the communist occupation of Poland, they would return to a free homeland.44 The myth of impending return prompted efforts to build strong exile communities, which could facilitate necessary political action as well as preserve Polish culture. The exiles formed separate organizations to fulfill those goals as well as to meet more pragmatic needs, such as securing housing, jobs, schools for children, language classes, and loans to buy furniture and other necessities, or finding churches and ethnic support groups.
The exile mission strongly emphasized both preservation and development of Polish culture in exile. The importance of this task for the spiritual survival of the nation had been clear since the partitions of Poland in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The exiles felt particularly responsible for the protection and nurture of Polish high culture: the literary language, artistic expression, as well as intellectual thought and scientific achievement. The wartime extermination of Poland’s intelligentsia, the Sovietization of political and economic life, and the suppression of Polish culture gave this goal a renewed sense of urgency. The patriotic upbringing of the next generation became another significant element of the exile mission. The youth had to be prepared to return to Poland or to continue the mission in exile. Children and young people were expected to know the Polish language; to be familiar with Polish history, traditions, and customs; and to adopt patriotic attitudes toward the homeland of their parents.
A sense of history and historical memory has always been vital to the Polish experience. The memory of past glories helped the nation endure the partitions. After World War II, the exile mission recognized the momentousness of history and ranked it high on the agenda. The war effort and the refugee experience yielded themselves to placement within the larger history of the Polish nation’s sacrifice and survival. Attention to history and the lessons learned from it permeated much of the exile discourse, providing examples, comparisons, and sometimes predictions for the future.
The mission’s strength rested within family and community, since individuals could carry out its particular components on both the local and the personal levels. The leaders were usually members of the intelligentsia, prewar activists, and politicians, but the vast majority of rank-and-file refugees also interpreted their refusal to return to communist Poland as a political decision. In the context of Polish history and the Cold War, exile politicized the diaspora and particular communities within it.45
Differences between the refugees and Polish Americans intensified in the conflict-prone environment of the resettlement program. The bipolar image of the new arrivals as victims and as sturdy immigrant material, and the specific needs of the refugees proved difficult for Polish Americans to absorb, while the resettlement program stretched thin their resources and put enormous pressure on the community. Without fully grasping the significance of the wartime experiences of the refugees and the intensity of their commitment to the exile mission, Polish Americans too often acted in dismissive and patronizing ways. The refugees, on the other hand, retaliated with accusations of political inactivity, cultural backwardness, and advanced Americanization.
While the exiles’ presence both energized and challenged the community, the majority of Polish Americans represented by the Polish American Congress revitalized the main elements of the exile mission derived from their earlier Polonia tradition. For example, Polish Americans’ vision of the struggle for Poland did not include the myth of return nor did it rely on close cooperation with the rest of the postwar diaspora. Polish Americans were ready to assume leadership in the struggle for Poland, but as American citizens who counted on American foreign policy and who recognized the Polish government in exile as an important symbol rather than as a sovereign political authority. In the cultural realm, working-class Polish Americans felt protective of their folk culture and confined their social and cultural activities to the traditional forms and structures of the existing Polonia organizations.
The debate between the exiles and Polish Americans, which took place in the 1940s and early 1950s, polarized Polonia but also provided a unique chance to explain and to negotiate the exile mission as well as to confront their ethnic identity. The process was not easy, and in some instances the differences would never be overcome; but by 1956, American Polonia and Polish exiles in the United States had managed to negotiate many, if not all, points of the exile mission. Changes within Poland and the stabilization of the international situation reinforced the values that both groups held in common: devotion to Poland and readiness to work together on the nation’s behalf.
1
“Smoke over America, blood over Europe”
World War II and the Polish Diaspora
War in Poland and the Creation of the Wartime Diaspora
One day very early in the morning some stubborn knocking at the door woke us up. My husband, surprised, goes, opens the door and after a short conversation, comes back inside, holding a piece of paper in his hand. Looking straight at me he says: “This is my draft card to the army. Germans entered our lands without declaration; it is war. . . .” My hands began shaking, my heart began pounding. We stood for a moment in silence, staring at each other.1
THE DAY WAS SEPTEMBER 1, 1939. Helena Podkopacz saw her husband for the last time. His military transport was bombed, and he was killed instantly. She was left alone in a small village in eastern Poland with two little children and an ailing mother, while German air raids on all major cities and military installations were destroying Polish ground forces. A counteroffensive on the river Bzura broke down by midmonth, and other points of defense in the country fell one after another when the Soviet army entered the Polish territories on September 17, cutting off escape routes and closing the trap on the surviving Polish forces. On September 28, Warsaw, although furiously defended by its civilian population, surrendered to the Germans, while the Polish garrison on the peninsula of Hel on the Baltic held out until October 2. The president of Poland and Polish government officials crossed the border to Romania, and, after a brief internment there, they continued on to France, where the government was reconstituted. The last Polish military unit in the field capitulated at Kock on October 5, although some guerrilla forces fought for many more months. Poland lost some sixty thousand men killed in action and another one hundred forty thousand wounded, in addition to high civilian casualties.2 By the end of the campaign, Poland was divided into a German occupation zone in the west and a Soviet zone in the east.
The formal division of Poland between German and Soviet conquerors became a fact with the signing of a convention between them on September 28, 1939. The demarcation line that ran along the rivers Bug and San became the official frontier between the Third Reich and the Soviet Union. Each occupation zone received a different administration and became subject to the unrestrained terror of the invaders. The territories in the Soviet zone were divided into three areas. The northern area was granted to the Republic of Lithuania, eventually annexed by the USSR. The central area was granted directly to the Belorussian SSR. The southern part, containing the city of Lwów, was attached as “Western Ukraine” to the Ukrainian SSR. Fraudulent and openly coerced plebiscites organized by the NKVD (National Commissariat of Internal Affairs, the Soviet secret police) on all three territories resulted in the “official request” of the populations to admit the occupied lands to the Soviet Union, a request that was promptly granted.3 The Polish lands under German occupation were divided into two separate areas. The western and northern parts were annexed directly into the Third Reich. The remaining, larger area formed the General Government (Generalna Gubernia) headed by Hans Frank, governor-general. The Polish population of both areas was subject to lawless and cruel Nazi terror, which increased systematically from the late fall of 1939.
Beginning in November 1939, shortly after Hans Frank took office, the Nazis undertook a systematic extermination of the Polish nation’s leadership. The city of Warsaw’s president, Stefan Starzyński—distinguished in his defense of the city—and thousands of other Poles were promptly arrested. The Nazis put to death about thirty-five hundred political and municipal leaders in
