“No place experienced more intense suffering for a longer period of time than Poland,” the blurb on the dust jacket of Poland 1945 by Magdalena Grzebałkowska notes, “the first country to be invaded by both Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia and the last to be ‘liberated.'” Note the quotes around the word liberated: Poland was not in fact liberated until 1989 when the people of Poland overthrew the Communist regime put in place and propped up by the Soviet Union.
I am not sure that the history of Poland around that time is particularly well known. As someone who was born in West Germany, I certainly only knew selected parts. I knew of the Germans who had been expelled from their homes in the lands that after World War 2 became Polish. I did not know that many of the people who moved into these homes had lost theirs under very similar circumstances when vast Polish territories became part of the Soviet Union.
I knew of the Warsaw Uprising, in part because West Germany’s former Chancellor Willy Brandt fell to his knees in front of the city’s memorial, begging for forgiveness. What I didn’t know — this part was never told — was that the city had been razed to the ground by the German military following the failed Warsaw Uprising. I learned none of the details provided in the long Wikipedia page dedicated to the city’s destruction in school (or elsewhere).
Much has been made of the French-German reconciliation after World War 2. Shockingly, no similar attempts have been made to reconcile Germany and Poland, two countries that actually share more of a joint history, with Germans and Poles living in the same cities and villages for hundreds of years (until the war ended it all). To this date, the German government, so proud of its presumed coming to terms with the country’s history, refuses to even talk to Poland about actual compensation for the destruction caused by Nazi Germany.
How would one even go about writing a history of a country millions of whose people had either been murdered or scattered to different places? Where to begin — and how to fight the, I would think, inevitable despair over all the suffering?
With Poland 1945, Magdalena Grzebałkowska shows how to do it. An extremely gifted narrator who at every point of the way refuses to engage in trying to weigh someone’s suffering against someone else’s, Grzebałkowska unfolds the history of the lands within Poland’s new, 1945 borders by focusing on many of the people who for some reason found themselves there.
The book is structured in twelve chapters, following the months of the year. But this is a device more than a structure: A month is just another month — January is not more or less important than February or March, and what is described in one chapter need not necessarily have happened after something described earlier. History, after all, follows dates; but events in people’s lives do not necessarily align with those — even during or right after a massive war.
But there are sections that do follow the calendar, two pages at the beginning of each chapter that contain brief excerpts of notes from newspapers. These notes range from the mundane (“After May 25, a half kilo of marmalade will be provided for the holders of Coupon No. 4 of the April Children’s Vouchers. Price: 13 zlotys/kilogram.” — Życie Warszawy, May 25, 1945) to the heartbreaking (“I will give a baby away into good hands. Girl, 4 months. Not baptized. Distraught mother. Mokotów, 14 Lewicka Street.” — Życie Warszawy, Aug. 24, 1945). As it turned out, the mundane could often be heartbreaking — or the other way around.
The chapters focus on different aspects of Poland in 1945. There is, for example, a chapter on people coming back to their completely destroyed capital, trying to find ways to get by or to find their loved ones (or possibly their possessions) or “merely” trying not get killed by the vast amounts of mines, bombs, and ammunition left behind after the German occupiers had left. There is a chapter on a Jewish orphanage where, again, the most mundane observations are the most heartbreaking ones.
And there is a lot of devastation. So much of it. The end of the war did not mean that there would be an end to the killings or the brutality. I find it difficult to talk about any given instance, given that to name one would omit another. How or why would one be worse than the other?
While reading the book, I also kept thinking back to some of the people I had encountered a few pages earlier. What had happened to them? There was no answer. There was no way of knowing. Instead, there would be more people popping up, some of whom I’d get to know better, others who quickly fell by the wayside.
As an aside, what a grim term “falling by the wayside” is in a context in which some people literally did that, being felled by an SS guard’s bullet while marching somewhere or maybe simply being exhausted from walking hundreds of kilometers to immediately freeze to death, with other people walking past.
While strictly speaking Poland 1945 is not an oral history, Grzebałkowska’s relentless focus on mostly ordinary people, people you would never find mentioned in history books, drives home the point that we will never understand history — and we will never be able to alter its course — if we lose sight of ordinary people.
After all, history is not merely an ordered collection of events. Instead, it is a mostly unordered collections of events in which people are caught up. History does not happen. Instead, it happens to people. Some people make it out; others are less fortunate.
If we focus on not forgetting the less fortunate ones, we might have a chance to change the course of what’s unfolding before our own eyes.
Highly recommended.
Magdalena Grzebałkowska: Poland 1945 — War and Peace; translated from the original Polish by Małgorzata Markoff and John Markoff; 336 pages; University of Pittsburgh Press; 2020
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