The Polish House: An Intimate History of Poland

Contemporary Review, Jan, 1998 by Iwo Zaluski

Radek Sikorski belongs to the next generation, but his personal story tells of the purgatory that was Communism, as well as the hell that was Hitler's adventure. For all that, his account is no less informative about the turbulent story of Poland. Mr Sikorski was born in Bydgoszcz, Poland, in 1963. At the end of his teens, his involvement with the Solidarity movement at the height of its troubles caused him to seek asylum in Britain. The fall of Communism prompted him to return home and buy the dilapidated manor of Chobielin, not far from the town of his birth. Over the next half a decade the restoration of this house into an elegant and true 'Communist-free zone'(Sikorski's words) became for him a parable for the restoration of his homeland to civilisation. The author's story is interspersed with vivid accounts of his own early life as a rebellious pupil at school, the beginnings of Solidarity from a bright but bumptious teenager's viewpoint, and the stories of his family - specifically his Uncle Edek, who kept a diary - and how they survived the War - even in Buchenwald, Dachau and a secret experimental medical centre. Mr Sikorski's story also goes back to the beginnings of Polish history to chart the bi-ethnic nature of his native Pomerania - broadly the north western reaches of today's Poland. In Bydgoszcz, the 'capital' of Pomerania, Germans and Poles, although deeply distrustful of one another, somehow managed to co-exist for centuries without recourse to genocide.

It has, however, been said of Poles that collaboration is a good career move, and it has been perfectly normal throughout history for Poles to sell out to the surrounding powers. The great families and magnates of the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth were generally allied to their Russian, Prussian or Austrian mentors and 'Germanisation' or 'Russification' both voluntary and forced was a regular occurrence. The traffic was two-way, and many Germans chose to be Polish, and even re-spelt their names accordingly. Sikorski even wonders about the fine points of his own ethnic origins. One might even surmise that there is no such a thing as a pure, ethnic Pole.

The fragile state of this 'apartheid' changed after the Treaty of Versailles, when Bydgoszcz and its surrounds were ceded to the restored Polish state. The humiliated Germans, to whom Pomerania was 'ancient German lands', never forgave the Poles, and their retribution, twenty years later, was terrible. Sikorski throws considerable light on the nature of ethnic cleansing that has parallels with the Yugoslavia of the 1990s. In 1945 the Germans were finally expelled from the new Polish western territories, and those Poles displaced by the Soviet annexation of eastern Poland were re-settled there. At the time there was no international outrage about ethnic cleansing - the term, as indeed the very concept, had not been formally invented in 1945 - and today's Poland, it must be said, faces no danger of a re-run of the Bosnian tragedy, even though a resurgence of German militarism is never absent from the Polish psyche.

Radek Sikorski's book is one after my own heart. We are both western educated Poles (Sikorski was at Oxford) looking for our roots in the fast disappearing rabble of a land with a rich and proud history, from which half a century has been ripped out and thrown onto a heap of barbarity. It is time for a renaissance, a new enlightenment, to which the Polish diaspora in the West must contribute and invest in its future. Radek Sikorski does so by rebuilding an old manor, for in its old bricks lie the ghosts and the clues to our past; and to know the future we must know the past. The Polish House is more than the story of the restoration of a house laced with a glimpse of Polish history. It is an immensely readable, often funny, sometimes heart-rendingly tragic account, written in an unstuffy modern style, of what it means to be Polish.

IWO ZALUSKI

Iwo Zaluski is a pianist and musicologist and a descendant of the Polish composer, Michal Kleofas Oginski. His compact disc, Music of the Oginski Dynasty (1996), is available on Olympia OCD 345.