Poland over 100 years

Press, 23 March 1985, Page 22

Poland over 100 years

Poland. By James Mitchener. Corgi, 1984. 849 pp. $8.95 (paperback). (Reviewed by Ralf Unger) Mitchener is not one to believe that present events are an isolated fragment of time. In “Hawaii” he began a picture of the present life there with the eruption of the islands from the ocean floor. In “Poland” the history begins in 1200 A.D. with Genghis Khan. With the battles of the Tatars and the fighting machine of Teutonic knights fully researched and described in all their bloody detail and complex strategy, the gradual evolution of a country and its mixture of peoples emerges. With Poland as the “savage hinterland” between significant Germany and Great Russia, its shape is frequently changed with annexation by these powers and the Austrian Empire. Centred upon a small area in western Poland, on the border of a shifting “Germany,” names of recurrent leaders, male and female, come up generation after generation with two principal families, one noble and one peasant. Eventually we jump to World War II and the decimation of the population in concentration camps and the subsequent power struggles of Resistance leaders, Communists and Nationalists. The book ends in the era of the 1980 s, with the revolt of workers against domination by yet another

outside power in the new ideological form, the Soviet Union. In the forests stand Russian tanks in the same way as there have always been sinister forces ready to pounce on the Polish peasant wanting to continue his traditional way of life. Mitchener has the ability to colour a mighty sweep of history and its players. At times he gets endlessly bogged down ’in descriptions of families and backgrounds of minor characters, but then takes off again into fascinating descriptions of historical significance in the meaning of events that would otherwise be incomprehensible — such as the close linkage of politics and the Catholic Church in the country. Nearly 900 pages is a lot of time to devote to a book by an author who has only visited Poland as a tourist on a number of occasions, but with his thoroughness of investigation Mitchener has furnished a historised piece of fiction which for many readers will become the complete truth of a country with a proud history that is usually now seen in the West as rather depressingly bleak, colourless, and without real power. Instead, the tradition here repeatedly presented is of the Pole born with a sword in his right hand and a brick in his left. When the battle is over, he starts to re-build endlessly through the centuries.