A Diary of Poland's Tragedy

...It is in the form of a diary, at once personal and political, by the man who headed the underground Polish State during the Nazi occupation and then, as second only to Stanislaw Mikolajczyk in the Peasant party leadership, openly and courageously opposed the new occupation...

...As a result the population has a hellish fear of the security police and hates it even more...

...Korbonski then described the wave of murders of opponents of the Moscow-made regime in many towns...

...The purpose of this is easily guessed—to arouse fear of the security police and to establish terror as the basis of the regime...

...Some time ago the greatest popularity was enjoyed by a news-reel of the Yalta Conference, but this was only because when Stalin was seen extending his hand to Roosevelt, the whole house yelled, 'Give me your wrist-watch!' This was followed by laughs, hisses and, occasionally, checking of identification cards by the police...

...Bierut on the podium...

...Stifled sobs could be heard through the solemn funeral chants...

...Embassy officials of Polish extraction, one entry shows, were enormously popular and had constantly to parry the heart-breaking question, "When are the Americans coming...

...Again and again we see once strong men turned into willing puppets...

...It is thrice-told history, but history so personalized, intimate, suffused by the emotions of the time that it comes alive on every page...

...But an Epilogue provides one of the best short accounts that I have seen anywhere of the Poznan uprising and the events of October 1956...

...Korbonski's diary barely touches on this theme, but for an American reader it runs through the book by implication, as it were...

...His story runs from July 26, 1945...

...Everyone realized the tragic implications of this spectacle...

...So much has been published about the ordeal of Poland, the brutality of the Red puppets, the opposition of the masses, that one shies away from yet another rehearsal of the tragedy...

...But I found myself engrossed and fascinated, and read the book to the end...

...To know that Poland was then being bound in chains, that it went through a period of hypocritical coalition, that the grim farce ended in total oppression is one thing—to watch the process through the eyes of an intelligent participant in its events who also has a gift for writing is something else...

...The country reminds one increasingly of a slaughterhouse...

...1946...

...The Femina seemed, to its management and clients, "a real bastion in the struggle with the regime...

...Some who had fought superbly against the Nazis succumbed to sheer fatigue and hopelessness when the Kremlin took over...

...I had opened the book as a matter of duty, with the intention of merely riffling and tasting its pages...

...It was...

...Reviewed by Eugene Lyons Senior Editor, "The Reader's Digest" IN CRACOW, on November 4, 1945, a vast throng marched behind the coffin of the beloved peasant and woodcutter, Wincenty Witos...

...Hatred burst from the crowd like a flame, hatred unexpressed by any movement or cry, but striking at Bicrul by the tense silence, amidst which his hypocritical phrases rang hollow...

...there was a reception to mark the first anniversary of Femina, a beauty parlor started by Korbonski's wife, Zosia, which had become the most fashionable in Warsaw...

...Motion pictures from the East arouse mirth, and many spectators don't bother to see them through to the end...

...March 25, 1946: "We witness an exceptional phenomenon—Poland's longing for the West and everything Western...

...Warsaw in Chains is a first-rate book...

...when he was released from a Soviet prison, to November 14, 1947, when he had found freedom and asylum in Sweden after a desperate last-minute escape...

...On the speakers' platform on historic Market Place there appeared Bole-slaw Bierut...

...For the average reader, the fascination is often in passages that are politically less significant but humanly touching...

...Good grooming somehow seemed a gesture of defiance, because the "dumpy Soviet Amazons" of the foreign rulers symbolized the new era...

...Because he came with the blessings of the United States and Britain, optimism ran high...

...he wrote, "like a battlefield on which the Warsaw ladies fought stubbornly with the new regime for the preservation of their city's pre-war elegance...

...These are random citations from Warsaw in Chains, an account of 28 of the earliest months of Poland's enslavement by the Kremlin...

...the grand old man of the Polish Peasant party...

...His awareness of American complicity in the crime tends to italicize the entries which reflect the ordinary Polish citizen's faith in his great overseas friend—the faith that was to be so totally betrayed...

...His detailed report on the phony election and on the sessions of the first Diet in which his party still played a bold but futile role will be especially interesting to serious students of the history of the time...

...On December 7, 1945, the journal recorded: "The massacre is in full swing...

...It was through a friendly Communist, in fact, that Korbonski learned of his scheduled arrest—this at a time when virtually all roads to escape had been doubly blocked...

...Some cases indicate," he wrote, "that the security officials intend to let the population know that they are the murderers...

...A dead silence fell on the Market Place,'' Stefan Korbonski wrote in his journal for that day...

...Mikolajczyk, on arriving in his native land from London, was greeted by enthusiastic demonstrations...

...The crowd had only one thought: Witos in the coffin...

...like the Polish Peasant party, continued the struggle as long as there was a margin of hope...

...It seemed illogical and humanly inconceivable that the great democracies, in their time of triumph over one police state, would permit their Polish ally to be swallowed by another police state...

...Not all Poles are heroes...

...On December 28...

...But we also see men, even a few who are technically Communists, risking their lives to help the cause...

...The story of his flight, under the very eyes of the Red Gestapo, is the climax of this book...

...one must stand in line for hours to get a ticket or buy it from an intermediary...

...The former Premier of the government that in 1920 repelled the Bolshevik invasion of Poland was being eulogized by a Soviet agent, one the new invasion had set over Poland, calling him her President...

...Every American movie draws tremendous crowds...