Bandar-Log in Action: The Polish Children's Experience of Disaster in Literature and Mythology

The expression “bandar-log” was popular in Poland in the first half of the twentieth century among readers of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book. Before WWI, in families of both the landed gentry and the intelligentsia, “bandar-log” served to describe unruly children (The Jungle Book was available in Polish translation since 1900). Thus, it referred to boisterous, frolicsome behaviours that clashed with the standards for proper child-rearing. Yet well-heeled children did have the right to vent their emotions – hence, the concept of “bandar-log”, borrowed from a “suitable” book, permitted albeit fleeting acceptance of behaviours otherwise frowned upon. The concept lost its meaning together with the decline of good manners and the acceptance of a “playground model”, in which children’s behaviour was regulated not by readings, but by adaptation to their group. Nonetheless, “bandar-log” did persist after WWII in rump form, as an echo of a bygone world. My chapter addresses children’s behaviours during the wrenching transformations that are part and parcel of war and revolution, and their reflection in literature and mythology. So, I examine the loss of childhood as coupled with the destruction of the world – and its subsequent recreation. Thus, I analyze literary representations and childhood as recalled much later, during adulthood. The founding myth of the Kresy (Poland’s onetime eastern borderlands) was that of an Eden. However, during the interwar period, a significant shift in society’s vision of childhood had occurred. In the following generation “bandar-log” was but a shadow. I portray the influence of childhood experiences on way the mythology of the Kresy was shaped before the Kresy were definitively lost in the wake of WWII. When in the course of WWII Poles were expelled from that Eden, the myth of the happy family in the “Recovered Territories” replaced it. The thesis of this chapter is that, within the process of eliminating childhood, “bandar-log” took an unforeseen and startling turn. The capacity of children to release their emotions proved to be an important resource in the process of accepting responsibility: it also helped assure the maintenance of emotional balance in circumstances of traumatic loss.