Iron Curtain (7 page)

In the months following the war’s end a more organized wave of
looting swept the former territories of Germany, in
Silesia and
East Prussia, which had now become the property of Poland. Groups of looters in cars, trucks, and other vehicles trawled half-empty cities looking for furniture, clothing, machinery, and other valuables. “Specialist” looters sought espresso machines and cooking equipment in Wrocław and
Gdańsk on behalf of Warsaw restaurants and cafés. “At the beginning, the looters weren’t knowledgeable about rare books,” remembered one memoirist, “but experts in that field soon appeared.” Former Jewish properties around the country were robbed as well, as were Jewish burial grounds, where peasants hoped to find “buried treasure” or gold teeth. But most of the looters were utterly indiscriminate in their targets, attacking the property of Gentiles and Jews alike. Following the Warsaw Uprising, looting broke out in the smashed, broken Polish capital as everyone—“neighbors, passersby, soldiers”—plundered half-destroyed apartment blocks and empty shops in the wake of the tragic last stand of the Polish resistance. The fields around
Treblinka were dug up by treasure hunters in 1946, but in September of that same year bystanders also fell upon the casualties of a train crash near Łódź, not in order to help them but to search for valuables.
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Though the looting fever eventually subsided in Poland and elsewhere, it may well have helped build tolerance for the corruption and theft of public property that were so common later on. Violence had also become normal and remained so for many years. Events which would have caused widespread outrage a few months earlier ceased to bother anyone at all. More
than seventy years later, one Hungarian told me he still clearly remembered a terrible scene on a Budapest street: the sudden arrest of a man, out of the blue, from the side of his two small children. “The father was pulling the children on a little cart in the street, the Soviet soldiers did not care, they took the father and left the children in the middle of the street.” None of the pedestrians on the street even treated this event as strange.
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When more
violence followed the official cessation of hostilities—the brutal expulsion of Germans and others, attacks on Jews returning home, arrests of men and women who had fought against Hitler, the continued partisan warfare in Poland and the Baltic States—no one found those to be strange either.

Not all of the violence was ethnic or political. “No activity in the village ends without a fight,” one rural Polish teacher remembered.
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Weapons were still available, murder rates were high. In many parts of Eastern Europe armed gangs roamed the countryside, sometimes calling themselves resistance fighters even when they had no connection to any organized structures of resistance, living by thieving and murder. Gangs of disoriented former soldiers operated in all of the cities of Eastern Europe and criminal violence bled into political violence, so much so that public records do not always make clear which was which. In two weeks in the late summer of 1945, police in a single Polish county recorded 20 murders, 86 robberies, 1,084 cases of breaking and entering, 440 “political crimes” (not defined) as well as 125 cases of “resistance to authority,” 29 “other” crimes against authority, 92 arsons, and 45 sex crimes. “People’s main problem is security,” the police report explained, “it would be better if there was quiet here, and not attacks and thefts.”
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Institutional collapse accompanied the moral collapse. Poland’s political and social institutions had ceased to function in 1939. Hungary’s stopped working in 1944, Germany’s in 1945. This catastrophe left people profoundly cynical about the societies in which they had grown up and the values into which they had been educated, and no wonder: those societies had been weak, and those values had been so easily overturned. The experience of national defeat—whether through Nazi invasion and occupation in 1939, through Allied invasion and occupation in 1945, or both—was extraordinarily difficult for those who lived through it.

Since then, many have tried to describe what it feels like to endure the disintegration of one’s entire civilization, to watch the buildings and landscapes of one’s childhood collapse, to understand that the moral world of
one’s parents and teachers no longer exists and that one’s respected national leaders have failed. Yet it is still not easy to understand for those who have not experienced it. Words like “vacuum” and “emptiness” when used about a national catastrophe such as an alien occupation are simply insufficient: they cannot convey the anger people felt at their prewar and wartime leaders, their failed political systems, their own “naïve” patriotism, and the wishful thinking of their parents and teachers. Widespread destruction—the loss of homes, families, schools—condemned millions of people to a kind of radical loneliness. Different parts of Eastern Europe experienced this collapse at different times and the experience was not everywhere identical. But whenever and however it came, national failure had profound effects, especially on young people, many of whom simply concluded that everything they had once thought true was false. Besides, the war had left them without a social network and without a context. Many really did resemble
Hannah Arendt’s “totalitarian personality,” the “completely isolated human being who, without any other social ties to family, friends, comrades, or even mere acquaintances, derives his sense of having a place in the world only from his belonging to a movement, his membership in the party.”
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Certainly that was what happened to
Tadeusz Konwicki, a Polish novelist who spent the war as a partisan. Brought up in a patriotic family near Vilnius, in what was then eastern Poland, Konwicki eagerly joined the armed wing of the Polish resistance, the Home Army, during the war. First he fought the Nazis. Then, for a time, his unit fought the Red Army. At some point their struggle began to deteriorate into armed robberies and gratuitous violence, and he found himself wondering why he was still fighting. Eventually he left the forests and moved to Poland, a state whose new borders no longer included his family home. Upon arrival, he realized that he had nothing. At the age of nineteen, he was in possession of a coat, a small backpack, and a handful of fake documents. He had no family, no friends, and no higher education. This experience was quite common.
Lucjan Grabowski, a young Home Army partisan fighting near
Białystok, turned in his weapons at about the same time, and then realized he owned nothing as well: “I didn’t have a suit, those from before the war were too small … my wallet was empty, I had a single dollar bill which I got from someone and a few thousand zlotys which my father had borrowed from our neighbor. And that was all I had to show for my four years fighting against the occupiers.”
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Konwicki had also lost his faith in much of what he had believed to be
true in the past. “During the war,” he told me, “I saw so much slaughter. I saw a whole world of ideas, humanism, morality collapse. I was alone in this ruined country. What should I do? Which way should I go?”
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Konwicki drifted for many months, considered escaping to the West, tried to rediscover his “proletarian” roots by working as a laborer. Eventually he fell, almost accidentally, into the communist literary world and into the communist party—something he would never have considered possible before 1939. For a very brief time, he even became a “Stalinist” writer, adopting the style and mannerisms dicated by the party.

His was a dramatic fate, but not an unusual one. The Polish sociologist
Hanna Świda-Ziemba has also tried to reconstruct the prewar morality of her generation—people born in the late 1920s and early 1930s—and has painted a very similar picture. Her generation grew up with a profound faith in the Polish state, a conviction in its special destiny. The very concept of “Poland,” she writes, was particularly important to her generation because the modern Polish state had only come into existence in 1918, and theirs was the first group of schoolchildren to be educated within it. They learned to objectify the nation, to aspire to “serve” it, to relate to it using other categories, such as faith and betrayal. When the nation collapsed, they had nothing left.
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Many focused their disappointment on the prewar politicians, on the authoritarian Right, and on the generals who had so catastrophically failed to prepare Poland for war. Another Polish writer,
Tadeusz Borowski, satirized the saccharine patriotism of the prewar politicians: “Your fatherland: a peaceful corner and a log burning obediently in the fire. My fatherland: a burned house and an NKVD summons.”
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For young Nazis, the experience of failure was even more apocalyptic, since they had been taught not just patriotism but a belief in German physical and mental superiority.
Hans Modrow—later a leading East German communist—was about the same age as Konwicki in 1946, and equally disoriented. A loyal member of the
Hitler Youth, he had joined the Volkssturm, the “people’s militia” that put up the final resistance to the Red Army in the last days of the war. At the time he was filled with intense hatred of the Bolsheviks, whom he thought of as subhumans, physically and morally inferior to Germans. But he was captured by the Red Army in May 1945 and immediately experienced a moment of profound disillusion. He and another group of German prisoners of war were put on a truck and transported to a farm to work:

A few days later, he was appointed driver to a Soviet captain, who asked him about the German poet
Heinrich Heine. Modrow had never heard of Heine, and felt embarrassed that the people he had thought of as “subhuman” seemed to know more about German culture than he. Eventually Modrow was transported to a POW camp near
Moscow, where he was selected to attend an “antifascist” school and to receive training in Marxism-Leninism—training which, by that point, he was more than eager to absorb. So profound was his experience of Germany’s failure that he very quickly came to embrace an ideology he had been taught to hate throughout his childhood. Over time, he also came to feel something like gratitude. The communist party offered him the chance to make up for the mistakes of the past—Germany’s mistakes, as well as his own. The shame he felt at having been an ardent Nazi could at last be erased.

But memories of the war could not be erased. Nor could the past easily be explained to outsiders who had not experienced the same level of destruction, and who had not witnessed the indifference human beings could show to one another’s suffering. “The man of the East cannot take Americans [or other Westerners] seriously,” wrote Miłosz. Because they hadn’t undergone such experiences, “their resultant lack of imagination is appalling.”
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Miłosz neglected to add that the reverse was also true: Eastern Europeans had deeply unrealistic expectations of their Western neighbors too.

Western Europeans and Americans were never indifferent to Soviet communism, either before the war or afterward. Fierce debates about the nature of the new Bolshevik regime and about communism in general had raged in
most Western capitals long before 1945. American newspapers wrote vividly about the
“Red Peril” as early as 1918. In
Washington, London, and Paris, much public debate in the 1920s and 1930s was devoted to the communist threat to liberal democracy.

Even during their wartime alliance with Stalin, the majority of British and American statesmen who dealt directly with Russia had plenty of doubts about his postwar intentions and a very clear understanding of the nature of his regime. “Alas, the German revelations are probably true,” Winston Churchill told Polish exile leaders after the Nazis stumbled upon the remains of thousands of Polish officers buried in the Katyn forest, where they had been murdered by
Soviet secret police: “The Bolsheviks can be very cruel.”
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George Kennan, the U.S. diplomat who would shape America’s postwar policy toward the USSR, spent the war years in
Moscow, whence he “bombarded the lower levels of Washington bureaucracy with analyses of communist evil.”
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Dean Acheson, then assistant secretary of state, compared negotiations with Soviet delegates in the summer of 1944 to “dealing with an old-fashioned penny slot machine … One could sometimes expedite the process by shaking the machine, but it was useless to
talk
to it.”
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Not that it really mattered. In his memoirs, Acheson summed up his observations of those negotiations by observing that “For us in State, however, this frustrating Russian interlude was soon forgotten amid the greater events then impending.”
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In truth, wartime Washington and wartime London almost always had “greater events” to worry about at least until 1945. Until the war’s end, Russian behavior in Eastern Europe was always a matter of secondary concern.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the official and unofficial accounts of the Tehran and Yalta conferences in November 1943 and February 1945, where Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill decided the fate of whole swathes of Europe with amazing insouciance. When the subject of
Poland’s borders came up at the first meeting of the Big Three Allies in Tehran, Churchill told Stalin that he could keep the chunk of eastern Poland he had swallowed in 1939, and that Poland might “move westward, like soldiers taking two steps left close” in recompense. He then “demonstrated with the help of three matches his idea of Poland moving westwards.” This, the minutes noted, “pleased Marshal Stalin.”
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At Yalta, Roosevelt halfheartedly suggested that the eastern border of Poland might be stretched to include the city of Lwów and the oil fields around it. Stalin seemed amenable but no one pushed him and the idea
was dropped. Thus were the national identities of hundreds of thousands of people decided.