Wars: Commentaries and Reminiscences
I saw the film Tea with Mussolini last week. Hollywood made a "cute" and humorous movie about war! This has been a terrifying and strange time since September 11, 2001, not only because of the terrorism, but also because of American reaction to it. I will try to understand my mixed emotions as my experiences in Poland in World War II and now get jumbled up. My American friends here in Wisconsin are quite taken back at some of my judgements and feelings. I am horrified over the bombardment of Afghanistan and the general American belief that it is okay to kill people there because "they have no idea of the value of human life" and because they are "Arabs" and "Muslims," as is their leader who killed innocent people in the World Trade Center Towers and Pentagon as well as those who were passengers in the hijacked airplanes. I once taught a course on dying and death. Much of the literature on that subject recognizes that the constant presence of the mass media visuals of murder and death of large numbers of people, combined with the readily available games in which a person can bomb and kill the demonized enemy, has so desensitized much of our global population that such murder has come to seem justified if the dead are part of the enemy or in any other way vilified. And the killers are heroeized as the good ones who should be doing away with the bad ones. Scary also are the explanations offered by United States government spokes people [I use the term United States to designate the political state and America to identify the national culture] for why innocent civilians are killed or in other ways persecuted in the rush to exterminate their leaders, as well as the definition "friendly fire" for the cause of death of American young fighting men and women.
Another WWII movie: Captain Correlli's Mandolin. The story took place on a Greek island invaded by Italians then bombed by Allies. The theme: local girl falls in love with melodic and nice enemy Captain, then a German betrays him and town. Local scenes reminiscent of my home city, Poznan Poland: tanks and soldiers marching in uniform with guns. September 11, 2001 like September 1,1939 except for many years of wartime movies and television. Many people in New York and those watching on television often stated afterwards that the plane going into the towers looked like a well designed movie. Then they thought it was an accident--did not believe that it could be a suicidal and murderous act. Americans have experienced terrorism in Oklahoma, the towers, the ship, and the embassies, yet still feel safe from wars on their own soil. They know of United States soldiers in WWI, WWII, Korea and Vietnam--but not in their own huge, powerful country. Most have no idea what war is like. One woman in my dinner group exclaimed "bomb China" after a United States plane was shot down. The horror of that comment struck only me in a table of seven women. War scenes of Israel, various sites and areas of Yugoslavia, Somalia and other places far away are experienced as though they are films or video games. No wonder teens kill with real guns: they have had practice emotionally with these movies and games. People own guns in many Wisconsin homes to shoot animals and to protect the owners from burglars. Even the women in Wisconsin want guns. I now have such mixed emotions. World War II against Nazis and the Japanese seemed right, yet I am horrified by constant talk now of wars and killing. Having demonized the "enemy" in Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Americans make heroes of past presidents who created Desert Storm and fought to "save Kuwait."
Now we have new glimpses of Americans and war. We have bombarded Afghanistan, and now ground troops are trying to make contact with the rebellious forces to overthrow the dictatorship. Our top military and other governmental leaders keep saying that this is a different war than ever before, but they are using the same weapons and methods as over and over again in the past. My fear of where the United States is going and my revolt over the killings clash with my hatred of the Nazis and reluctance, even fear, of traveling to Germany, where I look at men over middle age and imagine them as part of the occupying forces. I must go back in memory to the 1939-1940, when I was in Poland prior to and during the Nazi invasion. I was then fourteen to fifteen years old. We Poles, along with the rest of the world, had no real understanding of what was going on in Germany and the Soviet Union, nor of what was going to happen. Mother and I were staying in the mountain town of Jawornik, near Wisla at the base of the Wistula river. Daddy was in New York, as Visiting Professor at Columbia University at the invitation of Theodore Abel and Robert MacIver.This was his second such visit. We had gone with him in 1932-1934, but not this time in 1939 because mother wanted to supervise the finishing of our new home in Wisla, and New York is not as pleasant as the mountains during summer.
Everyday Poles were not fearful of a German invasion. Anyway, our cavalry would stop the German tanks. We heard Hitler on the radio, but lacked the television imagery and any serious anticipation of September 1 events. However, Mother decided to go back to our apartment in Poznan in August in case anything serious happened so that we would be there when Daddy returned. We woke up on the night of September 1 to the sound of bombs in the city. There were also sounds of bridges on the river Warta being blown up by Polish armed forces, but we did not know that at the time. The sounds were terrifying so we got some things together, and our bikes and rushed to join the stream of people on the highway out of the city. People pushing, pulling their belongings and children or old people. Luckily, mother stopped at Uncle Bronek's house around the block and he convinced her it was crazy to join in the escape because the roads were then blocked to allow our troops to come into the city. Also, German planes were strafing the escapees. So we went back to the apartment around the block. Mother did not know where Father was. He had planned on coming back from New York to volunteer his services as a sociologist to the Polish government in the case of war. Mother decided not to leave the apartment in case he could reach Poland.
Glimpses of the Nazis in the city: Poles could not ride in front sections of streetcars and soon families forbade girls from riding in them at all, with stories of some being pulled off by the German soldiers. Poles had to get off the sidewalk when soldiers walked on them. We young ones in our suburb (called Abyssinia by the builders a few years before because it was so far from the city) had to dig trenches to hide in during air attacks. We thought it was exciting. We watched a dog fight between two planes and cheered when the German one hit the ground. Uncle Bronek bought gas masks, and we practiced living in them in his basement for hours at a time. No one knew what was to happen day by day. Poznan, halfway between Berlin and Warsaw, was invaded first. It lacked the resources to fight long, so it collapsed quickly. Warsaw fought for an amazingly long time and was again completely destroyed during the uprising against the Nazis before the end of the War. Krakowians did not want their beautiful city destroyed, so that population did not fight. [Editor's note: I recall years ago after having traveled to Poland commenting to Helena that Krakow was such a beautiful city with its very old structures and art, while Warsaw was so drab and without character. She clarified that for me on the spot: Warsawians had had the courage to fight the Germans at length and in the process had sacrificed the beauty of their city, and then the Soviets later came in and rebuilt it in the fashion that I found so distasteful. Krakowians, on the other hand, had caved in at the point of German invasion.] We Poles at that time did not know about the Jewish persecution and the extermination camps. One day I saw one of my high school friends wearing an armband with a blue and yellow star. I asked someone what that meant and was told that the Nazis branded anyone with defined Jewish ancestors as a Jew. Poznan had a relatively small Jewish population, and Jews in the university and family social circles were quite well assimilated, so I was unaware of Polish anti-Semitism, especially that in Russian occupied Poland.
Rumor had it during the fall of 1939 that the Nazis had built a concentration camp outside of Poznan and that buses were traveling during the night, when Poles had to be indoors with the curfew, picking up families and taking them there. Mother found out this was true and got together packages of food and took them by streetcar to the camp, where she and others threw the packages over the barbed wire fence for the Poles inside. And then one December night the bus came for us. Three German soldiers, who spoke Polish so must have been born near the Polish border, came to our apartment. One went to the kitchen to watch over Pelasia the cook, one told me to dress, and one took mother to the living room and demanded all her papers, bank book and such things. I had been sound asleep and was very embarrassed and frightened to have to dress before that soldier. He even commented that I was well developed for my age. Mother had packed two suitcases in case something like this were to happen. The senior soldier, who was an officer, told mother to leave behind the suitcase with the pretty things and to take only the one with clothes. As it turned out, we really needed those clothes because it was very cold in the camp. All of our jewelry was lost, including pretty things I had gotten for years from one of my aunts. I was heartsick with the Nazi order to leave my canary behind in the cage as the soldiers locked and sealed our apartment. I begged them to let Pelasia take him or let me put him out of the apartment door so someone could take him, but mother and I were simply ordered to leave and get on the bus. Pelasia was told to return to her village.
There were other families in the bus and after a few more stops we got to the camp. It was filled with long one- and two-story buildings We were assigned a place on the straw on the floor, with a long table and chairs in front and a bright light shining above all night. It was scary. In the morning each day two men with pails went to the kitchen and got watery soup and bread for all ten to twenty of us at our table. One incident was difficult to understand at first. One day someone in our group started asking everyone else at the table, one by one, as a joke, to say a phrase in Polish that is impossible to say correctly if you are not born into the language. Mother was not asked to do so because they knew that she could not. When it became the turn of a particular man, he got up from the table, left, and was never seen again. Another young person explained to me that people were suspicious that this man was a German spy and that the game was purposely played as a way to get rid of him.
There was a boy in the camp on whom I had a crush. I had gone to the girls' high school next to his boys' high school and he had visited me on a motorcycle in my suburb. So we walked and flirted, oblivious to the danger surrounding us. One day railway cattle cars were brought into the camp. Mother had heard a rumor from underground people that this was the way the camp was vacated. People were stuffed into the cars and driven around for days until they froze; their bodies were then emptied in another part of Poland. The Nazis had incorporated our part of Poland into Germany and tried to rid it of the Polish intelligentsia and business people. After the War and when the communists finally allowed me back into Poland in 1966, I went back to Poznan and found the rock upon which was written the fact that 110,000 Poles had been taken to, and shipped out of, that camp. I believe that Jews were sent to another camp because I saw no one there wearing the Star of David.
Upon seeing the cattle cars, mother decided to act. Having been trained as an American lawyer, she marched to the camp commander demanding to be released. She claimed American citizenship, which she did not have because she had married a foreigner before the 1924 act that allowed American women to retain their citizenship after marrying a national of another country. Speaking English, she claimed that she had come to Poland to visit her sister and family. She explained that her sister and her sister's husband had been killed by the bombs and that I, the niece, was with her now. She said that she did not understand what was going on but that she had important friends in America who could cause trouble. This was before the United States entered the War. The Commander became frightened and let us go. The Poles standing outside the fence threw stones as we left, thinking that we had claimed to be "Volksdeutsch" or Germans, so Mother yelled in Polish (which she was not supposed to know) that we were Americans. With that, the crowd carried us on their backs to the streetcar, and we returned safely to Poznan.
Back in Abyssinia, we could not return to our apartment so we went to Uncle Bronek's home. Mother learned from the underground that Daddy had tried to return to Poland at the outbreak of the War but that the ship from New York had been stopped by the British and sent back to America with Daddy on it. So there was no need for Mother and me to stay in Poznan; we were free to leave Poland for the United States. I do not know now how Mother was able to travel in Poland, but she decided to go to Warsaw to find some papers for me that would allow me to travel with her [as a fifteen-year-old I could not understand all those complexities]. Uncle Bronek suggested that mother find a safe place for me to hide while she went to Warsaw to get some ID papers for me. I could not stay with his family in case they got picked up for the camp. They found a Dutch family who agreed to hide me in their attic if I promised to stay out of sight and be quiet. There I stayed like Anne Frank, but fortunately for me with different results. Mother finally came back with papers from the daughter of friends, so we were able to leave Poznan and cross the border from that German incorporated province to Warsaw [I learned during my visit in 1966 that the girl whose ID was given to me had died of typhoid because she could not leave Warsaw when she got the illness. This news left me with a terrible survivor guilt. Here someone had died because of me and I was not doing anything important with my life. This pushed me into trying to make a contribution, so I returned to sociological research and writing. That is when I undertook the widowhood study dealing with death and its trauma].
The trip to Warsaw was frightening; Mother had explained that we could be shot if the Nazis found out that I had false papers. Upon arrival in Warsaw, Mother and I went to stay with my half brother Julek and his wife and two children in their apartment, where they were living in fear. Julek was a writer of fiction and had won the equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize for his first novel. During the winter of 1939-1940 he went out nights to smuggle Jewish kids out of the ghetto through the sewers, a dangerous task. Often we had no heat or gas for cooking and only raw horsemeat for Christmas or New Year's Eve. During those days I often spent time with my Warsaw cousins (Daddy's sister's sons), who were all older than I. One day they left the city somehow planning to escape Poland by skiing through the mountains. They were never heard from again.
In the meantime Mother went daily to the American embassy. She told the Ambassador who we were, including that we were on the Nazi and Soviet blacklist because Daddy was a sociologist, and asked for a visa or some proof that she was an American. He refused because she was not a United States citizen. She went to the embassy every day at opening time for a month and stayed till it closed. The Ambassador finally got tired and embarrassed by this and gave her a letter written in English and signed by him but saying that we were Polish citizens. Again, Mother's legal mind got to work. She knew that we would not survive if the Nazis found us again, so she took her chances at lying her way out of the country. Getting out was complicated. Mother heard that Daddy and her cousins in America had sent money to Berlin, Stockholm, and Genoa, Italy for our trip to America. Mother decided that Italy would be easiest because we had relatives there and were somewhat familiar with that country.
In order to get out of Poland we had to go to the police to confirm that we were not criminals, to health offices, and finally to the Gestapo to get the ausweis, or permission to leave the city. Gestapo headquarters were in one of the hotels, and people were shot regularly in the back yard. We went to an office with an officer in full uniform and a secretary. Mother explained that we were Americans and gave the officer the Ambassador's letter. He okayed giving us the ausweis and turned to the secretary to type up the appropriate form. She got suspicious and asked Mother to show exactly where it said that we were American citizens. Of course, there was no such statement, and silence filled the room. Just at that moment a civilian man who was a stranger to us entered the Gestapo office and sat on the edge of the officer's desk, asking in German what was the problem. The officer and the secretary explained the situation to him. He picked up the letter, read it, and turned to the secretary telling her to hurry up with the ausweis. He then turned to Mother and remarked in English, "I see you plan on going through Vienna." Mother immediately caught on that he was not going to give us away and replied that she was glad about going through Vienna because she wanted me to see that city where she and my father had married. Mother was lying. He knew Mother was lying. And she knew that he knew that she was lying. This man then left, and we got the ausweis and also left, hearing shots in the back of the hotel. We then finished getting things ready, but there remained another problem. The Nazis declared that train tickets could be bought with money of only certain usual denominations, and Mother did not have such money. Unexpectedly a man from the underground approached her on the street and traded her money of the right type.
I remember escaping from Poland through Austria. I developed a high fever when leaving Warsaw. People in our car became aware that we did not have tickets beyond the Austrian-Italian border and no money. Mother had been warned not to get off the train at the Austrian-Italian border because Nazis had built a camp there and would be checking for fugitives. At the border German soldiers came in, closed the curtains of car windows, and told all without tickets to get off. No one moved. The Germans stepped down off the train and it continued on across the border. On the Italian side Italians entered smiling and opened the curtains. When the conductor asked for tickets, those who knew Italian explained our situation. The conductor took us off the train in Venice and again in Milan to argue with station masters, but whoever was in favor of our being allowed to go on won and we got put back. Mother told the other passengers and the conductor that Daddy had sent money to Genoa, but of course we had no proof. In Genoa we went to a hotel (I do not know how mother knew where to go) and got the money. The next day we returned to the railroad station to pay for the tickets and found that there was no record of the money we owed. We learned later that the Italians had helped many Poles escape. They did not like the Germans. It was January, and we could not get ship passage to New York till February, so we went to be near my aunt in lovely Bergamo. One of father's sisters had married an Italian, and their boys, Nino and Nelo, had spent summers with us in Wisla so they would not forget the Polish language and that they were half Polish. Mother collapsed in Bergamo after all that tension of getting us out of camp and Poland. One day the Italian police came to the hotel room because we had overstayed our visa. Mother told them we were visiting relatives, and they went away happily. Ipalled around with Nino and Nelo and their friend. Nino and Nelo were in Fascist uniforms. When war broke out they refused to fight with the Germans and joined the Red Cross, becoming translators. My husband Dick and I located Nino in 1966, and I am now in contact with Nelo.
After Bergamo we returned to Genoa and sailed to America on a nice, large ship, Rex. It was the end of February and very choppy. Most passengers became sea sick, so on several occasions I was the only passenger in sight in the big dining room. Upon our arrival in New York, Mother's cousins and a lawyer, a former student and friend of Daddy who had escaped Poland through Hungary with other cavalry officers, met us at the dock. The cousins, very American and covered with furs, said to mother, "Eileen, you do not have to worry." "Great," Mother thought, "Hitler must be dead." Corrine went on to say, "We have the papers that will allow Helena to join the Daughters of the American Revolution." Mother almost never lost her temper, but she grabbed the papers, threw them on the dock and said in anger, "Don't you know, that is what the whole war is about!" We then got the train to Champaign-Urbana, where Daddy had accepted a professorship at the University of Illinois. The United States government reinstated Mother's citizenship and later Daddy and I became citizens.
I spent the morning looking at the Znaniecki letters. These were from my great grandfather, Florian, his French wife Zofia, and the three sons, Leon (my grandfather), Bronislaw, and Stanislaw, to each other during the Franco-Prussian War. These letters and Zofia's diary of 1870-72 were left with Aunt Nela, Uncle Bronek's wife, who gave them to me when I visited Poznan in 1982. They were written mainly in Polish, with some German and French. Dick's mother and her husband John translated them into English, and I entered them into the computer. Now the problem of getting them published. The Znaniecki men were pulled into the War by the German occupying powers (Prussia, Austria and Russia partitioned Poland for 125 years) and had to furnish their own horses and uniforms, which severely depleted the Znaniecki estate. Zofia had trouble getting the crops, beets for instance, into the ground and harvested. Cezanek, the last son, was too young to help and it was expensive keeping four men in their supplies Ultimately they lost the estate and my great grandfather Florian Znaniecki then managed someone else's estate out in the eastern part of Poland.
This set of letters and diaries and many World War II letters illustrate the ridiculousness and pathos of wars. The latter include ones from Daddy's former students who survived but were dispersed all over the world and ones from Julek my half-brother, who had been caught in the Warsaw uprising and sent to Dachau. United States Armed Forces had liberated him. He was sent to France to recover; then he went to England waiting for a visa from Daddy's request, and finally to America. He kept writing poetry and short stories, but always about the War and the camp. No one wanted to read all this in the late 1940s and the 1950s. He wrote scripts and broadcast them at the Polish desk of the United State's government's Office of War Information Voice of America in Washington. Finally he committed suicide, hanging himself in his Arlington.,Virginia apartment. All these Znaniecki letters must have been confusing to God (a male one - the men of all generations and Zofia did not pray to women). In 1872 they wanted him to protect the Germans against the French, and from 1939 on, they wanted him to ensure that the Germans were killed and lost the war!
The letters contain many glimpses of life during the wars. I have not examined as yet the World War II ones, but the Znanieckis of the Franco-Prussian War often wrote to Zofia asking for reports of the battles as they appeared in the newspapers. She read Polish, German and French and sent them these reports, while at the same time they wrote about what they saw and experienced first hand on their marches toward and in Paris. Zofia never expressed her feelings as a French person over her sons' help in destroying her country. Once Bronislaw was stationed in Berlin and personally paying for his room and board and the services of a barber, a boot maker, and the caretaker of the horse that he had brought from the estate. When he was called to report to the front he wrote to his mother asking for money to pay all these service providers. The father had been conscripted as an officer in the Hussars, and the sons also wanted to be in this elite corps of German cavalry. I have a portrait of the father with an Iron Cross (military decoration on his uniform), and the sons were also hoping to earn the same. One of the sons wrote to the mother requesting that she write to the father that he should return to the boot maker because he forgot to tell him if the boots were to be made for the pant to go in or out. Hussars had to have the pants inside the boots. And the descendants of these men were taken to concentration camps, Julek even to Dachau, generations later!
On October 2001 I wrote in anger that the Americans have bombed Afghanistan, and now ground troops are trying to make contact with the rebellious forces in order to overthrow the powers of Taliban and catch Osama bin Laden. We decide to make war on terrorists, but the end result is suffering of ordinary people, people in Iraq, Iran and now Afghanistan. The decisions are unilateral, and then our leaders get support from countries dependent upon our aid, even when they do not like our actions. Millions of people are displaced, hungry or killed. A BBC correspondent saw many dead bodies of private citizens and commented that the Pentagon has made few admissions of the tragedy. Doctors without Borders is trying to help, as are other humanitarian agencies, but the talk in America is constantly of war. In addition, university professors and classes are being attacked and even dismissed if they try to examine the situation objectively and analytically. A perfect example is an article in U. S. News and World Report of October 8, 2001 (page 48), Learning to Love Terrorists by John Leo. The title reflects the tone of the piece, which is an attack on an anthropologist at University of North Carolina, the American Association of University Professors, and other university students and faculty. "A campus culture has arisen around very dangerous ideas." Trying to understand others is equated with "sympathy for anti-Western resentments." The Chicago Tribune ran a story by Vincent Schodolski (November 18, 2001, p. 8, Section 1) entitled Professors Learn Freedom of Expression has Risks, Limits documenting cases in which such scholars have been punished, or at last censured, for objecting to our war responses to the September 11 terrorist attacks. The attacks and other such cases are terrible, as is the treatment of women and hostages by the Taliban and other terrorist.groups. Yet our United States government response of inflicting severe retaliation on terrorist interests is not reasonable or decent.
The American Civil Liberties Union and other commentators are becoming deeply concerned with our overreactions, such as our government's reinstatement of military tribunals and wiretapping conversations between prisoners or suspects and their lawyers. The latest situation to draw many negative comments is the containment of prisoners in cages in Camp X-Ray in Cuba, accompanied by the explanation that the Geneva Convention rules of treatment of prisoners of war do not apply because these detainees are classified as "unlawful combatants." The BBC commentators found the caging of the prisoners to be barbaric. Recent news indicates that our government has imposed improvements on the treatment of prisoners in this camp, including "culturally appropriate food" and proper medical attention, but complaints persist. Several nations are requesting special treatment of their detainees in that camp.
I heard on the radio yesterday that it will cost 10 to 30 billion dollars to rebuild Afghanistan. Much of the damage to that country is the result of the United States government's previous military support to them to fight the Soviets, followed by our government's neglect of them afterwards, and now our bombing of them in this ironically expensive war. This reminds me of the movie, The Mouse that Roared, in which a small country got reparations and became very wealthy. Afghanistan is not a mouse! Neither was Germany after World War II; it was aided with reparations and at least partly because of that, is now a rich country, while many of its previous victims, including Poland, are still suffering.
Daniel Schorr just stated on NPR that it looks as if President Bush has set his agenda for this presidency: war expanded to include the evil axis of Iran, Iraq and North Korea. Schorr added that war is, after all, more fun and popular than dealing with a cantankerous Congress and economy. Bush certainly sounded warlike in his State of the Union speech on January 28, without even mentioning Bin Laden. Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, also sounded warlike when interviewed by Jim Lehrer on February 4th. Jim seemed almost surprised at the strong offensive rather than defensive stance against the "axis of evil" and the implication that we are going to a broad national war.The gradual buildup of scenario by those with military and political views is terrifying. The Bush budget certainly focuses on war and military matters. According to BBC, this makes our allies, especially Europeans, very uneasy. The humanitarian impulses of this country appear to be ignored in the expansion of "patriotism," anger, and fear. Let us hope that the humanitarian ideals of making the world better for all women, men and children prevails over our warlike stance to the fanaticism of terrorists and that we refrain from unilateral decisions that ignore the United Nations and other nations. [End of Comments.]
Helena Znaniecka Lopata has been a member of SWS since the late 1970s. Read her autobiography, "The Life Course of a Sociologist," Chapter Ten in Ann Goetting and Sarah Fenstermaker (eds.), Individual Voices, Collective Visions: Fifty Years of Women in Sociology. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995.
