Managing Disability and Constructing the Nation in Interwar Poland: The Lviv Disabled Veterans’ Home

After the proclamation of an independent Polish state, the government organized a welfare system for disabled servicemen of the imperial and the Polish armies and established the Disabled Veterans’ Home in Lviv, the largest city in the eastern borderlands. As these territories were contested by Poles and Ukrainians, the authorities implemented social programs for impaired soldiers as a means to strengthen loyalty to the state. The chapter studies the interconnections between the discourses created by military and civilian bureaucrats and disabled soldiers, and it examines how different visions of institutionalization formed the experience of disability of a diverse group of disabled veterans. It argues that disabled veterans’ agency, activism, and resistance to the disciplinary regimes of the institution became a challenge for the state-promoted institutionalization model and were the main factors in shaping the experience of Disabled Veterans’ Home residents.