Many people 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 an easy thing 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 “naive” patriotism and the wishful thinking of their parents
and teachers. Different parts of Eastern Europe experienced this collapse at
different times. 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.
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 age 19, 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.
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?” 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 dictated by the Communist Party.
His was a dramatic fate, but
not an unusual one. Many young people focused their disappointment on the old
political elite who had so catastrophically failed to prepare Poland for war,
and on the patriotic nationalism that had previously sustained them. 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 burnt house and an NKVD summons.”
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 communist politician—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” which put up the final resistance
to the Red Army in the last days of the war. At age 17 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:
“I was a young man, and I
wanted to help. I stood on the truck and handed down the others’ backpacks, and
then gave my pack to somebody else, so that I could jump off the truck myself.
By the time I landed on the ground, it was stolen. I never got it back. And it
was not a Soviet soldier who had done it but one of us, the Germans. Not until
the next day did the Red Army turn us all into equals: They collected all of our
backpacks—nobody was left with one—and we were given a spoon and cup to eat
with. Because of this episode I started thinking about the Germans’ so-called
camaraderie in a different way.
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 where he would receive
training in Marxist-Leninsm—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 that 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 be erased.
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