Wojtek the Bear [paperback] (19 page)

Meanwhile, the trustees – and Krystyna and myself in particular – continue to plot his new existence with great excitement. How could we tire of such a wonderful and fulfilling story
of trust and loyalty? He was a beautiful bear with a kind heart who was at the centre of many soldiers’ lives in a remote camp in the Scottish Borders as they prepared to journey home. In the
event, they had to leave without him, and that was a very sad moment. However, today his story is reaching out to Poland, his spiritual homeland, and it is a healing thing that will endure. There
can be no finer epitaph than that.

Neal Ascherson

What were Polish soldiers doing in Persia? Come to that, what were they doing in Scotland, both during and after the Second World War?

Aileen Orr’s beautiful story is in many ways complete in itself. But to be fully appreciated, it needs to be set in its wider historical context. This background must include the disasters
which fell upon Poland in the Second World War, the struggles of the Polish people to regain their freedom and the fate of those who adopted Wojtek: Poland’s soldiers, sailors and airmen.
These men and women had won a war which they alone had fought from its very first day to its very last, and yet they had lost their country.

Their story is one of the grandest narratives of human faith and endurance to emerge from the horrible twentieth century. It is a story still almost unknown outside Poland and the
Polish-speaking diaspora scattered across the world. It explains how a very special animal, a truly remarkable individual of a bear who thought of himself as a Polish soldier, came to be so
important to a very special group of men. They were tough and hardened survivors and warriors, but they had lost most of what is supposed to make a war worth fighting and a life worth living.
Wojtek gave
them hope, and the chance to protect, teach and care for another living being. In times of lonely despair, a bear helped them to stay human.

They had lost their families. Some utterly, because their families were no longer alive, others had lost contact with them in the chaos and terror of the Nazi and Soviet occupations. And they
had lost their homes. For most of the soldiers who adopted Wojtek and fed him and played with him, their homes lay in Polish provinces newly seized and annexed by the Soviet Union. They could only
return to those territories if they agreed to become Soviet citizens, and even then they would risk arrest. For others, it became clear as the war continued that ‘victory’ would not
give Poland back its independence and freedom. Instead, their country would become – against the wishes of almost all its people – a Communist satellite state controlled by Moscow. That
could not be the Poland they recognised as home, and many of them were wrestling with the realisation that they would never return to it.

So Wojtek was both a consolation and a symbol. Like the soldiers, he had no home except the army, no family except his human comrades in uniform. And yet, like them, he somehow remained an
optimist, endlessly adaptable to new camps, new climates, different countries with different food, unknown languages and strange customs.

To understand more clearly why Wojtek’s rugged, undaunted presence made him so much more than a mascot, that wide background of Poland at war has to be unrolled. This bear who thought that
he was a soldier was also an actor in an enormous drama, as millions of men, women and children – already dispersed across Eurasia as the human debris of war – set out on a series of
journeys.
Some of these journeys were the long, circuitous marches of armies pursuing an enemy. Some were deportations, as whole populations were evicted and transported
thousands of miles to a distant wilderness. Some began with gatherings of survivors and fugitives who then embarked on voyages across seas and deserts which were supposed one day to bring them back
to Poland.

There are easy metaphors for these journeys, none of them accurate. Many Polish people think of them as a sort of sacrificial pilgrimage. That is an image drawn from the work of the national
poet Adam Mickiewicz, who in the nineteenth century adopted the Messianic doctrine that Poland was the new collective Christ, destined to be sacrificed and die in order to redeem all nations.
Another labelling is to speak of a Polish
Odyssey
, or sometimes an
Aeneid
. As far as encountering terrible setbacks, obstacles and monsters on the way to a goal, this comparison
works. But Odysseus after years of wandering returned to find his own wife still ruling in their own house. And Aeneas eventually fulfilled his God-given destiny by founding a new Troy in a distant
land. The Poles were allowed neither of these happy ends.

The roots of all this suffering reach deep into history and geography. But Poland was not always a victim nation. In the early Middle Ages, the Christian kingdom of Poland united with the pagan
Grand Duchy of Lithuania to form the ‘Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth’, and for several centuries the Commonwealth dominated east-central Europe. It was a strange, ramshackle
structure, in many ways archaic but in other ways curiously appealing to the political ideals of our own democracy. The Commonwealth, ruled by an elected king, was multi-ethnic and in general
tolerant of differences. Ethnic Poles, Ukrainians,
Tatars, Ruthenians, Germans, Lithuanians, Belorussians, Armenians and Jews managed to live together, culturally distinct
but united in loyalty to the Polish Crown. The diversity of faiths – Catholic Christian, Orthodox, Uniate, Lutheran and Calvinist, Islamic and Judaic – caused no serious problems until
the Counter-Reformation began to impose a dominant Catholic identity upon Poland.

And Poland became rich. From the fifteenth century on, the demand for Polish wheat to feed the rapidly-growing populations of the Netherlands, northern France and England began to make profits
for Polish landowners. It was now that the Polish connection with Scotland began. From the early sixteenth century, carefully recruited groups of Scottish settlers sailed across the North Sea and
the Baltic to Danzig (Gda
ń
sk) and fanned out across the basin of the Vistula river. Along its tributaries, they founded small, tightly structured colonies which organised and financed the
transport of grain down to the Baltic. Their numbers are disputed, but the Scots who joined these colonies over their two centuries of peak prosperity, most of them from the east and north-east
coast of Scotland, must have been counted in the tens of thousands.

It was Scotland’s first planned stride into the outside world. And yet this episode was until recently almost completely forgotten by Scottish historians – although well remembered
by the Poles. Scots enjoying the Crown’s protection became generals, bankers and even potentates – Alexander Chalmers from Dyce, near Aberdeen, was several times mayor of Warsaw. The
traveller William Lithgow, from Lanark, who walked through Poland in the early seventeenth century, wrote that ‘for auspiciousness, I may rather tearme [Poland] to be a Mother or Nurse,
for the youth and younglings of Scotland who are yearly sent hither in great numbers . . . And certainely Polland may be tearmed in this kind to be the mother of our Commons
and the first commencement of all our best Merchants’ wealth, or at least most part of them.’

But by the early eighteenth century, the Commonwealth was growing weaker. On either flank of Poland, new and hostile states were emerging. The duchy of Muscovy expanded to become Russia of the
Tsars, consolidating central power over what is now European Russia and pushing eastwards to grasp the infinite wealth of Siberia. To the west, small and backward German princedoms along the Baltic
coast now merged under the new and formidable kingdom of Prussia.

The Polish Commonwealth was really a ‘pre-modern’ state. Central authority was weak, regional diversity was wide and political influence lay in the hands of the nobility. The new
Russia and Prussia, by contrast, represented a very different and ‘modern’ model of power. These were grimly centralised and authoritarian states, intolerant of ethnic or religious
diversity and – above all – obsessed with the training and equipping of large professional armies.

Culturally, the Polish Commonwealth considered itself more civilised than its big neighbours, whom Poles regarded as primitive. In return, the despots of Prussia and Russia loathed the relative
freedom of Polish society, regarding it as a threat to their own strictly controlled systems of government. In addition, both had historical reasons to resent Poland. On the Prussian side, the
Teutonic Knights had been defeated by the Poles in the fifteenth century, frustrating their drive to conquer the whole Baltic region. The Russians had suffered repeated
Polish invasions and political interference in earlier centuries, in the times of Muscovy’s weakness, and saw Poland as a deadly rival for control over Ukraine and
Russia’s western borderlands.

As the eighteenth century passed, Poland continued to decline both economically and politically. Hostile powers found that its archaic semi-democracy, with its elected monarchy and its
parliament operating on a rule of unanimity, was fatally easy to corrupt and subvert. At the end of the century, Poland’s neighbours used their military power to force a succession of
Partitions, dividing Polish territory between Russia, Prussia and the Habsburg Empire to the south.

But after the Second Partition, Poland’s last king – Stanisław August – and his advisers suddenly launched a dazzling programme of political and social reform, based on
the principles of the American Revolution and the European Enlightenment. Poland set up the first ministry of education in Europe, and in 1791 adopted the Constitution of the Third of May,
modernising the whole state structure and introducing a limited version of civil rights.

It was far too late. The Constitution enraged Catherine II, the Russian empress; she saw it as a deliberate provocation which would bring the democratic principles of the French Revolution up to
her own borders. The armies tramped forward again, and the Third Partition of 1795 finally wiped what was left of Poland off the map. The eastern regions, later including Warsaw, went to Russia.
The Prussian kings took what remained of western Poland, while the Habsburg Empire held southern Poland and the province of Galicia, including the city of Kraków.

There followed 123 years in which Poland did not officially exist. The three partitioning powers agreed that the very name should never be used again. Especially in the
Russian area, there was a sustained effort to abolish Polish identity by suppressing the language, discriminating against the Catholic faith and criminalising those who tried to celebrate
Poland’s rich culture or tell the truth about its history.

This policy was an almost total failure. Polish national identity retreated into a continuous national conspiracy against the foreign occupants, which preserved culture and tradition and often
erupted into armed insurrections. The first of these took place in 1795, as the Third Partition closed over the country. Led by Tadeusz Kościuszko, a Wallace-like popular hero, peasant armies
won early victories until they were overwhelmed by Russian numbers. A few years later, in 1812, Napoleon promised to restore Polish independence as he invaded Russia. Tens of thousands of Poles
joined his armies, fighting not only in Russia but in Austria, Italy, Spain and even in Haiti. They shed their blood in vain, but the memory of Napoleonic reforms to Poland’s legal and
administrative system was preserved, and revived when Poland regained its independence a century later.

In 1830, another insurrection – the November Uprising – broke out in Warsaw and rapidly spread. It took the Russians a year of hard fighting to defeat the rebels. Fierce repression
followed, and almost the whole intellectual elite of Poland, most of whom had fought in or helped to organise the rising, went into exile in western Europe. The Great Emigration in effect made
Paris the political capital of Poland for the next 80 years. And for the rest of the century
Poland’s literary and musical culture – now reaching its dazzling
zenith in the work of the poets Adam Mickiewicz, Juliusz Słowacki and Cyprian Kamil Norwid, and the composer Frédéric Chopin – was almost entirely created in France.

There were other, lesser, insurrections and a network of Polish patriotic conspiracies spread over Europe. But the next full-scale rebellion – the January Uprising – did not take
place until 1863. Once again, the Poles fought in their streets and in their forests, and held out for over a year. Once again, the collapse of the rising was followed by hangings and police
terror, and by the familiar sight of columns of chained men and women being marched away across the snow to Siberian captivity.

But the disaster of the January Uprising led to a change of mood in Poland. There was a feeling that the time for ‘romantic’, sacrificial rebellions was over. Instead, Poland should
concentrate on patient, ‘positivist’ campaigns to build up the nation’s economic strength and modernise its social structures. In the Prussian partition, which after 1871 became
part of a united German Empire, Polish farmers fought a long and successful struggle by legal and peaceful means to defend their land against Bismarck’s policy of German colonisation.

To the east, there was a lull in the general risings against the Tsardom until the Russian Revolution of 1905, which spread throughout the Russian Empire and in Poland became simultaneously a
battle for social justice and for national independence. Armed conspiracies continued to attack Tsarist officials and institutions with bomb and gun right up the outbreak of the First World War in
1914. One of these movements, the underground Polish Socialist
Party, was led by a petty aristocrat from Lithuanian Poland, the charismatic plotter and soldier Józef
Piłsudski.

The outbreak of the war meant that Poles in the Russian army would be fighting their Polish brothers in the German and Austro-Hungarian armies. But it also meant that the partitioning powers
were fighting each other, and almost at once they began a competitive auction of offers designed to win Polish support. Russia offered semi-independence under the Tsar while Germany and
Austria-Hungary attempted to set up a puppet ‘Polish Kingdom’ in the regions they conquered from the Russians. Piłsudski raised ‘Polish Legions’ in the Habsburg Empire
and invaded Russian Poland; this had little effect on the war, but created a heroic legend around the legions and Piłsudski himself.