1939: War Comes to Potocki Street

Mine was a much smaller family than the Basia's, and we weren't nearly as affluent. We lived in what was called the Caretaker's Cottage, rent free as a supplement to my father's wage of eighty dollars a month. We had no relatives within three thousand miles, though in time I would discover quantities of them in Ireland, England, Australia, and South Africa--the Irish diaspora. But in 1939 I knew only the four of us: Mom, Dad, my brother Joe, and myself, the second-born and usually in trouble. I've always suspected that Joe didn't entirely approve of me. In one of my earliest memories, he is leading me along a stone wall after a considerable snowstorm. (All snowstorms are considerable when you are forty inches tall.) We are walking on a surface we cannot see, between our house and the little barn out back where we play, where we'll smoke our first cigarettes, and which has a room set aside as a privy. (Perhaps that was our destination, though generally we used a chamberpot in the winter months. I suppose Mom had the job of emptying it.) Inevitably, at some point along the invisible wall, I take a false step and sink deep into the snow.

Joe went back to the house, took off his coat and galoshes, and settled down to read the funny papers in front of the fire. Some little time elapsed before Mom noticed I was missing, and sent Dad to retrace our footprints and pull me out of the snowbank.

Well--Poland! We didn't hear about its agony on the radio, for the very good reason that we didn't own a radio. Nor did the Caretaker's Cottage have any of the other amenities that were common even in 1939, such as electricity, running water, refrigeration, or a source of heat apart from a fireplace in the living room and a Glenwood range in the kitchen. Because they were wood-fueled, neither held a fire overnight, so the winter ritual called for Dad to rise at six o'clock and build a fire in the kitchen. On top of the Glenwood range was a kettle filled with water, which very possibly had frozen solid in the early hours of morning. It thawed by the time Mom got up, and she poured a cup into the throat of the hand pump at the sink, to prime it, since the handle had been raised to let the water run back into the well. (Otherwise the pipe would have "caught a little," as New Hampshiremen say.) Then Joe and I raced from the bedroom with our clothes in our arms, to dress by the radiant heat of the Glenwood range.

So at best I learned about the onset of the Second World War, as we called it from its very first week, in the Sunday edition of the Boston Post. The Sunday paper was the only one Dad felt we could afford; he bought it at McGrath's General Store in Alton Bay, as he drove us home from Mass. Dad liked to patronize McGrath's because the name seemed Irish. The news might therefore have reached us as early as September 3, 1939, two days after German tanks crossed the Polish border.

More likely, though, I absorbed the war's beginning--as I did much of the rest--through photographs in Life magazine, the oversized weekly that cost a nickel and covered the wide world in its fashion. (Dad didn't actually spend the nickel. The magazine was passed along to him by Mrs. Damon, whose lakefront home Dad cared for.) From Life I'd learned about the Spanish Civil War, in a spread depicting the demolition of a building across the street, the consequence of shells fired from a cannon in an upper story of a building on this side of the street. (Much later I discovered that these photographs were actually stills from a documentary film, and that the cannon and the disappearing building were in Barcelona.) I'd studied Adolf Hitler as well, orating from a balcony in Berlin, or Munich or Vienna.

Thus with the invasion of Poland. I remember a photo of women and boys digging trenches in a park, for passers-by to shelter from aerial bombardment. How I envied those Polish boys in short pants, soon to be heroes in war! Life also brought us full-page drawings of German bombers attacking cities, and of fighter planes intercepting the bombers, along with photos of tanks, motorcycles, and horse cavalry.

The German invasion, complete with the war's first terror bombing, got much more attention in Life magazine than the Russian invasion that followed it. It was a big deal, and it would seem even bigger now: with a million and a half men, the German army was nearly three times the size of the U.S. Army of today. At least ten thousand of them died during the month it took them to subdue Poland, and that with help from the Russians.

Life introduced something new to my vocabulary: blitzkrieg, lightning war, what the U.S. military now practices (none better!) under the name of "maneuver warfare." For a hundred years, armies had gone to war across a broad front, guarding their flanks and protecting their supply lines as they advanced; when the advance stalled, they dug trenches and defended them in depth. Wars thus involved stupendous numbers of men, of whom stupendous numbers died; wars spread across continents, and they lasted for years. The U.S. Civil War was the first such combat, and to this day remains the bloodiest in American history. Then the Great War, as it was called at the time--the First World War, as we began to call it in 1939--which destroyed the old order in Europe and left the United States as the world's leading economy, at least until it stalled out in the Great Depression of the 1930s.

To break the bloody stalemates of conventional warfare, the Germans developed blitzkrieg. Speed, flexibility, and violence would be the strategy: the Wehrmacht, German armed forces, would smash through Polish defenses, taking huge chances in the hope of confusing and demoralizing the enemy, rendering them unable to mount a coherent defense. To be sure, this wasn't an entirely new concept. Genghis Khan, when he led his Mongol horsemen on the gallop across four thousand miles of Asia and Eastern Europe, was a blitzer. So was William Quantrill in the U.S. Civil War, and T. E. Lawrence in the First World War. And even in the trench warfare on the Western Front, the Germans had experimented with sturmtruppen, storm troopers, who with dash and daring broke through the Allied defenses and spread death and panic behind the lines.

What the Wehrmacht now added to the concept were tanks, dive bombers, radio communication, and the principle of "leading from the front"--putting the commander in the lead tank or letting Unteroffizier Adolf make the decisions as he clattered along. Where they could, German troops bypassed the Polish army and attacked its supply lines, without which it could not fight. The chaos was compounded by refugees trying to escape the fighting: "All along the road," recalled one of them, "the farmers stared in amazement at this winding river of people, without beginning or end, this river of anguish."

Thus it was that Germany's 1st Mountain Division, a "light" force of twelve thousand Bavarians and Austrians, hooked into Poland's south. In the lead was the 98th Regiment under Colonel Ferdinand Schoerner from Munich, and the man who had whipped Hitler's paramilitary SS troopers into the dreaded Waffen SS. His men traveled on foot and on horseback, by motorcycle, truck, bicycle, and city bus, and probably some tanks. They covered up to thirty-five miles a day, with the rest of the German 14th Army trailing on behind. Their goal was the city of Lwow, in Poland's southeast, and their mission was to seal the country's southern border, so that the the Polish army couldn't slip into Romania and thus survive to fight on another front.

Lwow was Poland's second city. It was a regional capital, university town, commercial center, and home to a medley of cultures: "golden-skinned Poles with steel-blue eyes, Armenians with velvety eye-balls, Jews whose long pale faces are framed by the ritual cork-screw curls"--and Ukrainians, a small part of the city's population but a majority in the countryside.

Lwow! Basia taught me to pronounce the first letter as a syllable unto itself--a shortened leh--and immediately to follow it with a soft "woof." So: L'woof! It was one of the few foreign words I could pronounce with absolute certainty. (Another was the name of the Llanfair PG, the Welsh town that in its full form is supposed to be the longest in any language. Malcolm Hopson got me to master it one afternoon in our pub on the Oxford Road, across from the University. Such are the small triumphs of youth.)

Today Basia's city is called Lviv, and is located in western Ukraine. There are some Poles in residence, but not many. Stalin's intention in his flirtation with Hitler was twofold. He wanted to reclaim the considerable portion of central Europe that until 1918 had been part of the Russian Empire, and he wanted a significant and ethnically pure buffer zone between Germany and the Soviet Union. To accomplish this, he had to get rid of the Poles, or anyhow all the Poles who were likely to resist the return of Mother Russia. They included military men, and especially the officers; policemen, foresters, and "settlers," by which he meant war veterans given land along the eastern frontier, to reward them for past service and to guard the border in the event of a future war; members of any privileged occupation, such as teaching, banking, business, medicine, and real estate ... and their families! Basia's father fitted at least three of these profiles. He was a doctor, a war veteran, and a reserve officer.