Poland - Eastern Europe - page 380

wrong side of history every time. That's been replaced by something better and infec-
tious: a cautious optimism that maybe this time around the better times are here to stay.
A LOOK AT THE PAST
Nowhere in Europe will you feel history more strongly than in Poland. The country's
unenviable position though the ages, between Germany in the west and Russia to the
east, and without defensible natural borders, has meant Polish history has been one
long struggle for survival.
The Poles first established themselves in the areas to the west of Warsaw around the
turn of the first millennium, descendants of migrant Slav tribes that came to Eastern
Europe around A . D . 800. In the centuries following the first millennium, the early
nobility forged a strategic union with an order of crusaders, the Teutonic Knights, to
defend Polish interests from pagan Prussians to the west. The Knights built enormous
castles over a wide swath of western Poland, and the Poles soon found themselves with
a cunning and ruthless rival on their hands for the spoils of the Baltic Sea trade. In
1410, the Poles joined forces with the Lithuanians and others and managed to defeat
the Teutonic Knights at Grünwald, in one of the great epic battles of the late Middle
Ages. That battle is still fondly remembered in Polish history books.
Poland's early capital was Kraków, but the seat of government was moved to War-
saw in the 16th century after union with Lithuania greatly expanded Poland's terri-
tory. In the 17th century, the Poles are generally credited with saving Europe in
another epic battle, this one against the Ottoman Turks. Commander Jan Sobieski
saved the day for Christian Europe, repelling the Turks at the gates of Vienna in 1683.
From this point on, Polish history runs mostly downhill. Poland was unable to
resist the gradual rise of Prussia in the west and Tsarist Russia in the east as great pow-
ers. The result was a series of partitions of Poland in the late 18th century, with parts
of Polish territory eventually going to Prussia, Russia, and Habsburg Austria. For 125
years, Poland disappeared from the map of Europe.
Independent Poland was restored in 1918 after the collapse of Austria-Hungary and
Germany in World War I. The interwar period was relatively rocky, but World War II
was Poland's worst nightmare come true. Nazi Germany fired the first shot from
Gda ^ sk harbor on September 1, 1939. Russia, under terms of a nonaggression pact
with Germany, seized the eastern part of the country. In the ensuing battle between
fascism and Communism, Poland was caught in the middle. Nearly a quarter of all
Poles died in the war, including more than a million Polish Jews. The Nazis used Pol-
ish soil for the worst of their extermination camps, at Auschwitz-Birkenau and Tre-
blinka, among others. Poland's once-handsome capital of Warsaw was ordered razed
to the ground by a Nazi leadership enraged by Polish resistance there. By the end of
the war, nearly every one of the city's million inhabitants had been killed or expelled,
and 85% of the city lay in ruins.
Poland was reconstituted at the end of the war, but with radically different borders.
Bowing to Stalin's demands, the U.S. and U.K. ceded vast tracts of formerly Polish ter-
ritory in the east to the Soviet Union. In turn, the new Poland was compensated with
former German territory in the west. The Polish borders were shifted some 200km
(120 miles) westward. The ethnic German population was expelled and replaced by
Poles transferred from the east of the country.
But the end of the war brought little relief. Poland was given over to the Soviet
sphere of influence, and though Communism held little appeal for most Poles, a series