1939: Two Septembers & Two Perspectives

niemieckie-zdjecie-lotnicze-z-wrzesnia-przedstawiajace-plonaca-warszawe.jpg, default, German aerial photo from September showing Warsaw burning in the Reich, 1939, photo: (Bundesarchiv / CC-BY-SA 3.0)., center, #000000

#interrupted country

Early in the morning of 1 September, Germany invaded Poland with a force of nearly 1.5 million. On 17 September, the Russian army attacked Poland with a force of about half a million. Poland deployed an army of about one million. German losses totalled about 50,000 killed or wounded, while Polish casualties amounted to 200,000 killed or wounded and almost 700,000 prisoners of war. Poland’s September ended on 6 October. The country was divided into two zones: one under German and the other under Russian occupation.

September 1939, a time when little was known. A world more ‘innocent’, before it learnt about the Katyn massacre; the modern death factory at Auschwitz; the carpet bombing of cities that devastated the civilian populace; Hiroshima and the use of atomic energy for annihilation. One can long for a world in which all that had not yet come to pass.

The recollections of September 1939 are presented as two perspectives, two different descriptions of the outbreak of the war, two zones, two distinct futures. Here, I refer to the recollections of two prominent Polish intellectuals and writers – Karol Irzykowski, a doyen of modernism, novelist and critic who was in Warsaw when the war broke out, and Aleksander Wat, poet, futurist, translator and editor, who lived through that time in Lviv. September 1939 marked the beginning of one of the two watershed Polish autumns of the war. The point being that the events of the autumn of 1939 determined the prospective events of the autumn of 1944. September 1939 was key to everything that happened afterwards. Eighty years on, we are aware of this, but were they? Writing just after the war in his remote, provincial spot in Poland’s Małopolska region, Kazimierz Wyka expressed the view that:

Every generation experiencing great upheavals has illusions and exaggerates their experiences. If one were to believe the witnesses entangled in the game and the risk, whether they are its subjects or mere objects, then every generation is ground-breaking. [...] This, however, is not the case. Watersheds and upheavals fade like old photographs.

Was he right? In absolute terms, he probably was, but in relation to today’s Poland – that autumn is still bearing its overripe and rotten fruit.

Karol Irzykowski

Thumbnail — Karol Irzykowski, photo: audiovis.nac.gov.pl/NAC

One cannot prepare for war, for its outbreak. It is not that the signs are not there, but despite the omens, or even the certainty that it will come, one gets bogged down, as it were, in reality. The peaceful reality that is about to end cloys with its daily grind, preventing adequate preparation for the great unknown. It wants to last, but can no more. This applies both to individuals and to entire states. Irzykowski criticises the Polish state harshly for being caught on the back foot, for being late, for being foolishly confident of its own superiority (‘We laughed at the Germans that they had cannons, because we had butter, but now we have neither cannons nor butter’.), of the easy victory that awaited. However, Irzykowski himself was also unprepared, and he knew he was not up to the great mental challenge of war:

I faced the war amidst belated preparations, without proper moral and philosophical focus, with unfinished notes. It dawned on us when we saw German and Polish aeroplanes on our horizon and clouds from anti-aircraft artillery fire. We watched this from our balcony and courtyard [...] we were no longer light-minded.

As fate would have it, Irzykowski and his loved ones left their flat and spent the period of the battle for Warsaw in the Sejm (parliamentary) building, which was reduced to smoking ruins as the days passed and German bombardment intensified. That fortnight or so is a record of hope surging and fading, of feelings of strength and moments of profound self-abasement, of savouring the well-deserved defeat of an unprepared state, and of acute physical fear for one’s own physical survival. It was also a time of rumours glorifying minor victories, exaggerating the scale of defeats and highlighting the wickedness and weakness of commanders. On 19 September, Irzykowski writes in Dziennik, his published diary:

This morning, I took a closer look at the damages and this time, I was impressed by them, and was at the same time mortified politically. The rotunda of the Sejm, a nest of the remnants of parliamentarism, has survived, the parliamentary chairs are intact, the tribune is in one piece too, and a parliamentary session could be called without delay. But I shuddered when I saw the hallway joining the old and the new Sejm buildings pierced through, so that the ceiling is nature’s sky above, and one can see stars here at night. Something of the infinite is blowing in.

The daily grind of petty efforts, fears and sacrifices resembles the ‘circling of ants over a trampled anthill’. It is interesting that the spirit of eternity – the absolute, the wind of history? – should be felt by someone as deeply rational as Irzykowski, who is too anti-Romantic to feel the spirit of history blowing from every street corner. However, these are not the only feelings. Above all, he feels ‘a purely physiological shock, more imminent than reflection; I myself experienced it when something fell very close to me, my nerves shuddered, and my thought trembled helplessly against this backdrop’. The trembling of the body is intertwined with geopolitical reflection: ‘In a word, defeat – a fourth partition of Poland, [who] is no longer one who can take on responsibility, but has become an object of diplomatic negotiations’. Irzykowski wonders what to do about this watershed historical event, the meaning of which was grasped neither by his contemporaries nor by himself.

‘War, change my heart!’ he exclaims, ‘Prepare me for the ultimate.’

The point is ‘not to be as unprepared for death as I was unprepared for war’. The defeat should be meaningful, whereas – strangely! – it is not; horror should dominate, but it is barely felt. People, when they can, go back to their daily business: ‘One doesn’t see the gloom, because everyone is in a hurry [...] I didn’t meet Jeremiah on the ruins of Jerusalem. Nothing has actually come of this, perhaps people are doing their weeping in their homes’. ‘Everything is going back to normal, and I can’t go back to normal’ because normality has been lost, lost forever, not only in terms of people but also cultural works and the architectural fabric of the city. Bombed-out Warsaw is no longer itself. It is estimated that about 12 percent of the buildings were destroyed in September 1939; ‘the whole city has been distorted, and within such a short time – one is walking among some sort of caricature’. Many historical sites, museum collections, archives and libraries were destroyed. Irzykowski also personally experienced this, which is why he cannot go back to normal – his home was bombed; his beloved library, destroyed:

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Ruins of the building of the Central Military Library after the fire in 1939, photo: National Library Polona

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All my beloved books, I am sorry for abandoning you and giving you up to destruction, while you gave me so much pleasure, even when a book was not read, the prospect of reading it lifted my spirit. The first time I entered these ruins, I saw petals as black as leaves flying on the wind.

Irzykowski perceived everything that happened in September as an earthquake, so strong that it was off the scale. Whereas Japan is located at the junction of continental crusts, which causes earthquakes, Poland is located at the junction of political crusts, at the point of their constant friction. Hence, political earthquakes continually shake and demolish Poland with incomprehensible force. ‘It seems to me that the aetiology of this case is beyond the Polish capacitas and beyond Poland’s capacity for responsibility in general,’ he concludes with bitterness.

Aleksander Wat

Years after the war, Aleksander Wat describes his pre-war experiences differently from Irzykowski. He remembers the sadness and tension of the years and months leading up to September 1939. He speaks of losing his sense of reality, as if the world had turned into a sham of itself. He writes:

The sadness of those years. […] a sense of personal disaster, one indissolubly bound to the general disaster. […] Never in my life have I had such intense premonitions as I had then. Premonitions of terrible things in store for me and for the country. […] that was the dominant motif in all my feelings, absolutely the dominant motif, a feeling that there was absolutely no way out.

In the first half of the year, political events unfolded even more rapidly (if that was at all possible):

The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. I don’t want to brag, but I was absolutely certain that Poland would be divided and that war would break out. […] as soon as the news of the pact arrived – I think it was August 23rd – I knew that Hitler and Stalin would be coming into Poland.

The 1st of September finds Wat and his family in Warsaw, but, unlike Irzykowski, Wat flees the capital and after a few weeks of wandering, ends up in Lviv. Panic grows in Lviv, more and more people are arrested. At first, Wat is unaware of this, but with time the detentions snowball. The encroachment of the Russians, the Soviet army, the imposition of the new Soviet rule, actions by the NKVD, all this turns those weeks in Lviv into a nightmare, which, incidentally, ends with Wat’s arrest and years in Soviet prisons.

I would say that those few weeks in Lviv were the most disgusting period of my life. I acted like a coward. I lied. I knew that they would arrest me, that Ola and Andrzej [wife and son] would go under. I was trembling in my boots. I pretended that, yes, I had regained my faith in communism.

Is it possible to explain one’s own fate against the backdrop of a universal fate? Wat says:

I had gotten myself involved in history. Unfortunately, one of the sad laws of my fate is to be an anachronism. Because, in fact, I played every role one was supposed to play, but my timing was always off. I was political when it was time to be a poet and a poet when it was time to be political. I was a communist when decent people were anticommunist, and anticommunist when intelligent people were going over to communism.

This is what he means by his Lviv experiences in the autumn of 1939.

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Nazis destroying border markers on the Polish-German border, 1939, photo: Wikimedia.org

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Both Irzykowski and Wat have a sense of the mechanistic character of history. They believe that history resembles an inhuman, powerful and destructive machine. At the beginning of the war, we already see a premonition of the entire mechanistic character of modern war and the modern Holocaust; the war machine overlaps with the Holocaust machine. They are parts of a single, huge and incomprehensible mechanism. Moreover, there is the acute sense of the horror of the encroaching unknown. The horror of Asia entering Lviv, the feeling that the whole country is opening up into the infinity of the Russian territory, a boundless map in which the human being, the individual, becomes nobody and nothing, is lost, disappears, usually without a trace. ‘It's all shabby, Asia, Asia stripped, illiterate’.

A few weeks into the war, and people gain first-hand experience of the Russian methods of dealing with the conquered territory. It is a mixture of concealed cruelty and mock gentility. The two stories, mentioned by Wat almost in the same breath, do a good job of illustrating what is at stake in this bizarre, head-scratching combination of Russian slyness, cruelty and their peculiar theatricality.

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German and Soviet soldiers in Lviv, September 1939, photo: Yad Vashem Photo Archive, archival signature 5323

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At a meeting organised by the Soviets for local writers from Lviv, an apparatchik took the floor and said, ‘You don’t trust us, I know that, and I don’t require any trust from you in advance. Have a good look at us. We have time; take a year or two. If you like it, wonderful; if not, tough’. If temptation exists, or if one would like to imagine being tempted by the devil, this is it. However, not everyone knew at the time that they were being tempted and that pure evil was speaking to them in the guise of the inconspicuous Ukrainian social realist Oleksandr Korneichuk. This very evil sent to Lviv one of its most ardent adherents, an activist, a devoted, even haunted communist, Wanda Wasilewska, a seasoned militant. So, on the one hand, the Soviets sent Wasilewska to Lviv to have her impose a new rule on the city; on the other, they murdered her beloved husband, an innocent man. They killed him just like that. Let me repeat – they executed the husband of one of their most devoted activists and adherents. Why? ‘This is an interesting story,’ Wat explains,

because Bogatko’s death was real first-rate Stalinist training – so that she would have no illusions. Point de rêveries. Immediately. A one-time shock. Zen. A whack on the head and your entire consciousness is restructured. Then comes the reforging of the soul.

The new, Soviet soul replaces the former soul; the old self is dead, the new self is born.

Thus ends the autumn of 1939. The long winter begins, which – oh, the paradox of history, able to mix seasons together and even extend some of them at a whim – will only show signs of coming to an end as late as in 1944, and that too in autumn. That is, however, an entirely different story. After this five-year-long winter, unfolded in two different zones – the German and the Soviet, which were about to clash in a murderous fight – the world would never be the same again.

Translated from Polish by Natalia Mamul, August 2022

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