BACK TO THE EASTERN FRONT
Fear is rising in Poland, a country caught between East and West with Putin on the prowl,
WARSAW— Jacek Dehnel’s apartment smells like mandarin oranges and gas heating. Two dozen walking sticks protrude from one corner of the room, the accessories of a young man with the airs of a wise old dandy. Books are stacked everywhere, right up to the ceiling.
The apartment on the banks of the Vistula River offers a view of a tall, spiked highrise — the Palace of Culture and Science, a landmark of the Polish capital and a symbol of erstwhile Soviet imperialism. The people of Warsaw have given the building many colourful nicknames, including “Stalin’s syringe.”
Today, it is surrounded by prestigious buildings designed by western architects.
Warsaw reflects Poland’s history like no other place. It is the city where Soviet architecture stands next to western skyscrapers. Where psychology is taught in the building that once housed the SS. Where rubble from Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels’ birth house was displayed in front of the Zacheta National Gallery of Art.
Warsaw is the capital of a country whose culture is characterized by “western easternness or eastern westernness,” as Polish intellectual Maria Janion once wrote.
And, in this country caught between East and West, fear is tangible everywhere. It stares out from newspapers and magazines, crawls across TV screens and slips into barroom conversations. It nestles in people’s minds.
It is the fear of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. It is the fear that Europe is not reacting forcefully enough to the crisis in Ukraine, the fear that Putin will advance not only to the Donets River, but soon also to the banks of the Vistula.
And it is the fear of Putin himself, who recently referred to the “centuries-old common history” that connects Poles and Russians, words that sparked anxiety in the Polish media, because they match the rhetoric of the cold embrace the Russian president has reserved for Ukraine.
This fear is expressed in an open letter, “From Danzig to Donetsk,” an appeal to Europe signed by 20 Polish intellectuals and published on Sept. 1 in the Gazeta Wyborcza, the Economist, Le Monde, La Libre Belgique, Die Welt and in the Ukrainian media.
“Anyone who will not say ‘ no pasarán’ to Putin today . . . consents to the destruction of international order,” it says.
“Whoever follows today the policy of ‘business as usual’ with respect to the Russian/Ukrainian conflict is turning a blind eye . . . on attacks by Putin’s imperialist forces on successive countries. Yesterday it was Danzig, today it is Donetsk: We cannot allow a situation where Europe will be living again for many decades with an open and bleeding wound.”
Dehnel is one of the letter’s signatories. At 34, he is already one of the best-known authors in Poland. His poems are anachronisms, verses that could be 100 years old.
“The Germans,” says Dehnel, “have to understand that our fear of Putin is no accident.” Rather, it is the result of extensive observations of the country’s neighbours to the East and the West.
Dehnel feels that Germany’s position on the crisis in Ukraine is too weak, and he is not alone. Journalist Anne Applebaum, the wife of former Polish foreign minister Radoslaw Sikorski, accused German Chancellor Angela Merkel of failing in her diplomatic efforts to resolve the crisis, and Polish journalists contended that Germany’s judgment was clouded by its murky past: the bloodbath of the Second World War, mass murder in the Soviet Union and the battle of Stalingrad.
Dehnel sums up his message to the Germans as follows: “If Putin drops a nuclear bomb on Warsaw, the next one will strike Berlin.”
His reference to the most powerful weapon of all demonstrates the enormity — and familiarity — of the fear. It is the fear that history will repeat itself.
Recent events have rekindled a memory that slumbers deep in the collective consciousness of the Polish nation: the secret protocol appended to the Hitler- Stalin Pact, in which the Germans and the Soviets agreed to the Fourth Partition of Poland as they divided Eastern European regions into spheres of influence — an idea that Putin recently defended. On Sept. 1, 1939, the Wehrmacht marched into Poland, followed by the Red Army on Sept.17, while the rest of Europe did nothing. This historic betrayal of Poland by the Europeans is mentioned in every interview during this trip.
In Gorlice, roughly half an hour from the Slovakian border and a two-hour drive from Ukraine, Andrzej Stasiuk, 54, picks us up in an SUV. A signatory to the open letter, Stasiuk is one of Poland’s best-known authors internationally.
Dry mud crumbles from the dashboard as the SUV whizzes past remnants of the People’s Republic of Poland, past former collective farms that today belong to a millionaire. The roadsides are dotted with religious symbols.
“Until 1947, the Lemken lived here, a Ukrainian minority,” Stasiuk says, his voice low and gravelly. “The Poles forcibly resettled them.”
The Poles and the Ukrainians have a troubled common history. The Ukrainian Insurgent Army massacred thousands of Poles during the Second World War and Polish prejudices persist. “Many Poles only see Ukrainians as labourers and cleaning ladies,” says Stasiuk.
Stasiuk stops at a cabin at the edge of the forest, where he writes his books. In front of the cabin he has raised the flags of Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Ukraine — souvenirs from his travels — but he has taken down the Russian flag.
“After the Soviet Union, everyone said the old business of East against West was over. What a bunch of nonsense, damn it!”
Stasiuk’s travels have taken him far to the east, often through Russia. “Putin is more clever than the West,” says Stasiuk, “just as Russia has always been more clever. I genuinely fear that there will be a war.”
“I don’t want to see any Russian tanks,” says Szczepan Twardoch, 34, the enfant terrible of Polish literature. He lives in the village of Pilchowice, near the city of Gliwice.
One of the main streets of Gliwice is called Ulica Zwyciestwa — Victory Street. A beautiful woman smiles from a facade, her teeth whiter than anything else in Gliwice — but it’s just an advertisement for the fashion retail chain C&A. Only a few steps away, someone has sprayed “SS” and a hooligan slogan on the walls.
Twardoch is from Silesia, in southwest Poland, less than an hour’s drive from the Czech border, and his origins have softened his Polish. “I know that I’m not German,” he says. “And I know that I’m not a Pole.”
It’s a lonely identity, as Twardoch once described in an essay, but he can still speak for the Poles, he says, and he was among the signatories of the open letter. Twardoch composed his bestselling novel Morphine in Polish; the book caused uproar in Poland because it tells of a Polish resistance fighter in the autumn of 1939 looking for drugs and sex as he wanders through war-torn Warsaw.
“My Polish friends are genuinely afraid that their wonderful life could be destroyed by a big war,” Twardoch says. “They are afraid that they will have to fight.”
Twardoch sees the fear in his friends’ faces. He sees parallels in the books that describe the situation 100 years ago. “Before World War I, many people thought there would never again be war in Europe. We know what happened after that.”
The fear of war is old, but it’s important, as all of the authors agree. There is no end to history, as they say again and again. The crisis in Ukraine is just the beginning, they insist. But if this is merely the beginning, what comes afterward?
“This war will drag on, sometimes hot, sometimes cold,” Twardoch says. “Either Putin will be forced to his knees, or he will get what he wants: the old borders of the Empire.”
The next stage of the journey takes us to northwestern Poland. Some 180 kilometres from Twardoch’s house comes Wroclaw, on the Oder River, which becomes the Polish-German border further to the north.
On the outskirts of Wroclaw, young Poles push baby carriages through parks next to apartment blocks. In the old city — lovingly restored with EU funds — German pensioners explore their roots. Wroclaw was once home to German poet Hoffmann von Fallersleben. It is also a city that Adolf Hitler declared a fortress in1944, ordering that it must be defended at all costs.
A woman lies on a bed of skulls with milk shooting from her breasts and a baby lying on her stomach. “An unorthodox Madonna, wouldn’t you say?” says Olga Tokarczuk, 52, one of Poland’s most popular authors. The unorthodox Madonna is a painting hanging in Tokarczuk’s kitchen, in her house in Wroclaw, built in 1912 and inhabited over the past 100 years by Germans, Jews and Poles.
Tokarczuk has also signed the open letter. Her texts are often parables set in the border region where Poland, Germany and the Czech Republic meet. Wherever there are borders, there are stories — and they produce myths. “Unfortunately, the crisis in Ukraine is reviving a myth in Poland,” says Tokarczuk, “a myth that says we should serve as a wall for the West, to protect it from the wild East.”
This myth is as old as Poland. It pervades the works of national Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz, whose statue stands in Warsaw. In Mickiewicz’s poetic drama “Forefathers’ Eve,” for instance, written nearly 200 years ago at a time when the Poles had no state, Poland is portrayed as the Christ of Europe, which died for the sins of its neighbours. The Russian Czar is Satan and the Germans are the devil’s acolytes. This is the myth of Poland as the last uncorrupted bastion of freedom in Europe before the East begins. This myth legitimizes the fear.
Tokarczuk’s study contains an altar. On it is a Korean Buddha with drooping shoulders, the corners of its mouth turned down. The Hindu goddess Durga stands upright next to it, representing knowledge and action.
“The European sanctions against Putin are beginning to have an impact, yes,” she says. “But does this mean that Europe has voiced an unequivocal ‘no’ to Putin’s actions? That is not my impression.”
If Europe does not say no, who will? “I think that Donald Tusk will have an influence on the crisis,” she replies. Until last September, Tusk was the Polish prime minister, but he recently became the president of the powerful EU Council — and he has accused Putin of overstepping his power. “In their fear, the Poles are counting on Tusk — and on Europe.”
Tokarczuk presses her palms together, fingers pointing upward, as if she were praying.