210 EMIGRACJA
though much diminished, still functioned. Elsewhere in the United Kingdom,
there were large Polish communities in Glasgow, Manchester, Bradford, and
Coventry. There were Polish boarding schools at Fawley Court (Oxon.), for
boys, and at Pitsford (Leics.), for girls. In all major centres there were Polish
parishes, Polish clubs, and Polish Saturday schools. The tone was gradually
changing as the new British-born generation came to the fore. But if the spirit of
pre-war Warsaw, Wilno, or Lwow had survived anywhere it was in the rooms
of the Ognisko Polskie (the Polish Hearth) in Kensington.^14
The Poles of the USSR fitted into two distinct categories. On the one hand,
there were the remnants of the Polish and polonized population which had
inhabited Lithuania, Byelorussia, and Ukraine since time immemorial. On the
other hand, there were the political deportees. In both cases, it may seem odd
that people whose homes were excluded from Poland by a change of state fron-
tiers or whose ancestors were transported to Siberia in chains, should sometimes
be classed as 'emigrants'. Yet the final result was much the same. For better or
for worse, they had been physically separated from that main Polish community
to which their forebears once belonged. They shared most of the problems of
those who departed to the west of their own free will. The political deportees
had a very long history. Each generation of Poles which was dumped in the
depths of the tundra or the steppe in 1832, 1864, 1906, 1940, or 1945 has talked
of encountering Poles of an earlier generation who had shared the same fate. In
each of the traditional areas of exile, the new arrivals were welcomed by ex-
insurrectionists who in some cases were unable to speak Polish, but who were
fiercely proud of their Polish origins. From time to time evidence emerges of the
huge numbers involved in these terrible and obscure happenings, as in 1866
when the great Bajkal Mutiny occurred, or more recently in 1942-3 when the
Polish Army in Russia succeeded in evacuating itself and its dependants. The
population transfers of 1945—7, and the Amnesty of 1956 gave two rare oppor-
tunities for many thousands of Poles to leave. But many would not, or could not,
leave. For families who had lived in Russia for centuries, the chance to 'return'
to Poland did not always prove attractive. Others were not given the choice. The
fate of hundreds of thousands of Polish civilians deported in 1939-40, and of
tens of thousands of Home Army prisoners arrested in 1944-6, is still not-
exactly known.^15
The Polish presence in Israel deserves special mention. The larger part of
European Jewry, whose survivors fled to Palestine after the Second World War,
once shared their destiny with the Poles in Poland. It is perhaps a natural preju-
dice that the modern generation should choose to forget their links with a coun-
try which, willy-nilly, hosted the Holocaust. Yet all do not forget so easily. The
'Street of the Just' in Tel-Aviv bears witness to more Polish names than to those
of any other nation. And Jerusalem is one of the few cities in the world where a
visitor with a sound knowledge of Polish need not fear losing his way.^16
Internecine political divisions are an innate feature of life in exile, and can be
traced in the history of the Polish Emigration from the very beginning. The emi-