The brutal mask of anarchy

In September 1939 Britain went to war against Germany, ostensibly in defence of Poland. One big secret that the British government didn’t know at the time — and not until much later — was that while the Anglo-Polish alliance treaty was being negotiated during the previous months, the Poles had been actively training and arming terrorists to kill British troops in the Middle East.

I don’t normally believe in convoluted conspiracy theories, but this one happens to be true. In the 1930s the anti-Semitic government in Warsaw wanted rid of 3.5 million Polish Jews. Initially they tried to pack them off to Madagascar. But then the Poles hit on the idea of helping Jews create their own state in British-occupied Palestine. The problem was that Britain would not allow large-scale Jewish immigration into Palestine, where the Irgun terrorist group was beginning a bloody campaign for independence in a Jewish homeland. The Irgun’s principal backer was Poland, whose military trained scores of guerrillas, gave them generous supplies of arms and smuggled them into Palestine. So Jew-hating Poles helped Jews to murder British soldiers and civilians, supposedly their allies.

Timothy Snyder’s brilliant Black Earth is full of vividly told vignettes, new insights and a few good scoops. The bare bones of his story about the Irgun, for example, was known in a vague sort of way, but he found the evidence in Polish archives and skilfully weaves it into a broad canvas, confronting the reader with a series of new moral questions about issues that have been debated over the past 70 years.

Black Earth is not a straightforward narrative, though there are plenty of horrifying facts and figures and grisly stories of mass murder for those who want them. Geographically it covers the same territory as Snyder’s superb previous book, Bloodlands, about the areas of eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union where most of the killing in the second world war took place — Poland, Ukraine, the Baltic Republics and western Russia.