Wojtek the Bear [paperback]

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Wojtek the Bear [paperback] Page 14

by Orr, Aileen;


  One of the most important contributions to the film was made by former soldier Archibald (Archie) Brown. Archie had been a mine of information and enjoyed working with the film crew. He died a few weeks later and the film was dedicated to him. When he talked about the bear, it was with deep respect and love. At the end of his contribution he broke down on screen, and we all shared his grief. Watching him, there was not a dry eye in the house. He stated what we all thought in our hearts: we had no right to forget Wojtek. He was, indeed, a treasured being whose passing was as an old soldier, not just a beloved pet.

  On 23 January 2012 I received a surprise email from the UK embassy in Warsaw. It was an invitation from the UK ambassador, Robin Barnett, to be guest of honour at their Celebration of Scotland in Poland evening on Monday, 6 February. When I finally linked up with First Secretary to the ambassador, Iain Stewart, I was left in no doubt that this was a serious diplomatic initiative to promote stronger trade and cultural links between Scotland and Poland. Naturally, I jumped at the chance to take the bear to Poland for the first time.

  At Heathrow, carrying the maquette of Wojtek in a plastic bag, I made my way to the bus waiting to take us to Terminal Three and our flight to Warsaw. Being naturally inquisitive, the bear poked his nose out of the plastic bag and stared out. A child spotted him, raised his hand and touched the bear’s nose. While in transit he chatted away in German to the bear, confidently believing the bear was his new friend. The innocence and the joy of the encounter were palpable. His parents smiled at the scene. As we parted, the child laughed and waved goodbye to Wojtek before disappearing into the huge glass hall for his flight onwards to who knows where. Say what you like, the bear made friends easily.

  Security being security, Wojtek had to pass through a variety of scanners. Finally the flight was ready, and just as I rose to shuffle forward for embarkation, four young Poles spotted him and shouted, ‘Wojtek, Wojtek!’ They waved enthusiastically and as they passed by patted him on the head. ‘We love Wojtek,’ said one of them. Though their English was limited, I got the message: I was not very important but my companion Wojtek enjoyed superstar status.

  When I arrived in Poland it was –26ºF on the streets. But I found it bracing – very cold and dry, with no chilly wind. I was met by Maja Andrzejewska from the embassy. She was fascinated by Wojtek’s story, as many young Poles are. For many of them it is a new tale and they eagerly absorb the details. En route to the embassy I unwrapped Wojtek in the car so he could see Warsaw. Maja enjoyed the moment too, and we both laughed because in a way it was a celebration. Wojtek had come to his spiritual home.

  There was a quick turnaround at our hotel so that we could be at the reception early to meet the rest of the embassy staff. Iain Stewart was a fellow Scot. He told me he used to live in the Borders, in Bowden, close to my own home, which is typical of Scots: we meet up in foreign countries, only to find we are from the same place. On his plinth in the embassy, Wojtek looked really at home. Guests entering the reception could see him from the doorway; indeed, the glass-fronted room meant we could enjoy being outside, too, cold as it was. Staring at his poignant reflection in the glass, I felt proud that others, too, had faith in what we were doing, and I wished the moment could have been shared with the other trustees or, perhaps, with Kay Karolewski, who had been with the bear in Winfield Camp all those years ago. Kay was not a sentimental man, being fairly matter of fact about his relationship with Wojtek. But he was proud to be part of the story, and I now understood why, at other functions where the bear was present, he used to stand to one side, quietly observing people’s reaction to the maquette, and the great surge of emotion it generated within them.

  Others picked up on it, too. HM Ambassador Robin Barnett is one of those rare people who can see into the soul, and he fully understood the message the bear was sending out. Wojtek touched people’s hearts. The ambassador saw the links, and the opportunities to express these in a way which embraced both the past and the future.

  After the entertainments, which included a stirring address to the haggis by Adam Chuzanow and a superb performance from the Czestochowa Pipe Band, it was my turn to ‘sing for my supper’ and give a dissertation on Wojtek. I never work from set speeches so I have little remembrance of what I said. But I know I did stress that Wojtek was special; he was a link with both our countries. If the Scottish soldiers respected and held in high regard the Poles who had laid down their lives for our freedom, and their freedom too, why not bring this story to Poland and let them hear about those who had lived and worked with Wojtek? His story was different because he never got to see Poland, like many who had travelled with him. Although there is great sadness in the story of Wojtek, the legacy he left was beyond normality: he was an animal who knew nothing about being a lesser species; he was, in his own mind, a soldier who had Polish as his first language; his family were Polish, and his life was as that of the men languishing in a Displaced Persons camp in Scotland waiting for a freedom that never came. The core reason for doing this whole project was to bring Wojtek to Poland, along with the memory of the men, women and children who were with him from Persia to Scotland, and to tell the story of their survival. One of the most thrilling moments of the evening for me was to see for the first time the Polish edition of Wojtek’s story. Publisher Mateusz Bandurski had brought along a number of copies for distribution to the guests, and for me that was a major event – it meant that for the first time Poles could read about him in their own language. They were learning something about those lost years.

  On my final day it was my turn to learn about the deprivation and horror of the Warsaw Uprising on a visit to the Muzeum Powstania Warszawskiego, which manager Anna Kotonowicz had opened specially for us. The museum is a modern facility which matches anything in Scotland or the UK. And it is a sombre testament to man’s inhumanity to man. The Warsaw Uprising had been wholesale slaughter; the conditions for those residents for all ages, class or religion could only be described as hell on earth. In 1939 Warsaw’s population was 1.9 million; by 1945 it was a mere 1,000. Anna was a highly knowledgeable guide. While walking through the museum I said: ‘I now understand why this project is so important to me. My grandfather must have known about this slaughter, and he had seen similar scenes in France.’

  You cannot leave such an exhibition without being moved to tears. For me it was a short, three-minute film by an American pilot which brought the carnage into sharp and compelling perspective. This museum should never be missed. It is a reminder of what can happen if we fail to strive for peace. It is also quite overwhelming, because the museum is sited in the area where so many innocents were murdered. The sheer scale of those deaths cannot be measured other than by statistics, which themselves are beyond understanding. Needless to say, it took me some time to process the museum visit in my head. When you see pictures of wartime Warsaw, you understand why many Poles could not return; there was simply nothing to come back to. The city was razed to the ground; virtually all its citizens died, with no documentation to say how they met their end. There was no tangible measure of their existence save mile after mile of graves.

  As the men sat in Winfield Camp, they had little knowledge of the true extent of the killing and destruction that had occurred in Warsaw. What they pictured in their mind’s eyes was the elegant capital of 1939, the Paris of Eastern Europe, with ladies in their beautifully tailored finery, welcoming restaurants, superb theatre shows, fast cars and shops filled with fine food and wines and the latest fashions. The fantasy had been fact back then, but not by 1945. Hitler’s hatred of the Poles had seen to that. But many of the exiled Poles had no knowledge of the true destruction which had been wrought, nor could they have taken the pain of it.

  If there was no place for the men, then there was certainly no place for Wojtek. For those who may question this, visit the museum. We lunched in the restored Old Town, which is very beautiful. Built from the rubble, it is a testimony to those who pieced it all together to re-create what
was lost. No one should doubt its authenticity. How often have we broken a national treasure only to have it reconstructed and repaired to perfection? In rebuilding it, the joy of its existence is also restored.

  For a split second, I could imagine the men standing with Wojtek in the Old Town square. We watch so much on TV about the First and Second World Wars, yet we do not always absorb the true horror of these stories. When friends once told me about entering the main gate at the death camp of Auschwitz, and the feeling of panic and oppression weighing on them as they walked through, I had no idea that fellow Europeans – people so close geographically and socially to my own – could suffer the agonies of war with no hope.

  For them, Wojtek has to be one of those few beacons of hope in the history of their nation. He is a symbol of hope for the future. He could not have visited postwar Warsaw. The soldiers’ dream of returning to Poland, and Warsaw, with Wojtek marching through the city to the music of bands watched by crowds of cheering children was just that – a dream. There were no streets, no marching bands and, much worse, no children. How could Wojtek have lived in the rubble with his grieving comrades? His life would have been intolerable, just as it was for millions. Wojtek’s transfer to a zoo in Edinburgh was not ideal, but it was safe and secure. He had keepers who cared about him and a daily audience to amuse him, and sometimes visits from old friends who sang to him in Polish. And they swore he cried.

  But Wojtek can now go to Poland. It won’t be in the way that was originally hoped for by the men who knew him. But it will be in a much better way. He and his statue there will be a new story to new generations, and a fond memory to others.

  In marked contrast to the glacial pace of our discussions with Historic Scotland, the Polish reaction to my visit to Warsaw was a great tonic. On returning home, phone calls and emails flooded in from people wanting to help. Most refreshing of all was the ‘can do’ attitude of Polish officials, who very quickly got to work on compiling a shortlist of potential sites for a Wojtek statue. Indeed, their enthusiasm was so palpable it had a profound effect upon me. In Scotland I could feel my energy being drained as the project became more and more burdened with red tape. However, Poland’s reaction was so refreshing that it quickly revived my flagging spirits. The Poles see in Wojtek an icon which straddles past and future. He is not a bear who should be left in limbo: he is a symbol of what can be achieved through friendship and trust.

  I have always known that, once a memorial is built in Poland, the mission, in some ways, will be complete. However, I suspect Wojtek will continue to surprise us. In life, he was an extraordinary animal with a strong sense of mischief. There is no reason to suppose his shade has lost that sense of humour. There is one continuous blessing for the rest of us: you can’t be around Wojtek too long and take yourself too seriously. He also has a sneaky habit of making people do exactly what he wants.

  Meanwhile, the trustees – and Krystyna and myself in particular – continue to plot his new existence with great excitement. How could we tire of such a wonderful and fulfilling story of trust and loyalty? He was a beautiful bear with a kind heart who was at the centre of many soldiers’ lives in a remote camp in the Scottish Borders as they prepared to journey home. In the event, they had to leave without him, and that was a very sad moment. However, today his story is reaching out to Poland, his spiritual homeland, and it is a healing thing that will endure. There can be no finer epitaph than that.

  Epilogue

  Neal Ascherson

  What were Polish soldiers doing in Persia? Come to that, what were they doing in Scotland, both during and after the Second World War?

  Aileen Orr’s beautiful story is in many ways complete in itself. But to be fully appreciated, it needs to be set in its wider historical context. This background must include the disasters which fell upon Poland in the Second World War, the struggles of the Polish people to regain their freedom and the fate of those who adopted Wojtek: Poland’s soldiers, sailors and airmen. These men and women had won a war which they alone had fought from its very first day to its very last, and yet they had lost their country.

  Their story is one of the grandest narratives of human faith and endurance to emerge from the horrible twentieth century. It is a story still almost unknown outside Poland and the Polish-speaking diaspora scattered across the world. It explains how a very special animal, a truly remarkable individual of a bear who thought of himself as a Polish soldier, came to be so important to a very special group of men. They were tough and hardened survivors and warriors, but they had lost most of what is supposed to make a war worth fighting and a life worth living. Wojtek gave them hope, and the chance to protect, teach and care for another living being. In times of lonely despair, a bear helped them to stay human.

  They had lost their families. Some utterly, because their families were no longer alive, others had lost contact with them in the chaos and terror of the Nazi and Soviet occupations. And they had lost their homes. For most of the soldiers who adopted Wojtek and fed him and played with him, their homes lay in Polish provinces newly seized and annexed by the Soviet Union. They could only return to those territories if they agreed to become Soviet citizens, and even then they would risk arrest. For others, it became clear as the war continued that ‘victory’ would not give Poland back its independence and freedom. Instead, their country would become – against the wishes of almost all its people – a Communist satellite state controlled by Moscow. That could not be the Poland they recognised as home, and many of them were wrestling with the realisation that they would never return to it.

  So Wojtek was both a consolation and a symbol. Like the soldiers, he had no home except the army, no family except his human comrades in uniform. And yet, like them, he somehow remained an optimist, endlessly adaptable to new camps, new climates, different countries with different food, unknown languages and strange customs.

  To understand more clearly why Wojtek’s rugged, undaunted presence made him so much more than a mascot, that wide background of Poland at war has to be unrolled. This bear who thought that he was a soldier was also an actor in an enormous drama, as millions of men, women and children – already dispersed across Eurasia as the human debris of war – set out on a series of journeys. Some of these journeys were the long, circuitous marches of armies pursuing an enemy. Some were deportations, as whole populations were evicted and transported thousands of miles to a distant wilderness. Some began with gatherings of survivors and fugitives who then embarked on voyages across seas and deserts which were supposed one day to bring them back to Poland.

  There are easy metaphors for these journeys, none of them accurate. Many Polish people think of them as a sort of sacrificial pilgrimage. That is an image drawn from the work of the national poet Adam Mickiewicz, who in the nineteenth century adopted the Messianic doctrine that Poland was the new collective Christ, destined to be sacrificed and die in order to redeem all nations. Another labelling is to speak of a Polish Odyssey, or sometimes an Aeneid. As far as encountering terrible setbacks, obstacles and monsters on the way to a goal, this comparison works. But Odysseus after years of wandering returned to find his own wife still ruling in their own house. And Aeneas eventually fulfilled his God-given destiny by founding a new Troy in a distant land. The Poles were allowed neither of these happy ends.

  The roots of all this suffering reach deep into history and geography. But Poland was not always a victim nation. In the early Middle Ages, the Christian kingdom of Poland united with the pagan Grand Duchy of Lithuania to form the ‘Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth’, and for several centuries the Commonwealth dominated east-central Europe. It was a strange, ramshackle structure, in many ways archaic but in other ways curiously appealing to the political ideals of our own democracy. The Commonwealth, ruled by an elected king, was multi-ethnic and in general tolerant of differences. Ethnic Poles, Ukrainians, Tatars, Ruthenians, Germans, Lithuanians, Belorussians, Armenians and Jews managed to live together, culturally distinct but u
nited in loyalty to the Polish Crown. The diversity of faiths – Catholic Christian, Orthodox, Uniate, Lutheran and Calvinist, Islamic and Judaic – caused no serious problems until the Counter-Reformation began to impose a dominant Catholic identity upon Poland.

  And Poland became rich. From the fifteenth century on, the demand for Polish wheat to feed the rapidly-growing populations of the Netherlands, northern France and England began to make profits for Polish landowners. It was now that the Polish connection with Scotland began. From the early sixteenth century, carefully recruited groups of Scottish settlers sailed across the North Sea and the Baltic to Danzig (Gdańsk) and fanned out across the basin of the Vistula river. Along its tributaries, they founded small, tightly structured colonies which organised and financed the transport of grain down to the Baltic. Their numbers are disputed, but the Scots who joined these colonies over their two centuries of peak prosperity, most of them from the east and north-east coast of Scotland, must have been counted in the tens of thousands.

  It was Scotland’s first planned stride into the outside world. And yet this episode was until recently almost completely forgotten by Scottish historians – although well remembered by the Poles. Scots enjoying the Crown’s protection became generals, bankers and even potentates – Alexander Chalmers from Dyce, near Aberdeen, was several times mayor of Warsaw. The traveller William Lithgow, from Lanark, who walked through Poland in the early seventeenth century, wrote that ‘for auspiciousness, I may rather tearme [Poland] to be a Mother or Nurse, for the youth and younglings of Scotland who are yearly sent hither in great numbers . . . And certainely Polland may be tearmed in this kind to be the mother of our Commons and the first commencement of all our best Merchants’ wealth, or at least most part of them.’

 

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