War always brings greater or lesser deprivation of social needs. It translates into a significant increase in poverty in the affected societies, visible both during and immediately after the armed struggle. In this text, poverty is defined in a broader way (in relation to the classical definition) and is treated as a situation where several or all basic human needs are not met or are met at a low level (Szarfenberg, 2002: 221). It was no different in the case of the two twentieth-century great wars dubbed world wars because of their scale and impact. In their aftermath, the extent of poverty and social need became difficult even to quantify, and one of the areas in Europe which, for many reasons, was particularly affected by this phenomenon became the Polish lands. This was not only a direct result of the fact that they remained, in varying dimensions and spatial extent, the arena of armed struggles, including those that temporarily went beyond the caesuras officially ending major conflicts. The scale of post-war poverty in the Polish lands was also influenced by a number of other factors. These included: 1) the unique course of the two wars in these regions, 2) the long-lasting occupation and its negative effects, 3) the demographic and material losses endured, and 4) the mass displacements of the populations during and after the conflicts, which always worsened living conditions for hundreds of thousands of citizens uprooted from their homes.

In light of the outlined conditions and the severe scale of poverty in Poland following the world wars, it is worthwhile to examine the ways of counteracting this phenomenon and the methods of social rescue, as this exceptional and ad hoc activity was referred to in the period after the Second World War. After the end of World War II, the term social rescue was used to describe welfare and social assistance activities that provided emergency aid to individuals affected by the war. In this text, the term is also applied to relief efforts carried out after the end of World War I (more on the concept of social rescue see: Brenk, 2019: 121–124).

The aim of the text is to identify the institutional foundations, methods, instruments, scope and effects of the measures taken in the immediate post-war years to combat post-war poverty. An essential part of this analysis is both determining the extent of this phenomenon and, more importantly conducting a comparative analysis of the efforts made by the state, local governments and social organisations, with particular attention to similarities and differences and their origins, and the processes that were more or less successful in applying lessons from the experience gained after the end of the First World War.

The chronological scope of the work covers the period when emerging welfare needs in the Polish lands were directly caused by the effects of war. Thus, it encompasses the years 1918–1921, when, following the end of the Polish-Soviet war, migration processes were winding down and aid activities could gradually shift towards peaceful efforts, which was also reflected in the development of institutions. After the Second World War, time caesuras are marked by the expulsion of the German occupier from the Polish lands and the end of the crucial rescue phase in 1948, along with Poland's move towards Stalinism and the displacement of social organisations from the institutional aid system.