Witness to Hope

by George Weigel

  By August 12, as one historian has put it, “it was clear to most observers in Warsaw that the last desperate week of the resurrected Poland had arrived.” The entire diplomatic corps fled, with one exception: Archbishop Achille Ratti, the Pope’s representative. A Polish delegation left for Minsk, where they hoped to start negotiations for an armistice or a surrender with the Soviets. Dzerzhínskii was headed for Wyszków, thirty miles from Warsaw, from which he expected to enter a fallen capital on August 17.

  But Marshal Józef Piłsudski, who dominated the life of the Second Polish Republic from its inception in 1918 until his death in 1935, was not prepared to concede defeat. Piłsudski’s intelligence operatives had detected a gap between the two corps of Trótsky’s army. In a daring move, Piłsudski pulled some of Poland’s best divisions from the lines on which they were engaged and secretly redeployed them to take advantage of the gap between the Soviet forces. On August 16, the Poles attacked, and by the night of the 17th, the Red Army, which had begun its own attack on Warsaw on the 14th, had been reduced to a rabble of fleeing refugees at a cost of fewer than 200 Polish casualties.2

  Distracted by that year’s calamitous flu epidemic and still reeling from the slaughters of the First World War, western Europe seemed unaware that, but for the Poles, the Red Army might just as easily have been camped along the English Channel as fleeing back into Great Russia. Lenin, though, understood that world history had just taken a decisive turn. In a rambling speech on September 20 to a closed meeting of communist leaders, he went into dialectical dithyrambs trying to explain why “the Polish war…[was] a most important turning point not only in the politics of Soviet Russia but also in world politics.” Germany, he claimed, was “seething.” And “the English proletariat had raised itself to an entirely new revolutionary level.” It was all there, ripe for the taking. But Piłsudski and his Poles had inflicted a “gigantic, unheard-of defeat” on the cause of world revolution. At the end of his speech, Lenin swore that “we will keep shifting from a defensive to an offensive strategy over and over again until we finish them off for good.” But for now, the westward thrust of Bolshevism had been rebuffed.3

  Among many other things, Piłsudski’s stunning victory meant that Karol Wojtyła would grow up a free man in a free Poland, a member of the first generation of Poles to be born in freedom in 150 years. An experience he would never forget, it became part of the foundation on which he, too, would change the history of the twentieth century.

  THE CROSSROADS

  The nation into which Karol Wojtyła was born was once the greatest power in east central Europe. The Polish-Lithuanian dynastic union, formed by the marriage in 1386 of the Polish Queen Jadwiga to the Lithuanian Duke Władysław Jagiełło, created a mammoth state that, by defeating the Teutonic Knights, the preeminent military power of the age, at the Battle of Grünwald in 1410, set the stage for 200 years of Poland’s growth. A decade after Columbus discovered the New World, Polish rule extended from the Black Sea in the south to the Baltic in the north, and from the German borderlands on the west almost to the gates of Moscow in the east. In those days, France alone exceeded the Polish kingdom in population among the nations of Europe. Polish power and the world-famous Polish heavy cavalry, the winged Hussars, played a decisive role in world history. In 1683, Polish troops led by King Jan III Sobieski halted the Turkish advance into Europe at the epic Battle of Vienna. Sobieski presented Pope Innocent XI with the green banner of the Prophet, captured from the Turkish grand vizier. Along with it came the message “Veni, vidi, Deus vicit [I came, I saw, God conquered].”4

  Poland’s subsequent history was less glorious as historians typically measure national accomplishment. Memories of lost grandeur remained alive, though, in the form of an intractable conviction that Poland belonged at the European table. That conviction also had much to do with Poles’ sense of their location.

  A rhetorical convention, Stalinist in origin but widespread in the West, assigns Poland to “eastern Europe.” Poles never speak of themselves this way. Poland, for Poles, is in central Europe, and any map of Europe will quickly confirm their claim. For Poles, though, this sense of being in the center of Europe is a matter of history and culture as well as of geography.

  To be sure, Poland is a Slavic nation, speaking a Slavic language. But the fact that Poles use the Latin, rather than the Cyrillic, alphabet in writing their language is more than an orthographic curiosity. It tells us how to locate the axis of Polish culture.

  Throughout its early national history, Poland was in constant contact with the civilization of western Europe. More than a century before the Jagiellonians, during the reign of the Piast dynasty, Polish scholars were to be found in the West of the high Middle Ages. Martin the Pole, a historian, worked in Paris, and the Silesian philosopher Witello was a colleague of Thomas Aquinas.5 Renaissance Polish humanists like Nicholas Copernicus, Jan Kochanowski, and Jan Zamoyski all graduated from the University of Padua, then the leading school in Europe; in 1563, Zamoyski served Padua as its rector.6 Poland’s constant interaction with the West was not limited to intellectuals. Kraków’s Rynek Główny, at 650 feet by 650 feet the largest market square on the continent, was a crossroads of European commerce and culture. There, you could buy almost anything, hear almost any European language, meet almost anyone. This was not living on the edges of civilization. It was life in the middle of things.

  Being in the center of Europe meant being in the center of Europe’s controversies, of which the religious proved the most bloody in the sixteenth century. Poland was not immune to religious conflict, but it was also notable for a tradition of religious toleration that was remarkable for its time. Nowhere else in Europe during the wars of religion was there anything like the pledge made by Poland’s leaders on January 28, 1573, that “we who differ in matters of religion will keep the peace among ourselves, and neither shed blood on account of differences of Faith, or kinds of church, nor punish one another by confiscation of goods, deprivation of honor, imprisonment, or exile….”7 Life is never as simple as declarations, of course, and Norman Davies, a distinguished historian of Poland, argues that while toleration was the formal rule, the spirit of tolerance could be in short supply among individual Poles. The difference, Davies concludes, is that toleration did in fact prevail in Poland, the shortcomings of the people notwithstanding. Poland “was indeed a ‘land without bonfires.’ There were no campaigns of forced conversion; no religious wars; no autos-da-fé no St. Bartholomew’s Eve; no Thomas and Oliver Cromwell.” At the height of its influence as a world power, there were limits to religious freedom in Poland that moderns would find intolerable, but these “limitations…were trivial in comparison to the horrors which occurred in most other European countries.”8

  CATHOLIC AND CATHOLIC

  None of Poland’s intellectual, cultural, commercial, architectural, and political linkages to the West bears so much on the modern Polish drama as the strongest of the nation’s ties to the civilization of Latin Europe: the Roman Catholic Church.

  Polish history is generally taken to begin with the baptism of the Piast prince Mieszko I in 966. Mieszko’s choice for Latin Christianity over Eastern Christianity, which had been formed in the orbit of Constantinople, decisively shaped Poland’s history for more than a millennium. The motives for Mieszko’s conversion were not unalloyed; accepting Latin-rite baptism helped him maintain room for maneuver against the ambitions of the Holy Roman Empire.9 Whatever the complex motivation involved, Mieszko’s baptism as a Latin-rite Christian firmly anchored his emerging nation in the culture of the West. Over time, Poland would become perhaps the world’s most intensely Catholic nation.

  By Mieszko’s choice, a Slavic land and people would be oriented toward the Latin West. Thus the very intensity of the Catholicism of this land and people had an ecumenical or universal element built into it. These Roman Catholic Slavs were a bridge between Europe’s two cultural halves; they could “speak the language of two spiritual worlds.”10
Poland’s Catholicity and its geographic location led to a certain catholicity of cultural temperament.

  The fabric of Polish Catholicism had a distinctive texture, and one of its brightest threads was a fidelity to Rome untinged by sycophancy. Yet the Polish experience of “Rome” differed over the centuries. From the Polish point of view, “Rome” could misunderstand, even betray, Polish aspirations—as when the Church failed to support (and in one instance, sharply condemned) Polish patriots’ attempts to throw off the yoke of oppression after the final partition of Poland in 1795 had erased “Poland,” the state, from the map of Europe. But “Rome” could also stay and defend. During that third and final partition, the Pope’s representative refused to leave his post as the vivisection of Poland was completed—just as the apostolic nuncio, Archbishop Ratti, would do in 1920 in the face of the Red Army.

  The salt mine at Wieliczka is a metaphor for the special character of Polish Catholicism and its relationship to the national history. Salt has been dug out of the earth at this mine near Kraków since the Neolithic Period, about 3500 B.C. At the deepest level of the mine, 600 feet or so below the earth’s surface, is the greatest of a series of chapels carved out of salt by pious miners—the chapel of Blessed Kinga, wife to a thirteenth-century prince of Kraków, Bolesław the Shameful. Six thousand cubic yards of salt were removed to clear the chapel. Five great salt chandeliers hang from the vault, and when their tapers are lit, the impression is of standing inside a diamond lit by the sun. The land above the mine at Wieliczka is flat, a natural invasion route from east and west, across which marauders wrought havoc for centuries. Lodged deep within Polish soil, its ornaments carved from native material and radiating light where one expects darkness, is the steady, beating heart of a great spiritual culture, which often lacked what the world recognizes as power.11

  THE NEIGHBORHOOD

  Poland is not always appreciated this way. Indeed, the suspicion seems widespread that the Poles must, for some reason or other, deserve their bad luck.12 Yet Poland’s curse is neither in the stars nor in the Polish people. It’s the neighborhood.

  For more than a thousand years, the Polish people and their state have inhabited an enormous flat plain bounded by large, aggressive, materially superior neighbors. Whether they were Teutonic Knights, vassals of the Holy Roman Empire, Prussian soldier-statesmen, or the armies of Hitler’s Thousand Year Reich, the Germans were always to the west, and almost always aggressive. German-Polish enmity followed and peaked in World War II, when the Nazis sought to eradicate the Polish nation from history.

  The real, enduring passions of Polish antipathy are located eastward, however, toward Russia and Russians. For hundreds of years, Poles tended to think of Russians as “savage exotics living beyond the pale of Christendom.” An old Polish joke (which one can still hear today) has it that, should Poland be invaded simultaneously by Germans and Russians, the Polish army should shoot the Germans first, on the ancient principle of business before pleasure.13 This loathing was reciprocated by Russians, and not merely at the level of popular prejudice. In the seventeenth century, the monastery at Zagorsk, one of the spiritual centers of Russian Orthodoxy, featured a sign that read, “Three Plagues—Typhus, Tartars, Poles.”14 During the eighteenth-century partitions of the Polish state, these feelings of mutual hatred hardened, as the autocratic Russian authorities sought to turn Poles into Russians and the Poles contributed their share to the conspiratorial violence that wracked the czarist empire.

  Poland’s historic problem of location was often compounded by a certain incapacity for politics. The concept of freedom that entered Poland in the fifteenth century through Kraków’s Jagiellonian University was deeply influenced by the philosophy of William of Ockham: freedom is the capacity to assert one’s will against the willfulness of others. Over time, this notion made the Poles great freedom fighters, asserting their freedom against an enemy, but rather bad at living freedom for.15 There was, for example, the liberum veto of the Polish gentry class, by which a single nobleman could block the passage of any piece of legislation. Between 1652 and 1764, when a strong central government might have taken the steps necessary to defend Poland against its predatory neighbors, forty-eight out of fifty-five sessions of the Polish parliament, the Sejm, were dissolved because someone had proclaimed, Nie pozwalam, “I disapprove.”

  Yet Poland’s “Noble Democracy,” or democracy by the rule of a large gentry class, avoided the worst excesses of royal absolutism, even at the cost of a kind of democratic anarchy. Its deficiencies were not the result of willfulness and selfishness alone. The gentry’s moral claim to participation in Poland’s governance was captured in the famous phrase, Nic o nas bez nas: “Nothing about us without us.” The phrase was fanciful when it gave moral sanction to the irresponsible use of the liberum veto in eighteenth-century Poland. It would have a different ring to it in 1980, when “Nothing about us without us” became one of the mottoes of Solidarność, the Solidarity trade union and political opposition.

  A DIFFERENT IDEA OF “HISTORY”

  Poland’s location at the crossroads of Latin and Byzantine Europe, its geography, and its repeated experience of invasion, occupation, resistance, and resurrection gave rise to a distinctive Polish way of looking at history. The partitions of Poland in 1772, 1793, and 1795 were unprecedented in modern Europe. A historic state was murdered “in cold blood…by mutilation, amputation, and, in the end total dismemberment.”16 Yet the Polish nation survived the destruction of the Polish state, because Poles came to believe that spiritual power was, over time, more efficacious in history than brute force. A nation deprived of its political autonomy could survive as a nation through its language, its literature, its music, its religion—in a word, through its culture. Culture, not politics or economics, was the driving force of history.

  Thus history, viewed from the Vistula basin, looked rather different than it did from other vantage points. Poles may have been romantics, but few of them succumbed to the “blood and iron” Realpolitik that helped make a charnel house of twentieth-century Europe and paved the way for fascist and communist totalitarianism. Nor did Polish nationalism, for all its patriotic fervor, ever become narrowly xenophobic. Tadeusz Kościuszko sought Polish independence from Russia under a banner that read “For Your Freedom and Ours.” The Poles who died at Monte Cassino in 1944 had similar universalist sentiments. As the epitaph in their cemetery in Italy puts it: “We Polish soldiers/For your freedom and ours/Gave our bodies to the soil of Italy/Our souls to God/But our hearts to Poland.”17

  Poles were also skeptical of the fondness for utopian revolutionary violence that became fashionable in Europe in 1789. Their political circumstances—in which national survival was the crucial issue—did not permit too much speculation, much less action, along utopian lines. Yet Poland’s relative immunity to this particular modern virus also reflected the conviction that, over history’s long haul, the spirit counted for more than what secular realists, including utopian revolutionaries, deemed the facts of the matter. What realists insisted was “reality” did not wholly determine what was “real”—for example, the negation of Poland—if you refused to believe their claims. It was a particularly Polish form of stubbornness with Christian cultural roots. And it served Poland well between 1795 and 1919, the time Poles refer to as their “Babylonian Captivity” or their “Time on the Cross.”18 Without that stubbornness, Poland, the state, might never have reemerged on the political map of Europe.

  The Second Polish Republic, the Poland in which Karol Wojtyła grew up, was born at the end of World War I amid immense difficulties. The new state had no internationally recognized boundaries. Seven different currencies circulated in the territory that would eventually settle down as “Poland,” and five legal systems were in play. Its industry had been destroyed; half the rolling stock, bridges, and other infrastructure of modern transportation had gone up in smoke during the war. By 1918, half of Poland’s agricultural land was uncultivated and a thir
d of the livestock had been stolen by the armies that had fought across the Vistula basin. Influenza was rampant, and starvation loomed until relief shipments arrived from the United States. Few Poles had any experience of operating a modern government.19 Poland’s commitment to the priority of the human spirit in history was severely tested in the new country’s first months of independence.

  Yet for all these difficulties, “Poland” was a reality, and the Poles had changed the course of world history by repelling the Red Army’s westward thrust. It was thus into a free Poland, beset by problems but hopeful about its independent future, that Karol Józef Wojtyła was born on May 18, 1920.

  HOME

  Wadowice, Karol Wojtyła’s boyhood home, was an ancient town, founded in the mid-thirteenth century and located on the River Skawa in the foothills of the Beskidy Mountains. The parish of Wadowice was established in 1325. In 1564, toward the end of the Jagiellonian dynasty, Wadowice was incorporated into the Kingdom of Poland along with the rest of the Duchy of Oświęcim.

  In 1819, Wadowice became the center of an administrative district in Galicia and home to a regiment of Austro-Hungarian troops. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the town developed a reputation for literary and theatrical activity. With a pre–World War II population of about 10,000, Wadowice counted only a half-dozen automobiles. Horse-drawn carriages were still common, as were peasants in traditional dress. But this was no rural backwater. Its traditional cultural interests and the play of its history oriented Wadowice toward Kraków (Poland’s cultural capital) and Vienna, rather than toward Warsaw. Like most other Poles in Galicia, the people of Wadowice harbored no burning antipathy toward the Habsburg Empire, but they were Polish patriots who welcomed the rebirth of an independent Poland after World War I. The elder generation in Wadowice may well have felt that at long last the sufferings of the past were over. Poland would no longer be an exile nation, wandering in the wilderness of history.