October 12, 1954 Dr. hab. Karol Wojtyła begins teaching in the philosophy department of the Catholic University of Lublin.
February 25, 1956 Nikita Khrushchev denounces Stalin’s cult of personality at twentieth Soviet Communist Party Congress.
June 28, 1956 General strike in Poznań leads to armed repression and deaths of Polish workers.
October 23, 1956 Hungarian Revolution breaks out.
October 28, 1956 Cardinal Wyszyński is released from house arrest and returns to Warsaw.
The truth of Witold Pilecki’s life would beggar the imaginations of the great tragedians.
He was born in Russia, in 1901, of a Polish family forcibly resettled after the failed anti-czarist insurrection of 1863–64. After fighting with Polish partisans in the last days of World War I, he served with Polish forces in the Polish-Soviet War of 1919–20: a largely unknown affair that saved newly resurrected Poland from Bolshevik conquest and prevented the Red Army from blazing its way across war-exhausted Europe. Decorated twice for heroism in the struggle to defend Poland’s new independence, Pilecki was mustered out and spent the interwar years as a farmer; he married and fathered two children.
Less than a week before the outbreak of World War II, Pilecki took command of a cavalry platoon in the 19th Polish Infantry Division. After two weeks of fighting against the German invaders, the division was demobilized in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Poland; Pilecki and his commander, Jan Włodarkiewicz, went to Warsaw and launched the Tajna Armia Polska [Secret Polish Army] as an underground resistance movement. In 1940, its 8,000 members were incorporated into the Armia Krajowa [Home Army, or AK]: successor to the Polish military in occupied and partitioned Poland, and the fighting arm of the London-based Polish government-in-exile.
Later that year, Pilecki brought his AK superiors a daring plan: he would get himself arrested and sent to Konzentrationslager Auschwitz, located in that portion of Poland that had been incorporated into the Third Reich. There, he proposed to organize prisoner resistance, collect intelligence, and get it out to the AK, which had ways of transmitting such information to London. The superiors agreed. So, under the nom de guerre “Tomasz Serafiński,” Pilecki deliberately got himself caught in a Gestapo sweep of civilians; he was arrested, tortured, and then dispatched to the labor camp at Auschwitz, where he became prisoner 4859. At Auschwitz, Pilecki got busy organizing the Związek Organizacji Wojskowej, or Union of Military Organizations [ZOW], which worked to improve prisoner morale, distribute smuggled clothing, food, and medical supplies, and train a resistance movement capable of taking over the camp in the event of an Allied attack. Contacts were maintained with local Polish patriots, and intelligence on camp operations was gathered. By 1941, ZOW had managed to build a radio, and Pilecki’s intelligence reports on life, death, and torture at Auschwitz I got out to Polish resistance and thence to London. The prisoners’ hope was that these reports would lead to a joint attack on the camp by the Home Army and the Western Allies, perhaps using the Polish Parachute Brigade that had been formed in exile.
After two years, however, Pilecki decided to escape and make his way to AK headquarters; he wanted to make the case in person for a relief attack on the Auschwitz complex, which had now been expanded to include the gas chambers and crematoria at Birkenau (sometimes known as Auschwitz II). With the help of local patriots, he made good his escape in April 1943 and eventually worked his way to Warsaw. His reports on Auschwitz were considered exaggerated by the British, who seemed incapable of imagining mass murder on an industrial scale; and without Allied air support, the Home Army leadership concluded, an attack on the concentration and extermination camps was impossible.
Pilecki then joined a unit within the AK that, in addition to its anti-Nazi activities, was dedicated to resisting a postwar Soviet takeover of Poland—a possibility not unlikely in light of evolving Allied strategy. After the Warsaw Uprising broke out on August 1, 1944, Pilecki initially fought anonymously as a private. Later, on revealing his true rank, he took command of an important sector that held out for two weeks against fierce German assault. When the AK authorities surrendered after sixty-three days of epic struggle, Pilecki was captured and spent the rest of the war in two German POW compounds. After these camps were liberated, he joined the famous Polish II Corps, victors at Monte Cassino and in Normandy’s Falaise Pocket. The commander of the Polish II Corps, General Wladysław Anders, had another mission for the intrepid officer who had demonstrated such remarkable courage and ingenuity for five years. Pilecki was asked to return to a Poland being strangled by the Red Army and the NKVD (predecessor to the KGB); there, he was to reestablish his intelligence network and report to the government-in-exile in London, which still claimed legal authority over Polish affairs. It seemed another futile mission, but Pilecki agreed to go, and in addition to performing his assigned intelligence duties wrote a study of Auschwitz. When the government-in-exile decided that its situation was hopeless and ordered the remaining resistance fighters to return to civilian life or try to escape to the West, Witold Pilecki dismantled his intelligence networks but remained in Poland. In 1947, he began collecting information about NKVD and Red Army atrocities against Polish patriots, often former members of the AK or Polish II Corps.
Arrested by the Polish communist secret police in May 1947, Pilecki was brutally tortured prior to his trial, but revealed nothing that would compromise others. The suborned “evidence” used against him at his March 1948 show trial came from, among others, a fellow Auschwitz survivor, Józef Cyrankiewicz, who would later become one of communist Poland’s prime ministers. Pilecki freely admitted that he had passed information to Polish II Corps headquarters, which he believed to be his duty as an officer. Falsely charged with plotting assassinations, which he denied, Witold Pilecki was given a capital sentence and shot on May 25, 1948, at the Mokotów prison in Warsaw. His grave was never found; it is thought that the body may have been disposed of at a garbage dump near a local cemetery.
This was the Poland in which Karol Wojtyła, whom the world would come to know as Pope John Paul II, was ordained a Catholic priest in 1946: a country in which men of unblemished honor and extraordinary heroism could be convicted as traitors and murdered by communist thugs, their bodies tossed onto garbage heaps. The forces that created, and brutally maintained, this particular heart of darkness were the nemesis—the seemingly invincible opponent—against which Karol Wojtyła contended for more than three decades.1
THE TIME AND THE PLACE
By most historical accounts, Poland was something of a bit player on the twentieth-century global stage: rarely a protagonist, often a victim, a country whose heroic virtues seemed to go hand in glove with a striking incapacity for governance and diplomacy. Yet if we define the “twentieth century” not by conventional chronology but by its central drama, the truth of the matter is that Poland played a pivotal role at several crucial moments between 1914 and 1991: those seventy-seven years of Western civilizational crisis that began when the guns of August launched World War I and ended when one of the greatest effects of the Great War, the Soviet Union, disappeared.
By Lenin’s own admission, the “Miracle on the Vistula” in 1920—in which the Polish forces of Marshal Józef Piłsudski repulsed the Red Army cavalry and thrust Trotsky’s forces back into Russia proper—was a “gigantic, unheard-of defeat” for communist world revolution.2 Nineteen years later, Poland was the first European state to offer armed resistance to Adolf Hitler, demonstrating the imperative of defending freedom against totalitarianism rather than attempting to appease its appetites. Fifty years after that, in 1989, Poland once again asserted its right to freedom against seemingly insuperable odds, and became the fulcrum of a nonviolent revolution that swept European communism into the dustbin of history while giving birth to a new, democratic European order.3
The Poland in which Father Karol Wojtyła would spend the first years of his priesthood was a Poland that had been dramatically—some would say, “
completely”—changed by the Second World War, and by the postwar arrangements agreed to by the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States.4 It had been picked up and moved several hundred kilometers to the west, losing territories that had been Polish for centuries and gaining lands that would be a bone of contention with postwar Germany (and an excuse for Soviet hegemony) for decades. Politically, the Poland that emerged from World War II was a wholly owned subsidiary of the USSR, a central piece in the postwar Soviet imperial puzzle and the land bridge to communist East Germany. Postwar Poland was ethnically more Polish than Poland had ever been, its Jews having been destroyed in the Holocaust and its Ukrainians incorporated into the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Culturally, postwar Poland was arguably the most intensely Catholic country on the planet, not only because of genocides and population transfers, but because the Catholic Church, which suffered terribly during World War II, had emerged with its honor intact and its historic role as the repository of Polish national identity and memory confirmed. Economically, the country was a ruin, having been one of the battlegrounds on which two totalitarian powers had fought an armed struggle to the death. Psychologically, Poland was dazed and depressed; fear stalked the land even after the country’s putative liberation. One-fifth of Poland’s prewar population had died between 1939 and 1945. The survivors sensed that the flower of the nation had been sacrificed in the war Poland lost twice, even as the new postwar communist order was imposed with a ruthlessness matching that of the previous, Nazi occupying power.
Yet Poland had somehow survived World War II—as Poland had, somehow, been reborn in the waning days of World War I, after 123 years of exile from the political map of Europe. It was a close-run thing. Crushed in September 1939 between the totalitarian pincers of the Wehrmacht and the Red Army, the Second Polish Republic was in mortal peril. As one historian puts it, by October 1939 “the Polish state … faced the threat of not only total military defeat, but also the loss of legal and constitutional continuity. Almost its entire territory was controlled by an enemy alliance, and its constitutional authorities had been incapacitated by an erstwhile ally.”5 That ally, Great Britain, would continue to regard Poland as a diplomatic headache throughout the war, despite the heroic contributions of Polish squadrons to British victory in the Battle of Britain, and of Polish infantry and armor to Allied victories in Italy and Normandy.
Poland’s postwar fate was sealed by one event and one decision. The event was the Battle of Kursk, the greatest armored battle in history, which, in August 1943, effectively ended the German invasion of the Soviet Union and set in motion the long, bloody process by which the Red Army fought its way to Berlin. The decision was the strategic choice made by Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt at QUADRANT, their Québec City conference that same month. By agreeing to the American plan to invade Hitler’s Festung Europa from the west, across the English Channel (rather than from the south, through the Balkans), the Western Allies ensured that Poland would be overrun by the Soviet army rather than liberated by Anglo-American forces. During the latter part of the war, the incapacities and internal quarrels of the Polish government-in-exile were not inconsiderable. Yet those Polish failures were, in a sense, as irrelevant to the great power Realpolitik game being played at the “Big Three” conferences in Tehran and Yalta as were the heroics of Polish RAF pilots during the Battle of Britain and of Polish soldiers at Monte Cassino: cursed by the geographical reality of being a broad, flat plain between Germany and Russia, Poland was now a pawn in the emerging, bipolar, and deadly chess match between the Soviet Union and the West.
In 1945, few could have imagined that Poland would eventually provide the key to the ultimate victory of the forces of freedom in that contest. Yet some of the elements of such an outcome could be discerned in the Polish experience of the Second World War, if one looked keenly enough and below the surface of events. The Warsaw Uprising of August and September 1944, for example, is not infrequently regarded as a suicidal exercise with virtually no political effect.6 Yet, in the retrospect of late-twentieth-century history, one can perhaps see that Poland’s refusal to concede its sovereignty to the German occupation sowed seeds of resistance that would flower, albeit in a very different form, in the 1980s.7 The brutalities of Poland’s Soviet masters—including the 1940 Katyń Forest massacres of at least 22,000 Polish officers by the NKVD—could not be discussed publicly in Poland in the decades after the war. But families knew that husbands, fathers, uncles, and brothers had disappeared, and those bitter memories were a living, inextinguishable reminder that the communist regime, which claimed a unique legitimacy as Poland’s liberator, was in fact built on a foundation of homicidal falsehoods. The self-sacrifice of a man like Father Maximilian Kolbe, who gave his life in the Auschwitz starvation bunker to save the life of a prisoner who was the father of a family, belied the communist claim that the Catholic Church was the historic oppressor of the working class—as did the sacrifices of thousands of other Polish priests, nuns, and laity who went to their deaths under the crooked Nazi cross, for the sake of the cross of Christ.
True, Poland looked like, felt like, and in many respects was a different country in 1945 and 1946 than it had been in its brief twenty-one years of modern independence. There were different people, a different economy, and a different government denouncing different enemies. Yet there was a cultural and spiritual continuity to Polish life that would eventually falsify the communist claim to be building a new Poland. The presence of Red Army troops, the links between the Polish internal security services and the NKVD/KGB, and the Western policy of “containment” might mean that, by conventional reckoning, Polish sovereignty was a pious fiction. Yet, as Poland would demonstrate between 1939 and 1989, there are powerful forms of cultural and spiritual sovereignty that can resist, and eventually defeat, the harshest political regimes.
FITTING THE COW WITH A SADDLE
Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili, more widely known by his Bolshevik nom de guerre of “Stalin,” was an ethnic Georgian who adopted certain classic Russian attitudes toward Poles and Poland: which is to say, he hated both. His August 1939 pact with Hitler, intended to buy time to prepare his defense against the Nazi assault he knew was coming, involved gobbling up large chunks of traditionally Polish territory and deporting thousands of Polish families to the steppes of central Asia. When the Western Allies summoned up the spine to insist that some form of “Poland” be reconstituted after Hitler’s defeat, Stalin made sure that the new Poland would be a Soviet vassal state. As the Red Army moved across Poland in 1944, its divisions were followed by the agents, assassins, and executioners of the Soviet secret police, who made it their business to ensure that no political resistance could be mounted against the Soviet-sponsored Lublin Committee (which claimed to be the true government of liberated Poland), rather than the Polish government-in-exile in London.
A vast secret police apparatus of repression was thus born along with what eventually became the Third Polish Republic. At the time of V-E Day, the so-called ministry of “public security” had 11,000 employees, a number that would more than double in a few months’ time, while the numbers of agents, informers, and provocateurs also grew. The Polish army, now controlled by communists or their pawns, conducted propaganda campaigns with the civilian population even as it indoctrinated its own forces and conducted expulsions of German ethnics in the “recovered territories” in the west.8 Stalin would later say, memorably, that trying to make Poland a communist country was like fitting a saddle to a cow. In the early days of communist Poland, the man Churchill and Roosevelt referred to as “Uncle Joe” was taking no chances with the cow.
The brutality by which the NKVD and its postwar allies in the Polish internal security services liquidated thousands of Poles whose only “crime” had been their patriotic defense of Polish independence through the AK or other resistance movements reflected the paranoid style that was a long-standing feature of Soviet communism. It was neither a West
ern cold warrior nor a Polish critic of Russia, but the great Russian novelist and poet Boris Pasternak who once described Lenin as “vengeance incarnate” and Stalin as a “pockmarked Caligula.”9 Soviet communist paranoia expressed itself in many forms, ideological, political, cultural, and economic; its most lethal expression was that series of secret police agencies that eventually came to be known as the KGB. Ironically, its founder, in the days when it was known as the Cheka, was a Polish communist, Feliks Dzerzhínskii. Its subsequent leadership, according to British intelligence historian Christopher Andrew, included men “more suited to a chamber of horrors than to a hall of fame,” a truth perhaps unconsciously recognized by the fact that the officers’ club at the Lubyanka, the KGB’s Moscow headquarters, did not display photographs of former KGB chairmen (three of whom had been shot in various purges, one of whom had killed himself, and several of whom were clinical psychopaths).
Among the enemies of Soviet communism, real and imagined, none was more feared by the KGB and its predecessors than the Catholic Church, which was regarded as a prime ideological enemy even before the Bolsheviks seized power in a crumbling Russia in 1917. That fear was subsequently transmitted to allied internal security and intelligence services in the Soviet bloc (many of which, to be sure, did not require excessive instruction on this point). Vatican diplomats and others who imagined that Soviet intelligence and the intelligence services of its Warsaw Pact allies acted more or less like their Western counterparts were sorely mistaken. There was a ruthlessness about the communist persecution of Catholicism that was fed by a deeply ingrained paranoia—which in turn may have reflected the fact that Marxism-Leninism was itself a quasi-religious system (if of an ultramundane sort), complete with a doctrine, a theory of morality, an idea of salvation, a concept of the “last things,” and a martyrology.10 Communism and Catholicism could not peacefully coexist. In a confrontation extending over the medium and long haul of history, someone was going to win and someone was going to lose. That, in any event, was how real communists saw the matter.
The End and the Beginning Page 4