Entangled in Fear , livre ebook

ENTANGLED IN FEAR
ENTANGLED IN FEAR
EVERYDAY TERROR IN POLAND, 1944-1947
M ARCIN Z AREMBA
T RANSLATED BY M AYA L ATYNSKI
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.org
2022 by Marcin Zaremba
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
First printing 2022
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Zaremba, Marcin, author. | Latynski, Maya, translator.
Title: Entangled in fear : everyday terror in Poland, 1944-1947 / Marcin Zaremba ; translated by Maya Latynski.
Other titles: Wielka trwoga. English | Everyday terror in Poland, 1944-1947
Description: Bloomington, Indiana : Indiana University Press, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022011697 (print) | LCCN 2022011698 (ebook) | ISBN 9780253063083 (hardback) | ISBN 9780253063090 (paperback) | ISBN 9780253063106 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: World War, 1939-1945-Psychological aspects. | World War, 1939-1945-Atrocities-Poland. | Psychic trauma-Poland. | Terror-Poland. | Violence-Poland.
Classification: LCC D744.55 .Z3713 2022 (print) | LCC D744.55 (ebook) | DDC 940.53/1-dc23/eng/20220328
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022011697
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022011698
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Before There Was Fear
1 In the Labyrinth of Fear
2 Fear in Interwar Culture: The Bolsheviks and Jewish Communism
3 The Trauma of a World War: Psychosocial Effects of the Second World War
4 In the Beginning Was Chaos
5 Out of the Frying Pan and into the Fire : The Dreaded Red Army
6 The Demobilized
7 Looting Fever
8 Outlaws: The Dishonored Soldiers Peasant War
9 It Was More than Just Travel Nerves
10 The Politics of Fear
11 The Phantoms of Transience
12 The Three Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Hunger, High Prices, and Infectious Diseases
13 Ethnic Phobias and Violence
Conclusion: The Boogeyman
Bibliography
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book would not have been written had several things not happened. Marcin Kula helped me to overcome my ante-fear of studying fear. He read the whole manuscript, for which I am eternally grateful. I would also like to thank B a ej Brzostek, Jerzy Kochanowski, ukasz Krzy anowski, Jolanta Tokarska-Bakir, Antoni Su ek, Bo ena Szaynok, and Joanna Wawrzyniak for being so kind as to read the whole manuscript before it was published and to give me their comments. Andrzej Friszke, Joanna Hytrek-Hryciuk, Bartosz Kaliski, Adam Leszczy ski, Piotr Os ka, Andrzej Paczkowski, Krzysztof Persak, Dariusz Stola, Pawe piewak, and Marek Wierzbicki read sections. I presented some of the chapters in seminars and discussions chaired by Andrzej Paczkowski at the Institute of Political Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences; by the late W odzimierz Borodziej, Jerzy Kochanowski, and Marcin Kula in the Faculty of History of the University of Warsaw; and by the late Jerzy Jedlicki at the Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences. The tips about sources and the comments made on these occasions were of great help. A warm thank you to Padraic Kenney.
This publication would have been much shorter had it not been for a grant I received from the State Committee for Scientific Research [Nr 1 H01g 031 2 for Fear in People s Poland (1944-1989) ] and a two-month fellowship in 2005 at the Institute of Human Sciences in Vienna, where an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant allowed me to conduct research. The interviews with former prisoners of the Mauthausen concentration camp by Piotr Filipkowski and Jaros aw Pa ka of the Oral History Archive, to which I was given access, were invaluable. Translation of the book has been funded by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education, Republic of Poland, National Program for the Development of Humanities, grant no. 0126/NPRH3/H31/82/2014.
My wife was the book s first reviewer and editor, and without her help I would not have dared show it to anyone. I spent several years living by fear and in fear. My family could not avoid sensing it, and I would like to thank them enormously for their patience.
ENTANGLED IN FEAR
INTRODUCTION
BEFORE THERE WAS FEAR
T he period after the war ended was a strange time, so difficult to pigeonhole. A time of Roger Caillois s universal pairs of complementary opposites: celebration, carnival, and great hope as well as feelings of defeat, privation, and dread. 1
Poland s changing postwar reality was filled with contradictions. With peace came a natural rebirth and joy. 2 The poet Konstanty Ildefons Ga czy ski wrote in 1946, One has spent six years wandering the world. And out of the blue: Poland is there and an Aeolian harp is there, what a musical miracle. 3 People were thrilled that they had survived, that they were reuniting with their families, starting businesses, and tackling the challenges of rebuilding. 4 The writer Stefan Kisielewski reported, I went to Warsaw recently. They re all keeping busy as hell among all that rubble. Business is booming. Work is thriving. There is no shortage of humor. In the streets, the throngs are brimming with life; you would never know that all these people have only just been rescued from a catastrophe and are now living in conditions unfit for humans. 5 The Poles were celebrating, living it up. It was carnival time.
The slightest signs of normalcy-a shiny new windowpane, clean water flowing from a faucet, a tram coming down a rubble-free street-made people happy as never before. In the summer of 1945, a street scene encapsulated this mood: A funeral procession moved down Z bkowska Street in Warsaw. An ordinary procession with a small group of mourners followed the hearse. Suddenly, a tram emerged from the distance in Z bkowska Street (most probably coming from the Kaw czy ska Street depot). It was a real red Warsaw tram, a vital component of the cityscape being reborn. The sight of the tram sparked universal enthusiasm. Pedestrians stopped in their tracks, some came running toward it, cheering loudly and clapping. Oddly, the funeral procession came to a halt, too, and the living who were accompanying the dead turned to look at the tram and, then, swept by the mood, they, too, began to clap. 6
In 1945, the Poles were making merry, and any national, state, or church ceremony would serve as an excuse. There were parties and weddings everywhere. According to a Pomerania Province civil servant, a party fever had gripped the population. 7 A peasant memoirist in Cracow Province noted, Calm gradually returned after the war. A good feeling was back, especially among the young people, who are always eager to enjoy themselves and who are now putting on dances almost every Sunday. People dance to exhaustion to simple tunes played by a violin. Sometimes, dawn was surprised to see boys in sweat-drenched shirts, clouds of dust rising from under their feet, whirling zealously to the rhythms of a polka, an oberek or a sztajerek. Progress was just around the corner, as people learned to dance to modern (much deformed) hits. 8
A mad frolic also gripped the cities. Never again would people dance so much in streets, squares, and parks. The children of the intelligentsia preferred to put on parties at home and dances at school, and in the summer they dispersed to the countryside. 9 The night before last, I went to yet another ball, wrote Jan J zef Szczepa ski, a student at the time. 10 During the hot days of July 1946, the banks of the Vistula in Warsaw were literally caked with thousands of beachgoers, wrote the daily Express Wieczorny . 11 Manners relaxed, and sexual relations suddenly became quite easy. The end of the war made people want to marry and have children. The second half of the 1940s was the beginning of the postwar baby boom, which peaked in the early 1950s. This was also a time of great political hope, which was linked to the non-Communist Peasant Party leader Stanis aw Miko ajczyk and the expectation that the West would intervene and expel the Soviets.
But there was another side to this hopefulness-fear and trepidation.
Georges Lefebvre called the state of deepened peasant unrest in some parts of France on the eve of the revolution the Great Fear of 1789. 12 Fear of hunger and of brigands and bandits was pervasive. Rumors traveled about the aristocrats conspiring to raise food prices or to bring in foreign armies. People felt threatened by a hunger conspiracy, and a mass panic swept large swaths of the country. Hatred between the estates and fear combined with hopes of improving the lives of the peasantry led to a great outburst of grassroots violence. Another wave followed: the storming of castles and seignorial homes, the ousting of drifters, hunger tumults and anti-Semitic riots. Many similar surges of local fear exploded all through the history of Europe. Jean Delumeau wrote about them in his La peur en Occident XIV e -XVIII e si cles .
Poland in 1945 was obviously not France in 1789. In Poland, peasant animosities were based more on ethnic enmities and less on class differences. Still, the Polish peasantry s response to collectivization was rooted in its fear of a brand-new incarnation of the feudal system being imported from the Soviet Union. After the Second World War, thieves and looters supplanted bandits and vagrants. Despite these and other differences, the intensity of emotions, the state