It Wasn't a Hopeless Dream After All

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

 

May 3 is Poland’s national day. The holiday celebrates the Constitution of May 3, 1791, promulgated to save what was left of Polish independence following the two partitions of 1772 and 1793. 

It came too late, and in 1795, with the third partition, Poland disappeared from the map, divided up by Austria, Russia and Prussia until after the First World War.

It was once again the country’s national day after 1919, until Poland was attacked and again partitioned, between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, in 1939.

Following the defeat, much of the Polish Army was evacuated to France and then Britain, where it was reconstructed as the Polish Armed Forces in the West, under the command of General Wladyslaw Sikorski. 

Following the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, other Polish soldiers, who had ended up as prisoners in Russia, were organized in 1941 into the Polish Armed Forces in the East, under General Wladysław Anders. They made their way westwards to fight under British command.

The post-war pro-Soviet Communist regime replaced the May 3 holiday with July 22, commemorating the 1944 Manifesto of the Polish Committee of National Liberation, which established the Moscow-dominated regime after 1945. 

This effectively delegitimized the pre-war republic, whose government-in-exile had operated from London during the Second World War.

The Poles who now settled in western countries refused to recognize the Polish People’s Republic and continued to observe the May 3 date, but to the rest of the world, this was forgotten.

In 1966-1967, after graduating from McGill University, I worked as a reporter in the Montreal bureau of the Canadian Press.

On April 30, 1966, the Sunday before May 3 of that year, a group of Polish war veterans, who had served with the Allied forces during the war, gathered at the Cenotaph in Dominion Square to honour the pre-Communist state.

I covered the event, which to me seemed like a quixotic gesture by people living in the past. Communist states occupied a third of the globe and seemed to be going from strength to strength, under the tutelage of Moscow. 

It seemed that, at the very least, they would remain a force to be reckoned with. And Poland was Moscow’s most important satellite state and crucial to its geopolitical and military survival.

We need to remember that for four decades, competition between the Warsaw Pact and NATO shaped international relations. The Cold War was our reality, and a large percentage of the intelligentsia in the west supported these Communist regimes. 

So this memorial service seemed somewhat pitiful to me. The last sentence of my article called it a gathering of people passed over by history, reliving their “lost causes and hopeless dreams.”

The story went out over the Canadian Press wire but I never did learn if or where it was published by one of the many newspapers that subscribed to the CP. In those days, there was no internet, no “on-line” publications, and no one in the CP office kept track of such things. 

It’s a shame I have no copy of it.

As we know, the Communist regimes in eastern Europe imploded in the late 1980s. In Poland, round-table talks among the Solidarity trade union, the Communists and the Roman Catholic Church paved the way for the fall of Communism. 

Partially free elections in 1989 saw a landslide win for Solidarity, and Tadeusz Mazowiecki became the first non-Communist Polish prime minister since 1946. Soon enough, the entire Communist apparatus was dismantled.

Poland had regained its independence and May 3 is once again the country’s national day. I remembered my article when I spent three weeks in Poland earlier this year.

As the song says, “you never can tell.” I hope some of those old soldiers lived to see that day.