Memory Palace

Take a Polish family, almost any family, and chances are it can serve as a microcosm of Poland’s recent tormented history. In my family’s case, there was my grandfather: He served in the Russian army when Warsaw was still part of the czar’s empire, helped write his reborn country’s legal code between the two world wars, escaped to London at the beginning of World War II and served in the Polish government-in-exile there. His brother, an architect, stayed behind and was shot by the Germans after being caught in one of the random roundups of civilians in Warsaw.

There was my father, a tank battalion officer during the doomed Polish resistance to the German invasion in September 1939, who later escaped to the West and wound up in the Polish military under British command. There was my mother, whose family had fled to Warsaw from their estate near Minsk during the Bolshevik Revolution, and who later fled Poland with her in-laws at the outbreak of the war. She would become the driving force behind her new family’s decision to resettle in the United States once the Soviet occupation of Poland ruled out their return.

As Polish sagas go, ours was nothing unusual. In fact, my family was luckier than most. Two years ago, I interviewed survivors from the first transport of Polish political prisoners to Auschwitz before the camp was transformed into a death factory for European Jews. Several of the survivors turned out to be Polish army officers who had tried to escape, mostly on foot, across the Hungarian border as my father had after the German victory. “If your father had been caught like we were, he might have been in the same transport,” one of them told me. He seemed mildly amused by the near coincidence.

All of which illustrates how Polish families offer a rich vein to tap for those seeking to explore the country’s history, spirit and contemporary behavior. A book that employs this family-as-microcosm approach can be a valuable addition to more conventional histories. “Full Circle” is just such a book, weaving Radek Sikorski’s short but eventful life in Communist and now democratic Poland with layers of family and local history. But it is the author’s limitations, as much as his evident skills as a storyteller, that reveal--often unintentionally--insights into Poland’s past and present. In Sikorski’s narrative, what is evident is that his countrymen’s strengths, along with their weaknesses, have produced a bitter aftertaste to their stunning defeat of communism.

Born in 1963, Sikorski quickly developed into the kind of adolescent troublemaker that the authorities despised. He plastered anti-government posters around his native city of Bydgoszcz in central Poland. By the time Solidarity blossomed, he was a high school senior and, in his own words, “a hardened anti-Communist” who eagerly joined the new movement. When Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski declared martial law to crush Solidarity, Sikorski was in England, hoping to improve his English and to earn money working in a pub. Granted political asylum, he stayed there until the collapse of communism, studying at Oxford and then working as a freelance journalist.

Returning to a free Poland, Sikorski set a romantic goal for himself to rebuild an old manor house. An unabashed admirer of an earlier Poland--with “its firm standards and rules for respectable social behavior”--he bought a dilapidated ruin and treated the job as his contribution to rebuilding Poland. “I have certainly cleared up these few acres of Poland,” he proudly asserts. In the process, Sikorski explores the history of the house and the region, fleshing out his own family history.

Poland’s trials permeate every aspect of Sikorski’s inquiry. In the 17th and 18th centuries, Bydgoszcz was repeatedly sacked by the Swedes, the Saxons, the Russians and the Prussians. During the partitions of Poland from 1772 until World War I, Bydgoszcz remained under Prussian rule. The manor house Sikorski restored had been owned by Germans and later occupied by a family of uncertain ancestry who faced a dilemma in defining themselves at the outbreak of World War II. One tenant clung to his Polish identity, while his brother took the supposedly safer route of registering as a German. Ironically, the Polish brother survived, while his brother perished on the Eastern Front after he was drafted into the Wehrmacht.

Sikorski’s family offers plenty of its own history lessons. One great-uncle, Stefan, fought against the Bolsheviks in the Polish-Russian war of 1920. Another great-uncle, Roman, who was a Catholic priest, spent World War II as a prisoner in Buchenwald and Dachau, and refused to sign the Volkliste, the application for German nationality, in order to keep camp “privileges” (such as marginally better food). He and his church would be equally stubborn in resisting the Communist government that followed. But his Uncle Edek, who escaped German captivity just as he was subjected to grisly medical experiments (Sikorski speculates that his uncle was injected with malaria and tested with a “new form of artificial quinine”), turned to the Soviet “liberators” after the war. He became a political commissar in the new regime, a career cut short by an argument that turned into a fight with a Soviet general.

Despite being fiercely anti-Communist, Sikorski is surprisingly understanding of Edek, “the relative with whom I most identify.” He notes that he is lucky to be young enough to have avoided the questions of allegiance that confronted Edek’s generation. In his examination of his region’s complex local history, Sikorski doesn’t hesitate to unearth the sordid along with the heroic. The manor house, he discovers, is located right next to the concentration camp where Edek was a prisoner during the war. After the war, it was transformed into a camp where the new Polish Communist authorities exacted their revenge on German civilians.

Sikorski is able to examine much of Bydgoszcz’s painful history with admirable objectivity. “We are at last free to love our city while acknowledging another tribe’s contribution to it,” he writes, referring to its Germanic roots along with its Polish ones. Like many young Poles who grew up under communism, he is willing to make his peace with Germany but remains deeply distrustful of the new Russia. “A society which has wallowed in evil but is unwilling to face the truth about its own past, let alone confess and repent it, is condemned to offend again,” he predicts.

And what about the new Poland? The country had been liberated thanks to a tremendous movement of national resistance. “Quarrelsome, envious and often nasty to one another in ordinary times, Poles are capable of extraordinary selflessness in emergencies,” Sikorski points out. The problem is that those qualities quickly disappear when the emergency is over. Solidarity had barely triumphed when it began to splinter into myriad feuding factions, transforming statesmen into the pettiest of politicians.

At 29, Sikorski became a player on the new political stage when he was named deputy defense minister in a short-lived right-wing government. His account of his brief stint in office demonstrates why Poles are often so much better at resisting authority than at governing. The same qualities that make them ideal resistance fighters--their unwillingness to compromise, their ability to spot conspiracies against them--can make them singularly ineffective, embittered politicians.

While acknowledging some of his administration’s faults, Sikorski can’t resist the temptation to blame others for its dismal record and for the subsequent comeback of the former Communists. His chief villain is Lech Walesa, who did battle with his bosses. For that sin, Sikorski flings every unsubstantiated accusation against his former hero--the wilder, the better. Walesa, in this rendering, emerges as a Communist collaborator who, as president, wanted to purchase nuclear weapons from the KGB. Sikorski’s hatred of Walesa is so intense that he ends up praising Jaruzelski’s “dignified” presidency by comparison.

Walesa certainly shares the blame for the implosion of the old Solidarity camp, but there is plenty of blame to go around. And for all his faults, Walesa’s place in Polish history is assured. That is much more than can be said about Sikorski and his colleagues, who ruined the creditability of the anti-Communist camp by concentrating on conspiracy theories and by their inept performance. They have a ready explanation for this too: The Polish and Western media have been unduly influenced by leftist intellectuals who refuse to give Sikorski and other right-wingers their due. Sikorski’s evenhanded, thoughtful treatment of earlier history is nowhere in evidence when he tries to settle recent political scores.

Nonetheless, Sikorski professes a basic optimism about Poland’s current direction, one that I fully share. Polish politics may be maddening to the point of exasperation, particularly when former Communists take credit for the country’s remarkable economic success and democratization. But like Sikorski’s manor house, the country is rebuilding brick by brick. “Discouraged by the farcical politics, a whole generation of young Poles has channeled its zest into business,” he writes. For a people known for their hopeless romanticism, this pragmatic revolution may be the most dramatic transformation of all.