Untold Stories of Polish Heroes from World War II

Each addition to the stock of published sources and original biographical sketches helps build a solid foundation for scholarship. This is especially the case when the work is in the current lingua franca, English. Untold Stories of Polish Heroes from World War II, by Alexandra Ziółkowska-Boehm, is such a collection. Eight mini-biographies with a substantive foreword by the foremost historian of the American Polonia, James Pula, a brief preface, and a highly reflective addendum on writing “creative non-fiction” provide a valuable building block for twentieth-century Polish history.The first biography only touches on events during World War II. Ziółkowska-Boehm traces the life of the Polish diplomat Tadeusz Brzeziński (1896–1991) and, very briefly, his son, Zbigniew Brzeziński (1928–2017), President Carter's national security adviser. A person who always knew “how to give of himself, how to make permanent the fruit of his actions” (p. 22), the elder Brzeziński served as the Polish Consul General to Canada during the war and continued as an active leader of Canadian Polonia till his death. Zbigniew Brzeziński's success in academia and the Carter administration was, “in part, the product of very deliberate determination . . . to meld thought and action” (p. 25). Both stories are based on face-to-face interviews, a method, Ziółkowska-Boehm uses adroitly throughout the book.The second biography moves to the European theatre of World War II. As with so many persons from the Kresy (the former Polish eastern borderlands), Rudolf Falkowski (1919–2012) lived through exile, fought for Poland across the Old World, and ultimately settled in the New World. Falkowski found a love of writing and flying during his youth in the southeastern borderlands. With the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany's opportunist ally, the Soviet Union, he was forced into the Red Army, traveled through Central Asia, served in the 303 Squadron of the RAF, emigrated to Canada, and worked odd jobs, for instance as a farm hand and Bible salesman, before serving as a draftsman in the Port of Montreal for thirty years. At the age of eighty-eight, Falkowski published his journal, which he began in 1929 at the age of ten. Ziółkowska-Boehm focuses on her correspondence with the author, mainly on the process of writing. Historical content is scant. Readers will be sorely disappointed if they seek substantive historical information, but the material is instructive nonetheless. Ziółkowska-Boehm also misses basic information about Falkowski's book that is easily found on the internet in lubimyczytac.pl, where we learn that the full title is Żużle na dłoni (Ashes in a palm) and that the journal covers only the twenty years between 1929 and 1948. This was Flakowski's second book; the first was The Captain Amreich Affair (Doliwa Publishers, 2001) a partially autobiographical work never mentioned by Ziółkowska-Boehm. Flakowski's correspondence to Ziółkowska-Boehm indicates the hero sent valuable information to Jerzy Giedroyc's Zeszyty Historyczne (published by Instytut Literacki w Paryżu) but none of the material is revealed. Here is a second characteristic of Untold Stories. The collection does not always deliver but does point us in auspicious directions.The author's preoccupation with the process of writing begins chapter 3, but this is followed by a pleasant surprise. The biography about Wiesław Chrzanowski offers fresh information about his photographs from the Warsaw Uprising, the uprising itself, displaced persons camps in Germany, his studies in Germany, and his eventual return to Poland, where he worked in the Institute of Precise Mechanics for forty-three years. Chrzanowski's recollections included powerful pictures of the savagery of war during the Warsaw Uprising: The front walls of houses 1 and 3 were pressed inside at the first and third stories. The owner despaired, but she was comforted to see a pillow lying in the ruins and she wanted to take it. I told her to leave it because it wasn't a pillow. She touched it and fainted. It was a naked abdomen, not bleeding, cut off evenly at the groin and the ribs. A cut-off foot stood on a window sill and on the remnants of the window frame, there hung intestines, draped like a curtain. (p. 49)The chapter includes recollections from Chrzanowski's wife, Dziusia, born Halina Borczykówna. At Ravensbruck, she helped save two Jewish children and was forced to undress and lay on a pile of dying women who begged to be left alone. “Once they brought in French women. . . . What they did, their behavior, that shattered my image of French women. I still cannot recover from what I'd seen” (p. 57). Unfortunately, the author chooses not to tell the reader the main point. This kind of omission and the slight violation of grammar are not uncommon in Untold Stories.“Varsovians in the States” is the most substantive and scholarly chapter in the book. This double biography of Krystyna and Marek Jaroszewicz is supplemented with helpful footnotes and includes a short sketch of Marek's father, Władysław, who like many prominent Poles before the Russian Revolution had worked in parts of the tsarist empire. There is little information about the war. Marek withdrew with his father as part of the retreat into Romania through the Middle East and France to Switzerland, where he finished his architectural studies and was reunited with his fiancée. Marek Jaroszewicz became a prominent American architect. It was Krystyna who was the real hero. She served with the Polish cavalry and as a nurse in the Warsaw Uprising. Oddly, more interesting is the side story of her boss, the Countess Maria Tarnowska, vice president of the Executive Board of the First Light Cavalry Regiment. Tarnowska successfully negotiated with the Germans the evacuation of civilians from the ruins of Warsaw and the classification of the insurrectionists as prisoners of war (p. 64). The chapter offers a substantive view of life in exile. “Immigration had all the features of Polish people, but they were exaggerated, sometimes downright grotesquely so. An English friend married to a Pole . . . said, ‘I learned that if Poles are comfortable, they bitch about and badmouth each other, and when they're bad off, they offer hot soup to warm you up.’” (p. 74).The remaining chapters are short, and each has a distinctive quality. “I was that child about to be born” describes the survival of Maria Kowal and her family amid the massacres of Poles by Ukrainians in Volhynia and their evacuation to Germany. The next biography describes the journeys of Danuta Batorska and her family begun as part of the ethnic cleansing of eastern Poland by the invading Soviets. Surviving the Urals and Kazakstan, the Poles were evacuated from the Soviet Union after Operation Barbarossa. The Batorskis traveled through Iran and India to Mexico and, after seven years, to the United States where Batorska became a professor of art at the University of Houston. “People with a past as traumatic as mine are lonely in America, as they are on their own. In the States doctors are not familiar with such cases, or people with similar experiences. Only the Holocaust received pubic attention and serious study” (p. 99).The second to the last chapter traces the life of a Polish Jew from eastern Poland. Having escaped the German-constructed Lwów Ghetto, he fought in the Polish Home Army, was exiled in France, returned to Poland but left a second time due to the imposition of Stalinism, stayed a while in the Netherlands, and finally made a new home in Canada. In the process, Marion Tenenbaum became Marion Czarniecki and then Marion Andre, founding director of Teatre Plus in Toronto. The account includes a copy of Andre's letter in the Toronto paper the Globe and Mail from September 25, 1989. “Life Saved by Poles” condemned Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Shimir's comment “that Poles are anti-Semitic from birth, that ‘they suck it with their mother's milk’” (pp. 115–16). “One should reject such wholesale condemnations. It is this type of sweeping generalization that is a curse of our times” (p. 105).“Angola-Born, Brazil-Based Poet, Artist” is a brief, somewhat lyrical, somewhat fragmentary end to Untold Stories. The artist Tomasz Łychowski observes that “unfortunately, the Polish Diaspora is gradually crumbling” in South America (p. 120). With a Polish father and German mother, he is a person of multiple identities. “But deep down, I am Polish. As Shakespeare put it, ‘in the end truth will out.’” On this quirky note, the main part of Untold Stories ends.A productive and recognized author, Aleksandra Ziółkowska-Boehm is fascinated with the writing craft. “Annex: Literary Journalism, Storytelling, or Literature of Fact” is highly reflective, at times, very personal and introverted. Ziółkowska-Boehm looks to two writers as a source of inspiration: Earnest Hemingway and Isaac Bashevis Singer. She argues that Hemingway's journalism was literary since it told a story that caught the reader's attention. Singer captivated his readers with well-woven narratives told with passion and intimate ownership of the story. Hemingway's nonfiction style was called literary journalism and in the wider sense, the “literature of fact.” “If writers choose the literature of fact . . . they . . . must carefully observe that the basic facts of the story are accurate—the place and time of an event, as well as the cast of characters. . . . The challenge is how to tell the truth, be it ‘my truth’ or that of the other person” (p. 128). Must only the “basic facts” be accurate? With the admiration for a writer of novels and short stories, is Ziółkowska-Boehm's approach sliding into the trap of “lying the truth”?Untold Stories of Polish Heroes from World War II does not go that far. But neither are the stories as compelling as they might be. If Ziółkowska-Boehm attempted to produce captivating short story-like narratives, her efforts have been greater than the effect. If the intent was to provide mini-biographies or mini-histories, there was more success, although the periodic intrusion of the author's self-absorption in her task as a writer is a distraction. Also, the numerous ellipses leave narratives punctuated with lacunae and histories on the verge of depth but never quite reaching a satisfying ripeness. The final product has a scrapbook quality. Untold Stories offers valuable historical postings with frayed edges and blank spots, sketches that have value in themselves but more worth as rare material for further scholarship and markers pointing to additional historical evidence.

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