Witnesses to history
As Warsaw's politicians pack up their bags for in their eyes a well-earned holiday from a year's hard scheming and politicking, it is as good a time as any to remember that politics is not just about the contemporary interests of this or that party, but can often reach across generations and involve serious issues of right and wrong, truth and lies.
That is a conclusion that one is drawn to when reflecting on the recent deaths of two Poles who each in his own way had an impact on Poland and the way in which the country is perceived in the world.
Earlier this month saw the passing of Gustaw Herling-Grudzinski, one of Poland's most influential post-war writers. Yet Herling-Grudzinski never wrote from Poland, having departed the country during World War II and settled in France and later Italy, where he became part of the inner circle of the emigre monthly Kultura. The magazine was and still is an institution in itself, and was for many years after the war the only place where independent Polish writers could express themselves, mostly by writing anonymously.
But among Herling-Grudzinski's many contributions to post-war Polish literature, one book stands out: "Inny Swiat" (Another World), one of the first descriptions of life in the Soviet gulags. While the world rightly accords Aleksander Solzhenitsyn with having written the true magnum opus, "The Gulag Archipelago," Herling's tome in fact appeared earlier. Those in Poland who read it when it appeared in samizdat were hugely affected by it, and many drew their anti-sovietism and anti-communism from it. In the West, of course, Herling-Grudzinski's work was largely ignored, as was another tome exposing the mendacity of communism, "The Captive Mind," written by Poland's Nobel Prize laureate Czeslaw Milosz.
Yet that is not surprising, as it has been the practice of Western post-war intellectuals to belittle Soviet terror, and to portray the writings of men such as Herling-Grudzinski and Solzhenitsyn as the biased ramblings of disaffected bourgeois emigres. That was a necessary argument, of course, given the innate need of Western intellectuals to see the Soviet system as basically a good idea that just happened to be implemented inefficiently. Far more energy in the West was and is spent exposing Nazi terror and crimes in Central Europe.
Here, however, a double lie continues to be exercised: one is that Nazism was the only genocidal ideology of the 20th century, and the other, that not only Germans were responsible for the Holocaust. That certainly seems to be the view of the British Department of Education, which recently sanctioned a history book for English schoolchildren that informs us that the Nazis were assisted in the extermination of European Jewry by none other than the Poles.
The view that Poles were co-responsible for the Holocaust is now so ingrained in popular Western thinking that it is doubtful that it can ever be eradicated. But if it ever is, an important role will have been played by another man who passed away in the last few weeks, namely Jan Karski, the so-called "courier of Warsaw." Karski's fame came from his wartime role as liaison between the Polish anti-German home army and the Polish government in exile, shuttling back and forth between Britain and occupied Poland with important intelligence information for the Polish and British governments. It was Karski who was one of the first to alert Western powers, in both London and Washington, of the mass extermination of Jews by the Germans and the heroic efforts of the underground Polish resistance to help the Jews. Yet in this case too as would happen in the case of Herling-Grudzinski his information was either ignored or suppressed.
Although Karski and Herling-Grudzinski are no longer with us, it is to the benefit of Poland that there are still people alive who can bear witness both to the truth of what such Poles said and when they said it, as well as to the mendacity of the Western powers who affected not to listen or worse still, collude in the twisting of history even today. Foreign Minister Wladyslaw Bartoszewski is living proof of the truth of what the Poles did during the war, having been a prisoner of Auschwitz, supporter of the Jewish cause, and beneficiary of some of the highest honors of the Israeli state for his role in assisting wartime Jews. And there remains the redoubtable Jan Nowak-Jezioranski, another wartime liaison figure, now resident in Washington and eyewitness to the evils of both 20th century totalitarianisms, as well as the observer of the small-mindedness and petty deceits of post-war Western diplomatic establishments.
There remain reams of history still to be written about the role played by Poles during and after the war in combating Nazism and then communism. Such a history would include the role played Poles in deciphering the famed German Enigma code, understanding the V1 and V2 rockets, the Poles' fate in the Soviet gulags, and the extent of Stalinist murders in post-war Poland. Yet such historical truth still struggles against the counterview that Poles murdered Jews together with Nazis, and then set about happily participating in the construction of socialist society. With the deaths of men like Herling-Grudzinski and Karski, it is to be feared that this struggle will be increasingly difficult.
Marek Matraszek is the Warsaw director of CEC Government Relations. He can be e-mailed at director@cec.com.pl.
