WELCOME TO POLAND: INTRODUCTION

June 20, 2019

Poland has been at the top of my travel list for more than a decade. Our son served an LDS mission there in 2004-2006. During and since that time I read book after book about Poland, some of which I will include in future posts. I was moved by the stories of modern Poles that our son shared with us, and I was captivated by the resilience and courage I read about.

On the other hand, my mother was not so big on Poland. She was German, and the Germans look down their noses at the Poles. She told me they used to have a saying in Germany, "If your car is missing, look for it in Poland," implying that all car thieves are Poles. However, she too was moved by our son's letters and stories from his mission, and I think her heart was softened somewhat during those two years. I wish she were still alive and that I could share some of our experiences with her now.

As it turns out, Poland is now one of my most favorite tourist destinations in the world. I would return in a heartbeat. There is so much history, anguish, and triumph there. Situated between two super powers, Germany on the west and Russia on the east, Poland has been subject to a constant game of tug-of-war, and yet the Poles have managed to retain a national identify separate from either country. 

World War II was especially hard on Poland, partly because of its location, partly because its large Jewish population was annihilated by the Nazis, and partly because no one came to its aid. Poland, of course, was the first country invaded by Hitler in September 1939 (more on that in later posts).

Of all the countries that fought in World War II, Poland lost the highest percentage of its population--almost 20%. Six million Poles died, half of whom were Jews. Less than 10% of the total fatalities were caused by combat. Rather, people died in concentration camps, at the hands of brutal invaders, and of starvation and disease. It took almost 30 years after the war for Poland to recover the population it had at the beginning of the war.

Graph from here

Poland was more or less gifted to Russia at the Yalta Conference of 1944, and while Poland retained some autonomy in comparison to other Soviet states, the Poles were consistently resistant to communism. 

Lech Walesa, photo from here

In the early 1980s, during my college years, the independent labor union Solidarnosc ("Solidarity") thrust Poland into the headlines. This non-violent movement against Soviet oppression eventually led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. I was an English major at BYU at the time, and one of the professors in my department, Eugene England, founded a charitable organization called "Food for Poland," which raised and shipped millions of dollars' worth of food and supplies to the Polish people. (See more about Food for Poland here.)  A special "Fast for Poland" over the 1982 Christmas break, led by Gene England, raised over a million dollars.

In 1983, Lech Walesa, an electrician by trade and leader of the Solidarity trade union, was awarded the Nobel Peace Price. His work led to the first free elections since World War II, and Walesa was elected President of Poland in 1990.  

Things didn't change overnight, of course. Becoming a democracy after years of oppression isn't easy. The country struggled economically for years, and it was still struggling when our son was there in 2004-2006.

But by the time we visited in 2019, Poland's economy, based on nominal GDP, was 22nd in the world, coming in just behind Taiwan and just ahead of Belgium. (See this source.) Its economic climb in the last decade has been nothing short of miraculous.

Our guide in Warsaw, an educated, eloquent young man named Pawel, put it this way, "I can't believe how good my life is. Things are so much better than they were ten years ago. I have everything I want. I feel like I am living in a fairy tale."  It was a memorable expression of satisfaction, and I had to compare that to my own and other Americans' needs for more and more and bigger and better.

Another important Polish figure during my lifetime was John Paul II, originally Karol Józef Wojtyła, who was the Pope of the Catholic Church from 1978 to 2005. He lived a fascinating life and was (and remains) enormously popular in Poland. He was the first Pope I myself had any interest in. His role in bringing down communism in Poland and then in the rest of Europe was intriguing, as were his world travels.

Our son was in Poland when John Paul II died on April 2, 2005, and he witnessed the grieving of the Polish people. 

My final emotional connection to Poland comes through a young man we met through our son. They became friends when our son lived in Poland. Mariusz immigrated from Poland to the United States shortly after our son returned from Poland, and we became friends with him. Over the years we have kept in contact, and I have found him to exemplify everything good about Poland: resilience, friendliness, hard work, courage, and intelligence. He married an American woman several years ago, and they have two children. Just this past year Mariusz became a citizen of the United States. We couldn't be prouder. (And by the way, Mariusz even helped us plan this trip!)

Overall, I think I had a pretty strong emotional connection to Poland before I even set foot in the country. Our travels there intensified that connection as I fell in love with the beautiful countryside, the delicious food, the complex and tragic history, and most of all, the Polish people.

If I get a little effusive in the upcoming posts, I just can't help myself.

READING

As noted above, I've read many, many books about Poland. A good one to start with is His Holiness: John Paul II and the History of Our Time by Carl Bernstein and Marco Politi, published in 1996.

Why choose such an old book that doesn't even cover the last few years of the Pope's life?  Simple. The author it is THE Carl Bernstein, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Watergate reporter. His co-author, Marco Politi, is considered a "Vaticanologist" of the first degree.

Their biography covers the full life of the man who became Pope, beginning with his birth in 1920 (which means he was 19 when Germany invaded Poland in 1939 and 25 at the end of the war) and ending nine or ten years before his death, when he was already quite feeble, due in part to two assassination attempts.

Both a secular and a religious biography, this is an excellent, readable examination of the incredible life of a significant contributor to religion in the modern world, and along the way you get quite a bit of Poland's 20th century history as a bonus.