This historical obligation became even firmer, as the guilt of absence overwhelmed the refugees. Władysław Gieysztor poignantly wrote about the long, meaningless, lonely, and gray days of an exile, filled with worry and anxiety: “We seem to be alive—but really I often do not know whether present life is reality or fiction. Poland and our people in Poland are so far. . . . Far away are reality and painful concern for the beloved people and land—far at the end of the world!” After nights of troubling nightmares, Gieysztor still encouraged an equally depressed friend to be strong and full of faith, since Poles in Poland suffered so much more:
The threat of death looms over them day and night—and we are safe here. We have food—they starve. Their hardship is greater than ours. This is all true. But they fight, they are together, at home; they see Polish sun, listen to Polish skylarks sing. Polish storks return to them, not to us each spring! They take their strength from the aromas of the Polish land!
They do not know what the madness of hopeless longing can do to the Polish soul. What the blindness to foreign beauty, foreign sun means. They do not know how deep is the torment of the gray refugee days, days outside of life.144
Irena Lorentowicz revealed the agony of listening to the news about the Warsaw Uprising and the city’s lonely struggle in 1944: “We lived through it with despair and fear from afar, we ‘happy,’ we ‘free.’ . . . Nights of waiting, nights of hope. We hear the echoes, safe behind the ocean, undeserving, unharmed, fed full, worthless refugees.”145 Feelings of guilt accompanied the realization of their gradual loss of legitimacy to speak for fighting Poland. For example, Jerzy Paczkowski, himself a poet of the Skamander generation who had fought in the Polish resistance movement organized in France, in 1942 wrote a bitter response to a poignant war poem in which Kazimierz Wierzyński called for sacrifice in the struggle. Paczkowski accused Wierzyński of fighting the enemy with rhymes, when others fought with grenades; of chiseling his poetry during walks in a safe New York park while others were left behind to do “the dirty work.”146
The exiles tried to reestablish this legitimacy after the war had ended, but the homeland found itself in the chains of a communistic regime. While the ranks of the Polish postwar diaspora were swelling with veterans and refugees from Siberia and the DP camps, Tygodnik Polski revisited the concept of the exile mission, defined around the exile community as a “free voice” of the Polish nation. The author of the 1946 editorial “Emigration Speaks for the Country” (most likely Lechoń himself) admitted that even though the current emigration probably would never equal the genius of the nineteenth-century Great Emigration, their goals made it a close successor. While living in freedom, the author wrote, the exiles needed to devote themselves to the homeland and “to our brethren, imprisoned and silenced.” United in the struggle for Poland, Polish exiles could “not only help our countrymen immediately, but also speed up the moment of freedom, without hope of which our life would not be worth living even a day longer.”147 Numerous other references to the Great Emigration and to political exiles of the past directly called for the conscious “continuation of the national mission” and placed post–World War II exiles as heirs of the Polish Romantic tradition.148
After the end of the war, the exiles faced the task of redefining their place in American Polonia and in the larger American society. They had to give up their self-inflicted isolation based on the assumption of a speedy return to Poland. Their institutions, cut off from government funds, struggled for financial survival or totally disappeared. Some exiles did eventually return to Poland: poet Julian Tuwim from the United States in 1946, Antoni Słonimski from London in 1946, and Władysław Broniewski from Germany in 1945. Irena Lorentowicz returned in 1960. Some died in exile: anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski in 1942, and KNAPP activists Ignacy Matuszewski and Henryk Floyar-Rajchman in 1946 and 1951, respectively. A handful committed suicide: Wieniawa-Długoszewski in 1942, and Lechoń in 1956. Others blended into the new, broader wave of political refugees arriving on American shores after the war.
2
“All I have left is my free song”
The Polish Community in the Displaced Persons Camps
Formation of the DP Camps
Thursday, April 12, 1945, was just another prisoner-of-war day, although there were rumors that parts of the wider area around us might be already in the Allied hands. . . . In mid afternoon, I left my barrack for a little while, and when I was coming back it happened. I heard bullets buzzing through the air and saw a bent figure in a khaki uniform running on the other side of the barbed-wire fence in the direction of one of the observation towers. It seemed that he had a machine gun in his hand. Then a huge tank rolled through the middle of the roll-call area, with an armored car at its side and we knew immediately what it meant. We were free!1
AFTER LONG MONTHS OF captivity, Leokadia Rowinski could rejoice with the other women of the Warsaw Uprising who were liberated from the Oberlangen POW camp along with her. The women sang, cried, prayed, and planned for the future. Soon, however, their happiness gave way to anxiety and even despair. As Leokadia and her friends pored over the suddenly available newspapers, they understood that “there was no place in the world for the likes of us. We had no country and no home to return to.”2 The brutal and confusing reality of the Cold War thwarted the euphoria of freedom. The decision whether to repatriate to communist-dominated Poland or to embrace exile became the most difficult and painful choice that the refugees faced after the war. While waiting for repatriation or emigration, they stayed in displaced persons camps, which international organizations had created on German, Austrian, and Italian soil. For many of them, the sojourn in the DP camps lasted several months to several years.
Map 1. Major DP camps with Polish population in the occupation zones of Germany and Austria, 1945–1951. Map by Emil Pocock, Department of History, Eastern Connecticut State University, and the author
Poles were just a fraction of the approximately 10 million people who remained outside the borders of their home countries. In May 1945 “Europe was on the move.”3 Large numbers of refugees immediately undertook strenuous journeys home, either walking or catching rides on military transports, and the roads of devastated Europe filled with multilingual masses. Governments of western European countries promptly organized transport of their nationals, and the French, Danish, Belgians, Dutch, Norwegians, and Italians quickly found themselves on their way home. Among those who awaited repatriation were large contingents of Poles, Jews, Ukrainians, Russians, Bulgarians, Estonians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Czech, Slovaks, Hungarians, southern Slavs, and many other nationalities.4 Their homes were in a part of Europe that was changing dramatically before their eyes, while borders moved, new communist governments formed, and the victorious Soviet army reigned unchallenged.
Before any transportation to central and eastern Europe could be provided, the destitute refugees needed immediate care: shelter, food, clothing, and medical attention. In the early period after liberation, care for the refugees was supervised by the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) Displaced Persons Branch.5 Shortly thereafter the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), an international organization created in the fall of 1943, took