Thoughts from Poland

I sit here typing this in a cafe/bar/laundromat in Krakow feeling a swirl of emotions.

My first stop was Warsaw. My heart breaks for the city. Its history in the last century has been singularly devastating. In 1920, the Polish Army under the stewardship of Jozef Piłsudski was able to fend off the Soviets at the Battle of Warsaw. But then came the Nazi Blitzkrieg in September 1939, the occupation, and then, after all of that, the deadly, unwanted embrace of the Soviet Union.

Interwar Poland was a place of great hope, pride, but also disappointment. Poland, since the late 18th century, did not exist as a country. The people of the land continued to speak Polish and to hang onto their culture, which reached its apex (not counting today) in the late 16th century. In the 17th century came the Swedish Deluge, a series of invasions that devastated Poland and left it on its knees. Poland asserted itself again the next century, but was partitioned between the three powers it had the misfortune to be placed between: Prussia, Russia, and the Austrian Empire of the Habsburgs. Tadeusz Kosciusko, so famous for fighting alongside the Americans in the Revolutionary War, also fought for Polish independence in the 1790s: this was throttled by Russia, which crushed other rebellions in the 19th century. 

Poland finally had its chance in the aftermath of the First World War. It had the misfortune of being the battleground for much of the (all too forgotten) Eastern Front of that war, but politically its outcome worked in the Poles' favor. The Germans and the Austrians had suffered a crushing defeat. The Russians, who fought on the other side of the war, experienced the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, knocking that country out of the war. Russia, for the time being, relinquished its Polish territories (to the Germans), but the Allies took them back from the Germans after the latter's defeat. 

With intense diplomacy, Poland was able to grasp independence. It immediately fought several wars with its neighbors, most significantly against the Soviet Union, and it suffered economically. Its political life was fractured by incessant squabbling in the parliament, the Sejm. But it was a country nonetheless. And then came the Nazis. 

The Nazis swept into Poland and immediately made it clear that they were not be trifled with. They had prepared lists of tens of thousands of Polish elites and intellectuals; they located them, and they shot them. Poles were not to be educated beyond grammar school; they only needed to know enough to be willing servants of their German overlords. The actual policies that the Nazis followed in Poland, a patchwork of insanity, will be explored in a further post. Suffice it to say, Nazi rule was extremely brutal, the Poles were forced into labor and the Jews were concentrated, forced into slave labor, and ultimately, tragically, exterminated. There were 3.2 million Polish Jews on the onset of the Second World War, and nearly all of them were murdered. 

The Polish Home Army, a resistance movement in the Nazi-occupied country, rose in rebellion on August 1, 1944. After 60 some odd days of utter ferocity, the uprising was put down by the Waffen SS, the Wehrmacht, and groups of criminals led by the likes of Bronislav Kaminski and Oskar Dirlewanger, who was a child molester and a necrophiliac. The Nazis killed about 200,000 civilians and methodically destroyed about 85% of the city. You see a lot of ugly communist architecture in Warsaw. The rest of it was, 70 years ago, complete rubble. As I walked the streets of the city, I tried to grasp this fact. Where I was walking there were once smoldering ruins as far as the eye could see, and corpses choking the streets. And while this happened, the Soviets, who did not want an independent Poland and were completely content to see the Poles wiped out, sat on their hands on the east bank of the Vistula River. For this, and for many other reasons, Stalin will never be forgiven in Poland, nor should he. 

This is a massive subject of the utmost historical importance. I cannot possibly give it the respect it deserves in one post, without boring all readers. More soon.