Yet because I’d assumed, in my English island-dweller way, that my father was home and dry when he got to England, I hadn’t asked much about this time. I got that wrong: it was precisely what had happened after he got to England that sealed his fate for the next half century and locked him into silence.
In 2000, Joe told me the last piece of the story: in 1941, after Russia became the unlikely ally of the western powers, he’d been drafted from his Polish army training camp in Scotland to a small Polish intelligence unit in London, a unit with such sensitive implications for the balance of power between the West and East that its existence had to be kept top secret. My twenty-year-old father, in a strange country and with little English, was given the job of transcribing the Russians’ Morse code: spying on the Soviets. Our allies. It was not high-level espionage—and he had, of course, no option but to do it—but he was told by the officer in charge that the less he knew about the context of what the unit was doing, the better. Trust no one. (What, not even you? he asked the officer, who laughed and said: You’ll do.) It was here he committed to that Official Secrets Act. Trust no one. The instruction imprinted itself so vividly on his mind, in his vulnerable position in a foreign country, that he put the lid on all his experiences before and during the war. Rather than let anything out accidentally, he let nothing out. And no sooner was the war over than the Cold War began, and even my father, with his studied, almost belligerent lack of interest in politics (and I now see why), could see that the fact of the unit’s existence—albeit in the past—became just as incendiary in a Cold War climate as it had been during the “hot” war. Perhaps more so.
His unit had been set up after the Russians switched sides in summer 1941, for with the Russians suddenly their allies’ ally, the Poles were presented with a dilemma. They had good historical reasons to distrust the Russians: for having three times been party to the partitioning of Poland, and for having just brutally invaded part of their country in September 1939, in alliance with the Nazis. They also suspected that the Russians had designs on their homeland, now under Nazi control and chronically weakened through war, and they urgently needed to monitor their intentions toward it. Yet they couldn’t do this openly, since this would jeopardize the alliance with the only power now capable of helping the West finish the war against the Germans. The British wanted to monitor their unlikely Communist bedfellows, too, but couldn’t decently spy on allies, so were glad to let the Poles do the work for them—as long as neither side admitted to it, as long as it was kept secret. And neither side did admit to it, which is why I could find no mention of the unit in any history book. And why you still won’t.
Unfortunately for the Poles, from the 1943 battle of Stalingrad onwards, Russia’s hand in the war was strengthening. Roosevelt wanted to court this major force, and Churchill found he had to, with Britain itself now hemorrhaging money and power. Since the Poles in the West were beginning to be a hindrance to this courtship (although they were still fighting and winning battles for the allies), the two leaders secretly and treacherously dropped their cause at the Tehran conference in winter 1943 and then more openly at Yalta in spring 1945. The dire consequences for the Poles became clear in summer that year, as Churchill officially recognized the Soviet-installed government in Poland, withdrew support for the exiled Polish government in London, and—so shockingly to the Poles, as well as to their colleagues and friends in the other allied forces—did not invite the Polish forces to the victory celebrations in 1945 and 1946. In his own mind, my father now had nowhere to go, except to retreat into silence.
Like the other stranded Poles, he was now vulnerably stateless for years after the war, the years of my childhood, until he got, in that peculiarly English phrase, his “naturalization”—that is, his British citizenship. Stateless, he watched his homelands of Czechoslovakia and Poland lose their freedom to the very people he’d been spying on. He’d been dutiful and brave, as so many Polish servicemen and women had been, but he was now without security or nationality in a country that was cold-shouldering the Poles for internal reasons of its own (war weariness, unemployment, male envy of the dashing figure they cut in their smart uniforms, with women, the perverse flirtation with Communism by establishment figures like the press baron Lord Beaverbrook, or Etonian spy-traitors like Kim Philby and Guy Burgess).
In the fifties and sixties, Joe saw spy scandals detonating around him in Britain—George Blake, Gordon Lonsdale, Buster Crabb, John Vassall, the Profumo affair. In his own mind, he had every reason to fear the knock on the door in the middle of the night, small fry that he was. Hence the hammer under the pillow—a rather basic, but at least legal, weapon. Joe knew that most English people, blithely ignorant of police states, would have scoffed at his fears as melodramatic. Yet even now, half a century later—and technically after the Cold War has ended—these fears still have all too real currency, if the Russian Alexander Litvinenko can be poisoned in broad daylight in a central London hotel.
My father was no enemy of the Soviet Union—no enemy of any nation, just one of countless pawns of war—but his fears were not for nothing. To live in a police state, as he had done for a few months, and as many thousands of other Poles had done in far worse circumstances in Soviet labor camps—or, worse, and notoriously, shot at Katyn—and as hundreds of Czechoslovaks had done when Hitler turned their country into a “protectorate” (always, always beware that word), left you with a different frame of mind from island dwellers, even if they had suffered the Blitz. It was another gulf he bridged with silence.
Many of his fellow Poles folded that silence around them too: over two hundred thousand servicemen and women from the three armed forces in Poland had fought to secure the freedom of Britain and countries in continental Europe—in Norway, France, the Battle of Britain (where the Poles’ four squadrons, representing only 5 percent of the air force that defended Britain, famously accounted for 12 percent of enemy losses), the Battle of the Atlantic, Tobruk, Lenino, Monte Cassino, Ancona, Bologna and on D-day and at Arnhem. They were not only betrayed by their friends but, as I found to my surprise, until recently airbrushed out of the histories of the war. From Tehran onwards, the Polish government in exile and the Polish press in the West were gagged: the Polish ambassador to America wrote later, “We were asked to keep everything secret. We were deprived of the possibility of obtaining the support of public opinion. Our lips were sealed.”
Their lips were sealed, and they were also emotionally stymied by not wanting to appear a victim and by their gratitude at having a home in a free country. With nowhere to put their anger, many turned in on themselves. Since Joe’s War, I’ve had scores of letters from their children, all of whom felt they grew up in some twilight zone they couldn’t figure out, dominated by the silently brooding presence of their Slav father (The Quiet Slav was the working title for the book, deemed a bit too quiet for the market). Most of the correspondents’ fathers had died too young—of despair, the historian Adam Zamoyski told me; as his own father had done, even though (perhaps even because) he was descended from the Polish nobility.
And so my father’s silence, and the odd details my memory had stored—the hammer, the nervous eyes—had led me into potent historical silences, ones glossed over for political expediency by the narratives of authority. For his part, Churchill soon felt a laudable guilt about the nations he’d helped commit to living in a police state, a guilt that he buried with words and silences of his own. Privately, in a cable to his wife, he expressed his regret for the “poisonous politics” that “allowed us to win the war.” Publicly, in his massive six-volume history of World War II, written over the eight years following it and commonly known as his “memoirs,” he consciously commandeered the story of the war: “History will be kind to me,” he wrote wryly, “because I intend to write it.”
As I looked into Churchill’s memoirs and into the weighty tomes of British war historians to compare them with the archival records a
nd eyewitness reports I was finding, I began to feel like that boy in Hans Christian Andersen’s tale of the emperor’s new clothes. Why had none of the major British historians, in their supposedly comprehensive overviews of the war, mentioned the Polish generals Anders and Maczek, and barely, if at all, General Sikorski, who was, after all, until his still-suspicious death in the plane crash in 1943, the leader of the Polish government in exile—Britain’s first and, for a while, only fighting ally? Why, extraordinarily, had Churchill not mentioned Sikorski’s death in his memoir entries for July 1943—or at all in his six-volume work? Of course the strains and complexities of the war demanded on-the-hoof compromises. Of course every country had its own war story, its own griefs and grievances; Poland didn’t have a monopoly of suffering (although its death toll was second only to Russia’s, and its people lost their country, as well).
Yet I began to see the blanks in Churchill’s memoirs as a revealing negative image of his own no-go areas and of the new Cold War framework he was writing in: there was no mention of the decoding machine Enigma, or of the Bletchley Park intelligence unit that contributed as much as the military did to the defeat of the Nazis, none of the bad faith between him and Roosevelt at Tehran (which Stalin spotted at once, and exploited), and little about the role of the Red Army in winning the war. All of these touched more or less on Poland, that sensitive spot. Yet it was Churchill’s record, backed with all the authority of his unique access to classified material, that set the tone for the view of the war for years afterwards, and still does. As British social historian J. H. Plumb wrote, thirty years after the outbreak of war, “We still move down the broad avenues which he drove through war’s confusion and complexity.” Churchill’s road building was indeed remarkable for one man with such a heavy political weight on his shoulders. The only trouble was that his avenues buried the Poles under their tarmac.
In his fairy tale, Andersen describes the boy who tells the truth about the naked emperor as “a child who had no important job and could only see things as his eyes showed them to him.” And it could be that good memoir is best written with “no important job”—like Rousseau, like Montaigne—in the sense of not being in hock to power or convention. It could be that the important, oxygenating task of memoir is to keep faith with the individual, the paradoxical, the unsystematic: the minute particulars of truth telling. Truth, said Francis Bacon famously, is the daughter of time, not of authority. (And even the matter of time disclosing the truth is, of course, questionable: distance from an event can take away as much as it gives.) The kind of memoir written with a political motive, or by ghostwriters, is different in kind from that led by the mind’s eye and a real quest for truth—however partial and relative that truth will be, in the nature of things.
As Descartes, Montaigne, and Rousseau radically proposed long ago—and then demonstrated by bringing their ground-breaking “I” voices into literature—a felt relationship to the past can be as valuable, and often more trustworthy, than a rational, comprehensive one.
For myself, I’d found through talking with my father that I trusted contemporary eyewitness accounts most of all. I trusted what they saw with their eyes, at the time, on the ground. So I looked for more of them, to fill out what had happened before my father stepped into a picture he had no means of understanding. For Munich, I found an out-of-print memoir by Sydney Morrell, an English journalist who became my eyes and ears, and I brought in the accounts of writer Martha Gellhorn, who had, she said, “no qualifications except eyes and ears” (like the boy in the fairy tale; but what eyes and ears). For the Polish army’s phenomenal, and still unsung, trek out of Siberia to the Western Front, I brought in General Anders’s very felt personal memoir. Wherever I could, I wanted the “I” voice: the “I” witness. Like a bandleader bringing in soloists on kettle drums and saxophone, I brought in riffs—riffs of memoir.
And the last riff was my own: in 2001, sixty-two years after my father’s escape from Soviet and Nazi occupation, I made a journey with a writer friend in Joe’s footsteps, from Ukraine to his home village of Baligrod in the Carpathians. This eye-opening trek allowed me to feel underfoot the ground he’d covered, to see for myself the mountains, the beech forests, his straggly home village, and—still—the local people’s residue of guardedness from the war, so like my father’s own. It gave the narrative another foothold in the present, too, looping the time span of the story back like a lasso from current times.
And it allowed me to pick up a vital stitch from the past. By now it felt unthinkable to be writing about Poland, Germany, and World War II without mentioning the Holocaust, and yet it also seemed impossible to bring it in: my father wasn’t Jewish, it wasn’t part of his story, and it was too painful to touch on in passing, in a tipping-the-hat sort of way. But in Kraków one drizzly March morning, we stumbled across thousands of people in the main square, craning their necks to get a glimpse of a baseball-capped photographer on a high hoist in their midst. His name, people told us, was Ryszard Horowitz, and he was a well-known New York photographer here to take a picture of the scene for the forthcoming birthday of Pope John Paul II, who was born in the city. Back home, I emailed the photographer—only half expecting a response. His riveting reply told me that not only had he, too, been born in Kraków but he was the youngest survivor of Auschwitz, taken there at the age of three. Because memoir and travel writing are such agile forms, accommodating detour and discursive shifts (“I digress,” says Sterne breezily in Tristram Shandy, “and I also progress, and both at the same time”), Ryszard’s memories blended naturally into Joe’s War, giving a child’s-eye view—with humor, even—of the most twisted part of Hitler’s war in that long-suffering part of Europe.
So the question of who’s got the story? was woven right into the texture of the book for me, into its form—the plaited individual stories—and into its content. Who gets to tell the story of what goes on in a war? It’s a question with a new slant now, with the soldiers blogging from the Iraq war. The ordinary foot soldier—unless a poet—has not, typically, told the history of a war. Nor have women, since we haven’t been involved in combat until recently: the story hasn’t been ours, though the fighting sons (and fathers and brothers) have been. As I read the history and heard Joe’s story, I began to develop a mission to give my “ordinary Joe” father, and the eye-witnesses who had come my way, a voice against the shelf loads of books written about the tyrants who made their lives intolerable. Hitler’s own turgid memoir, Mein Kampf, stands as an example of how badly written and distorted a memoir can be when it’s bidding for power rather than truth.
But at a certain point, I knew I had to rein in that sense of mission: being up on a high horse is, after all, a bad position from which to write anything. For the most part, I jettisoned the crusade in favor of the memoir’s limber form so that I could stay with the ambivalences, contradictions, and dead ends I was exploring, in myself as well as others. The occasional shaft of polemic or rhetoric could hit its mark quite well enough without turning the whole tome into a battlefield. And it wasn’t a history book, either: I was tracking a figure—Joe—and my relationship to him, through a landscape of history. A landscape that just happened to be one of hot and cold wars.
Now, I see the book as part of an effervescence of time-lapsed stories from the monster-from-outside century. Often, like my father’s, they’ve been bottled up during the Cold War, and now, unstoppered, they course into the current vogue for memoir. It’s surely no accident that the memoir boom followed the dissolution of the Soviet Union: when the wall came down, people were let through, and the past was let through too. Its pent-up stories, with memoir at their core, have alchemized brilliantly into fiction and film. Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated, Maria Lewycka’s A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, the films Goodbye Lenin and The Lives of Others, all deal with the residue of massive tragedy in inventive and even playful ways, forging new forms so as not to get bogg
ed down—precisely—in high-horsery, reprisals, and us-and-thems.
Perhaps memoir flourishes best in newly unfettered times, as it did in Enlightenment France, memoir’s other heyday. For us in our times, it’s been like awakening from a coma—the Cold War coma. Memoir sees the world anew, and its singular voice has often ended up—almost as a by-product—challenging received political, religious, or stylistic views: St. Augustine, Rousseau, Thoreau, Malcolm X. The misery memoirs of our own time may perhaps in their turn be challenging idealized notions of families. It seems we need periodically to remake orthodox narratives, particularly those forged out of power: to re-member the past—as Isis did literally with the scattered members of Osiris’s celestial body—and bring it back to life. And we’re once again in a time when orthodoxies need challenging by people trying to keep their eyes and minds open, to see, as the child did, the naked body of power as it struts the street. We need power and leaders, of course, not least to tell us a good story, but we don’t need them to blinker or corral us into one overriding “vision.” The province of memoir is simply to explore, free-range, some things that seem to need exploring and retrieving, wherever that leads.
The handmaiden of memoir in this task—the one who quietly hands us our cues and clues, if we attend to her—is, of course, memory. Something in the project of memory latches on to just the detail it needs (Proust’s madeleine, the hammer) for its own purposes—which are what? Perhaps, as the aborigines and ancient Greeks thought, our stories really are, in some as yet inscrutable way, what we’re here for; perhaps neuroscience or quantum physics will eventually fill us in on that. Meanwhile, it does seem that linking ourselves to what’s around us, and to what went before, in however fragmentary and anecdotal a way, is necessary and satisfying, and possibly hardwired into us.
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