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237 Poland regained its independence in 1918 after 123 years of partition by Russia , Austria, and Prussia. But the euphoria of national rebirth was marred by political and economic instability that dominated Polish life between the two world wars.1 As elsewhere in Eastern Europe during the same period, power came eventually to rest in the hands of a right-leaning authoritarian figure with a prominent military past. In the case of Poland, it was Marshal Józef Piłsudski (1867–1935), revered to this day as a national hero. After conflicts with such neighboring countries as Ukraine, Lithuania, Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet Union between 1918 and 1921, Poland was in such a state of disarray that Piłsudski decided order could be restored only by strong, one-man rule, and toward this end he led a successful coup d’état in May 1926. From then until his death in 1935, Piłsudski ruled Poland as a virtual dictator. A Socialist earlier in his career and strongly supported by the Socialists and even the Communists, Piłsudski nevertheless left Poland a legacy of authoritarian rule backed by military and clerical interests. In the few years between Piłsudski’s death and the German invasion of 1 September 1939, Poland presented a sorry spectacle of right-wing military rule, nationalism, intensifying anti-Semitism, and self-delusional readiness for inevitable war. When that war came, it was in a sense the beginning of a fourth partition of Poland.2 Thanks to the Treaty of Non-Aggression between Germany and the Soviet Union (or Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact) of 23 August 1939, the Germans were able to invade Poland without fear of Soviet intervention or with no substantive reason to fear intervention on the part of Western powers too inclined to make compromises. The pact with the Germans also provided the Soviets with a free hand to march into Poland and seize whatever territory had not been left to German rule by mutual consent. Thus, sixteen days after Germany invaded Poland from the west on 1 September 1939, the Soviet Union, without po l and 238 | Poland a formal declaration of war, invaded from the east. After rapidly achieving its military goals, the Soviet Union annexed the entire territory of eastern Poland. By November 1939, the thirteen and a half million Poles living in the area were now brought under Soviet control. A program of intense Sovietization was initiated , including rigged elections held in order to place a fig leaf of legitimacy over the Soviet conquest. Opposition was mercilessly suppressed; thousands of Poles were executed, and hundreds of thousands were sent to prison camps in remote parts of the Soviet Union in four waves of deportations between 1939 and 1941. The Polish writer Gustaw Herling-Grudziński (1919–2000) brilliantly captured his two-year confinement in the Soviet gulag in the Arkhangelsk region of Siberia in his widely translated book Inny świat (A World Apart; English translation 1951). This appeared a decade before the internationally acclaimed One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by the Soviet writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008). The poet and prose writer Leo Lipski (real last name Lipschuetz, 1917–1997), endured a fate similar to Herling-Grudziński’s. In the first months of World War II he sought safe haven in the eastern Polish city of Lwów. But with the Soviet takeover of eastern Poland, he quickly found himself a prisoner in a Soviet labor camp. His imprisonment lasted until he succeeded in leaving the Soviet Union as part of the civilian contingent of the Anders army, named for the Polish general Władysław Anders (1892–1970). A Soviet prisoner at the time, Anders was invited by the Soviets to form an army of Poles living on Soviet territory to fight against the Germans. But disagreements with the Soviets caused a change of plans, and Anders led his newly recruited army and a large number of civilians out of the Soviet Union and into resettlement in the Middle East, specifically in Iraq, Iran, and Palestine. Here he formed the Second Polish Corps that fought alongside the Allies. Although Lipski intended to join Anders’s army, ill health prevented him from doing so. He resettled in Palestine in 1944 and there continued his literary career, producing, among other works, such collections of haunting tales of Soviet prison camp experience as Dzień i noc (Day and Night, 1957), which was first published by the Paris-based Polish émigr...

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