Jan Czekanowski

aviva_m and I just spent an overnight trip in Szczecin, which is just over the Polish border from Germany; for both of us it was our first time in Poland. Whilst we were there to do tourism, at the back of our minds we were conscious of the fact Poles have a reputation for a rather unreconstructed attitude towards Jews.

When we went on a tour of a wartime air raid shelter—which was fascinating for me, to see a glimpse of the wartime experience on the other side—aviva_m was struck by the fact that, though it talked a little about the general wartime conditions, not a single mention was made of what happened to the country's Jews. For me, following the guide in a printed English translation, the line about the air raid shelter having guards at the entrance to deny foreigners access (including, apparently, Poles whose ancestors had been living in what had been German territory since the eighteenth-century Great Northern War), had the addition "and Jews", but that was all.

By chance we came across a plaque on a wall marking where the synagogue had been, and that the community, dating from 1812, had been murdered in the Holocaust, but the plaque was not put up by the authorities (and was up a grassy bank, such that you couldn't read it from the pavement).

Then, in a park, we came across a statue of Jan Czekanowski:

There was no explanation of who he was, but on Wikipedia afterwards I read that he was "a Polish anthropologist, statistician and linguist, known for having played an important role in saving the Polish-Lithuanian branch of the Karaim people [Crimean Karaites] from Holocaust extermination. In 1942 he managed to convince German 'race scientists' that the Karaim were of Turkic origin although professing Judaism and using Hebrew as a liturgical language. This helped the Karaim people escape the tragic destiny of other European Jews and the Romas."

I'd vaguely heard of this before, but hadn't known who was responsible, and thought I'd take the opportunity to bring it to your attention.

German territorial changes

Something I wasn't really aware of until the last few years is the vast migration of ethnically-cleansed German refugees at the end of the War. One can argue about the rights and wrongs of this—certainly, Germany as a society had to be punished for what it had done (though the role of the Treaty of Versailles in the rise of Nazism should have shown the dangers of doing so in a blunt manner), but not all of the people forced to leave their homes would have been guilty of any wrongdoing. Furthermore, prior to the War, there were German colonies right the way across eastern Europe, way into Russia, descendants of German traders in the Middle Ages. Most of these also got expelled from their countries, and one can't help feel sorry for people dumped into Germany who had nothing to do with the Nazis, and who knew nothing of German life, as their ancestors might not have lived there for centuries.

It's (reasonably) well known that Poland moved a hundred miles to the west at the end of World War II. It's not really clear to me why; it seems to me Stalin performed a naked land grab of eastern Poland, but, not wanting to reduce the territory left to Poland, gave it Germany's eastern territories instead. Maybe he wanted to punish the Germans living east of the Oder-Neisse line by evicting them from their homes, but what I didn't discover until last week was that he also ended up punishing a vast number of Poles by evicting them from their homes in the east of the country (rather than either granting them Soviet citizenship or letting them remain as aliens). This left me appalled: there's a word for this; it's called Lebensraum, and it was the policy of the regime he had just been fighting.

Anyhow, something which occurred to me a while ago was to wonder how much of the territory taken from Germany to give to Poland at the end of both World Wars was German all along, and how much of it taken from Poland in the first place during the eighteenth-century partition of Poland (and yes, that part of history was indeed doomed to be repeated). (Or indeed how much was territory that Germany had dispossessed Poland of earlier still, but before the nineteenth creation of the German Empire, there was no German nation state, but just a mishmash of duchies, kingdoms and the like, any of which may or may not have been part of the German Confederation, the North German Confederation or the Holy Roman Empire, or had German or Polish rulers, or German or Polish citizens, etc, so it becomes difficult to tell without more research than I can be bothered to put into this.)

aviva_m said there was probably a map online which showed the information I was after, but I couldn't see one with a few minutes' googling, so I created my own, by crudely superimposing two maps from Wikipedia; the areas in red were the parts of pre-WW1 Germany which had been Polish before the partition of Poland.

Of course, that's not the end of the story. Pomerania, northeast of the present border, I discovered last week not to have been Polish since the Middle Ages; at various times it was independent, Danish, and (prior to the eighteenth century) Swedish. Silesia I have no clue about. I probably ought to rectify my ignorance at some point, but I find it hard to be motivated to learn the history of a country that can't be reduced to linearity like my own, but has to be considered as the sum of its many many parts.