Word: pilsudski
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There were three-and-a-half million Jews in Poland once. They shared a 900-year heritage, a richly diverse culture. Some served in Marshal Pilsudski's army, fighting for a free Poland and helping to repel the Red Army after the First World War. Some fervently believed in Zionism: others would die for the socialist Bund: still others thought "Nothing that didn't happen before should happen now." Some were orthodox, some reformed, most were poor, a few wealthy: many clustered in the big cities and universities, some lived in villages, and a few stayed on the farm. Some...
Several scenes stick out: The sorry-eyed children reluctantly munch on their morning bagels and milk: the sobering footage of World War I's devistation and of its wounded living in the pogroms: the spectacular sights of the bustling backdrop of the prosperous cities, the panorama of Pilsudski's funeral, and the sweeping shots of synagogues...
Countess Potolska sits in the sun-dazed plazas of Mexico, but her eyes blindly stare at aristocratic Polish drawing rooms, the image of Pilsudski, and her 20-year-old son standing in the streets of Warsaw in grim defiance of Nazi soldiery. Hawk-eyed and hawk-beaked, the countess is a Polish Jewess and a refugee, one of the world's involuntary tourists whose heaviest luggage is memory...
Eighteen years after Bismarck's death, the Germans got the chance to "help Poland a little." In World War I they gave Poland its independence under Pilsudski, on condition that it fight Russia. Germany was defeated, but the Allies at Versailles recognized the Republic of Poland. The Bolsheviks also recognized Poland, but a couple of years later Stalin bared Soviet imperialist policy in a speech to the Polish comrades in which he insisted that they must understand "the Russian problem," and consider Russia's dominance "primordial to the entire revolutionary movement . . . because Soviet power is the basis...
...attend a Cominform conference in Rumania where the satellite leaders were to gang up on Tito. That was enough for Stalin. At a signal Gomulka's comrades turned on him. General Marian Spychalski was Gomulka's chief denouncer. Gomulka was accused of being "permeated with the Pilsudski spirit." Economic Minister Mine accused him of betraying his underground comrades to the Gestapo. Said Polit-burocrat Jakub Berman: "Let Comrade Gomulka repudiate his mystical notions and let him march together with the party." But the stubborn Gomulka had another idea. Said he: "I have come to the conclusion that...