'But How Those Walls Moved'

I’ve intended for a long time to recommend Miron Białoszewski’s A Memoir of the Warsaw Uprising, edited and translated by Madeline G. Levine in 1977, but lazily never got around to it. We’re now in the midst of an anniversary of sorts: the Polish underground resistance started the uprising on Aug. 1, and it ended on Oct. 2, 1944. Some sixteen thousand members of the Polish resistance were killed in the fighting, and between 150,000 and 200,000 Polish civilians died, mostly in mass executions.

Białoszewski (1922-83) was a Warsaw-born poet who studied Polish literature in an underground school during Nazi occupation. He was not a fighter but was shipped to a German work camp after the uprising and escaped a month later, returning to Warsaw. Like Zbigniew Herbert, Białoszewski published his first book of poems in 1956. His memoir was published in 1970. Its prose is anything but elegant. Białoszewski’s style is staccato and fragmented. He records details, not drama. He’s not slumming, however. His aim is not avant-garde incoherence. His memoir reads like a diary, the writing of which is forever being interrupted. He is interested in recording immediate experience, with little effort to revise, unify and smooth out the messiness. Here he describes the impact of a German bombing raid. The ellipses are Białoszewski’s:

“But how those walls moved . . . once, I’m watching them – and it seems they’re moving a meter back and forth. . . . and back . . . and forth . . . are we breaking into pieces? . . . No-o . . . they’re swinging . . . a little less, less and less, and they settle down . . . as they were before. I rubbed my eyes in amazement.”

The jagged, jerky effect of the prose recalls Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s. Patience is required. To fill in the bigger picture, I suggest reading Victor Davis Hanson’s The Second World Wars (Basic Books, 2017), concentrating on Chap. 19, “The Dead,” pages 463-499. In it, Hanson tallies the carnage suffered by every nation, but even in the context of such cold calculation, Poland stands out:

“[B]y war’s end, Poland would suffer between 5.6 and 5.8 million dead, the highest percentage of fatalities (over 16 percent) of a prewar population of any participant of World War II.”

Part of the explanation for the slaughter is that Poland capitulated, though never surrendered, to both the Third Reich and the Soviet Union in little more than a month. Between Sept. 1 and Oct. 6, 1939, the country suffered some sixty-six thousand fatalities. “Poland alone,” Hanson writes, “lost more of its citizens than all the Western European nations, Britain, and the United States combined.” He continues:

“Poland was the laboratory of Nazi barbarism, given that it was the site of over 450 German extermination, concentration, labor, and prisoner-of-war camps. It was both the first country attacked by Hitler and the first to have its citizens—both Jews and Slavs—targeted for mass extinction. . . The Holocaust accounted for the greatest number of Polish deaths, given that the prewar Jewish community of Poland—10 percent of the population—was the largest in the world at somewhere around 3.5 million persons. Scarcely over a hundred thousand Polish Jews survived the German extermination efforts. The six most infamous extermination camps of the Holocaust—Auschwitz, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibór, and Treblinka—were all in Poland.”

In praise of the Poles, Hanson writes: “Polish resistance fighters usually fought the Nazi occupation in a far more muscular fashion than their Western European counterparts, provoking a commensurately fearsome German response.”