By Ben Sixsmith
Friday, August
19, 2022
For more than a hundred years, Poland did
not exist. Throughout the final quarter of the 18th century, Russia, Prussia,
and the Habsburg Empire divided and consumed the nation. Poland had been a
great European power, and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had been one of
the largest and most modern countries on the continent for more than two
hundred years. Poles had (very briefly) occupied Moscow during the
Polish-Muscovite War. King Jan Sobieski had turned back the Turks in Vienna.
King Stanisław August Poniatowski signed the Constitution of May 3rd, 1791—an
enlightened document that Edmund Burke called “the noblest benefit received by
any nation at any time.”
Yet by 1791, it was too late. Surrounded
by other rich and powerful states, Poland was not privileged geographically.
The influential upper class—the szlachta—was divided and
dysfunctional enough for state action to be sclerotic. Indeed, some Polish
magnates betrayed their country and supported the partitioners. So, Poland
disappeared—officially, at least. Of course, its people did not meekly submit.
There were various uprisings—all brave and some initially successful. None
succeeded in defeating the partitioners, though, and an inevitable consequence
of rebellion was a tightening of the persecutory screw.
For obvious reasons, the partitioners did
not act as one but there was a general desire to expunge Polish culture. The
Russification of Russian-held territories included, in the words of the great
historian Norman Davies, the “strangulation of all works in non-Russian
languages.” In German-held territories, too, Polish art, history, and language
were stifled. Bismarck had especially vivid fears about the implications of
Polish freedom. “We can do nothing but exterminate them if we want to exist,”
he wrote in a letter to his sister; “the wolf also cannot help that he is
created by God as he is and yet we shoot him dead when we can.” Territories
occupied by Habsburg Austria, including Kraków and much of what is now Western
Ukraine, were treated with greater tolerance. Kraków even became known as “the
Polish Athens.”
The failure of multiple uprisings split
Polish intellectuals and noblemen between those of a more romantic temperament,
who sought to reclaim Polish independence by bloody force, and those of more
pragmatic inclinations, who sought to do the “organic work” of preserving and
strengthening Poland culturally and economically. Stanisław Staszic, a
philosopher and educator who co-founded the Warsaw Society of Friends of
Learning, said, “Even a great nation may fall, only a corrupt one can perish.”
Polish statehood was out of reach, he and his colleagues argued, but the Polish
nation could still flourish as long as its cultural and economic character
endured.
Promoters of this kind of organic work
tended to be lofty Enlightenment liberals and positivists committed to
empirical reasoning rather than metaphysics or traditional belief. Their
pursuit of human progress transcended the desire for Polish independence. The
writer Aleksander Świętochowski mused:
The
well-being of all peoples, as we see it, is not dependent strictly on the
nation’s strength and political sovereignty but on its ability to participate
in the universal civilisation and to develop its own. We all know about nations
that are entirely independent but at the same time half-dead, retarded in their
progress, and by no means living a joyous life.
“Our nation,” he added, “should not merely
grow its power, strengthen its character, and foster in people the feeling of
love for homeland but also—inasmuch as it is possible—breathe the fresh breeze
of humanity’s general progress.”
The most famous manifestation of organic
work was the Flying University. At the turn of the 20th century, Davies wrote,
the typical Polish patriot was “a young lady of good family with a textbook
under her shawl.” In the second volume of God’s Playground, he reported that the university met every week at different locations.
“In time, four separate faculties were organised and diplomas were issued at
the end of course as rigorous as anything offered in the public sector.” Not
only were Polish writers and scholars studied; so was everyone from Mill to
Marx to (ironically) Nietzsche. Marie Curie was probably the most famous person
to study there.
The Flying University was liberal and cosmopolitan,
educating women and men alike, but it tended to attract Warsaw’s most
well-connected residents. Across Poland, though, independent education
flourished. “Self-education was a veritable craze,” wrote Davies, “Amazingly,
it has been estimated that one-third of the population of Russian Poland, young
and old, was engaged in some sort of home-study.” Educational outreach was
extended to peasants under the guise of “sport associations” and “beekeeping
societies.”
It was not organic work that brought
partitioning to an end and restored Polish independence. As well as an increase
in Polish strength, it had a lot to do with decline of Germany and upheaval in
Russia. Nevertheless, preserving Polish education and culture prepared Poles to
take advantage of the opportunity presented by circumstances beyond their
control. It also prepared them for the difficult task of rebuilding and running
an independent state. Prescience and patience were rewarded.
Poles were not able to enjoy independence
for long, however. In 1939, Poland was subjected to brutal invasions by the
Nazis and Russians. During the 18th century, the Prussians had hoped to
neutralise Polish culture and absorb Poles into their kingdom through a gradual
but inexorable process of Germanisation. Hitler saw no need to be gradual about
it, and he had no qualms about killing those Poles who, by ethnicity or
ideology, had no place in his schemes. Still, Poles resisted, militarily and
intellectually. The Nazis saw Poles as a crude and savage people, so they
closed their universities, theatres, cinemas, and newspapers and allowed them
only basic education. “Polish civilization is not worth consideration,” said
Joseph Goebbels, which was a bit like breaking someone’s arms and legs and then
announcing that they should not be considered an athlete.
Yet the Polish tradition of underground
culture and education was renewed even so. Underground schools and universities
were established, with the former educating more than a million children and
the latter educating thousands of older students. These underground
institutions were sophisticated as well as secretive. The University of Western
Lands alone, based primarily in Warsaw, boasted—or rather, hid—17 units and six
departments. Underground seminaries operated as well, and one of the students
in Kraków was a young man named Karol Wojtyła, who would later become Pope John
Paul II.
All this required considerable courage. In
July 1941, German soldiers killed 25 professors in the city of Lwów (which was
then Polish) for no reason at all. In Kraków, almost two hundred academics were
abruptly arrested and sent to concentration camps. Nineteen of them froze to
death. But amid the barbaric gloom of Nazi occupation, extraordinary faith
survived. Of course, people were fighting courageously under Nazi occupation
across Europe. But history had prepared Poles for such circumstances. After
all, their anthem was (and remains) titled “Poland Is Not Yet Lost.”
In this way, young Poles were being
prepared for all aspects of their future freedom. In his paper, ‘Polish Universities During the Second World War,’ Adam Redzik writes,
“Teaching also took place in the department of diplomacy, which, in the spirit
of the prewar diplomatic studies programme, was intended for the preparation of
future diplomats.” Many academics and teachers died at the hands of the Nazis
and the Soviets (including during the notorious Katyń massacre, which targeted
intellectuals as well army officers in an attempt to behead Polish society).
“As a result of the war,” Redzik writes, “around 450 professors and associate
professors at Polish post-secondary institutions perished, along with several
hundred young academic workers. Additionally, around 8000 secondary and
post-secondary educators lost their lives during this period.”
Many more students perished. Young,
passionate men and women spearheaded the Warsaw Uprising in 1944, rising like
flames from the embers of the Polish culture they had been nurturing through
the years of occupation.
Men like Krzysztof Kamil Baczyński,
Tadeusz Gajcy, and Andrzej Trzebiński were among the students of the
underground education system who subsequently took up arms in the covert
struggle with their occupiers. But they also took up their pens, writing poems
and commentary for underground magazines.
Professor Paweł Rodak of the University of
Warsaw told me that around 1,500 underground periodicals were produced during
the war. These publications reflected different perspectives. Some, like Płomienie,
were socialist; others, like Sztuka i Naród, were nationalist;
still others, like Pravda, were Catholic. Many of them
breathed hot cultural and ideological air infused with bold ideas and romantic
lyricism. They pursued organic work, in a sense, but their authors wrote and
acted with the stench of genocide in their nostrils. They had, in other words,
little time for patience.
It would be facile to reduce the radical
ideas of young Poles to this sense of existential urgency but it must have been
significant. It fuelled the literary and the physical resistance of
nationalists like Baczyński, Gajcy, and Trzebiński, all of whom died during the
war. The reputation of the tendency they represented has suffered due to its
regrettable anti-Jewish elements, but there were more idealistic, even
universalist aspects as well. One can hear the faintest echoes of Świętochowski
in a passage from a nationalist statement quoted in Marek Chodakiewicz’s So
Poland Be Poland:
Our
nationalism, as a Catholic nationalism, stands for the respect of the humanity
of the individual and the separateness of the national communities, their
rights and their goods. At the same time, in the name of the instinct for
self-preservation and the principles of justice, we demand the same of others
and, if the need arises, we shall fight for it. By serving our nation on the
basis of this idea and its principles we are not only carrying out our duty
towards the community in which we were born and raised, but we are also
fighting for a healthy and just tomorrow and better order in the world.
The cocktail of romanticism and resistance
that young Poles drank has proved controversial. In his book The Captive Mind, the great poet Czesław Miłosz criticised the initiation of the Warsaw
Uprising for encouraging “frenzies of voluntary sacrifice” that amounted to “a
gesture in the face of an indifferent world.” Certainly, people who resist
oppression should be realistic about the limits of what they can achieve. The
Polish tradition of organic work speaks of patience and prudence and abandoning
catharsis in favour of calm and pragmatic yet industrious development towards
one’s goals. But when lives are at risk and freedom is at stake, one needs
spiritual heat not just intellectual cool. It motivates that first step towards
the possibility of death—be it breaking cover to attack your enemy or stepping
into an underground tutorial. Any act of rebellion worth remembering requires
at least an element of fanaticism.
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