Poland: Study in Coexistence

The treatment accorded Poland by the world’s great powers since 1939 has been an almost flawless skein of infamy. If only by virtue of the dramatic unity with which it unfolded, the Polish agony stands foremost as an example of how Soviet treachery, born of imperialistic design, and Western treachery, born of fear, have conspired to produce the enslavement of half the world and may yet do likewise for the rest of it. In examining Poland’s case, we may indeed find the very “patterns” of Western diplomacy—that is, a prototype of the moral stupefaction and the paralysis of will which have distinguished Anglo-American dealings with the Soviet Union.

Such is the lesson conveyed by Dr. Edward Rozek in his scholarly, massively documented history, Allied Wartime Diplomacy: A Pattern in Poland (Wiley, $6.95). Poland’s years of suffering have been told, in their main outline, a number of times. Memoirs by participants (Premier Mikolajczyk, Ambassador Ciechanow-ski) and first-hand observers (Ambassador Lane), as well as “revisionist” historical surveys (e.g., Chamberlin’s America’s Second Crusade) have given the story in variously abbreviated forms. But it has remained for Dr. Rozek, a Polish expatriate now teaching at the University of Colorado, to set the story forward in the plenitude of its elements: deceit, cowardice, frustration, heroism. For the first time we have as a matter of cold record what appeared in the books of Ciechanowski, Mikolajczyk and Lane with only partial documentation or as fugitive recollection. Rozek’s painstaking chronicle makes the case with a finality that admits neither denial nor extenuation.

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M. Stanton Evans

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The treatment accorded Poland by the world’s great powers since 1939 has been an almost flawless skein of infamy. If only by virtue of the dramatic unity with which it unfolded, the Polish agony stands foremost as an example of how Soviet treachery, born of imperialistic design, and Western treachery, born of fear, have conspired to produce the enslavement of half the world and may yet do likewise for the rest of it. In examining Poland’s case, we may indeed find the very “patterns” of Western diplomacy—that is, a prototype of the moral stupefaction and the paralysis of will which have distinguished Anglo-American dealings with the Soviet Union.

Such is the lesson conveyed by Dr. Edward Rozek in his scholarly, massively documented history, Allied Wartime Diplomacy: A Pattern in Poland (Wiley, $6.95). Poland’s years of suffering have been told, in their main outline, a number of times. Memoirs by participants (Premier Mikolajczyk, Ambassador Ciechanow-ski) and first-hand observers (Ambassador Lane), as well as “revisionist” historical surveys (e.g., Chamberlin’s America’s Second Crusade) have given the story in variously abbreviated forms. But it has remained for Dr. Rozek, a Polish expatriate now teaching at the University of Colorado, to set the story forward in the plenitude of its elements: deceit, cowardice, frustration, heroism. For the first time we have as a matter of cold record what appeared in the books of Ciechanowski, Mikolajczyk and Lane with only partial documentation or as fugitive recollection. Rozek’s painstaking chronicle makes the case with a finality that admits neither denial nor extenuation.