'Twenty-Seven Thousand People Perished Each Day'

Every year I privately observe certain public anniversaries, including some that date from long before my birth: April 15, December 7, June 6, November 22. Chief among them, thanks mostly to my parents and others of their generation, is September 1: 

“On average, twenty-seven thousand people perished on each day between the invasion of Poland (September 1, 1939) and the formal surrender of Japan (September 2, 1945)—bombed, shot, stabbed, blown apart, incinerated, gassed, starved, or infected. The Axis losers killed or starved to death about 80 percent of all those who died during the war. The Allied victors largely killed Axis soldiers; the defeated Axis, mostly civilians.”

 

Victor Davis Hanson adds that some 60 million people died in World War II, most of them now nameless and forgotten. My father served in the American military during that war, as did most of my parents’ male friends. I grew up thinking of World War II as “my war.” We read Sgt. Rock and Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos comic books. A little later, Mailer and Jones. When we played army we killed Nazis and Japs. I remember the time, around 1963, when a slightly older kid suggested we start killing Viet Cong. No longer a kid, I've learned to see the war through others’ eyes – Churchill, John Keegan, Vasily Grossman, Max Hastings, Rick Atkinson, Curzio Malaparte, John Horne Burns, even Céline – and Zbigniew Herbert. The polish poet was born in 1924 in Lviv (Lvov, Lwów, Lemberg, Lwihorod, Leopolis) when it was part of the Second Polish Republic. In “Mr Cogito Considers a Return to His Native Town,” Herbert writes:

 

“If I went back there

I would probably not find

A single shadow of my old home

Nor the trees of childhood

Nor a cross with an iron plaque

A bench on which I murmured incantations

Nor a single thing that belongs to us.”

 

On August 23, 1939, Hitler and Stalin agreed to the secret non-aggression Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The Nazis invaded Poland from the west nine days later. On September 17, the Soviet Union invaded from the east. The battle was over, Poland subdued, by October 6. The Soviets were driven out of Poland by the Germans in the summer of 1941, and the Germans were driven out in turn by the Red Army three years later. Halik Kochanski writes in The Eagle Unbowed: Poland and the Poles in the Second World War (Harvard University Press, 2012):

 

“The Second World War left Poland devastated. Around 6,000,000 Poles had died during the conflict, 20 per-cent of the pre-war population; only about a tenth as a result of military action. The deaths of the remainder bore testament to the brutality of the German occupation from 1939 to 1945 and to the Soviet occupations from 1939 to 1941 and from 1944 to 1945. Of the dead, half were Polish Jews, representing approximately 90 per-cent of the pre-war Jewish population of Poland.” 

 

Herbert published “September 17” in 1982, during the glory days of Solidarity, when Poland was again threatened with invasion from the east. Herbert dedicates the poem to Józef Czapski, author of Inhuman Land, who survived the Stalin-ordered Katyn massacre in 1940. Here is “September 17”:

 

“My defenseless country will admit you invader

where Jaś and Mary went walking to school

the path won’t be split into an abyss

 

“Rivers are too lazy not quick to flood

knights sleeping in the mountains continue to sleep

so you will enter easily uninvited guest

 

“But sons of the earth will gather at night

funny carbonari plotters of freedom

they will clean old-fashioned weapons

will swear on a bird on two colors

 

“And then as always—glows and explosions

boys like children sleepless commanders

knapsacks filled with defeat crimson fields of glory

the strengthening knowledge—we are alone

 

“My defenseless country will admit you invader

and give you a plot of earth under a willow—and peace

so those who come after us will learn again

the most difficult art—the forgiveness of sins”

 

Some of Herbert’s readers, especially in the West, have decided he was cynical, pessimistic, unforgiving. He earned the right, as did millions of other Poles, some of whom survived the occupations. Here is a portion of the interview Herbert gave to his American translators, John and Bogdana Carpenter, in 1984:

 

Q: “When did you lose your faith in the reformability of the system? In 1949 with the beginning of Stalinism in Poland, or before 1956? After 1956? After 1968, 1970? When?”

 

A: “I have known this since September 20, 1939. When I came into contact with the Soviets in Lwów, as a boy. I cannot stop wondering at certain intellectuals. I had my revelations ab oculos. And not through Marx or Lenin. The city was changed within a few days into a concentration camp. This system attacks a European through smells and tastes; while I am a partisan of goodness and beauty, I don't have a model for the happiness of humanity. My advice is: compare the smell, the state of the street, people’s eyes, as I did in 1939.”

 

[The Hanson passage is taken from The Second World Wars (Basic Books, 2017). The first Herbert poem quoted is from The Collected Poems 1956-1998 (Ecco, 2007), translated by Alissa Valles. The second is translated by John and Bogdana Carpenter in Report From the Besieged City and Other Poems (Ecco, 1985).]