22. Darkness and Light

“The Nazis killed my parents, and there isn't a memorial to them." My father's words to the docent at the Holocaust Museum (which I wrote about last week) resonated with a painful truth for him but also encapsulated the complexity of Poland's wartime and post-war history.

Poland was Nazi Germany's laboratory and epicentre for its brutal racial experiment. As a result, Poland suffered the highest proportional population loss of any Allied nation during the war.

The Nazis' ruthless actions resulted in the staggering death of 3 million Polish Jews, half of the Holocaust's victims across Europe. The world knows the horrific story well.

In addition to the carnage the Nazis perpetrated in Warsaw, they also murdered approximately 2.7 million Christians across Poland and subjected the rest of the nation of 30 million to terror, enslavement, forced labour, and displacement.

The experiences of Polish citizens like my father and grandparents are rarely featured in literature or memoirs. It wasn't until 2004 that a museum dedicated to the Warsaw Uprising opened. There’s a reason this part of history is less widely known, and it really boils down to my father’s remark to the docent at the Holocaust Museum.

Millions of ordinary people lived the tragedy that unfolded in Poland and laid their lives on the line for their country. Despite all this, at the end of the war, Poland’s political fate was decided by the major Allied powers, and they handed it over to the Soviet Union. This occurred despite Poland's contributions to the Allied cause and involved the Western Allies acquiescing to Soviet influence in Eastern Europe and tiptoeing around Stalin's earlier non-aggression pact with Hitler and Soviet war crimes in eastern Poland.

In the aftermath of the war, the new Soviet-backed Polish government moved to consolidate power by targeting all potential opposition, particularly members of the Home Army. The regime propagated a false narrative, casting the wartime resistance heroes as Nazi collaborators while exaggerating the role of the far more limited Moscow-led Communist underground.

This disinformation campaign justified severe repercussions against Home Army members, including arrests, torture, exile to gulags, trials in kangaroo courts, and executions. The hostile environment led many, including my father Edward, to decide against returning to Warsaw.

The true history of the Home Army and its contributions to the resistance against Nazi occupation was distorted and suppressed for decades. Aside from whispered conversations between friends during the Communist era, people didn’t dare talk about the truth of what happened.

In post-war Communist Poland, discussions about Stalin's war crimes were also silenced. One glaring example was denial around the execution in 1940 of more than 22,000 Polish Army officers and members of the intelligentsia, their remains callously dumped in mass graves at the edge of the Katyń Forest and in other killing sites. Until 1990, the Soviets maintained the Nazis had committed the atrocity.

Even the Holocaust, while not denied, was not officially discussed. The Communist regime tended to subsume it under the broader portrayal of Nazi atrocities against all Poles. There was a deliberate effort to emphasize Polish heroism, particularly regarding efforts to rescue Jews, and downplay any instances of anti-Semitism or collaboration. This distortion stemmed from the government’s agenda to gain favour with the society it was subjugating. Embracing and emphasizing Polish martyrdom and victimhood was part of their strategy.

Historians in Poland during this era faced strict censorship in presenting an accurate account of the war. Access to valuable archival collections did not guarantee they could write the truth. Even memorials and museums, such as the one at Auschwitz, for example, were moulded during the Communist years to align with the Communist government’s political narrative of the martyrdom of the Polish nation.

Until the fall of the Iron Curtain, a scarcity of Polish- and English-language literature on Poland under German occupation—outside of the Holocaust—persisted, largely due to Communist censorship. The lack of objective accounts played a major role in why a more complete picture of what happened in Poland remained largely unknown in the West.

In the void, the international Jewish community and Holocaust historians painstakingly documented and preserved the unprecedented atrocities committed against the Jewish people, shaping the Holocaust as the dominant account of wartime Poland and overshadowing millions of untold non-Jewish stories. Unlike in Communist Poland, Holocaust survivors in the West were free to share their experiences. As this narrative emerged, Polish Christians were occasionally depicted as anti-Semitic bystanders.

In recent years, Polish historians have been actively studying and researching this period, working to fill the gaps in the historical record. But most of their work is published in specialized scholarly publications and not accessible to a general audience. And frankly, after so much time, does anyone care? I certainly never did, until now.

My father put the horror of this dark and complex time for Polish citizens—Jewish and Christian—during and after the war behind him, and it came flooding back at the end of our visit to the Holocaust Museum. He felt no solace that his life, along with the lives of his parents dying in concentration camps, had been acknowledged and their sacrifices truly understood.

This war spared no one in Poland; it affected both Jewish and non-Jewish populations facing a common enemy. Five years of unimaginable horror in Poland defies simplistic categorization of people into victims, oppressors, collaborators, and bystanders. While it's crucial to acknowledge the unprecedented and systematic nature of the Holocaust, which targeted Jews for complete extermination on an unparalleled scale, it's equally important to recognize the severe traumas and violence endured by Polish Christians under Nazi rule. All stories matter and will contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of this tragic time.

As I contemplate my father’s story, which I have shared with you over these past few weeks, I realize his seemingly perpetual optimism wasn't innate; it was a conscious choice, enabling him to move forward with his life. Bitterness and resentment would have consumed him.

Like many who immigrated to Canada post-war, my dad's new life permitted him to lock the darkness in a vault and turn toward the light, which he carried outwardly and defiantly for all to see. It was pure resistance.

I have come to understand that my mother also turned to the light. She carried it inwardly.

Within the pages of Polish history books that had become a constant presence in my life, I stumbled upon my mother’s story. She has been dead for almost twenty years, and I had long ago abandoned any hope of discovering it. Yet here was my own Pandora's box—the very box my mother never wanted me to find.

Her story was in plain sight; I had just never bothered to look. With trembling hands, I lifted the lid on the box, unleashing the secrets she had so carefully locked away. From inside flew all the dark times, painful memories, and unspoken truths she had hidden for so long.