'A Balance Sheet of Conscience'

“Strange as this may sound, as soon as I saw the first Soviet airplanes on September 17, 1939, I had no doubt at all that I’d end up in a camp, and yet I wasn’t much interested in them. Could I have been wearied in advance, by the monotony and dullness of mass atrocities?” 

That day, the poet Aleksander Wat, a self-described “progressive,” was in Lwów, then part of the Second Polish Republic. “Even back then, I was disturbed by the enigmatic stance of my communist friends: they simultaneously denied the existence of the [Soviet] camps and sporadically accepted their severity with a certain dull-witted approval.” Talk of the camps’ existence was dismissed by such friends as “reactionary slander.”

 

On September 17, the Soviet Union invaded Poland from the east, sixteen days after Nazi Germany had invaded the country from the west. The invasions had been secretly agreed upon less than a month earlier with the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. 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. Wat would spend almost two years in various Soviet prisons and camps.

 

Józef Czapski, a Polish officer, was taken prisoner that year by the Germans, handed over to the Soviets on September 27, and held in prisons and labor camps in the U.S.S.R. At Gryazovets, 250 miles northeast of Moscow, in a former Orthodox monastery, Czapski lectured his fellow prisoners on Proust, often quoting passages from memory. Along with 395 others, he inexplicably avoided the fate of 22,000 Polish officers murdered on orders from Stalin at Katyn.

 

In his poem “September 17” (trans. John and Bogdana Carpenter, Report from the Besieged City, 1985), Zbigniew Herbert writes:

 

“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”

 

Have the Poles forgiven Hitler and Stalin? Herbert writes in his essay “The Presence of History”:

 

“It’s pleasant to engage with history when one has a sense of one’s own innocence, righteousness, and serenity. Then it’s easy to pass judgment on the past, defend the oppressed, and brand the tyrants. . . . History turns into a balance sheet of conscience—it condemns, reminds, robs us of peace.”

 

[The passage by Wat can be found in My Century: The Odyssey of a Polish Intellectual, edited and translated in 1988 by Richard Lourie from transcripts of conversations Wat had late in life with Czesław Miłosz. Czapski describes his wartime experiences in Inhuman Land (trans. Antonia Lloyd-Jones, 2018), Memories of Starobielsk: Essays Between Art and History (trans. Alissa Valles, 2022), and Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp (trans. from the French by Eric Karpeles, 2018). Herbert’s 1975 essay is found in The Collected Prose: 1948-1998 (trans. Alissa Valles, 2010). All are essential artifacts of the twentieth century, part of our truest history.]