortage in the Donbas. 93 According to Franciszek Herbst, secretary of the Warsaw Citizens Committee’s Labor Sec- tion, which was coordinating the work of the giełdy pracy, during their first year of existence, the employment agencies found work for 57,000 candidates, mainly in Russia proper. 94 Dunin-Wąsowicz estimates that 70,000–80,000 workers left Warsaw during the first year of the war, including the thousands of skilled workers swept up in the Russian evacuation in the summer of 1915. 95
ties, which established a Central Labor Recruitment Office under the Presidium of Police. By April 1, 1916, over 19,000 had found work in Germany and Poland through “the Central,” which also provided monthly subsidies of approximately 10 marks (approximately $1.80) per family that had remained behind. 96 However, the occu- pation authorities’ appeal to “the workers’ own interest” to accept work offered by “the Central” revealed a certain frustration, as labor recruitment was hampered by reports that Poles were poorly treated in Germany and were given the most physically demanding work at the lowest possible wage and that they were not being allowed to return home. 97 In October 1916, under the urging of the increasingly powerful Gen- eral Erich von Ludendorff, the Germans resorted to a forced draft of males between eighteen and forty-five who were receiving welfare payments or public support and began round-ups of people on the street who were even suspected of receiving public assistance. 98 Some were forced into labor battalions to work on the eastern front, while others sought to avoid that fate by accepting work in Germany. However, Ludendorff’s labor conscription campaign gave rise to popular opposition and a decision of the German authorities to bring it to an end after a mere two months. 99 As a consequence, 20,000–30,000 unemployed workers remained in Warsaw until the end of the war. 100
As mentioned, evidence of the demographic impact of male labor out-migra- tion, most of which was voluntary rather than coerced, whether under the Russians or the Germans, can be found in the city’s dramatic feminization. Before the war, women had a 9 percent advantage over men in Warsaw’s total population. Three 93. “Działalność giełd pracy,” Kurjer Warszawski 319 (November 18, 1914, afternoon ed.): 3; “O pracę,” Kurjer Warszawski 9 (January 9, 1915, afternoon ed.): 2; “Giełdy pracy,” Kurjer Warszawski 54 (February 23, 1915, morning ed.): 2; “Dla poszukujących pracy,” Kurjer Warsza- wski 77 (March 18, 1915, afternoon ed.): 3. 94. Herbst, “Działalność społeczna i samorządowa,” 292. 95. Dunin-Wąsowicz, Warszawa w czasie pierwszej wojny światowej, 104–5. 96. APW Redakcja “Nowej Gazety” (RNG), Notice of Imperial German President of Police, April 12, 1916. 97. Jerzy Holzer and Jan Molenda, Polska w pierwszej wojnie światowej (Warsaw, 1963), 124; Herbst, “Działalność społeczna i samorządowa,” 310. 98. Holzer and Molenda, Polska w pierwszej wojnie światowej, 125. 99. Kauffman, The Elusive Alliance, 69–72. 100. Dunin-Wąsowicz, Warszawa w czasie pierwszej wojny światowej, 104–5. TPR 59_4 text.indd 39 3/12/15 11:37 AM This content downloaded from 141.211.155.157 on Mon, 18 May 2015 21:31:13 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
40 The Polish Review years later, in January 1917, that advantage had grown to 32 percent. Only with the conclusion of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918, which enabled the return of tens of thousands from a now Soviet Russia, did the sizable discrepancy between women and men demographically begin to narrow. Even so, at the beginning of 1919, women still had a 23 percent advantage over men in Warsaw’s population. 101
Meanwhile, the war’s prolonged demographic imbalance between the sexes obvi- ously contributed to steep declines in marriage, fertility, and birthrates. Thus, despite the return migration of tens of thousands in 1918 after the conclusion of the treaty, Warsaw’s total population remained lower in January 1919 than in January 1917. Returnees Estimates vary widely on the number of returnees, whether refugees or labor migrants, following the conclusion of the Brest treaty. According to Vejas Gabriel Liu- levicius, 4 million civilians, the majority of whom were returning refugees, streamed across the Soviet border for the German-occupied Ober Ost and Poland in the spring and summer of 1918. 102 Peter Gatrell reports a far more modest number of 400,000 refugees of various nationalities who left Soviet territory for lands under German occupation between May and November 1918. He also argues, however, that “Poland, more than any other state with the exception of Armenia, was faced with an enormous problem of refugee relief” after the war. Between November 1918 and July 1921, half a million refugees returned to Poland, with another half a million after that date. 103
Elsewhere, Gatrell estimates that overall, 5 percent of Russia’s wartime refugees were Jewish and that 11 percent were Polish. 104
Until November 1918, virtually no prospective returnee was refused entrance to the German-occupied territory of the Polish Kingdom. Nonetheless, the return migration of tens of thousands in 1918 had virtually no impact on the city’s total population, due to a steep drop in the birthrate and an even sharper rise in the mortality rate, the latter a consequence of severe malnutrition and widespread disease.
With the end of the German occupation, according to Konrad Zieliński, the new Polish authorities began to openly discriminate against Jewish returnees and immi- grants.
105 Zieliński’s claim bears closer scrutiny. Before the war, Jews had comprised 101. Ibid., 83–84. 102. Gabriel Vejas Liulevicius, War Land on the Eastern Front: Culture, National Identity and German Occupation in World War I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 103. Peter Gatrell, “War, Population Displacement and State Formation in Eastern Europe and Russia, 1918–1924,” in Homelands: War, Population and Statehood in Eastern Europe and Russia, ed. Nick Baron and Peter Gatrell (London: Anthem Press, 2004), 17, 22–23. 104. Peter Gatrell, Russia’s First World War: A Social and Economic History (Harlow, UK: Pearson, 2005), 186. 105. Konrad Zieliński, “Population, Displacement and Citizenship in Poland, 1918–1924,” in Homelands, 100. TPR 59_4 text.indd 40 3/12/15 11:37 AM This content downloaded from 141.211.155.157 on Mon, 18 May 2015 21:31:13 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
warsaw’s transient populations 41 38.1 percent of Warsaw’s total population. By January 1917, that proportion had risen to 45 percent, mainly the result of the out-migration of industrial workers, who in Warsaw were overwhelmingly Polish. By January 1919, following several months of return migration, the Jewish proportion had declined to 42 percent, despite tem- porarily higher birthrates among Warsaw’s Jews than Poles. Even though Jews had been far less likely to leave Warsaw during the war and therefore returned to the city in far smaller numbers, the Jewish population declined by over 34,000 from 1914 to 1919, or by slightly less than 10 percent, thus joining Polish victims of Warsaw’s wartime existential catastrophe. According to the 1921 census, the first after the war, Warsaw’s population had more than recovered its wartime losses, adding some 46,000 inhabitants, but its Jewish population had declined to 33.1 percent of the total, lower than its prewar proportion. However, this paled in comparison to the decline of the Jewish population in Warsaw’s suburbs as a consequence of the mass expulsions by the Russian army, from 40 percent of the population before the war to 15 percent by the beginning of 1919. 106
These Jewish refugees who attempted to return after the war were therefore far more likely to be subjected to discrimination by Polish officials than Warsaw’s Jews, who had remained relatively stationary during the war years. Conclusion During the years of World War I, Warsaw’s population declined by 150,000, 17 per- cent of its prewar total. To put the city’s demographic catastrophe and the contribution of population movements to it into a larger context, it is useful to compare Warsaw to other European urban centers. Freiberg, the German frontline city, lost some 9 percent of its prewar population, mainly due to military casualties among its male conscripts, lower marriage and birth rates, and a 60 percent increase in the mortality rate. 107
Leipzig lost some 13 percent of its population during the war years. With its large working-class population, Leipzig was particularly hard hit by the global influenza of 1918, with a mortality rate 37 percent higher than that prevailing in the rest of Germany. 108
tion of over 2 million before the war declined by 389,000, or nearly 19 percent by December 1917, with many deaths related to the virtual famine in the city of the winter of 1916–17 as mortality rates among civilians climbed to three to five times those prevailing among military personnel. However, Berlin’s population again began to rise in 1918 and by October 1919 had already made up half its losses, 109
106. Dunin-Wąsowicz, Warszawa w czasie pierwszej wojny światowej, 80–93. 107. Chickering, The Great War and Urban Life in Germany, 319–20, 352. 108. Sean Dobson, Authority and Upheaval in Leipzig, 1910–1920: The Story of a Relation- ship (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 160, 186. 109. Amt für Statistik Berlin-Brandenburg, www.statistik-berlin-brandenburg.de/ pms/2011/11–02–04.pdf; see also Belinda J. Davis, Home Fires Burning: Food, Politics and Everyday Life in World War I Berlin (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). TPR 59_4 text.indd 41 3/12/15 11:37 AM This content downloaded from 141.211.155.157 on Mon, 18 May 2015 21:31:13 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
42 The Polish Review whereas Warsaw’s population continued to decline until the end of the war. Vienna, a city similar in size to Berlin, also experienced a debilitating food crisis that caused or contributed to more than a third of all Viennese deaths during the war, while live births declined by over 42 percent. 110 Between 1910 and 1923, Vienna’s population declined by nearly 165,000, or 7.9 percent, but it is difficult to isolate wartime factors from postwar Czech and Hungarian migration from the city after the war. Unlike Warsaw, Vienna was also home to a large, if somewhat reduced, Jewish refugee population at the end of the war. 111
checked rather than reversed by the war; as Jay Winter terms it, a “loss of progress,” compared to the “loss of life” experienced in cities like Berlin, Vienna, and Warsaw. In Berlin, life expectancy at birth was reduced by 3.7 years in the last two years of the war, whereas London and Paris recorded only a negligible change. Moreover, in the early postwar period until 1921, London and Paris had major declines in mortality, whereas Berlin continued to experience a crisis. 112
doubled during the war years, from 18.4 per thousand in 41.4 per thousand by the end of 1917. 113 Warsaw’s wartime food crisis, which weakened the population’s resistance to disease, was also more severe than that experienced in either Berlin or Vienna. Warsaw experienced an unusually threatening typhus epidemic in the spring of 1917, as the number of those infected increased more than eightfold be- tween 1915 and 1917, rising to 15,871. Jews accounted for 73 percent of the reported cases of typhus in 1917, which Konrad Zieliński attributes to the large Jewish tran- sient population in Warsaw. 114 One could also argue that the transient population of returnees from Russia contributed to the spread of the influenza in Warsaw in 1918. However, tuberculosis, rather than typhus or the “Spanish flu,” was the main killer among diseases in wartime Warsaw. In the period 1915–17, tuberculosis-related mortality rose from an already high 13 percent to nearly 30 percent as a cause of death. 115
We have already noted that Warsaw’s Jewish population declined by 10 percent during the war years, due mainly to demographic factors unrelated to population 110. Maureen Healy, Vienna and the Fall of the Habsburg Empire: Total War and Everyday Life in World War I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 41, 216. 111. Rechter, The Jews of Vienna and the First World War, 82. 112. Jay Winter, “Surviving the War: Life Expectation, Illness and Mortality Rates in Paris, London, and Berlin, 1914–1919,” in Capital Cities at War, 488, 497. 113. Dunin-Wąsowicz, Warszawa w czasie pierwszej wojny światowej, 180; Holzer and Molenda, Polska w pierwszej wojnie światowej, 123. 114. Konrad Zieliński, Stosunki polsko-żydowskie na ziemiach Królestwa Polskiego w czasie pierwszej wojny światowej (Lublin: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Marii Curie-Skłodowskiej, 2005), 246–47. 115. APW RNG 6. TPR 59_4 text.indd 42 3/12/15 11:37 AM This content downloaded from 141.211.155.157 on Mon, 18 May 2015 21:31:13 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
warsaw’s transient populations 43 mobility. Over the same period, the Christian population declined by 23 percent. Although the decline in the marriage and birth rates and the rise in the mortality rate were more dramatic among Christians than Jews, they alone cannot account for such a discrepancy and, in fact, were considerably influenced by the out-mi- gration of Christian working-class males. Moreover, in the case of the death rate, it was practically equal among Christians and Jews by the middle of 1917 due to the high incidence of typhus among Jews. 116
From the data available to me, it appears that Christians and Jews from Warsaw served in the ranks of the Russian army in proportion to their share of Warsaw’s prewar population, while Warsaw had been largely cleared of its Jewish refugee population well before the end of the war. Thus, the expulsion by the Russian authorities of over 20,000 enemy subjects and “enemy aliens,” most of whom were Christians, the departure of tens of thousands Russian Orthodox and Polish Catholic Christians during the Russian evacuations of October 1914 and the summer of 1915, and, above all, the out-migration of as many as 100,000 predominantly Christian Polish workers contributed substantially to the decline of Warsaw’s population during the years of World War I. Thus, as a city in flux due to large-scale population movements, Warsaw became temporarily more Jewish and also more female, but it also had a far higher proportion of children and elderly than before the war, demographic segments that were more physically vulnerable in this time of an acute public health crisis. This was the population that remained in Warsaw during the war to deal with the hunger and starvation of the winter of 1916–17 and the devastating spread of deadly diseases in 1917 and 1918. 116. For example, during the week of July 8–14, 1917, there were 338 registered deaths of Christians, compared to 255 for Jews, which was relatively proportional to their shares of Warsaw’s total population at that time; see “Ze statystyki miejskiej,” Nowa Gazeta 382 (August 6, 1917, morning ed.): 2. TPR 59_4 text.indd 43 3/12/15 11:37 AM This content downloaded from 141.211.155.157 on Mon, 18 May 2015 21:31:13 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Download 220.09 Kb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: 
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