The Rape of Poland and the Death of Hope
Valiunas, Algis
Algis Valiunas THE RAPE OF POLAND AND THE DEATH OF HOPE Fifty years after the outbreak of World War II, is Western man any wiser? M en have always possessed an immense capacity for savagery and...
...Forces of the Polish underground fought the Soviets well into 1947, before they were done in...
...It is only by comparison with the Holocaust that the other crimes against Poland are anything less than supremely monstrous...
...half of them were dead within a year of deportation...
...Afterward, the Soviets tried the wartime partisans of the Polish Home Army for the crimes of banditry and fascist collaboration, and condemned Polish soldiers who had fought with the democratic allies as imperialist agents...
...Sadly, as Machiavelli has instructed, hope, like faith and charity, has its rightful place among the supreme Christian virtues, but political life frequently requires virtues of a different sort: the man who has no defense against a potent enemy but the hope that his enemy will do the decent thing is very likely to get it in the neck...
...Some eventualities are virtual certainties...
...The Soviets readily agreed, but insisted in public that their reason for entering Poland—or what had been Poland, for they reasoned that the Polish state with which they had had a nonaggression treaty no longer existed—was to protect their "Ukrainian and White Russian brothers" from harm...
...The struggle of the Polish people to regain that freedom on their own has been at once among the most pitiable and the most thrilling spectacles of the postwar world...
...The Soviet Union invaded Poland on September 17, and before long everyone came to harm...
...And while the twentieth century was already well along its terrible course by September 1, 1939—the Great War had claimed its ten million dead, and the Soviet project of extermination at least as many, though it was far from over—that date has established itself as the most famous, and the most infamous, in modern history...
...Their nonaggression treaty, which was made public at that time, nonplussed the democracies, who had placed their hopes in the Soviet Union as an unyielding enemy of fascism...
...it inaugurated an epoch of incomparable sorrow, and most especially for that part of Europe where the war had its start...
...The struggle of the Polish people to regain that freedom on their own has been at once among the most pitiable and the most thrilling spectacles of the postwar world...
...The terror in Poland did not end with the war, of course...
...In the Great War's aftermath, however, and particularly in the nations that had lost most in that war, Germany and Russia, there emerged two new species of political order, each with its own demoniacal aspiration to remake humanity in a purer form, for-ever...
...Neville Chamberlain agreed that Hitler had "no evil intent" as Germany devoured Austria, Czechoslovakia, and so weiter, British businessmen continued to sell Germany indispensable war materials up to the end of August 1939...
...In the Extraordinary Pacification Campaign of 1940, 15,000 Polish priests, teachers, and politicians were shot or shipped off to Dachau...
...Within forty-eight hours of the Nazi invasion nothing much remained of the Polish air force, its 500 finest warplanes bombed to pieces where they sat on the ground...
...The Soviet Union had known better than to place any such hopes in the democracies...
...A week's bombardment killed 10,000 in Warsaw alone...
...E. M. Forster declared he would rather betray his country than his friend...
...Under the circumstances—the circumstances being that duty, honor, and country were pure madness—the decent thing to do was to sever one's traditional native attachments, and to live an innocuous life strictly in private, or to devote oneself to advancing the socialist dream of a world without frontiers, THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1989 17 where such awful things as war could never happen...
...M en have always possessed an immense capacity for savagery and there has never been any danger that this capacity might atrophy for want of use...
...The awful thing about hope is that hope tends to die, almost inevitably, incapable as it is of doing anything else...
...The Poles remained in slavery, and no one else was about to fight for their freedom...
...While good men averted their eyes, unprecedented evil grew steadily in malignity and force...
...All the same, it generally does not die easily...
...The Pope added his concerned advice to President Roosevelt's, declaring himself "unwilling to abandon hope that pending negotiations may lead to a just pacific solution...
...What would have outraged the good democrats still further, had they known about it, was the "Secret Additional Protocol" to the treaty, uncovered only after the war, with the capture of the German archives...
...The democratic allies, exhausted by war and blinded by sentimental illusion which could not admit that their sometime friend was as barbaric as their foulest enemy, preferred to sit this one out...
...In this opening attack were foretold the airborne terrors of the London blitz, Dresden, Hiroshima, and also the purely earthbound terrors of the roundups, the mass executions, the common graves, and the crematoria...
...The nearly 400,000 Jews of Warsaw, one-third of the city's population, were reduced to a similar fragment...
...Polish culture, which had enjoyed a triumphant surge of achievement between the wars, and which had drawn much of its ardent strength from the West, now was crushed under the dead weight of barbarism...
...During World War I men died and died in numbers no one had ever before dared to imagine...
...It is not entirely certain that President Roosevelt, who remarked before the Yalta Conference that he was sure Stalin could be brought round, if only he had the chance to talk some sense into him—no need for any Popes, even—would have disagreed...
...Three years later the officers turned up in the Katyn Forest, where the Germans discovered them in a mass grave...
...Yet no other period in human history even begins to compare with our own century—in so many ways the most sensible and humane of times—for barbarity and murderousness...
...Polish culture, which had enjoyed a triumphant surge of achievement between the wars, and which had drawn much of its ardent strength from the West, now was crushed under the dead weight of barbarism...
...With the German invasion of Poland that September 1, the world began to understand, though dimly just yet, how significant an advance modernity had made since the last general slaughter over twenty years before...
...Official Soviet history blamed Poland's agony exclusively on the Nazi evil, which the singular heroism of the Red Army and Communist partisans had extinguished...
...and one cannot but think that whatever might become of today's hope, certain lessons history has to teach are likely never to be learned...
...and the British army was still scarcely better equipped eight months into the Second World War than it had been in 1918...
...It is only by comparison with the Holocaust that the other crimes against Poland are anything less than supremely monstrous...
...On September 3, the Nazis secretly extended the Soviets an invitation to assist in Poland's subjugation and to claim their rightful share of the take in eastern Poland...
...Nor did other Poles escape the Nazis' attention...
...several graduates of Cambridge, for their part, in the service of a utopian fantasy common at the time, became spies for the Soviet Union...
...What caused the Great War's unexampled carnage was an essential strategic misapprehension, of which all the participating nations were guilty: the conviction, maintained in the face of strong evidence to the contrary, that the correct way to break through a defense of machine gun and heavy artillery fire was to send wave upon wave of men straight at it...
...With the signing of the MolotovRibbentrop Pact on August 23, 1939, Hitler and Stalin arranged to help each other do these things...
...The Soviets and the Nazis even exchanged prisoners—the Gestapo swapping, say, Ukrainians for Jews—so that each of the allies would have the opportunity to eliminate precisely the enemies it found most loathsome...
...Millions more who had fled the country or been deported were to remain in exile...
...It was the horrific memory the great democracies had of the First World War that made war unthinkable, and that consequently made the Second World War inevitable...
...In no other art is genuine innovation so immediate and so telling in its effect as in the art of war: it has the power to render the previous day's avant-garde instantly defunct...
...Of a population numbering some 30 million, six million Poles, including nearly three million Polish Jews, died...
...Yet up to the very moment war began, decent people who should have known better continued to believe—or at any rate to behave as though they believed—that peace was theirs to preserve if only they urged peaceableness emphatically enough...
...What would have outraged the good democrats still further, had they known about it, was the "Secret Additional Protocol" to the treaty, uncovered only after the war, with the capture of the German archives...
...Yet up to the very moment war began, decent people who should have known better continued to believe—or at any rate to behave as though they believed—that peace was theirs to preserve if only they urged peaceableness emphatically enough...
...Some eventualities are virtual certainties...
...The Soviets and the Nazis even exchanged prisoners—the Gestapo swapping, say, Ukrainians for Jews—so that each of the allies would have the opportunity to eliminate precisely the enemies it found most loathsome...
...In no other art is genuine innovation so immediate and so telling in its effect as in the art of war: it has the power to render the previous day's avant-garde instantly defunct...
...It is not entirely certain that President Roosevelt, who remarked before the Yalta Conference that he was sure Stalin could be brought round, if only he had the chance to talk some sense into him—no need for any Popes, even—would have disagreed...
...The Jewish people survived this assault...
...This deadly folly became the grounds for widespread repudiation of the very idea of the political life men had always known, the life of men in nations...
...Yet no other period in human history even begins to compare with our own century—in so many ways the most sensible and humane of times—for barbarity and murderousness...
...This deadly folly became the grounds for widespread repudiation of the very idea of the political life men had always known, the life of men in nations...
...All the same, it generally does not die easily...
...S o it was that the terror struck Poland from both sides at once...
...During 1939 and 1940, the Soviets, for their part, loaded up freight cars bound for Siberia or the Arctic with two million Poles...
...And while the twentieth century was already well along its terrible course by September 1, 1939—the Great War had claimed its ten million dead, and the Soviet project of extermination at least as many, though it was far from over—that date has established itself as the most famous, and the most infamous, in modern history...
...Each of the officers had been shot in the back of the head with a German bullet...
...With the signing of the MolotovRibbentrop Pact on August 23, 1939, Hitler and Stalin arranged to help each other do these things...
...The Soviet Union invaded Poland on September 17, and before long everyone came to harm...
...The Soviets naturally blamed the Nazis for the massacre, and many in the West naturally believed them...
...S o it was that the terror struck Poland from both sides at once...
...and the British army was still scarcely better equipped eight months into the Second World War than it had been in 1918...
...Within forty-eight hours of the Nazi invasion nothing much remained of the Polish air force, its 500 finest warplanes bombed to pieces where they sat on the ground...
...A week's bombardment killed 10,000 in Warsaw alone...
...Those who survived could never hope to remake the world they had once known...
...By 1936, wrote George Orwell after war broke out, everyone knew war was inevitable, and the only question was when it would start...
...The loss of Europe's best young men, measurable in mega-deaths, crippled even the victorious powers...
...the Oxford University Union issued its notorious resolution in 1933 not to fight for king or country...
...The Pope added his concerned advice to President Roosevelt's, declaring himself "unwilling to abandon hope that pending negotiations may lead to a just pacific solution...
...In the spring of 1940, 15,000 Poles whom the Soviets were holding prisoner, including 4,500 officers of the Polish army, disappeared...
...It was the horrific memory the great democracies had of the First World War that made war unthinkable, and that consequently made the Second World War inevitable...
...M en have always possessed an immense capacity for savagery and there has never been any danger that this capacity might atrophy for want of use...
...In the Great War's aftermath, however, and particularly in the nations that had lost most in that war, Germany and Russia, there emerged two new species of political order, each with its own demoniacal aspiration to remake humanity in a purer form, for-ever...
...Their nonaggression treaty, which was made public at that time, nonplussed the democracies, who had placed their hopes in the Soviet Union as an unyielding enemy of fascism...
...President Moscicki assured FDR that Poland was really not inclined to undertake the conquest of Germany just then or any time soon...
...T he hope decent people had after 1 the First World War that peaceableness alone would make peace last should have died sooner...
...Millions more who had fled the country or been deported were to remain in exile...
...Of the 60,000 Jews of Vilna, "the Jerusalem of Lithuania," center of both Talmudic and secular Jewish learning, sometime home to legendary thinkers and rabbis, all but some 2,000 died...
...What caused the Great War's unexampled carnage was an essential strategic misapprehension, of which all the participating nations were guilty: the conviction, maintained in the face of strong evidence to the contrary, that the correct way to break through a defense of machine gun and heavy artillery fire was to send wave upon wave of men straight at it...
...The unique misfortune of the smaller nations of Central and Eastern Europe was to be caught between these powers, and to suffer in turn the worst that each was capable of doing—which is to say, the worst things that men have ever done...
...The attempt to exterminate the Jews was the single mostterrible aspect of the war: for genocide is not only the worst crime one people can commit against another, but also, short of universal destruction, perhaps the most severe crime against humanity, against the natural variety of mankind...
...For the first time, this was to be Algis Valiunas is a writer living in Chicago...
...Sadly, as Machiavelli has instructed, hope, like faith and charity, has its rightful place among the supreme Christian virtues, but political life frequently requires virtues of a different sort: the man who has no defense against a potent enemy but the hope that his enemy will do the decent thing is very likely to get it in the neck...
...The nearly 400,000 Jews of Warsaw, one-third of the city's population, were reduced to a similar fragment...
...Hitler did not have much to say to that, either...
...For the first time, this was to be Algis Valiunas is a writer living in Chicago...
...On August 24, 1939, as Germany menaced Poland, demanding Danzig and access to it through the Polish Corridor—despite the diplomatic formalities, Hitler had in fact already decided simply to take all he wanted—President Roosevelt sent telegrams to Hitlerand the president of Poland, imploring them to come to reasonable terms and stay clear of war...
...Forces of the Polish underground fought the Soviets well into 1947, before they were done in...
...this protocol, along with three others added a few weeks later, provided for the division of Eastern Europe—specifically, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Rumania—between the Nazis and the Soviets, "in the event of a territorial and political transformation of these territories...
...Afterward, the Soviets tried the wartime partisans of the Polish Home Army for the crimes of banditry and fascist collaboration, and condemned Polish soldiers who had fought with the democratic allies as imperialist agents...
...The story would be a similar one throughout Eastern Europe...
...The Poles remained in slavery, and no one else was about to fight for their freedom...
...E. M. Forster declared he would rather betray his country than his friend...
...President Moscicki assured FDR that Poland was really not inclined to undertake the conquest of Germany just then or any time soon...
...18 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1989 Algis Valiunas THE RAPE OF POLAND AND THE DEATH OF HOPE Fifty years after the outbreak of World War II, is Western man any wiser...
...this protocol, along with three others added a few weeks later, provided for the division of Eastern Europe—specifically, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Rumania—between the Nazis and the Soviets, "in the event of a territorial and political transformation of these territories...
...and one cannot but think that whatever might become of today's hope, certain lessons history has to teach are likely never to be learned...
...Each of the officers had been shot in the back of the head with a German bullet...
...T he hope decent people had after 1 the First World War that peaceableness alone would make peace last should have died sooner...
...And amid this general destruction, in which every nation suffered terribly, no other people suffered as the Jews did: every last one condemned to die, as the Jewish theologian Emil Fackenheim has written, for the unpardonable crime of having been born...
...And while the twentieth century was already well alo...
...Yet the West once again offers the East little but its hope that the tyrant, weary of tyranny, will at last turn out to be liberty's true champion...
...Suffering from the moral equivalent of shell shock, the powers that could have stopped Hitler, and for that matter Stalin, before they committed their abominations stood by and watched instead, hopefully...
...While good men averted their eyes, unprecedented evil grew steadily in malignity and force...
...During 1939 and 1940, the Soviets, for their part, loaded up freight cars bound for Siberia or the Arctic with two million Poles...
...In the first two months of war, the Germans murdered 5,000 Polish Jews and initiated other measures—driving two million Jews into ghettos, beginning to starve them—for their eventual extinction...
...On August 24, 1939, as Germany menaced Poland, demanding Danzig and access to it through the Polish Corridor—despite the diplomatic formalities, Hitler had in fact already decided simply to take all he wanted—President Roosevelt sent telegrams to Hitlerand the president of Poland, imploring them to come to reasonable terms and stay clear of war...
...Three years later the officers turned up in the Katyn Forest, where the Germans discovered them in a mass grave...
...The unique misfortune of the smaller nations of Central and Eastern Europe was to be caught between these powers, and to suffer in turn the worst that each was capable of doing—which is to say, the worst things that men have ever done...
...The Great War, however extreme its destructiveness, had been a manifestation of politics as usual...
...In the first two months of war, the Germans murdered 5,000 Polish Jews and initiated other measures—driving two million Jews into ghettos, beginning to starve them—for their eventual extinction...
...the culture they had made in that part of the world did not...
...a war conducted in great measure against civilian populations...
...The democratic allies, exhausted by war and blinded by sentimental illusion which could not admit that their sometime friend was as barbaric as their foulest enemy, preferred to sit this one out...
...Devastation came from above, and everyone walking the earth was fair game: this was the most striking feature of the Blitzkrieg, however memorable certain sidelights might have been, such as the spectacle of Polish horsemen charging Panzer tanks...
...had the Kaiser won, the world might have been a somewhat crueler place, for a time anyway, but it would have remained essentially the same place it had always been...
...The Soviets readily agreed, but insisted in public that their reason for entering Poland—or what had been Poland, for they reasoned that the Polish state with which they had had a nonaggression treaty no longer existed—was to protect their "Ukrainian and White Russian brothers" from harm...
...The awful thing about hope is that hope tends to die, almost inevitably, incapable as it is of doing anything else...
...By 1936, wrote George Orwell after war broke out, everyone knew war was inevitable, and the only question was when it would start...
...Of a population numbering some 30 million, six million Poles, including nearly three million Polish Jews, died...
...Nor did other Poles escape the Nazis' attention...
...While the Soviets continue to admit nothing, earlier this year an official publication of the Communist government in Poland, its tongue loosened by glasnost, indicated the Soviets had in fact been the executioners...
...The Luftwaffe bombed and strafed not only military targets but also open cities...
...18 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1989 Algis Valiunas THE RAPE OF POLAND AND THE DEATH OF HOPE Fifty years after the outbreak of World War II, is Western man any wiser...
...The Nazis slated the entire Polish nobility for annihilation, along with clergymen and intellectuals...
...Under the circumstances—the circumstances being that duty, honor, and country were pure madness—the decent thing to do was to sever one's traditional native attachments, and to live an innocuous life strictly in private, or to devote oneself to advancing the socialist dream of a world without frontiers, THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1989 17 where such awful things as war could never happen...
...The loss of Europe's best young men, measurable in mega-deaths, crippled even the victorious powers...
...Those who survived could never hope to remake the world they had once known...
...On September 3, the Nazis secretly extended the Soviets an invitation to assist in Poland's subjugation and to claim their rightful share of the take in eastern Poland...
...The Great War, however extreme its destructiveness, had been a manifestation of politics as usual...
...Yet no other period in human history even begins to compare with our own century—in so many ways the most sensible and humane of times—for barbarity and murderousness...
...The Nazis slated the entire Polish nobility for annihilation, along with clergymen and intellectuals...
...The Soviets naturally blamed the Nazis for the massacre, and many in the West naturally believed them...
...the Oxford University Union issued its notorious resolution in 1933 not to fight for king or country...
...The Soviet Union had known better than to place any such hopes in the democracies...
...In this opening attack were foretold the airborne terrors of the London blitz, Dresden, Hiroshima, and also the purely earthbound terrors of the roundups, the mass executions, the common graves, and the crematoria...
...The Jewish people survived this assault...
...Of the 60,000 Jews of Vilna, "the Jerusalem of Lithuania," center of both Talmudic and secular Jewish learning, sometime home to legendary thinkers and rabbis, all but some 2,000 died...
...The terror in Poland did not end with the war, of course...
...During World War I men died and died in numbers no one had ever before dared to imagine...
...a war conducted in great measure against civilian populations...
...While the Soviets continue to admit nothing, earlier this year an official publication of the Communist government in Poland, its tongue loosened by glasnost, indicated the Soviets had in fact been the executioners...
...With the German invasion of Poland that September 1, the world began to understand, though dimly just yet, how significant an advance modernity had made since the last general slaughter over twenty years before...
...Less than one Polish Jew in ten managed to get through the war alive...
...several graduates of Cambridge, for their part, in the service of a utopian fantasy common at the time, became spies for the Soviet Union...
...Official Soviet history blamed Poland's agony exclusively on the Nazi evil, which the singular heroism of the Red Army and Communist partisans had extinguished...
...And amid this general destruction, in which every nation suffered terribly, no other people suffered as the Jews did: every last one condemned to die, as the Jewish theologian Emil Fackenheim has written, for the unpardonable crime of having been born...
...The Luftwaffe bombed and strafed not only military targets but also open cities...
...half of them were dead within a year of deportation...
...The story would be a similar one throughout Eastern Europe...
...M en have always possessed an immense capacity for savagery and there has never been any danger that this capacity might atrophy for want of use...
...The attempt to exterminate the Jews was the single mostterrible aspect of the war: for genocide is not only the worst crime one people can commit against another, but also, short of universal destruction, perhaps the most severe crime against humanity, against the natural variety of mankind...
...The British poet Louis MacNeice reported in 1940 that he had just met an American professor who was sure Hitler could still be brought round to do the right thing, if only President Roosevelt and the Pope got together and talked some sense into him...
...the culture they had made in that part of the world did not...
...Hitler, ungraciously, did not reply...
...Yet the West once again offers the East little but its hope that the tyrant, weary of tyranny, will at last turn out to be liberty's true champion...
...Less than one Polish Jew in ten managed to get through the war alive...
...it inaugurated an epoch of incomparable sorrow, and most especially for that part of Europe where the war had its start...
...Neville Chamberlain agreed that Hitler had "no evil intent" as Germany devoured Austria, Czechoslovakia, and so weiter, British businessmen continued to sell Germany indispensable war materials up to the end of August 1939...
...had the Kaiser won, the world might have been a somewhat crueler place, for a time anyway, but it would have remained essentially the same place it had always been...
...Wisdom came hard, as wisdom tends to do, and it came too late...
...Devastation came from above, and everyone walking the earth was fair game: this was the most striking feature of the Blitzkrieg, however memorable certain sidelights might have been, such as the spectacle of Polish horsemen charging Panzer tanks...
...Suffering from the moral equivalent of shell shock, the powers that could have stopped Hitler, and for that matter Stalin, before they committed their abominations stood by and watched instead, hopefully...
...President Moscicki assured FDR that Poland was really not inclined to undertake the conquest of Germany just then or any time soon...
...This kind of thinking was certainly understandable, but it was nevertheless tragically mistaken...
...The outbreak of the Second World War marked the time when worse came to worst...
...The outbreak of the Second World War marked the time when worse came to worst...
...The British poet Louis MacNeice reported in 1940 that he had just met an American professor who was sure Hitler could still be brought round to do the right thing, if only President Roosevelt and the Pope got together and talked some sense into him...
...President Moscicki assured FDR that Poland was really not inclined to undertake the conquest of Germany just then or any time soon...
...Hitler did not have much to say to that, either...
...Wisdom came hard, as wisdom tends to do, and it came too late...
...In the Extraordinary Pacification Campaign of 1940, 15,000 Polish priests, teachers, and politicians were shot or shipped off to Dachau...
...In the spring of 1940, 15,000 Poles whom the Soviets were holding prisoner, including 4,500 officers of the Polish army, disappeared...
...This kind of thinking was certainly understandable, but it was nevertheless tragically mistaken...
...Hitler, ungraciously, did not reply...
Vol. 22 • September 1989 • No. 9
