'Nor a Single Thing That Belongs to Us'

“The atmosphere in Lwów, in November, December . . . A city that had lost its beauty, a city besieged by fear.” 

The Polish poet Aleksander Wat is speaking with his friend Czesław Miłosz in a series of interviews later published as My Century: The Odyssey of a Polish Intellectual (trans. Richard Lourie, 1988), recalling the days before the start of World War II.

 

“Did you know Lwów before the war? Lwów was one of the loveliest Polish cities in the sense that it was a merry city. Not so much the people, but the city itself. Very colorful, very exotic, it had none of the grayness of Warsaw, or even Poznań. Its exoticism made it a very European city.”

 

On August 23, 1939, Hitler and Stalin had 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 1941, and the Germans were driven out in turn by the Red Army three years later. Lwów is located in East Galicia, now part of Ukraine.

 

“Lwów was a bit more like the Vienna of operetta, the Vienna of joie de vivre. Like some of the Italian cities. Not all of them though—some Italian cities are dismal as well. Lwów was like Marseilles. Well, the Soviets had barely arrived, and all at once everything was covered in mud (of course, it was fall), dirty, gray, shabby. People began cringing and slinking down the streets. Right away, people started wearing ragged clothes, obviously they were afraid to be seen in their better clothes.”

 

Depending on its most recent conqueror, Lwów has been known as Lviv (the current designation), Lvov, Lemberg, Lwihorod and Leopolis. When Zbigniew Herbert was born there in 1924, it was part of the Second Polish Republic. Other natives include Emanuel Ax, Martin Buber, Stanisław Lem, Leopold Staff and Simon Wiesenthal.

 

Three days ago, on December 6, the Russians launched a massive drone and missile strike on Ukraine’s power generation infrastructure. This followed a similar attack on November 28-29. Power was interrupted in Lviv, Kyiv, Chernihiv, Odessa, Zaporizhia, Dnipropetrovsk, Mykolaiv and Kharkiv. In “Mr Cogito Considers a Return to His Native Town” (trans. John and Bogdana Carpenter) 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.”