Victims of Stalin and Hitler: the Polish Community of Bradford

Abstract

Having admitted large numbers of Polish nationals into Britain after the Second World War on grounds of moral obligation and labour shortage, the British government assumed that the newcomers would ‘assimilate’, though no precise meaning was given to this term. In this study of assimilation in Bradford's Polish community it is suggested that in the first generation of Polish settlement many factors combined to preserve rather than dilute Polish culture and identity, whereas cultural dilution was characteristic of the second and third generations. Despite this, a firm sense of identity, based on kinship and memory rather than culture, has remained.