Poland’s ordeal and sacrifice in World War II reveal enormous personal suffering and tragedy. The war was a calamity of extraordinary proportions, in which human lives were lost or changed forever. But just as wars bring out the worst in some people, they also highlight the best in others. In the face of disaster, the Polish people demonstrated exceptional resilience and strength. Prisoners, slave laborers, deportees, civilian refugees, resistance fighters, soldiers, women, men, and children responded to the trials of their exile with determination and resourcefulness. Even accidental and temporary Polish refugee communities all over the world strove not only to survive but also to continue the cultural and political life of the nation. One aim was to care for the younger generations and their education. As a standard, Polish refugees established kindergartens and schools and pooled resources to provide for their children and youth. A second common element was the establishment of a press and publishing institutions, which flourished in all refugee communities.52 The exiles also established political and cultural institutions, which, even if short lived, provided them with space to exchange ideas and to rebuild the disrupted connection to Polish culture and tradition; they also were symbols of hope in a time of loss and despair. Some Poles survived unimaginable tragedy in concentration camps or as slave laborers in Germany; others traveled the world as deportees, soldiers, or refugees in pursuit of safety. Their experiences during the war shaped their views and personalities and became absolutely central to the concept of the exile mission for the postwar Polish diaspora.
The U.S. Polish Exile Community during the War
The war years witnessed the creation of a new community of refugees and exiles from Poland in the United States. Statistics from the INS indicate that a total of 14,956 persons born in Poland arrived in the United States as quota immigrants between 1939 and 1945. Between June 30, 1945, and mid-1946 (when the influx of refugees admitted under the so-called Truman Directive began) a total of 4,806 immigrants born in Poland arrived in the United States.53 They came largely through private channels, sponsored by friends and relatives or, in some cases, by American employers. No formal resettlement program had been organized. Initially, these immigrants remained largely invisible, as developments in occupied Poland attracted public attention. Soon, however, the refugees, who had been admitted mostly on temporary tourist visas, began creating small groups and social circles based on common experiences, intellectual affinity, as well as professional and political interests. They formed new organizations with political or cultural agendas and initiated new publications. For the most part, they remained relatively isolated from Polonia, regarding America as a temporary stop on their way back to a free Poland once the war ended. Kazimierz Wierzyński, one of the greatest Polish poets and essayists, described that state of isolation in the following way:
For the first five years I lived in the United States absent in this country. My thoughts were in Poland. I wrote things related to the war, I had lectures, I started “Tygodnik Polski” with my friends, and we began publishing books under the name “The Polish Library.” I circulated only among Poles and watched America through the window. When after the war it turned out that a return to Poland would be a return to a country deprived of its own will, I awoke in America as if within an unknown, overlooked reality.54
Kazimierz Wierzyński belonged to the generation of Polish poets who gained fame in the interwar period. He was a member of the “Skamander” group connected with the popular literary monthly of the same name. The Skamandrites (Skamandryci) celebrated poetic freedom in the independent Polish state and consciously broke with the older tradition of nineteenth-century Romantic poetry, which had focused on national issues and demanded that Polish poets be spiritual leaders of a suffering nation striving for independence. Before the war, the Skamandryci published together in literary magazines, such as Skamander and Wiadomości Literackie (Literary News) and often met during poetry evenings in Warsaw’s salons and bohemian cafés (such as the legendary café Ziemiańska) to recite their newest poems and discuss literature. Among them were Julian Tuwim, Kazimierz Wierzyński, Jan Lechoń (Leszek Serafinowicz), Antoni Słonimski, Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, Maria Pawlikowska-Jasnorzewska, Kazimiera Iłłakowiczówna, and Stanisław Baliński. In September 1939 almost all members of the group found themselves outside of Poland. Most of them came together in Paris, where the editor of Wiadomości Literackie, Mieczysław Grydzewski, reestablished his magazine until the fall of France in June 1940. On Christmas Eve, 1939, Wierzyński, Słonimski, Tuwim, Lechoń, Baliński, Grydzewski, and their families spent an evening together celebrating the holiday with a traditional Polish meal, their last meeting before the war dispersed them all over the world. After the German occupation of Paris, the poets succeeded in obtaining visas to Portugal. From there, Słonimski, Baliński, and Grydzewski sailed to London; Lechoń, Tuwim, and Wierzyński traveled to Brazil, and then in the spring of 1941, to the United States, where they soon met up with another Polish exile writer, Józef Wittlin.55
In Paris, the Polish poets and writers had tried to define their mission as émigré artists. Similarities abounded between their situation and that of the Great Emigration to the West after the November Uprising of 1830; but in the first issue of Wiadomości Polskie (Polish News), poet and writer Ksawery Pruszyński distanced the new exiles from the nineteenth-century tradition:
That previous emigration was the emigration of the defeated. This new one is an emigration of fighters [emigracja walczących]. That old emigration lost its army, this one is just creating it. Finally, the former emigration was the emigration of mature persons, who were never to return to their country. This new emigration is an emigration of young and very young people, who are forming the army and who, with the army, will return to the homeland.56
Pruszyński called on his fellow writers to respond to the tragedy of September 1939 and to provide artistic expression of Polish volunteers’ experiences in the military forces in the West. The literature of the new emigration, Pruszyński wrote, had to “enter the soldiers’ ranks . . . , learn the art of war, fight—when they fight, perish—when they are to perish. Had we remained in the country, we should have suffered with the country, but since we crossed the border with the army—we need to fight in the army.”57
Polish exile literature during World War II accepted this challenge. As Kazimierz Wierzyński concluded in his literary review in 1943, the Polish pen was again in the service of the Polish cause.58 Wherever the war led Polish soldiers and refugees, they produced new writing. A large group of poets and writers joined the Second Corps and followed its route from Siberia to Iran, the Middle East, Italy, and Great Britain. Polish poets and writers followed the legacy of the Great Emigration: they, too, became spiritual leaders of the nation in exile. They, together with other intellectuals, scientists, and politicians, laid the foundation for the formulation of the exile mission, constructing bridges to the nineteenth-century Polish Romantic tradition and making struggle for Poland the