Poland

NINETEEN

The Polish Republic

Suspicion of central authority had been a constant of Polish political life from the earliest times. During the period of partition, it had morphed into more or less active and patriotically motivated civil disobedience and subversion aimed at the occupying authorities. With the recovery of independence in 1918, the state had to be accommodated among the most sacred elements of a Pole’s life, and this did not come naturally. For too long virtue had lain in opposition. This marked the attitude of the peasant to the policeman as much as it did that of the general to his government.

Creating the structures of the new state was not going to be easy. A hundred years of living within one or other of three entirely different cultures had marked mentalities and behaviour. Those brought up in a Prussian mould found it difficult to work with those of more urbane Habsburg habits, let alone with those schooled in the Byzantine inefficiency of the tsarist bureaucracy. The same was true of those who had any experience of parliamentary practice: whether they had sat in the Russian Duma or the German Reichstag they had generally blocked and opposed. This augured ill for the political life of the new Polish state.

The provisional Sejm which assembled on 10 February 1919 was dominated by parties of the right under Wojciech Korfanty, with the centre taken by peasant parties led by Wincenty Witos’ Polish People’s Party (PSL Piast) and the left by three socialist parties. The largest party had less than a quarter of the seats, and the very first sessions led to further splintering, but this was not as dangerous as it might have been, as the Sejm had conferred extensive executive powers on Piłsudski for the duration of the war, and its most important task was to prepare a constitution for the new state.

The constitution adopted on 17 March 1921 was based on that of the French Third Republic: it consisted of a Sejm of 444 deputies elected by universal suffrage of both sexes and proportional representation, a Senate of 111 seats, and a president elected by both chambers for a term of seven years.

Neither president nor Senate had extensive powers, most of which were in the hands of the Sejm. But this was crippled by the impossibility of achieving stable majorities or durable coalitions. The principal currents of Polish politics had been defined from the start not by ideology but by group interest: conservative-minded peasants hungry for land had nothing in commonwith conservativeminded landowners, and left-wing industrial workers who wanted low food prices would not combine with left-wing peasants who wanted the reverse. Proportional representation favoured minority parties and single-interest groups, while the demographics of Poland gave rise to ethnically based parties with specific agendas.

The first elections held under the new constitution, in November 1922, saw a turnout of 68 per cent and returned no fewer than thirty-one parties to the Sejm. Not one had more than 20 per cent of the seats, and most of the major parties had no more than about 10. They coalesced into clubs, but these often fell apart in the very process of building coalitions. The large number of single-interest parties meant that coalitions or even clubs were likely to fracture over a particular piece of legislation. The chamber contained thirtyfive members representing Jewish parties, twenty-five representing Ukrainian interests, seventeen the German and eleven the Belorussian minority. Their voting patterns were erratic, but their number could exert a disproportionate effect.

The sense of instability was only enhanced when the first President of the Republic, Gabriel Narutowicz, was assassinated by a lunatic on 16 December 1922, two days after his inauguration. Four days later the Sejm and Senate voted in his successor, Stanisław Wojciechowski, while General Władysław Sikorski, who had been appointed Prime Minister, stabilised the situation. But instability continued to dog the Sejm, with budgets failing to be passed and governments coming unstuck over minor issues—no fewer than fourteen cabinets fell in the space of seven years.

The self-perpetuating dissension which enveloped parliamentary politics provoked disgust, and, with time, a chorus calling for ‘strong government’. Only one man in Poland enjoyed the sort of public esteem and personal authority needed to provide this: Józef Piłsudski. In the early 1920s Piłsudski withdrew into sullen retirement on his small estate of Sulejówek, whence he exerted a muted but pervasive influence through his writings, his Sibylline pronouncements on various matters, and his very absence from public life. He had a strong following in the armed forces and was respected by people on the right and the left of the political spectrum, by the most chauvinist Poles and by the Jewish minority.

On 10 May 1926 Wincenty Witos formed the latest in a succession of cabinets too weak to rule effectively. Two days later Piłsudski marched on Warsaw at the head of a few battalions of troops, and demanded its resignation. Witos was ready to comply, but President Wojciechowski urged him to stand firm and called out the army. Some units dragged their feet, others backed Piłsudski, as did the entire left, with the result that railwaymen refused to move regiments loyal to the government. After three days’ street fighting Wojciechowski and Witos resigned.

The Sejm offered the presidency to Piłsudski, but he declined and put forward the name of an eminent scientist and one-time member of the PPS, Ignacy Mościcki, who was duly elected. Changes introduced into parliamentary procedure had the effect of marginalising the Sejm and strengthening the role of the president, who henceforth appointed the government. Piłsudski himself briefly served as prime minister, and then handed over to Kazimierz Bartel, a respected politician of the People’s Party.

Piłsudski had no policy beyond ‘cleaning up the mess’ of parliamentary bickering, and took little interest in the day-to-day affairs of government. He was more interested in the army, which he saw as the key to Poland’s survival and a repository of its chivalric values, and the only formal title he accepted was that of Marshal. He hovered on the sidelines, part-dictator, part-monarch, his role ill defined, his influence paramount. By these means he managed to conserve his popularity: he was at once accessible and aloof, and while he was the linchpin on which the whole regime was hung, he was not too closely associated with any programme or policy to forfeit his essentially non-party appeal. If his manner, which grew increasingly surly, and his methods, which became more peremptory, were deplored by many, his purpose could be faulted by few. He was a national hero embalmed in the legend of his life of struggle for the freedom of Poland, embodying rebellion as well as authority.

At the next elections, in March 1928, the Non-Party Bloc of Cooperation with the Government (BBWR), created by Piłsudski as a surrogate party through which to support his policies, came out with almost 30 per cent of the vote, while his greatest enemies, the National Democrats, were soundly beaten. But Piłsudski was disappointed that his Bloc had failed to gain a more substantial majority, and what little respect he had for parliamentary procedures evaporated.

A life of conspiratorial activity had taught Piłsudski to use trusted men to carry out his plans and to obviate institutional channels. He gathered round him a bevy of trusties from the PPS, the Bojówki, the Legions or the POW. They were men like Walery Sławek, honourable, naive, devoted, with no political ideas of his own and few talents; and Edward Śmigły-Rydz, a soldier and patriot with the soul of a second-in-command. They were the levers through which the Marshal exerted power. He treated all parliamentarians with mounting scorn and attempted to intimidate the opposition in the Sejm by various means, including packing the chamber with army officers on one occasion, and when this did not work he ignored it.

This was not as unpopular as might have been expected: in Poland, as elsewhere in Europe, many committed democrats found the parliamentary process wanting and reached the conclusion that ‘strong government’ of one sort or another was needed to deal with the acute problems of the day. Others, spiritual heirs of the nineteenthcentury Democrats, found parliamentary politics too humdrum, and lurched to the left out of a romantic longing for upheaval.

The opposition grew increasingly truculent, and in 1929 a new centre-left coalition of 183 deputies (known as the Centrolew) called for reform to strengthen the powers of the Sejm. At a meeting in Kraków the following year its members spoke out in defence of democracy and criticised the government and the President in strident terms. President Mościcki responded by dissolving the Sejm, nominating Piłsudski Prime Minister, and arresting eighteen deputies. The elections held in November 1930 were marred by intimidation, arrests, confiscation of leaflets and vote-rigging. The BBWR received 46.8 per cent of the vote, which was somehow translated into 56 per cent of the seats.

Piłsuski and his henchmen backed up their increasingly authoritarian rule with a barrack-room ideology of ‘cleaning up’ political life which earned the regime the sobriquet Sanacja (’sanitisation’). Opposition leaders such as Witos, arrested in 1930, were put on trial on charges of conspiracy, and the freedom of the press was gradually restricted. Following the death, on 12 May 1935, of Piłsudski, the ruling clique tightened its grip.

A new constitution was passed, by sleight of hand, when many opposition deputies were absent from the chamber, in April 1935. It reduced the Sejm to a more manageable 208 deputies elected from 104 constituencies, which cut out small parties that had thrived on proportional representation. Its powers were curtailed and those of the president extended, enabling him to legislate by decree, but it was not President Mościcki who ruled. The camarilla put in place by Piłsudski remained in control, dominated by the éminence grise of Marshal Śmigły-Rydz, head of the armed forces.

Most of the opposition boycotted the elections of September 1935, and turnout fell to 45.9 per cent, but this did not affect the situation. The government founded the Camp of National Unity (OZN), which sucked in frustrated National Democrats as well as malcontents from smaller parties. The only weapons left to the opposition were strikes and demonstrations, but these were put down with force.

In 1936 a group of concerned constitutionalists, including Wicenty Witos, General Józef Haller, General and ex-Prime Minister Władysław Sikorski and Ignacy Jan Paderewski, met at the latter’s home near Morges in Switzerland and founded the Morges Front in an attempt to build a respectable centre-right opposition. There was little they could do, as opposition at home melted away in the face of intimidation and a certain conformism took hold—at the 1938 elections turnout was back to over 67 per cent, and the OZN captured 80 per cent of the vote.

European politics of the 1920s and 1930s present an unedifying picture of confrontation, fed by class hatred and racism, thuggish behaviour and riots, and constitutional crises leading to military coups. In Poland, the twenty years of the Republic witnessed a breakdown of parliamentary procedures and the emergence of intimidation as a tool of governance; but neither public life nor politics sank to the levels seen in most neighbouring countries, let alone in France, Spain and Italy. Poland may not have resembled a democracy, but it was not a dictatorship, and dissent flourished despite the Sanacja regime.

This was partly due to the human fabric of the country. The peacemakers of 1918 had attempted to create nation-states in Central Europe, but the communities embraced by the Commonwealth were so interwoven that merely contracting its frontiers did not produce a homogeneous Polish state. The Republic was about half the size of the Commonwealth in 1772, yet in 1920 only 69 per cent of the population of 27 million were Poles: 17 per cent were Belarusians or Ukrainians, nearly 10 were Jews, and 2.5 were Germans.

The Polish ‘nation’ of the Commonwealth had been open to all nationalities, but when Poland was resurrected as a nation-state in 1918, it could only be based on the linguistic, cultural and religious tradition of the dominant group. Minorities were not actively discriminated against, but it was difficult for a member of one of them to gain high office in the army or the civil service. This was partly because many came from poor backgrounds and backward parts of the country, and it was easier, for cultural reasons, for a member of the German or Jewish minority than for a Ukrainian.

The Ukrainians who inhabited the east and south-east of the country were treated as second-class citizens by local administrators and police, and with suspicion by the central authorities. After 1926 Piłsudski launched a programme of local cultural autonomy in the hope of engaging the loyalty of the population to the Polish state. But this was undermined by the Soviets, who launched crossborder raids which targeted Poles and Ukrainians loyal to Poland.

In 1930 a Ukrainian nationalist organisation, Orhanizatsiia Ukrainskykh Natsionalistiv (OUN), founded in Vienna in 1929 and funded from Germany, began a campaign of terrorism and sabotage. Meaning to polarise attitudes, it concentrated on murdering Ukrainians who sought accommodation within Poland and Poles sympathetic to the Ukrainian cause. The authorities responded with a brutal ten-week pacification during which troops combed the area, burning down restive villages and publicly flogging real or suspected terrorists. In June 1934 an OUN activist assassinated the Minister of the Interior, Colonel Bronisław Pieracki, in Warsaw. The government responded by setting up an ‘isolation camp’ for subversive and undesirable elements at Bereza Kartuska near Brześć.

The extremists were undermined by an agreement in the same year between the government and the principal Ukrainian party (UNDO), whose original hostility to the Polish state had been tempered by Stalin’s genocidal activities across the border in Soviet-occupied Ukraine. Calm returned to the countryside until 1939, when many of the extremists would re-emerge as a German fifth column. Meanwhile, the camp at Bereza Kartuska filled up with other enemies of the regime.

Relations with the German minority were more decorous but no more cordial. The Volksdeutsche resented having been marooned in a foreign country and felt no loyalty to Poland. With the rise of Nazism in Germany, they became increasingly strident in their denunciation of the Versailles settlement, demanding the return to the Reich of large areas of Poznania and of the Free City of Danzig. But even this hostility did not pose the same problems as did the Jewish minority.

Up to 1772 the Commonwealth had sheltered some four-fifths of the world’s Jews, who fitted more or less comfortably into its political, economic and cultural framework. This symbiosis disintegrated when, under the new conditions created by foreign rule, the Jews came into direct economic competition with the déclassé szlachta, the urban proletariat and the budding Polish middle class. This was aggravated by the influx, in the 1880s and 1890s, of some 800,000 Jews from the Western Gubernias into the Kingdom, where they were seen as Russian interlopers.

Numerous Jews assimilated into Polish society, but the community as a whole did not identify with Polish aspirations. While many were active in the PPS and fought in Piłsudski’s Legions, many more supported the Bund. Most were hostile to the National Democratic movement, which openly proclaimed that those not prepared to assimilate completely should be encouraged to emigrate, and whose members often gave vent to anti-Semitic feelings.

The collapse of law and order in November 1918 had produced a rash of anti-Jewish outrages in country areas and in towns such as Lwów and Pińsk. Further violence and reprisals took place in the wake of military operations between the Poles and the Bolshev iks, since numerous socialist Jews had welcomed or even joined the Red Army. Like much of European society at the time, many of the clergy did not distinguish between Jews and Bolsheviks, and parish priests encouraged anti-Semitic feelings. Hostility towards the Jews was inadvertently heightened by American and British Jewish pressure groups at the Paris peace talks of 1919. It was at their insistence that states such as Poland were made to sign ‘Minority Treaties’, which subjected their treatment of their Jewish citizens to international scrutiny. In Poland, with its long tradition of toleration, this was seen as an insult.

The census of 1931 revealed that there were 3,113,900 Jews in Poland, representing 9.8 per cent of the entire population. They made up over 30 per cent of the population of Warsaw, a fairly standard figure for most of the larger cities, with exceptions such as Białystok’s 43. In smaller towns the proportion was often much higher, reaching 60, 70 and in a handful of cases over 90 per cent of the population. As the majority wore black gabardines, sidelocks and beards, and spoke Yiddish rather than Polish, they were conspicuous. They also stood out by their economic relationship to the rest of the population.

The occupational breakdown of the 1931 census reveals that only 0.6 per cent of those engaged in agriculture were Jews. They made up 62 per cent of all those making a living from trade, and the figure for the town of Pińsk was 95. Their fortunes fluctuated dramatically during the economically unstable twenties and thirties. Every time a new peasant cooperative was founded or a village combined to sell its produce direct to the buyer, the livelihood of several Jewish families vanished. By 1936 at least a million Jews in Poland were losing their source of subsistence, and by 1939 just over that number were entirely dependent for their survival on relief from Jewish agencies in the United States.

Polish representatives to the League of Nations urgently pressed for the lifting of restrictions on immigration into Palestine and the United States. The desire to be rid of the Jews may have gone hand in hand with concern for their plight, but it was not entirely racially motivated: the same representatives also appealed to the League to facilitate large-scale emigration of poor Polish peasants.

While the majority of Jews in Poland were caught in a poverty trap, they never managed to dispel the envy surrounding the community as a whole. In 1931, 46 per cent of lawyers and nearly 50 of doctors were Jews, who were also disproportionately successful at getting into universities. An anti-Semitic campaign began in the mid-1930s at the University of Lwów, spreading to other universities and technical colleges, which resulted in some cases in the introduction of admission quotas based on percentages of the population.

The National Democrats, denied power for so long, had largely lost their sense of identity as well as much of their membership. In an attempt at gaining the support of disgruntled elements, they began to play the card of anti-Semitism, but they were outdone in this by small openly fascist parties, the most notorious of which, Falanga, carried out assaults on Jewish shops and synagogues. Violence of this kind was not uncommon, but the overwhelming majority of popular disturbances were the result not so much of racial hatred as of economic factors. Law and order were precarious, and the police force (whose inspector-general was a Jew) was about half the size of that in Britain and France in relation to the respective populations.

Relations between Poles and Jews varied enormously; they were far more complex than, and rarely as bad as, is usually made out. There was certainly a great deal of low-level but deeply ingrained anti-Semitism in some areas of Polish society. Yet at no point did the sort of biological anti-Semitism of the Nazi or anti-Dreyfusard variety catch on in Poland. The points at issue were political, cultural and economic, and they have to be viewed in the context of the situation confronting the population as a whole.

Along with four legal systems, the Republic inherited six different currencies, three railway networks, and three administrative and fiscal systems. There were huge discrepancies between the agriculturally advanced Poznania, the primitive rural economy of Mazovia and the industrially developed Silesia. Galicia, the grainbasket of the Habsburg Empire, and the Kingdom, which had been the industrial centre of the Russian Empire, were cut off from their respective markets. The area had been ravaged by six years of war. Four and a half million hectares of agricultural land had been devastated, two and a half million hectares of forest felled, and over four million head of livestock removed by the Germans alone. According to Vernon Kellogg of the American Food Mission, onethird of the population were on the point of starvation in 1919.

Nearly 64 per cent of the population lived off the land, and most could not support themelves. The political solution to this problem was land reform, introduced in 1925, whereby 200,000 hectares were distributed each year to landless peasants at the cost of large estates. But this only aggravated the problem of production, by multiplying the number of tiny, inefficient farms. In 1939 there was still only one tractor for every 8,400 hectares of arable land, and yields were as much as 50 per cent lower than in neighbouring Germany.

The solution was massive industrialisation, but this was made no easier by the fact that in 1918 the retreating German army had carried out a gigantic operation quaintly termed ‘the de-industrialisation of Poland’, which left no factory, railway station or bridge standing, and no piece of machinery in place. The state came into being with vast debts to the Allies (for equipping and arming the Blue Army and supplying armaments between 1918 and 1920), and the obligation of making war reparations on behalf of those parts of the country which had been Austrian or German during the Great War. Poland was not the only country rebuilding its economy, and therefore it had to compete for credits. Foreign capital saw the new country as an uncertain investment.

The result was a bumpy start. In December 1918 the US dollar bought 9.8 Polish marks; in December 1923 it bought five million. At that point Prime Minister Władysław Grabski managed to balance the budget and to stabilise the situation with the introduction of the złoty. Nevertheless, foreign capital continued to elude Poland, while Germany waged a tariff war against it. It was not until 1929 that production reached the pre-1914 levels, only to sink to an all-time low in 1932.

In spite of a host of teething troubles and extremely unfavourable conditions, the Republic achieved a modest measure of economic success. By the end of its twenty-year existence it was the eighth largest producer of steel in the world, and the ninth of pig iron. It exported over 12 million tonnes of coal, 1¹/₂ million tonnes of crude oil, 100,000 tonnes of textiles, and 140,000 tonnes of yarn, and was developing a world-class chemical industry. Per capita income reached the same levels as in Spain and Portugal.

Since the Free City of Danzig was dominated by its predominantly German population, which yearned for incorporation into Germany, Poland built its own port. The dredging of the new harbour was started in 1924, in the fishing village of Gdynia. By 1938 Gdynia was the busiest port in the Baltic, with 12,900 ships docking annually. A Polish merchant marine of over eighty ships was built up, as well as a small but well-equipped navy.

The building of the economy had been hampered by the need to create a whole state apparatus from scratch, including administrative buildings, law courts, schools, museums, theatres and so on, and by the obligation to maintain an army. It was made all the more difficult by the hopeful assumptions of every social group in the euphoria attendant on the recovery of independence. In 1918, even before the fighting was over, the first Polish government passed decrees on social insurance and an eight-hour working day. In 1920 the government launched a health insurance scheme, and in 1924 an unemployment insurance act. The 1930s saw the building of remarkable state housing schemes for the low-paid, and by the middle of the decade Poland had the highest levels of social security in the world.

Over the twenty years of independence illiteracy was almost halved. By 1939 the six universities of Kraków, Warsaw, Lwów, Wilno, Poznań and Lublin contained 48,000 students, almost a third of them women, while a further twenty-seven technical colleges provided higher education for many more. The standards achieved in the Polish educational system during the 1930s compared very favourably with those of other countries, particularly in the humanities and pure science.

Retrospectively, it appears that the overriding problem faced by Polish society in its new role as a sovereign nation was one of identity. There might be a Sapieha foreign minister, a Zamoyski presidential candidate, a Potocki ambassador and members of szlachta families in every officers’mess, but it was not their values that triumphed in the new Poland. Nor did those of the nineteenth-century intelligentsia. Piłsudski and Dmowski had already been superseded by the movements they had created. The higher echelons of government and of the administration were largely filled by new men of disparate origins who had been tempered in the furnace of conspiracy, jail, and struggle for independence. They were united by their common experiences and service in the army, which played a major role in forging a new national consciousness. It was not just Ukrainians and Jews who felt out of place. Many members of the landed classes, the old intelligentsia, and particularly artists, became alienated. In the grotesque poem Herrings in Tomato Sauce, written in 1936, Konstanty Ildefons Galczyński (1905-53) brings back to life Władysław the Short, the king who had struggled to reunite the fragmented country in the thirteenth century: ‘Well, you wanted your Poland, now you’ve got it!’ he is told. The sentiment expressed spoke for many.

The 1920s and 1930s witnessed an explosion of literary and artistic talent of a very high order. Liberated from the need to serve the national cause, writers and artists felt free to express themselves in ways that on the whole found little recognition in the reigning zeitgeist of the Sanacja regime. And while they enjoyed a following in the vibrant artistic milieus of Warsaw and other major cities, many found it difficult to associate themselves with the realities of the resurrected Poland. Musicians too found the promised land disappointingly philistine.

The long-yearned-for independence had been under threat ever since it was achieved in 1918. The Versailles settlement had created a situation in Central Europe which was uncomfortable for all parties. Germany could not help feeling a grudge against Poland, and the Poles could not help feeling one against every one of their neighbours, all of whom felt the same way towards the Poles. The powers which had helped restore Poland to the map were reluctant to commit themselves to her survival, and while all formally guaranteed the 1919 Franco-German border, only France did the same with respect to Germany’s eastern border with Poland. Since the Western powers demonstrated at the Locarno Conference in 1925 that they would do anything to avoid involvement in another war, Central European states had to fend for themselves. Another war seemed likely, and all but the most sanguine or ill-informed realised that Poland did not stand a chance on her own.

With all the wisdom of hindsight, it is hard to suggest a foreign policy that might have saved Poland. Between 1932 and 1939 foreign policy was conducted by Colonel Józef Beck, who saw clearly that in the diplomatic game Poland had nothing to offer a potential ally. In 1932 he signed a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union. This elicited an aggressive response from Germany, which demanded the Free City of Danzig. When Hitler came to power in 1933 Piłsudski considered a Franco-Polish pre-emptive strike on Germany. But Hitler stepped in with conciliatory offers and in January 1934 Poland and Germany signed a ten-year non-aggression pact. Hitler was keen to meet Piłsudski and discuss plans for a German drive into the Baltic countries in conjunction with a Polish drive to the Black Sea. But this was not a realistic option for Poland.

After the Anschluss with Austria in the spring of 1938 it became obvious that the West would be of no practical assistance to Poland. Beck could not turn to the Soviet Union for a military alliance, since no Pole who knew his history could consider allowing Russian troops onto Polish soil, even if they came as allies. The only hope was to placate Germany in the hope of staving off aggression and of eliciting a convincing promise of military support from Britain and France, who were naturally anxious to keep Poland out of Germany’s orbit.

In October 1938, after the German seizure of the Sudetenland, the Poles reoccupied the Zaolzie (the part of Cieszyn which the Czechs had annexed in 1918). It was intended partly as a show of force and partly as a strategic measure to strengthen Poland’s southern flank against German attack—a consideration which also prompted a Polish ultimatum to Lithuania to open diplomatic relations and declare her intentions. These moves had little practical effect beyond creating the impression that Poland was a bully little better than Germany or Italy.

On 22 March 1939 the German government delivered an ultimatum to Poland demanding Danzig and the strip of Polish territory dividing East Prussia from the rest of Germany, the so-called ‘Polish Corridor’. The ultimatum was rejected. On 31 March Great Britain offered an unconditional guarantee of Polish territorial integrity, and a few weeks later a military alliance was signed by Britain, France and Poland.

There followed three months of uneasy calm. Optimists saw this as a sign that the situation had been contained and peace assured. In fact Germany was using the time to make final preparations. Hitler put pressure on Romania to rescind her defensive military alliance with Poland, and started negotiating with Stalin. In August, the foreign ministers of the two states, Joachim von Ribbentrop and Viacheslav Molotov, signed a secret protocol detailing a new partition of Poland.

On the evening of 31 August 1939 a dozen German convicts were dressed in Polish uniforms and ordered to attack a German radio station in Gleiwitz in Upper Silesia. Early next morning, as the world awoke to the remarkable news that Poland had attacked the Third Reich, the Wehrmacht invaded Poland in defence of the threatened Fatherland. Two days later, on 3 September, Great Britain and France declared war on Germany. Two weeks after that, on 17 September, when it had become clear that they would do nothing further to help their ally, the Soviet Union also invaded Poland.

What followed was no ordinary war. It was a concerted and sustained effort by Germany and Russia to destroy not only the Polish state, but the Polish nation itself. And although full-blown military operations would end in 1945, it would not be over for Poland until September 1989, almost exactly fifty years after it began.