INTRODUCTION 9Both Czechoslovakia and Poland had a higher percentage of
Catholics at the war’s end than at its beginning. Protestant Ger-
mans were expelled from both countries. Poland, furthermore,
lost the substantial Eastern Orthodox and Greek Catholic popu-
lations who had inhabited its interwar eastern territories, ceded
in 1945 to the Soviet Union.19 Most dramatically, the Holocaust
took its toll on the postwar demographic composition of Central
and Eastern Europe—especially in Poland—as did waves of out-
ward Jewish migration in the immediate postwar by Holocaust
survivors, accelerated in some instances by pogroms like the one
in Kielce, Poland, in July 1946.
As historians have noted over the years, the establishment of
Communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe did not pro-
ceed uniformly. Some countries by the war’s end already sported
a Soviet-backed puppet government (Poland), while others took
several years to arrive at Communist domination (Czechoslova-
kia).21 All of the states that came to constitute the Soviet Bloc—a
geopolitical entity defined by the nominal sovereignty of its mem-
ber states, as constrained by autarky and military dependence on
the USSR—experienced forced migration and substantial demo-
graphic shifts in the war’s course and aftermath. In addition to
Czechoslovakia and Poland, both Germany and Romania were re-
defined by border revisions and forced migrations.22 On the other
lishment of Communist Regimes in Eastern Europe, 1944–1949 (Boulder, Colo.: Westview
Press, 1997).
- Norman M. Naimark, Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century
Europe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), 108–38. - Jan T. Gross, Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz; An Essay in His-
torical Interpretation (New York: Random House, 2006); Bożena Szaynok, Pogrom
Żydów w Kielcach 4 Lipca 1946 (Warsaw: Bellona, 1992). - Mark Kramer, “Stalin, Soviet Policy, and the Consolidation of a Communist
Bloc in Eastern Europe, 1944–53,” in Stalinism Revisited: The Establishment of Com-
munist Regimes in East-Central Europe, ed. Vladimir Tismaneanu (Budapest: Central
European University Press, 2009), 51–102. - Philipp Ther, The Dark Side of Nation-States: Ethnic Cleansing in Modern Eu-
rope, trans. Charlotte Kreutzmüller (New York: Berghahn, 2014), 143–208.