The Stories That Maps Tell. (May 2020)
Warsaw, May 31, 2020
Geography is not considered the most sexy subject. But that’s probably because of the way it has been taught to most of us. But when you consider approaching a major part of a country that you have lived in for 24 years but that it would be a stretch to claim that you know, maps are a good way to seek to close the gap in understanding; to approach the subject matter by graphically trying to grasp what has made the regions and people who they are today, and what has come to pass there in the past.
To modern Europeans, Poland’s eastern frontiers are the EU’s external border. While in the southeast that is EU member Slovakia and Ukraine, in the central East is it Ukraine and Belarus, in the northeast it is EU member Lithuania, as well as the Russian Federation in its Kaliningrad region, the former Koenigsberg, a Russian island within the EU, and a constant worry for NATO defensive planners (on which more towards the end of this trip; keyword: Suwalki Gap …).
Among modern, urban Poles, the ones that find the current Polish administration and its policies as unrepresentative and offensive as many international observers, the area that I am about to visit is derogatorily known as ‘Polska B’.
(And the schisms keep coming: despite the current anti-EU and anti-liberal-democracy policies of the administration, Poles continues to be among the biggest supporters of the EU – only logical if you consider how much stability and predictability and relative well-being that has brought to this country, after its exceedingly difficult history – on which more below).
If one wanted to stay fact-based and escape political polemics, one can state unequivocally that the eastern, south-eastern and north-eastern parts of the country are among the poorest areas, in terms of GDP per capita, and also the areas that have most consistently voted for politicians associated with the PIS party that is currently benefiting from an absolute majority in Parliament and whose President is up for re-election in late June (blue colour in map below). The GDP p.c. and the electoral maps speak a clear language here, with the question of correlation and causal links one to be debated further. This has of course been spotted by seasoned observers, to whom I defer.
Poland GDP p.c. by region (2011)
Distribution of Voting between Conservatives (blue) and Centrist-Liberals (orange), Poland 2014
So comparison’s to Italia’s ‘mezzogiorno’ in the south come to mind, another large region that has long been economically underdeveloped, with instable politics, infamous for its organized crime, weak infrastructure, a drag on the Italian economy requiring lots of transfers from north to south, giving rise, inter alia, to the hateful politics of Salvini and his (originally: “Northern”) League party.
Or to the former GDR, East-Germany, the Soviet Zone from 1945, caught on the ‘wrong side’ of Churchill’s iron curtain when the Allied WW2 Coalition gave way to containment and realpolitik. For years a diligent pupil in the Socialist World, with most of its industry made uncompetitive by the 1:1 foreign exchange decision between Deutschmark and Ostmark by Chancellor Kohl upon German unification in 1990, recipient of huge annual transfers from its detested richer western brother, still today the poorer eastern half of the country despite gleaming infrastructure, with significant hidden unemployment, and with the AFD, the right-wing German party, regularly doing very well among white men in regional elections there; not so different than the PIS electorate in Poland, it might appear (or some other places where white men that see their values challenged by globalization and societal change have swayed recent election results).
(One of the most astute observers of Poland, Oxford historian Timothy Garton-Ash, gave a speech in 2018 on recent Polish history and freedom, it is worth listening to for those who want a more substantive perspective. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fdlBjhgBjCQ&t=1018s))
So geography takes on a new meaning, if one considers the confluence of history, economic factors, demographics, the long aftereffects of external shocks (wars, unification, border movements, systemic changes). And one does well to do dig up more maps on eastern Poland to appreciate the long shadow that history throws over us, whether we realise it or not.
A motorcycle does not pack many books, unfortunately. So one the best Polish histories in English, “God’s Playground” (1979), by Oxford Emeritus Professor (and married to a Krakow girl) Norman Davies, which I had read a quarter century ago, travels with me in PDF form. But another fascinating history by somebody with Polish roots and emotional attachment, NY-born and Oxford-educated historian (and scion of one of the most famous Polish noble families), Adam Zamoyski, “The Polish Way. A Thousand-year History of the Poles and their Culture” (1987), travels with me in heavy paperback.
He opens by pointing out the pride and bad fate that combines in Poland and its history like in few proud large European nations. In 1683 Europe was about to fall to the Turkish onslaught, Vienna appeared doomed to fall to the siege by the Grand Vizir and his army of over 100,000; but at the last moment Jan Sobieski, King of Poland, showed up with the famous Polish hussars (cavalry) and an army of some 68,000 (of which 1/3 was Polish), and freed Vienna from the ‘infidels’, safekeeping Christianity and Europe, before retreating to Krakow and asking nothing in return.
A mere 89 years later, that same Austria, Prussia and Russia commenced the dismemberment of Poland in three partitions, such that by 1795 the country had disappeared from the face of this earth, nominally (see map below). Zamoyski cites a condemnation in the British Parliament at the time: ‘the most flagrant instance of profligate perfidy that has ever disgraced the annals of mankind’. (Zamoyski, p.4). He closes his opening chapter with some prescient comments that are worth repeating here, as even seasoned observers of this country are still trying to come to grips with it:
“The origins of this discordant relationship with Europe must lie somewhere in the fact that Poland was the product of an entirely different set of dynamics from other states. It was the only major medieval political unit not to have been built on the spiritual foundations laid by the Roman Empire. It was not just that the Romans never reached Poland – no part of Russian soil was ever trodden by a legionary, yet the whole of Russian civilization is deeply market by Rome in its Byzantine form. It is simply that by the time medieval Christianity brought the influence of Rome to what is now Poland, there was already a nation-state in existence.” (Zamoyski, p.7)
The Three Polish Partitions, 1772 - 1795
So if I got on my motorcycle and went through a time machine back two hundred years to 1820, my trip would take me to the dark green area that was the ‘Kingdom of Galicia’ (annexed by Austria in 1772), and then northwards – bordering on the eastern dark pink areas that were annexed by Russia in 1795 demarcated by the river Bug – through the light green area that was ‘West Galicia’ (annexed by Austria in 1795), onto the north-eastern area of ‘New East Prussia’ (annexed by Prussia in 1795), before looping back westwards into an area known as East Prussia for some 700 years.
This last area, as we shall see elsewhere, was the result of a historic ‘error’ by a Polish king, who had seen how crusading knights had fought the ‘infidels’ in Jerusalem, and who in 1226 had invited a Teutonic knight order to defeat the troublesome local Prussians inhabiting this area; the knights forged a temporary lease to make it permanent (according to Zamoyski, p.31), and then endeavoured to be a thorn in the side of the Polish state for the better part of the millennium; until the Soviet Army with an officer called Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn put an end to that in 1945, that is. (more on him later)
But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s stay with Poland before the partitions. The Polish kingdom was founded in 1025 and reached its largest power in the Commonwealth with Lithuania from 1569, extending eastwards beyond Kiev and comprising a large part of what today is Belarus and Ukraine (as well as Poland and Lithuania and Latvia) - see map below). It was that mighty Poland which came to Vienna’s and the west’s defense in 1683.
The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as of 1582
Poland, which recently made headlines when it proposed a law to ensure that the Nazi concentration camps would not be associated with the name of the country in which the Nazis had perfidiously located them close to the major livelihood of European Jewry and far away from any discerning eyes, was also known by historians as ‘paradisus iudearum’, Latin for ‘paradise for Jews’, since it was in the middle of the last millennium one of the religiously most tolerant countries for non-Christians to settle in.
Whereas western Europe had fought the 30-year war from 1618 until the peace of Westphalia in 1648, during which 8m people perished, including 20% of the population of the German lands, all due to the conflict between the Roman Catholic creed and the Protestant creed further to Martin Luther’s publication of the 95 Theses in 1517, Poland’s rulers had established a relatively liberal religious regime, and had managed to avoid much of that mayhem. As a result, many European Jews settled in Poland, including some of the Jews forced out of Spain after 1492, so much so that it is estimated that by the mid-16th century about ¾ of the world’s Jewish population lived in Poland.
After the partition of 1772-1795 most of these lands came under Russian administration, which like much of Europe at the time had anti-Semitic attitudes, largely restricting Jewish settlement in a long narrow band between Latvia and the Black Sea, known as the Pale of Settlement. Despite many difficulties, this became the focus of Jewish life, including after WW1 when Poland was re-created as one of the 14 points of US President Woodrow Wilsons’ peace plan, with 3m Jews living in eastern Poland.
Its linguistic map from that time shows that pre-WW2 Poland was a very multi-ethnic, multi-linguistic country, heritage to that history of annexations and moving borders and religiously motivated demographic flows. (My paternal grandfather was born in Memel (today Klaipeda in Lithuania), my paternal grandmother a staunch German, born a ‘Szymanski’, in Ortelsburg/Szczytno in East Prussia (today Poland); we shall check up on them in the latter stages of this trip.)
These borders reflect the re-birth of Poland as a state in 1918, and show a country that lies much further to the east than the Poland of today, with East Prussia an anomaly, and the Free City of Danzig also an excuse for Hitler to challenge the status quo.
Poland as of 1938
Having been dismembered by 1795 and reborn in 1918, a mere 21 years later it was again to fall victim to its powerful neighbours west and east, ruled by arguably the two most ruthless totalitarian dictators of the 20th century. Less than ten days after they shook hands on a nominal ‘non-aggression pact’, which happened to include a secret protocol delineating ‘spheres of influence’ from Finland through the Baltics and Poland down to Romania, Hitler Germany invaded Poland on September 1st, 1939; by September 17th, Stalin’s army fell into the rear of the defending Polish army by occupying ‘its’ half of Poland. Another partition had effectively been enacted.
It is important to recall what it meant being caught between the merciless genocidal machine of fascist Nazi Germany, and the life-disdaining policies of absolute Stalinism, all at the time of war and far from any international supervision. Another unread book from my laden shelves is travelling with me only in PDF form, the 2010 account by US historian Timothy Snyder (Oxford-educated -- with Timothy Garton-Ash, another friend of Poland, his supervisor -- and now teaching history at Yale) of what it meant being caught up between these two horrific regimes: “Bloodlands. Europe between Hitler and Stalin.” For an excellent review of this book by one of the foremost analysts of Poland (and much else), see the attached review by Anne Applebaum, or this review in the Guardian.
Molotov Ribbentrop Division of Poland (August 1939 Secret Protocol)
Poles fought in the underground, in the resistance, had a government in exile in the UK, provided a significant number of the pilots defending Britain against the threatened Nazi invasion in 1940, and in the ‘Anders Army’ had a unit that had left Siberia via Persia to fight along the Allies in Egypt, Italy and throughout the western front; Beata’s paternal grandfather was one of its soldiers and died a few weeks before the end of the war. Having helped liberate Europe from the yoke of Nazism, free Poland was deprived of the prize of its valiant efforts by Stalin’s objectives in central and eastern Europe, which Roosevelt/Truman and Churchill felt unable to contain at the time.
To add insult to injury, Poland also lost many of its eastern provinces, with ‘compensation’ provided by annexing formerly German regions in the north and west of the country.
As a result, millions of Germans were forced to flee to Germany and well over a million of Poles had to move from the formerly eastern regions and to re-settle in Silesia (SW), Pomerania (W and NW), and East Prussia (N).
Westward forced migration of Poles post-WW2
When one digs a little deeper, it turns out that there is a whole academic literature on ‘phantom borders’, on the long-running effects of prior separations of countries, demographic movements, historical demarcations. They are published in journals like ‘Erdkunde’ (the German word for geography), but in the end it is quite common sensical, if one thinks of other regions of the world where one has encountered this.
E.g., if you travel to the Saar region in SW Germany (where I grew up as a teenager), and which alternated between France and Germany for a number of times, people speak both languages and have affinities to both nations. The same holds true for Alsace Lorraine in France on the western side of the river Rhine. And there are many more examples.
Still. Nothing is as obvious as it seems. It won’t be a simple trip along Poland’s eastern border. But it will be a journey to rediscover what once was, what traces have been left, what monuments have survived or have been restored, to discover a people and their outlook on life after so much historic upheaval.
So let’s get cracking, the BMW has been mothballed in my garage for a decade and deserves a proper outing, just like its boss after 3 months of lockdown, me thinks.
Ready to rock and roll!
