by James A. Michener, 1983
A 616-page novel about Poland, it’s history from the 1200s to 1980s and Lech Walesa’s Solidarity, told through fictional families and towns. The first few pages of the book tell what is historic and what is fictional from each chapter. That is helpful. The Tartars, which were Genghis Khan and his descendants, is where the novel begins. They were terrors and would ride in and kill, rape, and destroy everywhere they went.
Poland refused to elect a central government throughout the centuries that followed, being ruled by Magnates, a few very wealthy landowners. The peasants were slaves and had little – only ate meat twice a year, dirt floors, all their labor for the magnate that ruled them.
Whenever someone tried to organize, the magnates would destroy the faction. Other countries, Russia, Germany, Austria, ended up swallowing up Poland.
In WWII, the Germans invaded Poland and took over the wealthy landowners castles. Many, many Poles went to concentration camps and 2 million died. After WWII, there were hopes that things would be different under Russia, but Russia ended up worse. They immediately took whoever was among the Polish resistance to Siberia where they were never heard from again.
The book ends with a fictional farmer in the 1980s trying to start a farmer’s union the way Lech Walesa started a union of factory workers. There is a meeting in a Polish castle with Russian officials who threaten the farmer and lie to the world. All is well, the farmer, Janko Buk, has agreed that a farmer’s union will never work.
The details he gives from the concentration camp, Majdanek, are horrific, yet true. This brutal history must never be forgotten, the power of evil men, even one man, to spread hate and unfathomable horrors. God, how long will the wicked prosper!
Throughout this book, there are brave souls that rise up and fight against the evil and Poland survives because of them. We are to do the same, fight against evil, but beware we don’t become one of them.
God is with us and he promises evil will not prevail, Psalm 37:7-9:
Be still before the Lord and wait patiently for him;
do not fret when people succeed in their ways,
when they carry out their wicked schemes. Refrain from anger and turn from wrath; do not fret—it leads only to evil.
For those who are evil will be destroyed, but those who hope in the Lord will inherit the land.
Thank you, God!
I got this book from a little free library. Mark K. read it and told Wayne it was good.
There is a lot of Ukrainian history in it, too. Russia has been a tormentor of Ukraine for a long time.
Other things from the book:
- Zamosc sounds like a beautiful city
- Late 1700’s Ukraine: “that mysterious land which lay between Russia and Poland, between Europe and Asia, and the more deeply the caravan penetrated this always-conquered but forever-unconquered land, the more the young men respected it.”
- W’s are pronounced as V’s and J’s are pronounced as Y’s.
- Jews entered Poland in the 11th century escaping persecution elsewhere and they thrived. During one of the partitions of Poland, some of the new ruling countries were anti-Semitic and encouraged the Poles to be also.
- Lots of pages on music. The wealthy landowners had musicians brought in for their entertainment. Chopin was Polish and his music was beloved by Poles.
- “The closest I have ever been to heaven was when Enrico Caruso stood on my stage and sang “O Paradis” from Meyerbeer’s L’Africaine.”
- In 1920, Polish and Ukrainian armies united and threw the Communists out of eastern Europe, but unfortunately, it didn’t last. There was another invasion from Russia but again, the Polish army defeated them, and saved all of Europe from becoming Communist.
- But Lithuania, Poland, and Ukraine refuse to ally and they face tragic consequences in late 1930’s: “Ukraine would become one of the world’s great tragedies, a land in which the oppressors [Russia] would allow ten million citizens to starve to death, where the native language would be outlawed and where all kinds of depredations would be visited upon a distrusted and despised subject people.In despair, in 1939 the Ukrainians would try to side with Hitler in hopes that he might rescue them from Russian domination, and when this proved a fatal miscalculation, the revenge of the Communist victors would be harsher than ever.”
- “In the years 1921-1939, after Poland had repulsed the Russian invasion of 1920, she accomplished a miracle. Her three provinces had been ruled for more than a century by three radically different foreign occupiers, yet the Polish people were able to unite these provinces in one reasonable system. Three disparate judicial, educational and administrative patterns had been reconciled. Land reform was initiated, social security established, health care organized, industry encouraged…There was reason to hope that if this rate of progress could continue for another two decades, Poland might become one of the principal illuminations of Europe, but on 1 September 1939, Adolf Hitler’s Nazis crashed over the border with such overwhelming superiority in manpower, tanks and dive bombers that the nation was quickly devastated and occupied.”
- This was the plan of the Nazi’s, especially formulated by Heinrich Himmler and Dr. Rosenberg: work to death or murder all of the 20 million Poles and murder every single one of the 3,547,896 Jews living in Poland. They also took blond women and soldiers on leave raped them. The babies were taken away immediately to be raised in German homes.
- Here is a conversation about living under the Germans vs. the Soviets: “‘They said: “The Germans are the cruelest people on earth. They murder. They slaughter. And they do it all in the name of civilization.” They warned us that life under the Germans was to be avoided at any cost. [paragraph] ‘But always they said that in the long run, as years passed and the first fury subsided, life with the Germans could reach compromises. Continuance was possible. It was never pleasant, but it was possible, for there was music and celebrations and you could travel to Berlin, and if you did things their way you survived and could even have a good time now and then. [paragraph] ‘But with the Russians, there was no hope. Only the dead hand of oppression, the unrelieved weight of Russian insensibility. Work, work, work. One stupid rule after another. Never an alleviation in a special case. Do it their way or die. [paragraph] ‘I myself have lived under the Russians, and it’s like being in a tomb–a large tomb, yes, with perhaps a little room to move around, but a tomb nevertheless. Russians can make an entire nation a tomb. They’re geniuses in building tombs.”
- After years under Soviet Communism, Poles in Warsaw were facing shortages in everything and were nearly starving, while nearby Austrians in Vienna gorged themselves with every good thing. In Polish talks with officials from the Kremlin, a farmer’s wife pours out her grievances to the officials. A cameraman thinks: “If she did this in Moscow or Kiev. . . Whsssst! No one would ever see that one again. In Bulgaria they’d shoot her. In Rumania, silenced for good. We showed such people in Czechoslovakia where power rested and what happened when people criticized it. What’s the matter with these Poles? [paragraph] As a young man, he had been active in dragging seven hundred thousand Lithuanians from their homes and dispersing them one by one throughout the vast emptiness of the Soviet Union’s eastern territories, and with their leaders gone, the back of Lithuanian resistance had been broken. Later he had done even more important work in Ukraine, where millions were deported to Siberia and other distant settlements, while millions more were allowed to starve.”
- In Auschwitz, the Nazis were brutal to priests and rabbis. They would put them in a small cell with one window high up, 60 or more men, and hope that most of them were suffocated or trampled by morning. A Jewish rabbi whispered to a priest, “Stand opposite the window.” That priest survived because everyone tried to get under the window, while he was left alone, and the air wafted toward him all night. The little Jewish rabbi was kicked to death by Nazi guards: “‘What was the last thing he did on this earth? He smiled at me. Through the blood that dimmed his eyes he smiled at me, as if to say: “Be not afraid.” I seemed to hear this little Jewish rabbi using the words of Jesus Christ.'”
- A conversation between survivors of Auschwitz and Majdanek, a Polish priest and a Polish farmer respectively. The priest shows him 3 books that were written after WWII that tried to persuade the reader that Nazi horrors never happened: “‘They prove to the satisfaction of those who wish to believe, and millions do, that the camps where you and I lived in hell never existed.’…’That Auschwitz was a fable invented by lying Jews. That Majdanek was a great lie perpetrated by Poles who wanted to discredit Germany’…the conclusions of the London book had been translated into Polish…: “1. No concentration camps ever existed. They were lies created by Jews and Poles. 2. If any camps did exist, they were detention centers such as are used by all nations to imprison criminal types who have committed specific crimes against society in general. 3. It is preposterous to claim that six million Jews died in these supposed camps, because there were never that many Jews in all of Europe. 4. It is equally ridiculous to claim that two million Poles died, because the Germans have never borne animosity toward the Poles and have always treated them well. 5. The total number of criminals who died in the detention centers, either through legal execution for specific crimes or from the epidemics which occasionally touched the camps, could not possibly have exceeded three thousand. 6. If concentration camps did exist, Adolf Hitler knew nothing about them. 7. In the long light of history, Hitler will be seen as a generous, wise, considerate and constructive leader who took bold steps to save Europe and the world…The priest urges the farmer not to ally with the tanks in the forest, in otherwards to continue the hatred. He says, “Szymon, clear your mind of torments. Put the ghosts to sleep.’ [paragraph] ‘That is not so easy.’ [paragraph] ‘Think of it this way. The little girl from Zamosc died to save you. The little Jew from the synagogue died to save me. But Jesus Christ died to save us all.”
The book ends with a Polish concentration camp survivor turned Russian Communist official revealing the ever-repeating ugly story of mankind–men filled with hatred, unable to forgive, hatching their plans for revenge: “Now, from his desk, he took out a pile of index cards, golden-yellow, on which he had for some time been listing the names of those Poles who would have to be arrested when the inescapable crackdown came. The people named on those cards that were marked with a black cross would be sent to the concentration camps which would eventually be needed–and to this growing list he now added Szymon Bukowski and his wife, Biruta.’
“But for the time being the Russian tanks remained will hidden, deep within the forest of Szczek.”