Land of inspiration

to a young

Alex Salmond

David Torrance

 

Photograph of the Warsaw Rising memorial by the author

 

Back in 1980, when Alex Salmond was more of a romantic and less the hard-headed man of numbers he appears today, the young Eck was clearly inspired by events in a faraway land of which most Scots knew nothing.
     'From the shipyards of Gdansk to the coalfields of Silesia,' he told SNP activists in West Lothian, 'the flag is hoisted to show solidarity with the struggle against an unwanted regime. We in the SNP call upon the people of Scotland to show something of the resistance displayed by the Poles, and raise the Saltire…in protest against the unwanted government, foisted upon our nation by the pampered south-east of England.'
     There were traces of the contemporary Salmond at that meeting, with his talk of Tory policies threatening 'to destroy the very fabric of Scottish society', but also elements of the old, for today he claims to 'fight not for flags and anthems, but fairness and compassion'. I could well understand the youthful Alex's enthusiasm for events at the Lenin shipyards as I read Timothy Garton Ash's account of those events, 'The Polish Revolution', on a recent trip to Poland. The strike (or rather strikes) was a game-changing event at the height of the cold war; anyone interested in international affairs must have been captivated. 
     Yet on another level it was a rather crass analogy. To compare Scotland's position vis-à-vis the United Kingdom with Poland's vis-à-vis the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was surely a nonsense. Alas, Scottish and British politics is littered with similar hyperbole. The constitutional pressure group Charter 88 deliberately sought to echo the Czech human rights movement Charter 77, while more recently some commentators have referred to a 'Scottish Spring'. Indeed, the former SNP leader Gordon Wilson linked that to the 'Arab Spring' in an article for what the Daily Mail called the 'ultra-nationalist' Scots Independent.
     But enough of this. Poland is a terrific country, so engaging that I can't believe it took me so long to ignore my carbon footprint and hop on an EasyJet flight from Edinburgh to Krakow. It's a disconcertingly beautiful city, and not just within the confines of its tourist-packed Old Town. It was here that Oskar Schindler based himself during the war, and thus it was here that being Jewish did not necessarily mean certain death. When I asked someone how the city had managed to escape the ravages of war, his response was arresting. 'There was no Jewish uprising in Krakow,' he told me. 'In Warsaw, there was an uprising. And so Warsaw was destroyed.'
     The Polish capital was an easy three-hour train journey from Krakow's charming old Glowny station, so there I spent a scorchingly hot Sunday. I realise it's tiresome to bang on about other countries' superior railway networks, but please indulge me. Not only do Polish trains retain the old British Rail six-person carriages, but there's complimentary coffee and water, even in standard class. So conditioned was I to expect a charge that initially I declined the offer. No, the attendant seemed to imply with a quizzical look, you must take the coffee.
     Warsaw allowed me to indulge my fascination with the events of October 1944. Determined to liberate the city from Nazi occupation, the Polish resistance Home Army rose up just as German forces prepared to retreat and the Red Army approached the capital's eastern suburbs. Tragically, the Soviet advance stopped short, and the Home Army was left to fight for 63 days with little outside support. Winston Churchill pleaded with Stalin to help the UK's Polish allies, but to no avail.

 

     The devastation was immense. At the superb Warsaw Rising Museum, I was given an animated 3D journey over the city. Almost nothing remained. Although the Old Town was quickly rebuilt after the war, the essential character of the city was lost forever. It struck me that the trauma of the London Blitz couldn't possibly compare. A massive hole had been punched in the heart of Poland, and the lingering bitterness at the failure of the allies to prevent it is evident from the museum's displays.
     What of Poland today? To the superficial eye of the tourist it appears prosperous, but then I learned from a recent economics graduate that unemployment is approaching 20%. But that, as my acquaintance pointed out, was an unreliable statistic, for it didn't necessarily take into account the large number of Poles still working abroad. An underdeveloped financial services sector may have spared Poland a banking crisis, but it continues to struggle with the transition from a stagnant Soviet-era economy to 21st-century Eurozone status.
     Consequently, Poles have a healthy disregard for their political masters, widely perceived as lazy, right-wing and, most damningly, stupid. There's a joke in Poland (so someone recounted to me) that while the Polish government speaks only Polish, in any Krakovian restaurant the waitress can converse in English, the chef speaks French, the owner German, and so on. The contrast is between the educational achievement and flexibility of normal Poles, and the inflexibility and ineptitude of their leaders.
     The Polish language is nevertheless, as it has been for centuries, a key benchmark of 'Polishness', an essential ingredient – even more than birth or religion – of Polish nationality. This is in sharp contrast to the English-speaking world, where the Irish, Americans, Australians and, of course, the Scots can all be native speakers of the same language but would violently object to being taken for Englishmen as a result.
     There are, as in most countries, some parallels with the curious dynamic of the Scottish/British state. In 1569 the Union of Lublin established the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, a unified federal state with an elective monarchy. This coincided, like the creation of the United Kingdom, with a period of great stability and prosperity in Poland. The Commonwealth was richly multicultural, its people priding themselves on descent, real or imagined, from Dutch, Swedish, Italian or even Scots immigrants.
     But there were tensions. As Norman Davies observes in his stimulating 'short' history of Poland, 'Heart of Europe', the 'Polish connection' in Lithuania came to have the same connotation as the 'British connection' in Scotland. Remarkably, I encountered three Poles during my visit all of whom had read Davies' longer, two-volume history of Poland, the splendidly titled 'God's Playground', an impressive reach for a British chronicler of their nation's history. It's an interesting work, not least because the historian's sympathies are clear throughout. A fluent Polish speaker, Davies deliberately abandoned academic impartiality in order to tell the story of 20th-century Poland.
     Davies also reminded me of the many links between Poland and Scotland, elegantly recorded elsewhere by Neal Ascherson. The Polish 'first corps' of General Marian Kukiel was stationed on the Isle of Bute (known to the Poles as 'the island of snakes') during the war. Designated a Polish political detention district, an excess of officers and too few men initially caused difficulties. But there was a romantic flipside. A cousin of my late grandmother married one refugee and settled with him in Poland once hostilities ceased. I already find myself planning a return visit, perhaps to see the shipyards of Gdansk for myself, perhaps to track down my Polish cousins.

 

David Torrance is a writer, broadcaster and political historian. He is the author of biographies of George Younger and Alex Salmond