7 - Outbreak of War:Warsaw

Summary

In France and England, I had noticed, despite the curious apathy, at least a vague awareness of the dangers of the deteriorating situation in central Europe. Back in Poland, I found my countrymen completely out of touch with reality.

A few days after my return to Warsaw, I met an old school-friend and our conversation soon turned to politics. I told him gloomily of the scenes I had witnessed in Austria the previous year, voicing my dread that Hitler's expansionist aims could lead to tragedy and annihilation.

‘Hitler?’, my friend said, and burst into laughter, as though I had told him a good joke. ‘You have just come back from abroad, so you don't know what we think in Poland.’ His tone became suddenly harsh and aggressive: ‘Hitler?’, he repeated. ‘We all shit on him with loose bowels!’ (a charming expression he had coined from Marshal Piłsudski).

He plainly expected to shock me. I replied quietly, ‘Of course, but don't you realise that he's capable of invading us. He's power mad! And the German army is said to be extremely well organised, disciplined, very strong…’.

I was interrupted, ‘The German army? They don't know how to fight!’ It was a firm declaration of faith, based on the widely held belief that only Poles had military prowess.

‘But they have incredibly tough, lethal tanks,’ I argued. ‘I saw them in Vienna. What is more, they can produce them with great speed, in great numbers.’

‘German tanks?’ My friend laughed with total assurance. ‘They are made of paper. Everybody knows that. If they dare to attack us, our boys from the cavalry will finish them off in a flash!’

His naïve views on the invincibility of Poland were shared by practically everybody I met. For the time being I had to keep quiet about my fears. But as the situation in Europe worsened, the government gradually began to admit to the general public the possibility of military conflict in the not-too-distant future. These hints soon turned to positive defiance. An optimistic slogan, borrowed from Marshal Rydz-Śmigły, the Minister of Defence, was trumpeted forth by press and radio so many times a day that eventually it became sickening: ‘Incursion by force will be repelled by force!’