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Waiting to be Heard: The Polish Christian Experience Under Nazi and Stalinist Oppression 1939-1955

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I first met Dr. Bogusia Wojciechowska over the internet about five years ago. Someone sent me a note about her and her work, and I got in touch with her as soon as I read it.

She was working on an extensive research project to document the lives of Poles who were forced to leave Poland during World War II. This was a project that touched me directly. For years, I've try to find books that would tell me more about what happened to people like my parents who had been rounded up by the Germans and taken to the slave labor and concentration camps in Germany. What I found surprised me. Beyond Richard C. Lukas's excellent Forgotten Holocaust there weren't many such books, and his book in fact didn't tell me what I wanted to know about the lives of the Poles who were taken to German and those -- like my Uncle Jan -- who were taken to Siberia.

It seemed that what my mom once said was true. They don't make books about people like us.

Dr. Wojciechowska's project has attempted to change that. Over the years, as a historian, she devoted herself to chronicling the experiences of those who were forced to leave Poland. Her website -- The Polish Diaspora -- has been an essential source of information about those experiences. Now, she has edited a book that brings together much of her research about the lives of those who were taken from Poland during the war.

If my mom were to see the book Waiting to Be Heard, she would probably say, "At last, here's a start."

John Guzlowski, Author of Lightning and Ashes

Haunting personal accounts of events the reader will not easily forget. This book is aptly named - I for one wish to tell all those interviewed that I heard them.

This is a very important work. What happened to Poland during the 20th century was so terrible and so traumatic that the world just wants to forget about it and move forward. But the most amazing thing is that although Poland was ruthlessly decimated in WWI, in WWII, and then dominated by the Soviets until 1990, the Polish nation is now alive and thriving again.

Over 200 years ago, Polish officers and men came to America to help fight for our independence and serve the cause of freedom. Now, Polish officers and men and women stand with us in Afghanistan like they have in Iraq and once again, in the tradition of Pulaski and Kosciuszko, proven with their courage and honor and blood that Poland is one of our biggest supporters and defenders of freedom. Let us do everything we can to help Poland continue its recovery from the 20th century nightmare and to help it take its long delayed place among the most prosperous of Nations. This would be the only thing that would help re-assure those who have been "waiting to be heard" that all they went through and all that they lost will never be forgotten.

This extensive collection of written testimonies demonstrates the scale of Polish suffering at the hands of the German and Soviet powers during WWII. Many of the testimonies include Poland's experience during the 1939 German-Soviet invasion of Poland. A very large share of the testimonies focus on the deportation of Poles into the interior of the USSR, and the horrible slow-death conditions that prevailed there. The testimonies also call attention to the difficulties of postwar survivors, attempting to carve out a new life in the western nations that had betrayed Poland to Stalin.

Supplemental background war-related information is included in each chapter. For instance, the Nazi genocide of Poles was not limited to mass murder of millions of gentile Poles, especially the intelligentsia. Thus, for example, the deportation of millions of Poles into the interior of the Reich was not solely for forced labor. It was a genocidal act that removed a large fraction of Poles of prime childbearing age from the Polish population. The net deliberately-induced reduction of the Polish birth rate was then further accentuated: "Infants born to Polish women deported to Germany as farm and factory laborers were usually taken from their families and subjected to Germanization. If unions between forced laborers resulted in a pregnancy, and a `racially valuable' child might not result, the mother was compelled to have an abortion." (p. 93). Also, Danuta Banaszek Szlachetko, a POW following the Soviet-betrayed Warsaw Uprising, reports being forced by the German captives, along with other Polish women, to take drugs that prevented menstruation (in some cases, for a lifetime). (p. 109).

Jewish-Soviet collaboration at Poland's expense (the Zydokomuna) has long been a wound in Polish-Jewish relations. A number of eyewitnesses identify local Jews as active collaborators in the Soviet 1939-1941 arrests of Poles for deportation into Siberia. These eyewitnesses include Adam Szymel (p. 41), Emilia Kot Chojnacka (p. 133), and Stanislaw Milewski (pp. 164-165).

Not surprisingly, the strongly Judeocentric definition of, and over-attention to, the Holocaust, has caused the genocides of Poles to be largely forgotten in the west. In fact, far too many westerners do not have a clue on this subject. Stanislaw Sagan comments: "My North American friends are constantly surprised when they learn that, not being a Jew, I was imprisoned in German Concentration Camps. One of my Canadian friends, heaving learned that I had been in a German Concentration Camp and knowing me as a Christian, thought that I must have been one of the guards there." (p. 96).

The non-Jewish victims of the Nazis have not merely been ignored; they have been deliberately marginalized. In fact, Bozena Urbanowicz Gilbride, a Polish WWII victim of the Germans and prominent Holocaust educator, resigned in 2003 from NPAJAC (National Polish-American-Jewish-American Council), for the following reason: "I can no longer serve as a member of an organization that excludes five million people as victims of the Holocaust." (p. 101). She adds: "Teaching the Holocaust is mandated in many schools, but it has become the teaching of the six million Jews and `others', and only rarely do students learn about the five million `others'...Some public schools are not willing to speak about the five million `others', as if it would be disloyal to the six million Jewish victims." (p. 5).

Waiting To Be Heard (The Polish Christian Experience Under Nazi and Stalinist Oppression 1939-1955)
This is the kind of book that your parents, if they survived the Second World War, would have wanted written about their experiences. At best then, it is a book that you should buy for them so that they can share in the recollections of the seventy-odd contributors. But be warned; it is a cathartic experience. My parents survived the War but, really, I was never captivated by what they had to say because they spoke about it when I was too young to fully understand. And, then, they stopped talking about it. Now that I'm older, I am ready to listen and I am ready to understand; my life experience has taught me that theirs was an incredibly frustrating post-War existence. In the truest sense they, too, were Waiting To Be Heard. Bogusia Wojciechowska has broken down and spread these recollections chronologically over 400 pages that read like an oral history, from the week preceding the outbreak of war on September 1st 1939, to the aftermath of the death of Stalin in 1953. This is a riveting read and, fortunately, it is presented in page-long chunks that allow one put the book down, to draw breath, and to begin to get a sense of the sheer magnitude of the oppression that Poles suffered both during and after the War. So, while I knew something about their plight, I never really took the time to think it through. This book made me cry, literally; it was not just for the individual acts of heroism, or for the pain of individual losses, but for what comes across as the considerable and unfathomable effects on a nation by two madmen who conspired together and against one another and whose disregard of anything approaching decency or protocol in the pursuit of their objectives, was played out using a society that was simply destroyed. And then, to add absolute insult to injury, the Allies who had joined in the fight to repel the aggressors, closed their ears to the fears and anxieties of those who had fought alongside them in all European theaters of war and denied them a safe return home. I was left with the question: what price political expediency. I was shocked and I wept; I finally came to understand what my parents had to endure and how theirs was a noble and dignified struggle. This book is scholarly; it is cross-referenced, annotated, foot-noted to the extreme, and filled with photographs from private collections. The generation that followed, the children of these survivors, grew to adulthood and wrote sensitive and loving poetry which appears frequently within its pages. While the peoples, lands, and industries of Poland are now free of the Communist yoke, the death of countless millions who constituted one third of the Polish population, and the loss of a homeland for those who were no more than pawns and who survived physical and emotional hardship and deprivation, these are all realities that have been submerged by history's tendency to account selectively. Finally, then, this is an opportunity for them to be heard. It's been a long wait.

Waiting To Be Heard is a compilation of thoughts that provide insight into the survivors of Nazi and Stalinist oppression. Survivors in this book include, not only those who lived through the brutality of the World War II years, but also their progeny and the ripple effect of those years on those children. The editor of these voices includes narratives and recollections about the war years as well as the post war years.

Although this is supposed to be a review, as opposed to a political statement, I will allow myself one observation, and that is that the entire World War II experience of Poland and Polish people have been ignored by the West, especially the U.S. I suspect that it is because the U.S. has much to be ashamed of with respect to Poland. Ignoring the Polish experience effectively negates that experience. It also cancels out any complicity that the U.S. might have had in selling Poland to Uncle Joe. It simply does not exist because it has been relegated to null. Poles must find the voice that they have allowed others to take away from them for far too long.

But I digress into personal musings.

I think that the book is a laudable attempt at shedding light on a phenomenon that has been ignored. The stories encompass a wide variety of experiences, from those of slave laborers under the Nazis to people, who like my father's family, were forcibly taken to Siberia or the Soviet steppes from the Eastern Borderlands in 1939. It includes stories of people who left the USSR for Iran, Iraq, Africa after Sikorski negotiated the agreement for their release, and it deals with the extended diaspora to Italy, Mexico, South America, Australia, and the U.S.

Of particular relevance to my own experience as a displaced person were the recollections of the people of my age who had the same slanderous terms directed at them as I did in the U.S. It came as no comfort to read about the universality of the experiences, irrespective of country.

There are poems scattered throughout the book. While I am not a fan of emoting on paper, there is no question that the poems underscore the raw emotions that they are meant to illustrate. For those who like that kind of convention, they will add to their reading experience.

The book is well organized and the editor preserves the unique voices of her participants in this project while editing for comprehension. Having done a good bit of qualitative research in my academic career, I know how difficult this can be, and she did this admirably. I thank Dr. Wojciechowska for providing this interesting platform for the, unheard, and ignored.

I have no real substantive criticisms of this book from a literary point of view, but since this is supposed to be a review and not an uncritical endorsement, I will speak to an issue that I did not like and that is calling these Christian experiences. As opposed to a non-Christian? As opposed to the Jewish narrative? I really think that Gentile might have been a better word if a word was needed to distinguish these experiences from the Jewish experiences of WW II. Putting the word Christian in there assumes that all of these Poles were Christian. Perhaps many, if not most were Catholic, but I suspect there were some secularists as well and even some atheists. I think that introducing the word Christian may narrow the audience (Gentile might have as well). I think "Polish experience" would have been just fine without the introduction of a religious category.