Gdańsk Redux

A Canadian poet read this column and told me there was a blank verse poem of about 120 lines hidden in it. He dared me to find it.

Well, I am not a poet, but I have a lot of respect for that one, so I opened the file and had a look. The poem was there, so I tried to lift it out of the article, like a skeleton from a fish.

When I got it out, I sent my poem to the poet. He said it was vivid and painful and matters, so I'm posting it here. You'll recognize some of it from a blog post.

The poem matters because the West has a blank spot in its memory when it comes to the Polish experience of the Second World War. Poland was the wounded soldier whose buddies left him behind enemy lines. We don't like to remember that the Allies did that; it tarnishes our shiny stories of heroism and grandeur and triumph over a totalitarian nightmare. That our forgotten war buddy suffered another one...Well... Hiroshima seems so much more important. And perhaps the violence of victory hurts us less that the acknowledgment that the biggest winner was Stalin.

To add insult to injury, some people in the West speak as though the Poles were at all responsible to what happened to the Jews in Poland once the Nazis were in charge. The name for this is "blood libel", and I suspect it is mixed up with fear and resentment of Poland's Catholicism. It is definitely mixed up with ignorance of Polish history and of how Poles existed as a people "without a country" for centuries.

But here is the blank verse poem that was once a column:
   
                                            In Gdańsk
                                                    by DCM

English is the lingua franca of the young of Europe;

perhaps they forget it is understood by older people, too.

Or so I thought as Marta and I walked along the Motława River

one evening behind a young foreign tourist determined

to impress upon the young man to her right

how sexually liberated she was.

Her voice was shrill; it carried.

“I don’t believe in marriage,” she bragged.

“People ask me how you can be 22 and not married, but I don’t need

marriage for sex. I have boyfriends.”

The young man, who seemed more interested

in the silent girl to his right,

asked the loud girl

in quieter tones

what she believed in.

“I believe in freedom,” she snapped and

I thought, “Oh, honey.”

Gdańsk is a city of memorials to freedom,

to Polish freedom lost

and to Polish freedom won.

There is the memorial at Westerplatte

where the German Navy opened fire

and at the Polish Post Office where

at that very hour

the SS also attacked.

There is the Gdańsk shipyard

where the Solidarity movement was born

and St. Bridget's Church

where tortured steel shows how its chaplain died.

Every child in Canada is taught that

six million Jews were killed

between Hitler's rise to power and the end of the Second World War.

But although we may be told that

three million of those Jews came from Poland

and that Auschwitz was in Poland

(Occupied Poland),

we are not usually told that 

three million Poles

mostly Catholics

were killed alongside the Jews 

and that the Nazis' ultimate plan for the Poles 

was to make them slaves.

Slaves!

Actual slaves.

To work in the fields

and in factories

and down mines

and as domestic help.

And this is why

secondary schooling

and post-secondary studies

were banned for Poles

in Occupied Poland.

And why

Polish professors

were rounded up and shot.

And why

since the Soviets were in cahoots with the Nazis

at the start of the war

22,000 Polish officers,

basically, the aristocracy,

were murdered,

most infamously but not only in Katyn Forest.

Officers, aristocrats and professors:

not only were they lousy slave material,

they were proof that the Poles had

a culture of their own,

an inconvenient truth

troublesome to both Moscow and Berlin.

That P on the shirt worn by St. Maximilian Kolbe in the icons

does not stand for "Political"

--that's the red triangle--

or "Priest."

It stands for "Pole".

The Nazis did not wish to wipe out all the Poles;

they just wanted their

beautiful and strategic country

and to use the Poles

(as mentioned above)

to till it

and mine it

and serve the German settlers the Nazis would send out there

once the war was won.

However, the Nazis did want to exterminate all the 

troublesome Poles,

even simple peasants

who would hide Jewish neighbours out of kindness,

so when a Pole was caught hiding a Jew,

the Pole and his or her entire family were

killed:

children,

grandmas

and all.

But the Poles were not enslaved long-term

not exactly

because the Nazis were defeated and

Occupied Poland was liberated by the Soviet Union

albeit in the same way the Soviet Union generally liberated countries: 

with strings attached.

Poland was run by a Communist Polish criminal gang

controlled by the Soviet Union until 1990,

when the gang ceased to be either

Communist or controlled by the Soviet Union

although, depending upon whom you talk to,

it might still be quite criminal.

History lies heavily on the city of Gdańsk,

and it was beginning to lie heavily on

me.

By the time I got to the twisted sculpture

commemorating murdered Father Popiełuszko,

I was ready to throw myself

down on the floor of Swiętej Brygidy and weep.

And this is why I was so aggrieved

the next evening

at the young lady who called her sex life

freedom.

Freedom, I wanted to tell her,

is not taking off your clothes and having sex with any guy

just because you want to.

Women have almost always been able to do that;

it’s talk about it afterwards that got you into trouble,

and not usually with the police.

Sure, people might call you names,

but that's not like not being allowed to go to high school

because you're a Pole, is it?

It's not like shutting the curtains on May Day because

if your child looks out the window at the tanks rolling past,

the police will come upstairs and beat up your husband.

But of course I didn’t say anything.

Canadians don’t do that; it’s rude.

Instead I thought about my friend beside me

who, when she was a little girl,

stood at the gates of the shipyard with her father.

Marta didn’t say anything either.

I think she was praying.