I have a.
Before introducing our Today Speaker, I would like to ask Professor Timothy Garton Ash to offer some introductory remarks about the witness caucus,
who is essentially the platform of our lecture series. Thank you.
Well, it's a very great program to say a few words about Mr. Cousins, to give his name for this lecture.
And let me start by thanking Dr. for our for allowing us to name the lecture after that have come across.
And it's a great pleasure to have you with us this evening.
Mr. Clarke was key, was the most important Polish scholar ever to be on the permanent faculty,
on the Oxford University lecture himself the probably immediately of some medieval laughing scholar
who wondered if I'm going to dedicate this program to it to Oxford than the future of the claim.
But we know that this is the case. He actually spent nearly half his life in Oxford, having been,
in fact driven knowledge of the People's Republic of Poland after the events of 1968 and
having himself escaped with relief from the People's Republic of Berkeley in California.
He found refuge in also part of Oxford, in which, you know, what I think would be described as a people's republic,
and where he spent the rest of his academic life was a Chicago now,
where not many continental European intellectuals lecture Karpovsky regarded with a kind of affectionate, benign, humorous semi detachment.
He found it a delightful, somewhat amusing place, something that in left to test for me was describe the rain, the ill fitting windows,
the strange man of the Church of England, which he always found a very entertaining institute and said, I really wasn't confused with Q religion.
He once said, threatening if an island Oxford is an island within Britain.
Also college is in Ireland within Oxford. And I am an island know so.
But he also, of course, very much appreciated the academic freedom that he found here, the tolerance,
the decency, the intellect that he was one of the most learned people I have ever met, like Azar Berlin.
He could quote at the drop of a hat.
And all you have to do with democracy, that first principle.
He had the most wonderful sense of humour come through in a lot of his writings.
One of his favourite, one of my favourite quotes is one of the best that he invented a conversion,
an atheist which for free would undertake convert you from any afraid of you.
I'd rather see the ending of a playful ideology, the free with according to the difficulty of conversion.
So to convert you to the Church of England, for example,
the level of Judaism that you invite you to meditate for a hobby, Islam is slightly more expensive.
It's an absolutely characteristic of method.
You also have a quality which he described that none of these essays is going to be a very powerful, very romantic phrase.
We all, from one of his most characteristic qualities, was the sheer intellectual delight of discovering the truth,
however difficult or paradoxical that truth was his work in the nearly 40 years he was based at Oxford,
I would say had four simple vibration for me described.
The first was the main currents of Marxism, his most certainly his largest and most famous work, which he started in Poland or completed it.
LITTLE So we actually have a wonderful presentation in this very room of the new edition of The Main Card to Marxism,
published by Norton in 2005, a packed road full of students at Oxford.
And it was, I think, particularly for this, that he got out of this extraordinary book of of the Erasmus prize,
de Tocqueville prize, the Jerusalem Prize, the MacArthur Award, the Kluger Prize, and the list goes on.
Actually, by the time he'd been in office for a few years, he wasn't particularly or mainly interested in Marxism.
He had been there and done that. His major intellectual interest was religion and a large, the largest part of his work done in all that concern.
Religion in the broadest sense works like the from comic book of religion, metaphysical horror God Owes US Nothing,
a book only recently rediscovered and just published in Poland of Jesus Christ of Refinement.
And so it's particularly fitting that under the auspices of the program on all these programs,
we have a doctoral student working on this and KARPOVSKY and with it,
the third major thread of his work is what I might call literary philosophical essays.
Tarkovsky was a wonderful writer, not just a philosopher, but a writer.
Essays, fables, satires, powerful poet with titles like My Correct Views on Everything or How to Be a Conservative Liberal Socialist.
A wonderful essay. If you want to get a taste of this work and your reading only in English, there is a penguin volume entitled Is God Happy?
A selection of essays introduced by his daughter Agnes Circumscribed and also just translated a lot of his work wonderfully.
Is God happy? You will get a taste of that wonderful literary essayist, ladies and gentlemen, the last great friend of his work,
actually, his life, you know, that was poet Thomas Mann once said, Where I am is driven and this.
The same might be said of National Krakowski.
Where I am is Pope and wherever he was he was in Poland and Poland with him.
He made a major contribution, even from abroad, even from exile, to the discussions of the democratic opposition in Poland.
Essays like the Theses of Hope and Hopelessness.
He was a member of for the Workers Defence Committee.
He was constantly engaged in letters, poems.
And in the last years after 1989, of course, travel frequently to Poland, where he was celebrated quite literally as a kid,
not just metaphorically, because he had been somewhat in jest, crowned the king of Central Europe by a few of us and some friends.
And there was a ceremony in Warsaw where he was actually physically crowned as the king of Central Europe, along with his previous princess.
So he was present in Poland to all those years that he lived in Oxford and of course,
engaged very seriously with both politics and public intellectual life.
And one of the most moving things in his last years, of course, when we already had quite a lot of great students at Oxford,
was the time that he would devote to her students to seeing groups of her students
literally sitting at his feet and him engaging with them and then with him.
And so it is it's not just fitting that the major keynote lecture of the program on modern Poland is the Holocaust lecture.
It would be absurd if a program of modern Poland at Oxford did not have that Holocaust lecture.
I am sure he would have been absolutely fascinated by the subject of today's lecture by
our very distinguished lecturer who thought for a few minutes he is about to introduce.
And I hope that our lecture imagine that Fred Kautsky sitting in the front row and listening in his lecture.
Thank you. Thank you very much for this illuminating remarks.
I am extremely honoured today to introduce the first lecture to the lecture series that scholar.
These are historian and professor at the Institute of Political Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences.
He's also a fellow at the Centre for Immigration Research at the University of Warsaw.
And since March 2014, he has been the director of Polling, the Museum of the History of Polish Jews.
Dr. Stoller has published ten books and more than 100 articles on the history of Polish Jewish relations,
the Communist regime in Poland and international migrations in the 20th century.
And I'm going to read you titles of his books, both in Polish and in English, so that I can actually test my translating skills.
I will start with Nadja, exemplar of the open extermination, which came out in 1995.
A company officials that's the boss of Geneva decision Chevron, which was Judicature Energy, show Russia the anti-Zionist campaign in Poland,
1967 1968 publishing the year 2000 drivers who show me Francis Polsky because he visits the dishwasher because
during the depression to show change a country without exit with a question of migrations from Poland 1948 1989,
and which came out in 2010. Fathers of Migration in Central Europe, written together with Professor Claire Wallace Perez.
Funny, some young Polish People's Republic continuous and change region together with marches on over desert bioreactor
machine up lovesick Polish United Workers Party has power powerhouse Britain together with just the person in
2012 that you still out there as lecturer in history for many years and served on advisory boards of several
Polish and international institutions and journals at please give a warm welcome to our speakers today Professor.
The title doesn't tell you much, except that it's about pollen and Pluto.
Several pollens and one century. The one century. The 20th century.
Uh, uh. And is slightly misleading because when preparing to this lecture I realised that there were at least three
pollens and probably six or seven of them posed follow the French in giving numbers to the republics.
At present we have the Third Republic, such as which was Perdita.
But this is not the Third Republic in the 20th century.
Actually, the first in accounting is the old pre partitions, pre 19th century, not the republic, which ended up in the late 18th century.
The second one is the interwar republic of Poland, and the third one is its responsibility to Polska, which began at the end of 1989.
You may know that there is something missing in between, and this is the People's Republic of Poland, which was called a republic.
But again, following French, we don't give a number to this country.
Like the French don't give a number to the state of Vichy, which is not a republic in the French country.
So I will focus on the three major problems that existed in the 20th century, and especially on the territorial and population aspects of a country.
My understanding of the word country in English is that it's slightly more political than the word P or land in the continental languages.
I understand that country in English is more a state than just a region of a specific culture, history or economy.
Poland in the 20th century, or the historical territory of Poland in the 20th century,
was an incredible natural laboratory of state making, state unmaking and state remaking,
which may give us some interesting insights into the general questions of making the state,
and especially the relation between the population, territory and statehood.
And this, of course, Kosky. Among his many works, he has also written exactly on this topic.
In 1987, he has published a tale, a fable on war among the lemurs.
I hope I pronounce it well.
Small mammals living in Southeast Asia, so small and big lemurs have been at war since a meeting some 30 years before the publication of this article.
And the meeting started with a small lemur saying The land of the lemurs is a great and magnificent country.
Why so? Because lemurs live in it. And Lemuria is called the Moorea because lemurs live in it.
Then a large lemur got up very angry and said, It's untrue that Lemuria is so cold because lemurs live in it.
On the contrary, lemurs are called lemurs because they live in La Moria and anyone who says otherwise is a traitor to the more you.
So in this short story, grasp the nexus of population, territory and identity.
Lemurs don't live in Eastern Europe, so it was not a symbol of any specific people or a nation of Eastern Europe.
But it had very obvious resonance in Polish political debates beginning in the late in the late 19, early 20th century.
So let me start chronologically first, this map photo introduction.
This is a simplified map of changing territories of Poland in the 20th century.
I would come back to it several times.
What is important for us at this moment is that you have a territory that in the 19th century belonged to the Prussian then German state,
the blue one, which was a part of the Hapsburg Empire called Galicia,
and then two parts that belong to the Russian Empire, one which was directly incorporated in the Russian Empire,
and the other which was a relic of the old Polish kingdom, which I will come back to in a second.
So we begin the 20th century. Without Poland, there is no Poland.
And actually one of the French writers of the late 19th century could say that the action of his drama is taking place in Poland.
That means nowhere. There was a name for it, but there was no estate, so it existed as a country in the continental,
the meaning of the term, there was a a land, but not a state.
However, what the closer look at the closer look, we realise that legally, legally, in 1914, the Kingdom of Poland largely forgotten.
It was forgotten because a state of this name was established at the Vienna Conference following the Napoleonic Wars.
It was a part of the Russian Empire and each consecutive sort of Russia was the kingdom of Poland.
However, following the failed uprising of 1830 and in 1863,
the Russian rulers gradually abolished almost completely the autonomy of the Kingdom of Poland.
However, the name remained on the books and there were some legal differences between the rest of the Empire and the and the Polish kingdom.
And that was a useful argument for the Germans in Austria and occupied the territory of the Kingdom of Poland.
This one in 1915, they took it from the Russian hands and decided to use the Polish card in international relations.
And the reason was quite simple. The bloodshed on the western front and the need for manpower, for cannon fodder.
So already in 1916, in the fall of 1916,
German and Austrian governors declared declared that the rulers would like to establish an autonomous kingdom of Poland,
Romania in fraternal union with the Balkan and German empires.
They established a free person regency.
There was no king at the time. Well, the lesser kolakowski was not to be appointed.
It gave this country a name. It gave it a kind of government, very limited government.
They didn't decide the borders at the time, so it was unclear what at the borders of Poland.
But there was a legal entity, of course, recognised only by the central powers, by nobody else.
So this is this this first Poland of the 20th century.
It had a currency and you could see the currency had the white eagle, the symbol of the old Polish kingdom.
It also had an army in construction, properly called Polish government.
The project failed. It was quite unsuccessful but was very important because this way the Germans and Austrians opened the bidding process.
Who will offer more to the Polish national movement and then other rulers, beginning with the revolutionary Russian government.
American presidents. Then the French government gradually were expanding the declarations of on the
likeliness and desirability of a Polish state that would emerge after the war.
And in particular, President Wilson among his 14 points.
In January 1918, the first one was he declared that an independent Polish state shall be erected,
which should include the territories populated by indisputably Polish populations.
So the Wilson belong to the small dreamers. He believed that Poland is the country inhabited by indisputably Polish population.
I'm sorry. After a long struggle, which I'm not going to give you all the time,
because it's very complex, did emerge that Poland finally it finally in the borders,
which you can see emerge in 1921, 1922,
after several wars with virtually all the neighbours and the key decisions made universally by the great powers in relation to Germany.
So a Polish Patriots claim that Poland was reborn at that moment.
However, it had a dissimilarity to the old Polish kingdom.
The Polish-lithuanian Commonwealth of the pre partition era was very distant.
It was much smaller. Yes, it had all the three historical capitals of Poland, Krakow, Vilna and Warsaw.
However, it was less than a third of the territory of the partition problem.
It had at the beginning 27 million inhabitants and some 390,000 square kilometres.
So much less than the old Poland, the First Republic,
but about three times more than both the Russian Kingdom of Poland and the German Kingdom of Poland, which I have just this.
But notably it had some 3 million people less than the same territory before the First World War.
And I stress it because First World War is largely forgotten in Eastern Europe.
It didn't fit into the national or nationalist narratives of the great calamities of the 20th century,
because for Poles, Ukrainians, Jews and some other peoples of Eastern Europe, it was a fratricide.
That means Polish.
Ukrainian Jewish soldiers were fighting both in the Russian army, Austrian army and the Prussian army, so it didn't fit it very well.
It's been dominated by a much smaller, much smaller defence of national legions like Pilsudski Aegis or the Czechoslovak Legion, who were, well,
some 3 million inhabitants of the historical Polish territory was drafted to the German,
Austrian and the Russian army, and only 1% of this number was in the piece of skin.
So it was a much smaller landscape, but much, much better. Remember the cancer, which you can see.
Its first task was to reintegrate the historical territories, the territories that greatly changed in the 19th century.
Being a part of the legal, economic, political system of the three different empires,
and I would stress in particular belonging to three different economies, reintegration of Poland was an economic disaster.
Western Poland lost markets in Berlin and Germany, and that was a agriculturally well developed greater Poland.
Between the coal mines and the steelworks, this DCR tariff zone was erected.
The textile industry, of which lost the great Russian market.
And the price was independence. So Poles were happy.
Although the GDP of the pre 1914 level was reached only again in 1928, a few months before the beginning of the Great Depression.
So from the economic point of view,
the costs of the reconfiguration of markets after the destruction of great multinational empires of Central and Eastern Europe were substantial.
Of course, the cost of material reconstruction. After this destruction of the First World War.
But this I would like to stress, because first it's forgotten is somehow doesn't fit with the glorious national narrative that
independence has a cost and we can measure this costs zloty dollars British pound at the time and so on.
But certainly most of ethnic poles was ready to pay this price.
And I stress that most of them because certainly not all of them. It seems that, for example,
the reactions to the beginning of the First World War among the Polish speaking population of the historical
Polish territory was not necessarily completely alienated from the reality to the house of copies of Works,
House of Romanos or the King of Prussia. I would say that it was only the next war that made all Polish peasants into Poles.
I mean nationally conscious poles, integration of the economies, the legal systems of the three countries, different currencies.
By the way, you concede at the beginning this Polish territory was using several currencies of the
occupying force and as please see especially this meddled by the 10 million of Polish marks,
this is a sign of hyperinflation of the early 1920s.
And only then, after significant monetary reform, Polish currency, the restabilize,
which was a major burden for the economy during the Great Depression,
which goes in impose de facto austerity policies against what the American or the German government was doing at the time this country.
Let me go back to to the map. This country not only consisted of historically three different regions,
regions that the previous 120 years, more than 120 years, had remained in three different empires.
It was also very culturally, religiously and ethnically diverse.
Well, not more diverse. The average East European country, because ethnic poles made some 60 to 66%.
We don't have exact figures because the data from the censuses, especially the scenes of 1930, are not fully reliable.
Some people were made to declare themselves Polish while they not necessarily were Polish, but still some 60% of the population was was ethnic Polish.
So there was certain discrepancy between the model of the political regime,
which was to a large extent copied from France, like significant parts of the Polish interwar constitution,
a highly centralist nation state with a with a unified administration, and the de facto nature of the state, which was a nationality state.
And the tension between the ethnic diversity of the country and the political model in took and also
certain political ideas of what a modern nation is became the major political problem of interwar Poland.
So if the integration of the legal systems free economies railroad goes into one system of the police raids
was quite effective the integration of citizens of different ethnic groups into one political Polish nation.
This, we can see to a large extent, failed. This applied even to groups that were dispersed like the Jews who didn't have any
territorial claims on Poland and some other groups had territorial claims in Poland,
the eastern side of Galicia, where most of it was contested between Poles and Ukrainians,
virtually all of western Poland was a contested territory between Poles and Germans.
This part of north eastern Poland was contested by Lithuanians and actually Lithuania in the government.
Up to the end of the interwar period, claimed that the city of Vienna viewed New Zealand.
This is one of the cities with many names. Was the capital of Lithuania under temporary Polish occupation.
So. Developing a stable enough narrative that could incorporate groups like Ukrainians, Germans or the two Anyons was especially challenging.
But it didn't work also with the Jews who were largely dispersed and didn't have any territorial claims on Poland.
In a desperate situation, Polish leaders tended to a solution, which Rogers Brubaker called the nationalising state.
Poland wasn't just a nation state. It was a state who was nationalising its citizens,
which meant colonisation policies towards Ukrainians below Russians, Lithuanians, but not necessarily the Jews.
And ironically, among the young Jews, especially the generation that was born in interwar Poland, acculturation went very fast.
At the end of interwar Poland, virtually all Polish Jews spoke fluent Polish, which was not the case, of course, at the beginning of it.
In the city of West stock,
which made the part of the Russian Empire the second language of Polish of the list of Jews in the early 20th century, it was Russian.
And the first one, of course, was Yiddish.
So despite the acculturation of the 1920s and 1940s, there was no success in political integration of the of the minorities.
So we have certain discrepancy.
Interwar Poland was a modernising state. Its elite had the modernising objectives.
They wanted Poland not just to be strong, to be independent, to be sovereign.
They believed that the only way to achieve these goals is to make Poland modern.
And the the idea of modernity, of course, was the idea of modernity of the 1920s and thirties,
which meant centralisation, industrialisation, urbanisation, education, especially at the elementary level.
And I need to stress that at the beginning of the interwar republic in eastern Poland, most of the population was illiterate.
So one of the great successes was to teach this population through the 20 year, 20 year period of independence.
At the end of them on their minority, some 20% of them was with the illiterate.
And of course, many of them learned to read and write in Polish the official language of the of the country.
This. Poland disappeared in September 1939.
You have a copy of the German Soviet agreement from September 1949.
This is not the most famous or infamous Ribbentrop out of pocket of August 1939.
The original Ribbentrop out of Pact planned to divide Poland Poland along the Vistula.
So Warsaw would have been like Berlin during the Cold War period with the German part of Warsaw and the Soviet part of Warsaw,
because Soviet army invaded Poland later than was expected.
Soviet Union got only 50% of the Polish territory east of the Booker River, as you can see here.
And it was the Germans who were left with the question that was stipulated in the original Ribbentrop out of Pact,
namely what to do should we make a Polish state in the future?
In the original agreement, both parties agree that they are. They will talk about it later on.
They didn't decide it in August 1939, which was a reasonable policy.
They didn't know what may happen during the war, but they still took into consideration the idea of having a Polish state.
But nevertheless, both countries claimed that the Polish state ceased to exist, which was a legal justification for the Soviet invasion, by the way.
Soviet government claimed that the Polish state ceased to exist, which is of course untrue, and invaded the eastern part of the territory.
So for the next almost six years, we may say that there was no Poland again.
Here you have Hitler's Europe. You don't see any country with the name of Poland.
However, the problem is that there were many parallel pillars at the same time, none of them full of fields.
The definition of a sovereign state, controlling a territory, having a nation, a population.
But Poland existed under different forms. So first of all, the legal government of Poland remained remained in exile.
Thanks to a clause of the Polish constitution of the night in the thirties, the presidents during war could appoint his successor.
So Polish president was interned in Romania, could appoint a new president residing in France at that time.
And this president could appoint a new government.
Government of General Sikorski, who first resided in France and then after the defeat of France in 1940, moved to this country.
So from the legal point of view, Poland, as the state existed,
it was just occupied initially two countries and then somebody of Germany claimed the opposite.
But France, Great Britain, United States,
most of the Interwar League of Nations recognised the Polish government as the legal representative of the occupied Poland.
And the Fact of London, we can say that London was the capital of Poland between 1940 and 1945.
This country, this government had the executive, the government with no Sikorski.
It had the quasi parliament, the Polish National Council. It had an army in exile and had the Navy in exile.
It participated in the war effort of Great Britain and other allies.
But it didn't control the territory. Sometime later there emerged another body which post-Cold Policy post-football gym,
the Polish underground state, which was even more extraordinary than the state in exile.
Namely, it was underground administration, civilian and military,
underground secret army, underground judiciary system, underground and vocational system.
All of it existed under German occupation to a lesser extent under the Soviet occupation, 1939 1941.
And the complexity of this invisible state testifies to incredible managerial
skills of Poles Wholesale Detroit not famous for their managerial skills,
but with proper motivation. As we see that was possible against one of the best organised and most effective states in Europe at the time.
That is not in Germany. So I think the the test of managerial efficiency was passed extraordinarily in terms of rank and file citizens of the state.
What is important? It was a voluntary states. Only those who wanted to obey the underground authorities obeyed underground authorities.
Well, yes, it was a state that was using violence against collaborators, not only against the occupiers, but also collaborators.
So there was a way of executing certain. Decisions. But broadly, the state could do only what the population wanted to do.
And this way the state became an ethnic Polish state because largely ethnic minorities
of interwar Poland didn't join it or were not welcomed actually at the beginning.
So the 19th century tradition of the Polish independence movement first romantic, then modern nationalist, influenced the nature of the state.
It was a secret network, a voluntary state of largely ethnic poles.
Parallel to the state, which was indivisible. Germans established another state.
They called it general government. And here you can see both Third Reich and the Soviet Union incorporated large parts of the Polish territory.
However, the eastern part of the German zone of occupation was left with Krakow, and Warsaw was left as actually a German colony in Eastern Europe.
It was very much a colonial institution similar to the pre-World War One.
German colonies in Africa and India says also similar to the protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia,
another colony the German administration was running in Central and Eastern Europe.
The state also had the currency, and notably the bank that was issuing this currency was the bank in Poland.
So the currency, using the term of government, was the last evidence of the existence of a country called Poland.
Of course, the governor general and the governor of individual provinces were Germans.
Germans fully control administration to the lowest level actually preserved.
Polish mayors or deputy mayors, the village leaders at the lowest level, but under strict German control.
They introduced the own legislation. They own the penal code.
And most importantly for us, they introduced a very colonial racial hierarchy of the population level.
Government was an instrument. Of the revolution of the Nazi revolution at several levels in times of change of ownership,
massive transfer of property from virtually all the Jewish property was nationalised,
became the property of the Third Reich, but also all major Polish businesses and the property of anyone arrested or
accused of anti-German activity was becoming the property of the Third Reich.
Plus, we must mention massive private looting by German soldiers, officers, officials sent to Poland.
Some of them became famous. For example, Mr. Schindler, a good German,
came to Poland to exploit opportunities of this colonial country using free Jewish labour and special conditions offered for,
I think, Germans that were ready to operate into in the occupied territory.
So he's probably the best known German profiteer in occupied Poland.
I would like to stress the territorial aspect of the Nazi racist hierarchy within this territory.
Nazis establish special zones.
The best known zones are Jewish ghettos, formerly called the Jewish Residential Quarters, the largest of them being the ghetto of war.
So it comprised only a few percent of the territory of the city and some 450,000 people.
Jews from Warsaw and smaller localities around Warsaw were deported.
It was if Oxford is an island in an island,
Warsaw ghetto was an island of horror in this horrible country called the little government in the horrible Hitler's Europe.
But there were also other zones of inclusions, uh, districts of the city streets,
tramways, restaurants, cafeterias for Deutscher only for the Germans.
So the areas closed as the ghettos for the Jews.
There are areas accessible on the, for the ethnic Germans and then zones for the rest of the population,
which was stratified on a racist or ethnic basis.
I mean, to the very mundane basics aspects of life, for example,
food rationing system divide the population into categories depending on the alleged ethnicity and ethnic Germans,
food allocation was equivalent to some 2200 calories per day, which is a daily requirement, as it was believed at the time.
For for all the human being, it was some 1500 for ethnic poles and 500 for the Jews.
So certainly well, well below any level of of subsistence.
This is why the Warsaw Ghetto and other ghettos in occupied Poland to survive had to smuggle food into
80% of the food in the Warsaw ghetto was illegal and that was a consequence of the specific food ration.
And in other aspects, such a forced labour career opportunities in the administration or police being ethnic poles,
bigot, Ukrainian, ethnic German largely determined the future of a person and a group.
So the most radical aspect of the Nazi revolutionary policies was a genocide,
of course, namely genocide of the Jews making Eastern Europe you then Rhine.
And I would like to stress that what we now call the Holocaust begun, begun the first as a policy against Polish Jews.
Polish Jews made most of the victims of the Holocaust of of some 5.5 million European Jews killed during the Second World War.
More than 3 million were Polish citizens. They were first to experience ghettoisation and almost all the ghettos were established in the
historically Polish territory terrorising the start to and this is the case outside of this area.
And also they were the first to experience the beginning of the final solution,
the so-called final solution that this mass shooting in the summer of 1941,
which was combined with the, uh, with the wave of pogroms between the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea.
We have, we have, well, several dozens of pogroms with substantial participation of the local population in Polish case,
the best known cases in a small town in the, in the was region this Polish state,
the total government was expanded after the German attack against the Soviet Union into eastern Galicia,
again nullifying Ukrainian dreams that the Germans may help them establish an independent Ukraine actually step on the Bandera.
A man who tried to establish a Ukraine government in the lives of the.
German invasion was properly arrested and deported to the concentration camp to Saxon housing, where human remains to the end of to the end of war.
At the end of war in 1944. We have one more government emerging in Poland coming into being.
And that was the Polish Committee of National Liberation. It had the name of a committee,
but it was a de facto government appointed by the Soviets to administer the central part of the pre-war Polish territory occupied by the Soviet army.
So I need to use this long sentence to establish, to define what happened,
because the the the Committee for National Liberation was declared to exist and issued its manifesto only when the Soviet Army and the Polish army,
fighting alongside the Soviets controlled by Polish Communists,
cross the Catterson line, the river while Soviet, which is basically this is the Volga River,
the former border between the, uh, German and Soviet zone of occupation,
which coincides to a large extent with the line established by Lord Curzon, famous politician of this country, right after the First World War.
Why is this important? Because why? This government was not recognised by no one, by the Soviet Union.
It was a committee.
It was given the Soviets the authority to administer the territory, in particular to make it the draft into the Polish Communist Army.
Again, we are coming back to the question of of manpower and labour used in the industrial wars of the 20th century.
One of its first decision was to cede half of the Polish territory to the Soviet Union.
Just a few weeks after its coming into being.
In July 1944, it signed an agreement with the Soviet Union of, uh, defining the Polish and Polish border,
basically following the present line, which meant that more than 45% of the pre-war territory was then next to the Soviet Union.
On the later on, this decision was reconfirmed by the Polish Provisional Government, established the following year,
1945, that with the approval of the Western powers and participation of Mr. Nikolai Church,
who returned from the Polish government in London to join this this Committee of National Liberation, this the paper,
the national the Committee of National Liberation, very much like the government in London, it had its quasi, uh, legislative and national council.
It had an army. It had the security force.
It had a foreign policy which was recognised in addition to the Soviet Union by Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia of the time.
It also had the currency. So it was quite a full fledged state, but with unclear borders, but in fact with an unclear western border.
Why it was so quick to recognise the annexation of Eastern Poland.
The question of what is the West Western?
The border of this new post-war Poland remained opened up to the Potsdam Conference of the Great Powers and actually up to 1990.
This is surreal. I haven't shown these pictures.
The only pictures which are not maps or bank notes in my presentation.
This is my hometown, Warsaw, in 1945. And now I'm showing this because to show how radical and how revolutionary were German policies
in occupied Poland and India affect the main product of this revolution was destruction,
human losses, material destruction, disruption of the economy.
I said that the Poland restored after the First World War was not very similar to the old pre partition Poland.
And similarly the Poland established in 1940 445 was not very similar to the Poland of 1939.
In fact, if we believe that the state consists of territory, government,
population, political regime, economy and culture, all of them were different.
Here you can see the changes of the territory. This is the part annexed to the Soviet Union, to the Soviet republics of Lithuania,
Belarus and Ukraine, which made almost half of the pre-war territory.
And here is the compensation.
Actually, the argument of compensation was used in during the negotiations of what should be the shape of the western Polish border.
The net result was -20%. That means Poland was among the victors of the Second World War.
But it was a strange victory because it lost 20% net.
Why? Germany lost 25%. It lost many more people, but it's difficult to count them.
The official estimate of the Polish war losses was 6,027,000.
And any statistician who heard the number immediately knew that this cannot be true.
When you speak about such a big number of 6 million, you cannot be so accurate to give the figure of 27,000 at the end of it.
And today, we know that this was invented. We even know who invented the number.
The number was invented by Yaakov Berman, a Jewish communist member of the Politburo of the Polish Communist Party,
who thought that a precise figure would appear more reliable.
The problem is that that was not.
This figure did not refer to the losses of Poland that entered into war in September 1939, discounted only the losses of ethnic Poles and Jews,
and excluded Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Germans, Russians, Roma, all other minorities that made about 20% of the people of Polish population.
So it was most misleading. It was inflated in terms of the ethnic Polish losses and at the same time an underestimate
which retroactively excluded Ukrainians below Russians and Germans from the Polish nation.
So these were losses of communist Poland, the country that did not exist during the Second World War.
So to my knowledge, Poland is the only country in Europe that does not have a reliable estimate of our losses.
And we may maybe it was 6 million, maybe 6.5 million, maybe 5.8 million.
And we probably will never know it. And I believe that it tells us more about the nature of this war and the radical transformation, this war abroad,
that any specific number that we could have estimated, surprisingly and ironically, the easiest to estimate were Jewish losses.
Why? Because only a few Jews survived the war. So the calculation was simple.
Before the war, some 3.33.5 Jews lived in Poland.
That was the largest Jewish community in Europe after the war.
About 300,000 remained alive. So basically we can say that about 3 million Polish Jews Polish during the Second World War.
The problem is that some of them were just only for the Nazis.
For example, in the Warsaw ghetto, there was a Roman Catholic parish,
so there were Roman Catholic Jews and the island within the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw.
Few of them because assimilation in Poland in the early 20th century was very limited.
But still, it wasn't about a margin. That was people who were killed as Jews or survived hiding as Jews.
But before the war, they didn't declare themselves Jewish. Where Christians, some of them, even distanced themselves from the from the Jewish origin.
And they were certainly overrepresented among the survivors. Why?
Exactly. Because of acculturation. Integrate. They had non-Jewish Polish families as Christians, for example, the new Christian players.
They could much easier pass as non-Jews under German occupation.
So in fact, we don't know how many Polish Jews survived the war and how many of them were Jewish before the war,
and how many of them became Jewish during the war as a consequence of Nazi policies?
In effect, Nazi German occupation introduced a very simple behavioural definition of a who is a Jew in Eastern Europe.
Andrew is a person facing death as a Jew. So even if someone who was not a Jew, by in the civilised standards facing a Jew, one behaved as a Jew.
That means he had to hide his pre-war identity.
Asper Ethnic Poles, Russians, Ukrainians and Germans.
We have no idea how many of them passed and we cannot estimate it because of the changes of border disorder.
Changing borders. post-War Poland, the first sieges of 1946 to establish that Poland had some 24 million inhabitants,
which is 11 million less than pre-war Poland, but in a very different territory.
And out of this 24 million, some 2 million were ethnic Germans waiting for deportation,
plus one more million of former citizens of pre-war Germany who are recognised as ethnic Poles Polish minority in Germany.
So out of the pre-war population of of fate of 35 million people, only 21 million found themselves in the post-war Polish borders.
So some a part of them disappeared due to war, genocide, disease, malnutrition, starvation, all the calamities that fell on the Bloodlands estimate.
It's neither called this part of Europe, but some of them didn't relocate into the new Polish borders or didn't come back from the wartime migrations.
And here what I would like to stress that in addition to Thomas killing, that the Second World War brought to Poland on non-combatants and combatants,
we also have mass population movements caused by both the Nazi, the German and the Soviet regime.
The biggest group of this migrants were slave workers.
Some 2.8 million people were deported to forced labour, mostly to Germany proper, but also to some countries occupied by Germany.
We don't know exactly the ethnic composition. In addition, there were people fleeing the war.
Already, September 1949, we have some 150,000 people who escape abroad.
These are the men who then establish the Polish army in France, and then some of them relocated to Great Britain,
including my uncle, who spent the rest of his life in Manchester.
Some of them were deported into the Soviet Union. Now we have a relatively accurate Soviet data about the number of deportees.
But then a number of people escaped in the summer of 1941 facing the German invasion.
So calculating the number, calculating what happened to this population during the war is extremely difficult.
They probably will never had an accurate and accurate estimates.
What we know is that post-war Poland had 312,000 square kilometres and the Poland of today has almost exact territory.
It lost 77 square kilometres and that its population declined dramatically and in particular some part of the population.
So while the general losses were about 20% of the population, urban population had lost 50%.
Why? Because Jews were mostly urban population. So 30% of the Polish urban population was Jewish and they almost entirely disappeared.
And in addition, 20% of urbanites, non-Jewish urbanites, also was lost somewhere.
We don't know if they survived the war or were relocated elsewhere.
The name of the pre-war Polish state, the Republic of Poland, remain valid after 1952.
It was only done when the Communists introduced the new constitution.
Actually, Poland had the honour of having its constitution personally edited by Comrade Stalin.
We have a copy. Russian translation. With his handwritten notes on the margins.
He corrected some clauses of the Polish constitution, and this constitution remained valid up to the 1989 and actually up to the late 1990s.
It was significantly amended in 1989, but some parts of it remained valid in the 1990s.
So the name of the country changed from the Republic of Poland into the People's Republic of Poland in 1952.
But the political regime of this country, its territory, its economy had already been reconfigured in the previous years.
We may divided the history of communist Poland in several periods.
In fact, there were at least three Communists Poland's between 1944 and 1989.
The first was Poland under communist rule, not yet communist Poland, but Poland under the communist rule.
And this is 1944 to 19 4748.
At that time, we have I mean, for Soviet standards, we have a relatively liberal regime.
There is a civil war going on. There is a bloody terror. But still, there are several political parties in Poland.
After 1948, there is one party plus two satellites fully controlled by the Communist Party.
So this is the first Poland. It still has the name of the pre-war republic.
It has a communist dominated government. There is a legal opposition which is gradually through the salami tactics.
Destroyed, physically destroyed.
Its leaders either are imprisoned or escape abroad.
Then between 1948, 49 and the mid 1950s, we have the Poland of High Stalinism.
Despite the fact that its name change only 52. We can call it the People's Republic of Paul.
Actually, that was the most communist Poland of the communist period of Polish history.
This country was made upon the Soviet model.
Polish communists largely imitated the Soviet Union in economic policies and cultural policies.
However, we must stress, Oh, so here you have the cure.
You have the map of the Communist bloc with this little Polish province over here.
But there is one aspect of the history of communist Poland which is easily overlooked,
namely that Stalin did not incorporate Poland into the Soviet Union.
Contrary to Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia or Romania and Bessarabia,
which became the Soviet republics of Lithuania, Estonia and so on, Stalin did not incorporate Poland,
Czechoslovakia, Hungary or Bulgaria, despite the fact that, for example,
Slovak and Bulgarian communists formally requested to be incorporated into the Soviet Union.
And I'm pretty sure if Stalin wanted, if he made this decision, Polish, Hungarian,
Czechoslovak population in the national plebiscite would overwhelmingly support,
I would say 99% of voters would support and request the Soviet Union to be incorporated to the great family of the Soviet nations.
That was important in all aspects of life. First of all, they wanted it honoured.
Polish, Hungarian, Romanian, communist were nationalistic.
They could not enter the Soviet Politburo.
The highest level of the possible career was the Polish Politburo, Czechoslovak Hungarian Politburo and so on.
And that was defining the perspective about thinking of the country themselves and the role of their party.
So even in the period of the highest Soviet ization and homogenisation of the Soviet bloc,
which was in the 1950s, we see striking differences between individual countries.
For example, in Poland, there was no equivalent of great purges.
None of Polish communist leader was executed like Slansky in Czechoslovakia.
Vojislav Gomulka, the first leader of the of communist Poland after the war was arrested.
He spent some time in prison, but he was alive when Stalin died.
And then in 1956, when starting was condemned by Khrushchev at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union,
Gomulka was alive and ready to come back to politics.
And this is not unimportant. Difference, and these differences were many.
From my field of study in my migration research,
I was very surprised to learn how much Polish Communists objected to cross cross-border labour mobility.
There had been a tradition of Polish workers working in Austria and then took a Slovak industry inside issue.
After the war, beginning in 1948, it ended.
Why did it end? Because four communist managers of heavy industries, that was Polish labour.
That means that was the property of the government. They didn't want to share it with the brotherly Czechoslovak government.
So despite the socialist solidarity of all the Soviet bloc, they saw it in terms of national interests.
They want to they wanted to extract coal, they needed labour, they needed miners.
So they didn't allow Polish miners to work in Czechoslovakia.
So we see that a very low level of management of individual miners factories,
but at the same time we see similar processes at the national level in effect.
In fact, the Communists established the most consolidated Polish state in history.
It was not Soviet, but it was the most centralised, unified, probably nationalistic, homogeneous and militarised.
So if we have the ideology of the right wing nationalism of pre-war Europe, unified, centralised, nationalistic, homogeneous state.
That was the communist Poland. Well, the problem was it was a satellite state.
So claiming that the Polish communists were nationalist must have a footnote.
As one of them said, My homeland is the Soviet Union.
Our borders today are in the middle of Germany and tomorrow they may be in Portugal.
This is a quotation from the best known Polish national Bolshevik General Mortara,
the head of the security service in the 1960s, incidentally, of Ukrainian origin.
So the preservation of satellite, but separate states in Central Europe,
including the Polish state, was, for me the major factor shaping the history of communist Poland.
Interestingly, interestingly, out of this, several aspects making a country territory,
population, economy, culture the most fragile proved to be the most persistent, as you see.
Let me come back to this. As you see, territory was completely different.
Population was not just smaller. It was much, much more homogeneous.
Economy was destroyed by the war, physically destroyed.
But also markets. US institutions were destroyed and then underwent the rapid industrialisation beginning in the late 1940s.
Less successful Collectivisation drive and massive nationalisation.
I think companies nationalised virtually or or the all enterprise except for the smallest one.
A political regime was of course a complete novelty. Never before Poland had a regime called people's democracy.
So what connected the communist Poland with people?
Poland was culture. But even in this field, communists had far reaching objectives of completely remaking the Polish culture.
However, and this, I would say, is the intervention of Providence that Comrade Stalin died in 1953.
Namely, they didn't have enough time to systematically implement this policies.
And most clearly this we see in their policies against the Roman Catholic Church.
The Catholic Church in Poland was under heavy pressure, repressed.
Several bishops were arrested, including the president of Poland, Cardinal Vichy's scheme.
But it was not broken as it was in several other communist states.
However, now what? We have much better documentation, much more detailed historiography of the Polish church in the 1950s.
We can see that the process of penetration, erosion of loyalty towards the states was really going fast.
So possibly if Stalin didn't die in March 1953 and Polish communists continue with harsh anti church policies until,
let's say late 1950s or early 1960s, the start of the great resistance heroic Polish church would have looked different.
Of course, this is counterfactual history, but this is to stress the coincidental nature of history in general.
Yes, there was a lot of resistance. It was very strong, but a matter of luck.
Well, it was not lucky for Joseph Stalin, the fact that he died in 1953.
But certainly it was lucky for the Polish church and the Polish culture.
That so that the first communist Poland was Communist Poland before the name of the People's Republic.
The second one was the Poland of High Stalinism.
And after 56, we see a new communist Poland, which is the Poland of so-called really existing socialism.
I like very much this name because it means nothing really existing socialism, basically.
This is what you see. It doesn't give us an equality of the socialism, except the fact that it exists.
And it shows a major problem with the theory of the Stalinist communist regime.
It's not clear what they were. They were a communist regime.
They were dictatorships that were authoritarian, but were they totalitarian?
And there is an ongoing debate for the past 20 years or even more.
Some leading scholars of leading other ends of the totalitarian theory claim that
Poland never was a totalitarian country contrary to Czechoslovakia or Hungary,
for example. Exactly, because purges were more limited. Church remained relatively independent and Collectivisation failed.
Well, even if Poland was not totalitarian in 1953, it certainly was most totalitarian in the 1960s, in the 1870s.
That means even if we assume that the conditions of totalitarianism were not met and totalitarian is always fragmentary,
there's nothing like a fully totalitarian, fully total totalitarian state.
It's always fragmentary. And Poland was less totalitarian than other communist states.
But part of the 1960s and seventies,
a crucial component of the Polish realities of this really existing socialism is the remembrance of the state in Europe.
And I would say Polish regime could have been relatively liberal comparing to Czechoslovakia or is German.
Exactly, because in the back of the heads of millions of poles was the memory of the wartime destruction and then the horrors of the late 1940s,
early 1950s. We can debate if 1980 the emergence of solidarity movement and the martial law is a watershed.
Was there a fourth communist Poland? Some people claim that the communist in Poland changed significantly, and certainly social attitude to change.
That means the practice of governing. A country where 10 million people had to belong to a anti-communist movement were
different than the practicalities of running the same country five years before.
So even if it wasn't, certainly the politics of governance was very, very much different than in the fifties, sixties or even 1970s.
And in particular, a peculiar feature of this Poland of the 1980s is that that was a highly personal dictatorship,
namely the centre of rule of communist Poland was the body of General Voyager, Rosa Risk, who was the key person in all decision making circles.
So it was no longer the collective leadership of the Politburo,
but the individual dictatorship of a general who had not made an apparently career as other communist leaders in Central
and Eastern Europe had made a military career and jumped into the Politburo at a relatively late stage of his of his age.
So we see peculiarities of Poland within the Soviet bloc and peculiarities of Poland of Eurozone,
when compared to the Poland of Gomulka or Beirut in the 1950s.
Finally, we have this. Uh, last Poland.
The Poland of today. Yeah.
This is actually from not from the 20th century was from the 21st century when Poland is already a member of the European Union.
And comparing to other dramatic changes, the shift from communist Poland to the Third Republic is the most limited.
Same territory. Nothing changed. Population is stagnant.
Despite mass emigration to this country. Still almost the same number of Poles remaining in Poland today.
What's changed radically.
And the change was revolutionary, where the rules of the game, especially in the economy, but also in politics and in fact that all aspects of life.
And this I understand when I try to explain what was my life in communist Poland for 30 years I go to my children.
The most basic things are most difficult to explain to them. For example, that there was almost nothing in shops and to say, You mean Tesco was empty.
So this is a kind of challenges of comparative analysis of Poland of today and communist
Poland actually a comparative analysis of communist Poland and the pre Second World War.
Poland is easier because you have this dramatic territorial shift, dramatic population changes and so on.
Here, changes are less visible but equally, equally profound.
What I would like to stress, speaking about this new Poland, is that we take it for granted that its borders didn't change.
It's obvious. But please note that that was highly unusual.
In 1989, Poland had three neighbours Soviet Union, Socialist Czechoslovakia and the German Democratic Republic.
Three years later, no one of the states existed anymore.
Now Poland has five neighbours, and of these neighbours, only one country, the Federal Republic of Germany had existed before 1989.
Okay, this shows the relative stability of Poland in Central and Eastern Europe.
A country that didn't fell apart, was not absorbed into another country, has the same territory, population infrastructure largely built in the 1970s.
So a peculiar stability of Poland.
Some people claim it is a consequence of the dramatic shifts after the Second World War, namely ethnic, homogenisation and relocation to the West.
However, I would like to remind you that the western border of Poland was finally legally confirmed on the November 1990.
From the West German legal perspective, the eastern borders of the Third Reich remain up to 1990.
And if you happen to see a German school atlas from the 1960s, 70 or nineties, you immediately noticed that there is a border.
The Third Reich, riding across Polish side of Pomerania with the cities of Breslau 13, and Danzig,
well, dancing being a free state, but the setting and in Breslau belonging to this strange territory.
So our understanding of the inevitability of the smooth transition in territorial
times from communist Poland into independent Poland may be a little bit misleading.
Actually, from this point of view, we should mention 1970s, the Polish German agreement of December 1970 and the Helsinki Agreement,
which were the two substitutes of a peace conference for Central and Eastern Europe in 1970.
Poland and the West Germany established diplomatic relations and the West German government recognised the western border of Poland,
but it was not the eastern border of Germany.
The remained a strange legal object called the Third Reich,
and the fate of this illegal object could be solved only by the great powers which happened with the German unification in the 1990.
Okay. Now, let me give you a few comments about about all this changes that you have seen here.
First of all, so much has changed in a very short century.
So why are we so sure that there was and there is a Poland?
What made Poland appear and reappear on the maps again and again only today?
We can think that was obvious. It was not obvious. It certainly was not obvious in 1914.
It wasn't obvious in 1918. It wasn't obvious in the late 1940s, Poland could have re-emerged as the Soviet Socialist Republic of Poland,
together with Lithuania and other countries.
So it was a process of consolidation of Poland and the recognition of Poland as a stable element of the political map of Europe.
What we see at the end of it is Poland, member of the European Union, and NATO, probably safest in its history for the past 300 years.
But at the same time, Poland, which shares its sovereignty with European Union to some extent, Poland,
which is much more decentralised than it was in the communist period, but also in the interwar period.
Poland, which was.
Despite its cultural homogeneity, increasingly diverse in the lifestyles, opinions, foremost religiosity of its citizens, and also Poland,
which is much more open the well, excuse me, the sociological you speak to transnational phenomena, namely the borders remain where they were.
But the nature of the border changed dramatically in the past 25 years.
And now one of the problems of contemporary Poland is how many Poles are in this country,
and maybe there is half a million of them, more than we estimate, or half a million less.
If there is half a million less, they live in this country, Ireland, Sweden, but they are still formally residents of Poland.
Some of they pay taxes. Some of them keep their families. So the understanding of what does it mean to belong to a territory has been changing.
You may have a family in one country, work in another country, pay taxes in a third world or nowhere.
You may have an emotional affiliation no longer to a nation state, but, for example,
to your city, you may be more vast or of Swabian than the Polish nationalist.
The new identities that historically coexisted.
But for this period, I was presenting what dominated dominated by the nationalist interpretation of of the identity as an exclusive identity.
Coming back to the story of leavers that I started with.
The problem was not in the fact that some leaders had a different definition of what is an imperial and where the name of Europe comes from.
But in the fact that they were accusing lemurs of different opinion of trees in small lemurs claim that big lemurs were traitors.
Big lemurs claimed that small lemurs were treated because of the different definition of where the common identity was coming from.
It seems that the solution to this problem which is emerging is appearing is parallel or multiple identities.
Yes, maybe La Moorea is called Memoria because lemurs at the moment settled in this country
or lemurs are called lemurs because they have settled in the Morea at a given point.
So what? That was the answer of my son, 18 years old.
Now, in the final class of the secondary school, what I told him the story of lemurs when preparing to this lecture.
And he had problems understanding he's a smart boy. But here, the problem of understanding why the lemurs hated each other.
For me, it was obvious why the lemurs, the big lemurs in the small team was hated each other for him.
It's not clear anymore. Probably he and his generation will have other reasons to disagree.
They probably hate each other. They will find they may find a reason, but it's not going to be the reason that the lemurs had them.
Thank you very much.