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This is a Channel Four Book intended, say the publishers, 'to bring history graphi- cally to light' with rare photographs and hundreds of interviews. Neal Ascherson, who has worked as a journalist in Poland, has tackled a complex task with sympathe- tic insight. Faced with a kaleidoscope of events he has sought out their underlying trends and stressed the motives, the spirit and yearnings of this turbulent nation in its unceasing struggle for freedom. By 1795 the corpse of Poland had been sliced up by Russia, Prussia and Austria and expunged from the map. In 1918, following the collapse of the three conquering powers, Poland reappeared, its silver eagle still crowned. In 1939 the country was again partitioned by Hitler's Reich and the Soviet Union. In its restored postwar shape its boundaries have been shifted 200 miles to the west, the composition of its Population altered (the Jews have virtually disappeared and there is no Wilno or Lwow), and Poland has become a satellite of the Soviet empire. But its reputation for gallantry and truculence remains. Ascher- son calls Poland 'a smoking volcano, quies- cent after its latest discharge in 1980 but capable at any time of yet another eruption which could shatter the whole landscape of East-West relations.' Many references in the book jog my memory, though the author has not always had space to elaborate on them: the notorious role played by the Free City of Danzig, for instance, in the events that led up to the German invasion of 1 September, 1939. It was in Danzig, where I was working (1937-38) at a small Polish printers which employed about ten Poles, that I had commenced my own private war with the Nazis. Young German louts used to picket the building and try to beat us up when we left. These were the classic type of street — they also attacked Jewish shops and synagogues — whom I had already seen in action in Berlin and Nuremburg. The Danzigers treated them as local heroes and after an affray they would expect hot soup and sausages from their parents. Ascherson speaks of the calm of Warsaw in the months just before the war. But Underlying the calm was controlled ten- sion. The Poles knew there would be war, but there was no panic. They had confi- dence in their military prowess and the support pledged by their Western allies. There were black-out exercises, the opera singer Jan Kiepura sang at open-air con- certs to raise money for new bombers, reserve officers disappeared from the cafes and bars, it became the fashion to learn English. The two weeks' leave I spent in a
A smoking volcano
Denis Hills
THE STRUGGLES FOR POLAND by Neal Ascherson
Michael Joseph, £14.95
Polish farm outside Warsaw at the end of July were idyllic summer days — the hired Ukrainian labourers sang as they worked in the fields and the little local train of wooden carriages drawn by a quaint 19th- century locomotive (the `Samovarele) was crowded with bearded Jewish pedlars and traders who carried newspaper parcels and had a fiddler to play for them. It was noticed, however, that Mars was shining ominously red. 'It means war,' the farm labourers told me. 'But first we must get the harvest in.'
I was walking in Galicia when the panzers attacked Poland. On the third day a village grocer beckoned me excitedly into his shop and I heard the faraway voice of Chamberlain announce that Britain had entered the war. Cobbled squares filled up with peasants awaiting mobilisation orders and scanning the cloudless sky for signs of RAF vapour trails. It was rumoured that the navy was steaming into the Baltic. Then the first refugees from Warsaw began to arrive by car and train, the Red Army moved up to the border and I was warned to go. As I walked over a footbridge across the Dniestr into Bukovina (Romania) I had a feeling of shame. I was in flight. The Germans were ripping Poland apart and I hated them.
Many thousands of Polish soldiers man- aged to escape and later regroup in France — one cavalry brigade found its way via Syria to Egypt with a few Citroen trucks, Hotchkiss machine-guns and riding horses. This was only the beginning of Polish retaliation. Ascherson gives full credit to Poland's splendid contribution to the Allied war effort while fighting from fore- ign bases in the old Legionary tradition. I recall the excitement when Stalin agreed to evacuate General Anders's interned Polish troops to the Middle East in 1942. Some 115,000 Poles (including dependants) ar- rived by ship across the Caspian. I was in charge of a staging post when the first draft arrived at Habbaniya (Iraq). They were an incongruous collection in crumpled khaki, among them a group of good-looking women in ammunition boots. The women refused to be cossetted, segregated or specially guarded, but after a meal put on a concert using the lights of our trucks. Their charm and silvery voices in this desolate sandy place astonished my Sikh drivers.
It took well over a year to train and equip Anders's 2 Polish Corps of 50,000 men before they were ready to fight in Italy. This was their long-awaited chance to recover self-respect and vindicate their nation's honour. It was sad and significant, though, that about 1,000 Polish Jewish soldiers were reported to have deserted before embarkation and were lying low in Palestine and the kibbutzim. Zionist lead- ers had persuaded these defectors that their chief enemy was no longer Nazi Germany but British soldiers and police maintaining the Palestine Mandate. They had in effect become part of a Jewish Fifth Column. Menachem Begin, fresh from the 'white nights' of Soviet imprisonment, was one of their manipulators.
Ascherson does not dwell on the cam- paign in Italy, the casualties and the moments of elation: Corporal Czech sounding the Cracow hejnal on his bugle over the wreckage of Cassino monastery with the dead lying below; the vino and raw eggs in liberated tavernas, the bitterly- fought river-crossings. But by the time Bologna had been captured it had become a useless trophy. Warsaw had already been destroyed, and General Berling's Poles, under Soviet command, had marched into the derelict capital with the Red Army, `stepping in horrified silence through a desert of fallen rubble'. The country lay under Russian occupation and after long bickering the politicians had given in to Stalin's demand to strip Poland of her eastern provinces and push her back to the old Curzon Line. For Anders's Poles this was heartbreaking news. Many of them came from the east and they now had no homes to go back to unless they accepted Soviet citizenship. Given the option of returning to Poland branded as 'Fascists' or building a new life in Britain or the Commonwealth, few Poles chose to be repatriated. I was present when the last draft of Polish soldiers boarded an Amer- ican Liberty ship at Naples for Gdynia. There was no cheering — indeed some of the men were not 'true Poles' but Silesians of mixed German and Polish stock whom 2
Polish Corps had recruited after capture to replace its battle casualties.
Ascherson gives a painful account of the wranglings over the 'Polish imbroglio' at the peace negotiations and how matters were finally settled to suit Stalin's de- mands. Churchill, he reminds us, was so infuriated with Polish stubborness that he shouted at the Polish representative Miko- lajczyk at a meeting in Moscow (October 1944), 'I shall leave you to your own troubles. You have only your miserable, petty, selfish interests in mind!' — adding that Mikolajczyk ought to be in a lunatic asylum. Churchill also told him, 'You are on the verge of annihilation. Unless you accept the frontier you are out of business for ever. The Russians will sweep through your country and your people will be liquidated.'
Compared with the earlier years, Po- land's postwar history — apart from the dramatic episode of Solidarity defiance has little of the epic quality that marked the time of the revolutionaries, the rebirth of independence in 1918 and the new state's miraculous escape at the battle of Warsaw (August 1920) when the Red Army was beaten back and (as Poles say) Christendom was saved. The postwar years are the story of a socialist experiment forced on an uncooperative and resentful people justifiably envious of the Western world's prosperity and higher living stan- dards, and stuck in a geographical mire at the mercy of the Soviet Union. It is a chronicle of trade union and party politics, of strikes and samizdat, of production figures, indebtedness and black marketeer- ing, of bureaucratic control and corrup- tion. It seems to have produced few charismatic figures — the Pope, Cardinal Wyszynski, Lech Walesa, and Father Popieluszko perhaps. Ascherson's gallery of Polish socialist leaders does not flatter them. Gomulka he describes as 'an incur- able workaholic with a violent temper'. Gierek spent his last 25 years as a party bureaucrat. General Jaruzelski is 'a stiff, reserved figure behind his black specta- cles'. There is no Conrad and no wild- haired musical virtuoso such as prime- minister Ignacy Paderewski, no gruff Mar- shal Pilsudski with martial whiskers. The music of Chopin, played constantly on Warsaw radio, is a nostalgic reminder of ghosts. Not even Czeslaw Milosz, who was awarded a Nobel prize for literature in 1980, has the flair of that other Polish-born winner Singer — though Singer, who writes in Yiddish, is not accepted by Poles in any Polish context. Polish anti-Semitism will undoubtedly crop up in the Channel 4 film of The Struggles for Poland: for Hitler's main death camps were set up\ amongst the Poles and Lanzmann, director of Shoah, has charged the Poles with direct complicity in their fate. But Ascherson properly rebuts Lanzmann's charge as un- just and based on 'a misunderstanding of Polish attitudes'.
Revisiting Poland not long ago I was taken aback by the heavy, austere hand of socialism in a poor country: the dour Warsaw crowds, the queuing for shoddy goods, the grey stained buildings, the ubiquitous police, the lack of gaiety. Night life is restricted, the elegant cavalry offic- ers with their cloaks and riding boots have gone. Most significant of all, there is scarcely a Jew to be seen and their dis- appearance has immeasurably impover- ished Poland's intellectual and cultural life. There is of course another side under the blanket of Polish socialism: the generosity of Polish hosts, the spirited talk of politics and world affairs among friends, the pri- vate gatherings of artists, the vodka, Bal- kan wine and mushroom soup. When the warm spring days arrive Warsaw recap- tures something of its youth. People put away their winter wrappings, and parks and public gardens fill with owners walking their dogs, with spruce pensioners and clean happy children. In the countryside the mud dries from the lanes, ihe farmer lets out his cows to graze, and wayside shrines sparkle with paint. Watching the men doff their hats and women kneel to pray as they pass the little wooden crosses with their bowls of fresh flowers and candle stumps, listening to their earthy language, one knows that traditional Poland has survived. Ascherson says that the struggle for Poland will go on. It is, he explains, 'a struggle to establish the truth'. Foreigners may complain that the Poles make too much of their grievances. 'But appeals from the space between Germany and Russia go unheard if they are not pro- claimed loudly and with drama.' One assumes that the Channel 4 television series will underline the Polish case. Ascherson ends with a photograph of Father Popieluzko comforting the mother of a student who died of injuries recieved in police custody in October 1984. The priest's own pictorial epitaph — hung in the church where he used to preach and is now buried — is a photograph of the car from which police officers tossed his mur- dered body at night into a dam.
`We'd better put his name down for Dartmoor.'
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