Shirley Temple in Siberia

I am writing about the odyssey of a Polish girl through Russia, the Middle East, and England during the 1940s. One of her childhood memories is of going to the movies in Lwow and seeing Shirley Temple eat spaghetti. (That would have been Poor Little Rich Girl).

Presumably because of that adventure, she acquired a Shirley Temple doll, and when the NKVD put her on a cattle car to Siberia, of course she took the doll with her. Almost certainly this is the doll--well, not the very same doll, but a sibling. It was manufactured in Poland in the 1930s, and it has blonde hair rather than the brown hair of the original (and of all American Shirley Temple dolls). When I sent her a photo of a typical doll, she that she remembered hers as having lighter hair ("and more bedraggled, naturally"). Gosh, I love discoveries like this! Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Operation Unthinkable

I am enjoying Max Hastings's Winston's War: Churchill, 1940-1945. The most entrancing bit so far is Operation Unthinkable: in May 1945, Churchill ordered up a study of what it would take for the British, the Americans, and the Germans (!) to roll back the Red Army far enough to liberate Poland. When the chiefs of staff assured him that the notion was indeed Unthinkable, Churchill ordered up another study, this one to determine whether Britain could repel a Russian invasion, assuming the Americans pulled out of Europe and the Red Army advanced into France. Churchill, it seems, had a much clearer view of the Soviet Union than any of his contemporaries (or indeed than many of our contemporaries). Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

About those Polish concentration camps

The New York Times has now followed the lead of the Wall Street Journal and inserted an instruction in its style book for reporters and editors: Auschwitz was a "German Nazi" concentration camp, not a Polish one! Why did it take more than sixty years to figure that out?

Personally, I don't even like the term "Nazi," which has always struck me as an alibi for Germans behaving badly from 1933 to 1945. "The Nazi army." "Nazi-occupied Europe." The army was actually German--does that really need to be said? The Germans occupied Europe--does that really need to be said? And of course the Germans built the concentration camps, in Poland and elsewhere. (But mostly in Poland! Poland had three million Jews, and it was easier and more sanitary to murder them there. Indeed, German, French, Dutch, and other Jews were exported to Poland for the express purpose of working or otherwise doing them to death.) The impression left is that the Nazis came from some alien planet, and returned there in May 1945, never to trouble us again, leaving only the Poles with guilt for the atrocities the Germans committed.

I don't know how many letters to the editor I have written over the years on the subject of "Polish concentration camps,"  to The New Yorker among others. I never got an answer, and the letter was never published. Perhaps now this will change, but I am not optimistic. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Escape from the Gulag

Sally and I drove down to Salisbury MA yesterday, to the nearest 'plex that is screening The Way Back. This is a must-see film, especially for the increasing number of Americans who feel apologetic about our role in the Cold War. It's a long movie, and most of it, as Anthony Lane complains in this week's The New Yorker magazine, is a picaresque yarn of five men and a girl trekking across Siberia and Mongolia in their quest to escape the Soviet Union. Like all picaresque yarns, it's largely one damned thing after another, though some of it (especially the girl, who is supposed to be thirteen, and who is played by the wonderfully named Saoirse Ronan) is quite affecting.

But what must be seen, and soaked into memory, is the movie's first half hour, in which our hero, a Polish officer named Januscz (Colin Farrell) is battered by the NKVD, betrayed by his tortured wife, and dispatched to a slave labor camp in northern Siberia, where he first hews out logs from the forest, then hews out ore from a mine. (Sally kept her face covered through most of this.)

What's necessary to bear in mind is that this is all true. This happened to millions of men and women--Poles, Russians, Americans, anyone who fell afoul of that foul despotism in Moscow--and millions of them died in Stalin's Gulag. This may be difficult for a Good Person like Anthony Lane to accept, but it is true, and a virtual tip of the hat to Peter Weir for making a film of it. (The Way Back DVD will be released in April. If you prefer to wait, you can watch Katyn meanwhile.) Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Dziekuje!

Poland is one of history's most tormented nations, regularly invaded by its neighbors (and occasionally invading them), and in 1945 shifted like a skateboard several hundred miles to the west. This was Stalin's double punishment: eastern Poland was incorporated into the Soviet Ukraine, and in exchange Poland got a chunk of eastern Germany, thus diminishing both rivals and pushing the USSR's security zone deep into Europe.

The other day, Stalin's successors took responsibility for another of his atrocities against Poland: the murder of thousands of Polish officers and noncoms at Katyn and other forest sites. (The link is to the gripping 2007 film.) This is progress, as noted in the Wall Street Journal today. The editorial tells a lovely story about the jazz pianist Dave Brubeck, who was a soldier in the liberation of Europe from German control, and who visited Poland in 1958 on a cultural exchange mission. At that time, Mr Brubeck composed a piece entitled Dziekuje. He played it the other day at his 90th birthday celebration, at which time he explained that "dziekuje" is the Polish word for "thank you. And I want to play this piece as thanks to the people of Poland for resisting Soviet Communism."

When Soviet agents murdered those thousands of Poles, they intended to decapitate the future Polish society. They then blamed the atrocity on the Germans, figuring that no one could ever challange that story. Instead, they cemented the evil in historic memory, and encouraged rather than suppressed Poland's desire for freedom. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

On being a Pole during World War II

Many years ago, I hitchhiked from Paris to Perugia with this young woman. She was Polish--born in Lwow in the southeast, her father likely murdered in the Katyn Forest massacre, herself sent to Siberia with her mother and sister. They were among the minority of deportees who were rescued after Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 and Stalin was persuaded to scratch up a Polish army to fight on the western front. They were sent first to Iran, then the women and children were scattered all over the world, an experience that left Basia fluent in Russian, Arabic, French, and English, and Polish of course; in the spring of 1955, when I took this photo, she was heading to Perugia to perfect her Italian.

This all came alive to me again while reading the magnificent Bloodlands, an account of central Europe's agony from the 1930s to the 1950s. This in turn led me to borrow The Polish Deportees of World War II, containing first-hand accounts of this great hegira and the suffering it entailed. (Roughly ten percent of the Poles died in Iran or en route to it, of disease and malnutrition from their Russian exile--and these, remember, were from the select groups that actually got out of the Gulag, and those in turn were the hardiest of the deportees, who survived weeks in cattle cars or horse-drawn sleighs en route to the Russian outback.)

Lots of those Polish young men died in the Italian campaign, at Monte Cassino and elsewhere. I wonder if Basia knew that? Blue skies! -- Dan Ford