Escapees, Modernity Seekers, Private Traders. Yugoslavia and the Westernization of Polish Tourists, 1956–1989

Abstract

The author envisions the Polish experience of socialist Yugoslavia as a gateway to Eastern European modernity. Drawing on a variety of sources—private letters, oral histories, press reportages, visuals, communist state records, and private archives—the author aims to define and locate the practices and imaginations of Westernization in the reality of Polish tourism to Yugoslavia. He claims that transnational tourism created hidden corridors for Polish escapees from the transcultural Silesian region. Tourism gave a chance for Jewish families to unite after the wave of persecution in Poland in 1968. While a lot of attention was focused on commercial tourism as the main driver for East-West tourism, the author argues that it
was rather an illegal emigration opportunity to the West that was the most “desirable good”
for Polish tourists en route to Yugoslavia in the 1960s.