The plight of the Poles

Was a nation ever so beset by calamity as Poland? During the second world war, Polish cities were bombed, fought over hand-to-hand and crushingly shelled. Beyond their ideological differences, Hitler and Stalin were united in a determination to destroy the country. Without the Nazi-Soviet ‘friendship’ treaty of 1939, Hitler would not have been able to implement the mass killings of Jews in Poland, or Stalin been able to deport thousands of Poles as ‘enemies of the people’ to the frozen immensity of Siberia. Through their opportunist alliance, the dictators worked to undermine Polish statehood.

At the war’s end, Poles found themselves dispersed in places as far-flung as India and Soviet Kazakhstan. History had blown them to a harsh lee shore. Stalin, with his customary brutality, had deported thousands of Poles eastwards as ‘bourgeois deviationists’. Once Poland had been subsumed into the Soviet sphere of influence, the country was depopulated of Catholic priests, army chiefs, university professors and other suspected nationalists.

In Kazakhstan, as elsewhere in the Russian empire, Polish deportees were set to work on collective farms, weeding and digging for Mother Russia. Political developments were whirling darkly in the world outside, however. In June 1941, in an abrupt betrayal, Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. Of a sudden, Poland and Stalin were allies; the thousands of Poles left captive within the Soviet Union were now to be liberated. News of the amnesty was greeted with stupefied incomprehension by most Poles. How was it possible that Communist Russia and Nazi Germany had become sworn enemies so soon?

Halik Kochanski, an historian born in Britain of Polish parents, has written a superb account of Poland during the second world war. Though rather long drawn-out, The Eagle Unbowed serves to illuminate the political sickness that caused a nation to vanish from the map of Europe.