From Napoleon to the Warsaw Uprising: Essential Polish Anti-War Books

stanislaw_osostowicz_demonstracja_antyfaszystowska_mnw.jpg, default, 'Anti-fascist Demonstration' by Stanisław Osostowicz, 1932–1933, displayed at the Never Again exhibition in 2019 at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, From Napoleon to the Warsaw Uprising: Essential Polish Anti-War Books

#language & literature

War seemed to be an important, but closed chapter in our part of Europe, but it is returning today as a still-current and frightening possibility. Let us take a look at what war meant for those Polish writers who lived through it. How did they respond to it and what do their works tell us about it?

War and war-related activities affected Poland and our part of the continent more profoundly than any part of the world in modern history. From the Napoleonic Wars and the national revolutions that followed during the 19th century to smaller, but key existential conflicts, war was the most important factor influencing human life in the ‘Bloodlands’ (as historian Timothy Snyder dubbed our Eastern European region) in the 20th century.

What do Poland’s greatest works of literature dedicated to the subject tell us about these incessant wars? How did writers deal with the experience they went through which is often considered indescribable? What does Polish literature tell us about war? And must works on the subject of war be by nature anti-war writings?

‘Topsy Turvy Talk’ by Aleksander Fredro, 1877 (translated by Harold B. Segel, 2010)

Napoleonic Wars

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The Battle of Berezyna in a damaged painting by Julian Fałat, photo: Wikimedia

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The Napoleonic Wars, and particularly Napoleon’s major campaign against Russia in 1812, were in many respects the first modern total wars – with gigantic armies, covering vast territories and often involving the most ruthless methods of warfare. For Poles, this same period was a time of great hope for regaining independence – then followed by an overwhelming sense of failure and defeatism that persisted for years.

One of the most outstanding literary testimonies of that and other campaigns by Napoleon remains Aleksander Fredro’s Topsy Turvy Talk (written in 1842-1844, serialised in the late 1870s, and published in full in 1880). Fredro enlisted in the army in 1809 as a 16-year-old and completed his tour of duty five years later when the Tsar abdicated. He served as an officer in some of the greatest battles of the Napoleonic era: the battles of Mozhaisk, Smolensk and Berezyna (1812), as well as Dresden (1813) and the Battle of Nations outside Leipzig (1814).

Written with exceptional flair, crackling with humour and real stylistic fireworks, full of digressions (in the spirit of Laurence Sterne) and anecdotes, Fredro’s autobiography is one of the most powerful anti-war statements you can read. Many times, as if they were asides, Fredro drops into his writings remarkable images of war that have little in common with heroic scenes of cavalry charges. His descriptions instead depict the tremendous destruction and savagery that accompany the prosecution of war, showing people in the extreme conditions created when civilised principles cease to hold sway and people stop behaving ‘like human beings’. These are often moments when one’s faith in mankind is put to the ultimate test:

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I saw how determinedly access to the fire was blocked so that a half-frozen man was denied the ability to warm himself for a moment… that was self-evident… fire was life there… no one can share life, but the poor guy was prevented from reaching a bit of flame which might let him take a bit of warmth on the tip of a straw back to his den. He wasn’t the only person on that illuminated field of snow that fixed his eyesight on a warmth which he didn’t dare approach and, come the morning, he was left a frozen heap. I saw wounded men thrown onto the road, because someone healthier and stronger coveted his horse and wagon. I saw POWs shot if they weakened and couldn’t walk any further.

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Extract from ‘Topsy Turvy Talk’ by Aleksander Fredro

That’s how Fredro described the retreat from Moscow when the traditional contradictions of warfare were exacerbated by unceasing cold and constant hunger. On another occasion, Fredro’s gaze also takes in the animals that suffered whilst human beings played their awful games:

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After a few days of the campaign, it was a horror to look under the saddles. The stench from the festering wounds caused by unrelenting pressure wafted along the marching column. One can only wonder how an animal could withstand – and for such a long time – such suffering.

As Tomasz Łubieński wrote, young Fredro collided with the primal force of history and, like an entire generation of young Napoleonics , he never again recovered fully from the shock (though he then became a comedy writer). We have him to thank for descriptions of the horse odours and battle sounds that were never captured on the painted canvasses of the era.

‘Gloria Victis’ by Eliza Orzeszkowa, 1910

The January Uprising

A dark, atmospheric black-and-white drawing by Artur Grottger titled "The Forest" (Puszcza). A spectral, hooded figure representing Death or a spirit looms over a massive, gnarled tree trunk in a dense, ancient forest. The figure holds a long scythe, its ghostly drapery blending into the shadows of the woods. In the lower left, a small lynx or wildcat crouches near the water's edge of a narrow stream that reflects a faint light. The overall mood is eerie and symbolic, with high contrast between the deep black shadows and the pale, light-drenched vertical tree trunks in the background. The top of the image is finished in an arched, semi-circular shape. — 'The Forest' (Puszcza) by Artur Grottger from the "Lithuania" series, photo: public domain

For many years, the failure of the January Uprising (following the Kościuszko and November Uprisings) marked the outer limits of Poland’s capabilities in the realm of armed aspirations for independence – at the same time, it embodied an unprocessed trauma that could not find its complete expression in Polish literature for a long time thanks to censorship. One had to wait until the 1905 revolution which brought a momentary respite. It was then – over a few months – that Eliza Orzeszkowa’s tales were composed and eventually compiled in her collection Gloria Victis.

In the book, Orzeszkowa returns after almost half a century to the experiences of her youth. In 1863, she was 22 years old and found herself on the territory of today’s Belarus, in immediate proximity to much of the insurgent action and events. She undoubtedly must have heard many anecdotes since they make up the bulk – including some first-hand experience – of Gloria Victis.

In the titular and best-known story from the collection, Orzeszkowa tells one of her characteristic tales from that odd partisan war. The war consisted of over 1,200 battles and skirmishes, with about 100,000 volunteers taking part – 20,000 of them ended up dead, a thousand of them hanged or executed by court martial.

Many of these battles took place deep in the countryside, far from human settlements in silent forests. It was in these conditions – in the fields and amidst dense forests – that a final desperate struggle, doomed to failure from the start, was fought by surrounded partisans. Among the stories of Gloria Victis, one follows the fates of three protagonists where one is the uprising’s leader Romuald Traugutt and the others are a brother and sister (the latter recognisably Orzeszkowa’s alter ego).

What is most interesting and novel in those stories is how she makes nature itself into a witness and narrator of those events. Their accursed memory is already manifest in the landscape, in the barely visible graves and crosses in the woods. We learn the history of the insurrectionists from tales told by the trees, which have somehow absorbed the suffering and tragedy of the fallen. As a result, we have a tale with traces of an ‘eco-critical’ awareness – in which the author tries to shatter the boundary between human experience and nature, making nature an equally sentient element and object of history.

Before moving on, another important and exceptionally compelling literary testament to the January Uprising worth mentioning is the tale Ravens and Crows Will Peck Us to Pieces by Stefan Żeromski (1895). This harrowing account tells of a lone insurrectionist who dies while transporting weapons, only to have his body then stripped of its clothing by a local peasant – an image overpowering in its cruelty and lack of pretence, leaving no hope whatsoever. Żeromski also dedicated other works to the uprising, including his well-known novel Forest Echoes whose sequel is the story The Faithful River.

‘The Salt of the Earth’ by Józef Wittlin, 1935 (translated by Patrick Corness, 2018)

World War I

wittlin jozef portret.jpg — Józef Wittlin, fot: Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe

Józef Wittlin began writing The Salt of the Earth in 1925, when, as he would recall years later, ‘many people in Europe still wanted to believe that war on a global scale like the one that had passed belonged to the past and would never be repeated again’. He wrote it over ten years, so, when the story appeared in 1935, the coming war could already be sensed in the air – a war even more destructive and irrational, one that could effectively ‘normalise in our sensitivity everything that, in 1925, had seemed to us absurd, immoral and thus inhuman’.

The Salt of the Earth opens with a fantastical prologue in which Wittlin shows how a declaration of war by Austria against Serbia might have looked in 1914. The decision was reached in elaborately gilded ministerial chambers by officials with wide sideburns and polished sabres, based on ruthless calculations and without any trace of consciousness of the consequences for the average citizen of the empire and also for millions of others throughout the world who would be affected by the war.

The rest of the story describes the war from the perspective of an average citizen of the empire drafted into the army, into a struggle for a cause that he doesn’t understand, while being incited to foster hatred for an enemy (Russians, Serbs, Italians, Romanians) that he just doesn’t feel. The main character Piotr Niewiadomski, the simple son of a Polish father and Hutsul mother, is a porter at a provincial Galician railway station before being drafted overnight into the army. An average man becomes a soldier and an unwilling witness to a situation in which the technologised and bureaucratised world turns him into cannon fodder.

The Salt of the Earth is also an exceptionally colourful panorama of the various characters and ethnic types that populated the Austro-Hungarian Empire moments before its collapse, a kind of snapshot taken in the final moments of that extraordinary multicultural state which, for a long time, did not exhibit any criminal or expansionist tendencies and moreover lived within a myth of harmonious coexistence of nations and cultures.

Despite the initial success of The Salt of the Earth (including many translations and the author being named as a candidate for the Nobel Prize), it was not reprinted in the communist Polish People’s Republic until 1979 (the author was then living in the USA). Today, the book, it seems, belongs unquestionably to the world’s canon of pacifist literature on an equal footing with other outstanding World War I stories such as All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque or The Good Soldier Švejk by Jaroslav Hašek.

‘W Polu’ (In the Field) by Stanisław Rembek, 1937

The Polish-Bolshevik War

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Polish soldiers in a trench during the Polish-Bolshevik War, 1919-1920, photo: NAC

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As is well known, the regaining of Poland’s independence in November 1918 did not bring an end to military activity on Poland’s borders. There soon came a general test of the new Polish state in the form of the Polish-Bolshevik War, a test that was passed through the great determination and dedication of its citizens (something Poles don’t always remember, having in mind only the most dramatic moments, such as the 1920 Battle of Warsaw – hopefully not the version portrayed in Jerzy Kossak’s film though). In any case, the war went on for a long time (February 1919 to October 1920), was full of various dramatic turns of events, and came at the cost of great effort and many lives.

One of the war’s most difficult moments became the theme of Stanisław Rembek’s tale In the Field. Rembek (1901–1985) was a cannoneer of the Tenth Kaniów Light Artillery Brigade and a participant in the battles of Dźwina, Zamość and Warsaw – he knew the subject first hand. The action of his book takes place entirely in the trenches and on the battlefield, on the northern front (on the territory of today’s Lithuania and Belarus) at the moment when General Tukhachevsky launched the Bolshevik offensive. The move resulted in the retreat of the Polish Army and the utter destruction of the Seventh Company, whose fate is portrayed in detail by Rembek.

The author here combines a socio-psychological tale – its leading motif being the mysterious death of Corporal Górny and its terrible effect on his colleagues’ morale and psychological welfare – and a narrative account of the battle. Thanks to this latter element, we know exactly what life in the trenches (hunger, filth and bone-chilling cold) and a murderous struggle with bayonets and grenades wallowing in the mud looked like. We get to know the Polish army as if from the inside, which is constituted to an overwhelming degree – as it turns out – of citizens from peasant backgrounds. And it is to their tremendous sacrifice in defending their land – Rembek seems to say – that Poland owes its final victory in that war.

The author provides verbal portraits of the soldiers, imitating their dialects and reflecting the class resentments smouldering in the ranks. There are military dialogues and jokes too (‘What doesn’t eat, doesn’t drink, but walks and fights? A Polish soldier’.) as well as interesting historical (and humorous) tidbits: Polish soldiers singing Bolshevik songs at the front, and a Bolshevik POW defending himself by saying ‘Ya nikagda, pany, vas nie strielal’ (I never, sirs, ever shot at you!).

Other Polish-Bolshevik War stories can be found in Rembek’s debut book Nagan (1928) and Marek Świda’s Generation (1925) by Andrzej Strug (AKA Tadeusz Gałecki). But in seeking out the most powerful images of the Polish-Bolshevik War, one must look to Israel Rabon’s ‘The Street’ (Di gas / די גאס). This modernist Yiddish novel takes place over several days in Łódź in the early 1920s. It contains unbelievable, hallucinatory scenes (Did they actually happen? Or are they only the protagonist’s nightmares?) that play out in an intensely macabre and cruel context, but portrayed with extraordinary symbolism.

‘Black Torrent’ by Leopold Buczkowski, 1954 (translated by David Welsh, 1970)

World War II

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Leopold Buczkowski, 1972, photo: Aleksander Jarosiński / Forum

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Leopold Buczkowski, 1972, fot. Aleksander Jarosiński / Forum

Published nearly ten years after the war, Leopold Buczkowski’s Black Torrent is surely one of the most important portrayals of the war and Holocaust in Polish literature. But that wasn’t clear from the outset – the decoding of its meanings and even its complicated story presented certain problems and took researchers (and readers) some time to penetrate.

In Black Torrent, Buczkowski relates events in Podolia that he knew first hand (two of his brothers perished there), focusing on the fate of a few members of the military self-defence units (Poles, Ukrainians and Jews) as they stumble through forests at night and try to survive amidst the general disorientation and traditional conflagrations of war. And yet, nothing is entirely clear: it’s unclear who is friend and who is foe, nor who (or what) is narrating. The entire chaotic, choppy narrative, composed of different episodes that are not necessarily connected, reminds one – as critics have noted – of the sensation of a dream or a fevered nocturnal vision.

Portraits of Leopold Buczkowski – Image Gallery

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In this extreme psychological realism, one can see people (the narrator) at the limits of their ability to comprehend, as well as a reflection of the destructive nature of war, shattering all the integrity and solidity of human experience. What remains is the element of storytelling, which continues to try save itself and its claim of making sense of things. But it’s hard to avoid the impression that war as a destructive force has triumphed here at every level. Its further destructive influence is seen in Buczkowski’s later works, where are ever more amorphic, non-linear and resistant to interpretation.

The many and varied experiences of World War II and its portrayal in Polish literature are, of course, a subject for a separate study. But it is worth at least quickly listing here the most representative works of Polish fiction covering various aspects of World War II:

Tadeusz Konwicki writes about the partisan war in the Vilnius region in his book Rojsty (The Marshes)
Critical views of the partisan struggle can be found in J.J. Szczepański’s Buty I Inne Opowiadania (Boots and Other Tales)
Iconoclastic views of the partisan struggle appear in Tadeusz Różewicz’s drama Do Piachu (To Dust)
For village life under occupation, especially in terms of Polish-Jewish relations, there’s Tadeusz Nowak’s A Jak Królem, a Jak Katem Będziesz (Will You Be a King or an Executioner?)
The wanderings and wartime odyssey of Anders’ Army in the Middle East are centre stage in Marian Czuchnowski’s poetic tale Tyfus, Teraz Słowiki (Typhus, Now Nightingales)
Life in Soviet prison camps is shown by Gustaw Herling-Grudziński in Another World (1951)
Tadeusz Borowski wrote about life under occupation and in concentration camps in his memoirs
The issue of collaboration is addressed by the previously-mentioned Stanisław Rembek in Wyrok na Franciszka Kłosa (Franciszek Kłos’ Sentence)
Lastly, issues of LGBTQIA+ identity and the Holocaust are raised by Marian Pankowski in his mini-novel Rudolf

‘A Memoir of the Warsaw Uprising’ by Miron Białoszewski, 1970 (translated by Medeline G. Levine, 2015)

The Warsaw Uprising (World War II)

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Evacuation of civilians in Wola, Germans herding people along Wolska Street from St. Adalbert’s Church to Warsaw West train station, in the background on the right is part of the house at 83 Wolska Street, photographer unknown, photo: Warsaw Uprising Museum

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But how does war really look to regular people in a big city which, until recently, had been a place for a reasonably normal life? How does life look in a state of constant threat? How does war touch and affect all of the city’s residents – whether they’re soldiers or not? In Polish literature, these questions are best answered by Miron Białoszewski in his A Memoir of the Warsaw Uprising.

When the it first appeared in 1970, it provoked a major scandal. Białoszewski showed the uprising from the perspective of a civilian non-combatant. In his account, there is none of the pathos, heroic struggle or the atmosphere of wartime adventure that had hitherto been a compulsory element of the martyrological narrative. The world portrayed by Białoszewski is a world of cellars, gateways, courtyards, provisional kitchens and group shelters filled with former residents that were now displaced persons in their own city. ‘I wanted everyone to know that not everybody fought; I wanted to write about the universality of the uprising,’ said the author when explaining the goal of his book.

The phenomenon and novelty of the memoir in the context of Polish culture was best expressed by famed literary critic Maria Janion. According to her, Białoszewski had completely abandoned the ‘sacredness’ of the war and radically shifted the focus to its normality ‘rationalising it – even if only by accident!’:

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In describing the death of the city, Białoszewski achieves the heights of a masterwork. […] He doesn’t repeat anything for anyone – in reaching to the core of the wartime reality, phenomenologically delving into the essence of things, he finds for the war its own sovereign form, at once both personal and societal.

This phenomenological perspective and the way he strips the narrative of all reflection after the fact results in Białoszewski’s story being free of any moralising or value assessment. In a way, the book becomes the ultimate, universal testament to the devastating consequences of war for ordinary people.

For more Warsaw Uprising reading, the experience of the civilian population was also the theme of the poems in Anna Świrszczyńska’s collection Building the Barricade in 1974.

_{Originally written in Polish, March 2022, translated by Yale Reisner, May 2022}

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