THE GROWTH OF THE MODERN NATION 59the overwhelming power of ruthless neighbours, and how to combine with suit-
able allies against them, mutatis mutandis, as relevant in the mid-20th century
as they were a hundred years before. In this sense, the predicament of the
People's Republic after the Second World War resemble that of its many prede-
cessors in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Taking the Modern Era as a
whole, the two decades of genuine national independence between 1918 and
1939 represented a brief and exceptional episode. To quote the phrase of S. Cat-
Mackiewicz, 'unhappy is the nation for whom independence is nothing more
than an adventure.'^64
The events of the Second World War were incomparably worse than anything
which the Polish nation had suffered before. The conduct of the Nazis and the
Soviets makes the misdeeds of their Prussian, Austrian, or Tsarist predecessors
pale into insignificance. In the nineteenth century, the Poles had been faced with
a life of deprivation. In the twentieth century, they were faced with extinction.
If, somewhat fancifully, Poland had once been compared to Calvary, it later
became, in reality, Golgotha.