Born under a Lucky Star (review)

Richard F. Staar's Born under a Lucky Star is subtitled "Reminiscences," and these run the gamut from anecdotes of personal dinners with old friends in academia and government to an insider's view of the Mutual and Balanced Forces Reduction (MBFR) talks in the early 1980s—he was the U.S. ambassador to these talks. Staar has had a long and extremely productive career in academia, with intermittent but fascinating stints of federal service, and he records much of it in great detail here, with a good ear and eye for the personal as well as the scholarly. Although the accounts of the MBFR talks and Staar's confirmation testimony before the Senate when he was appointed ambassador will likely be the portions of the book that interest historians, the most compelling portions are the early scenes of youth in Poland just before, during, and immediately after the Second World War. Staar spent time in an internment camp, and his family was involved with the Polish resistance. Although he spends little if any time explaining how his war experiences shaped his political and intellectual views, he is a member of the now passing generation that was molded by this conflict and that determined the course of international affairs for a good fifty years afterward.

The author was born in Warsaw as a child of U.S. citizens of Polish descent. The family returned to the States when he was eleven months old, but eleven years later his father decided to take the family to Poland once more and reconnect with his roots. Staar briefly and understatedly describes the trepidation the young English-speaking boy felt when he entered a Polish school. The family apparently had set no timetable for returning to the States, but on 1 September 1939 Nazi Germany seized control of their fate when it invaded Poland.

Staar's father immediately began to work for the resistance. Among other things he helped smuggle Jews from Poland via an "underground railway" to Lithuania, which at that time was still free. Staar sometimes accompanied his father on these trips and noticed that "Dad seemed to enjoy the excitement of the underground organization"—so much so that he declined to have the family sail to the United States while there was still an opportunity.

In May 1941, young Staar was arrested by the Gestapo, as were many young Poles, despite his U.S. citizenship. His father was arrested several days later. Staar says he blocked out the memory of his internment early on and does not describe it in detail, but suffice it to say it consisted of interrogation, labor, crowded and unsanitary conditions, and poor food. He was fortunate to remain interred for only half a year and to find a family to harbor him after his release. His father was sentenced to death, but university colleagues from the United States (he was an engineer and teacher) mounted a successful campaign for him, and U.S. officials proposed a prisoner swap to the Germans. Although the swap never occurred, his sentence was reduced, perhaps in anticipation of it, and he was freed at the end of the war.

Although Staar does not dwell on the personal effects of the war, he is a representative of a generation that emerged older than its years and with an accompanying sense of purpose. I am writing from North Carolina, where people like the late governor and senator Terry Sanford and the former president of the state's university system, William Friday, along with many others, returned with opened eyes and hard-earned maturity and changed their state. Similar stories abound from across the country. Staar certainly doesn't make any attempt to glamorize his generation, as some recent books and films have done, but the stamp of the Second World War is on everything that generation accomplished, as well as...