A few excerpts from Polish Renaissance

This was the country that set to rebuilding its churches and palaces and ancient cities. I ask Marek Kwiatkowski how this was possible. “We had to rebuild because we were poor!” he insists with great animation, as if annoyed that I had missed such an obvious point. “England didn’t have to rebuild Coventry Cathedral because it was a rich country.” Warsaw was the first city in Europe to decide to rebuild, because, he says once more, “we had to.”

Gdańsk may be the most successful reconstruction in the country. With its high-gabled houses, its golden fountains, and its face toward the sea, the Baltic port feels closer to Amsterdam or Stockholm than to Warsaw or Kraków—”or it did, until I decided to walk over to the National Museum to see the famous Memling brought here in 1473, after pirates snatched it off the English coast.

It is easy to imagine what such a beautiful museum might have meant to the people living toilet-paper-less in those dingy apartments: a hope of dignity, for themselves and their nation. “My generation had only one goal: the independence of our country,” Kwiatkowski tells me. But with the Red Army occupying Poland, there could be no question of political or economic independence. A degree of cultural independence was the best the Poles could hope for, and as it happened the very existence of Polish culture was controversial enough to make its manifestations far more powerful than they would have been elsewhere.

This was because something about Poland so irritated its neighbors that they went to great lengths to wipe it out. In the nineteenth century, Russians seeking justification of their conquest settled on the excuse that the Catholic Poles threatened the unity of the Orthodox Slavs. In the human taxonomy devised by the Nazis, only Jews ranked lower than the Poles: Hitler did not want to exterminate them entirely, but, unlike other occupied peoples, they were to be reduced to slavery, their culture eradicated.

The occupiers devoted a startling amount of effort to destroying all symbols of Polish culture, from statues of Chopin and Copernicus to professors at Kraków’s Jagiellonian University. Thirty percent of Poland’s university teachers were killed, along with twenty-one percent of its judges, forty percent of its physicians, and fifty-seven percent of its lawyers. All told, a third of Poland’s population was displaced or murdered in the war.

But preserving the culture their enemies tried to annihilate was the one way the Poles could show the world that they were not a race of slaves.

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Not much had changed since the days of King Stanisław, who could transmit a barbed political message by having a god petulantly stare at a nymph across a Baroque ceiling. Under communism, art and culture were the most powerful weapons the Poles had; and in his final book, Travels with Herodotus, the great Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński recalled why even that ancient Greek historian couldn’t be published in Stalinist Poland.

“All our thinking,” he wrote, “our looking and reading, was governed during those years by an obsession with allusion. Each word brought another one to mind; each had a double meaning, a false bottom, a hidden significance; each contained something secretly encoded, cunningly concealed.”Architecture was all the more eloquent in such an environment, and after Stalin died, in 1953, its expressive potential was unleashed.

A people under foreign occupation, whose intellectuals had been massacred and whose economy had trouble keeping up with the demand for toilet paper, had to piece together the accumulated artistic legacy of centuries—”in a country nearly as large as France.

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The Polish language, spread across a giant area, has almost no dialects—”a situation unique in Europe, where even different neighborhoods in the same city can have starkly different dialects. And Poland’s ethnic and religious homogeneity is also unique: The population is almost entirely Polish and Catholic, although historically Poland was one of Europe’s most diverse and tolerant nations. Untroubled by the Reformation, which tore apart societies across Europe, Poland became known as a Paradisus Hereticorum, and those heretics included the Jews, so welcomed in Poland that the community soon became the world’s largest.