318 NIEPODLEGLOSC
Democrat Kurjer Warszawski (Warsaw Courier) to the Pitudski-ite Kurjer
Poranny (Morning Courier), set the tone for national debates. Warsaw's the-
atres attracted the leading directors and producers, such as Leon Schiller
(1887—1954) or Stefan Jaracz (1883—1945). Warsaw's star-studded musical
world, led by the Contemporary Music Society of Karol Szymanowski
(1882-1937), attempted to marry traditional and national tastes to modern tech-
niques. What is more, all the established arts and media as patronized by
respectable society were kept on their toes by a vibrant avant-garde culture,
which flourished in the literary coffeehouses and the satirical reviews. On all
these counts, Warsaw sought to transcend its terrible problems. For all its vices,
it was a city full of life. When the testing time came, it was defended with hero-
ism.^33
Poland's last pre-war Premier, General Felicjan Stawoj-Sktakowski
(1885—1962) was to be remembered for two 'buzz words', which summarized his
somewhat dubious legacy. The word owszem, meaning 'naturally' or 'of
course', referred to a rejoiner which he made to a parliamentary question about
his Government's policy towards Jews. Having vehemently opposed any form
of physical attack, he was asked if economic or commercial discrimination was
permitted, and he replied, notoriously, 'owszem'.^34 The word stawojka, which
was a diminutive noun derivrd from his own name, referred to the 'privy' or
'latrine' which he ordered to be installed in any rural dwelling bereft of basic
sanitation. Decades after the OZON and its works were long forgotten, any
form of ramshackle farm shack or broken-down toilet was still being called a
stawojka.
In apportioning the blame for the final denouement of the pre-war crisis, the
sins of Colonel Jozef Beck (1894-1944), Foreign Minister from 1932 to 1939,
have been specially exaggerated. To say that he was guilty of 'insane obstinacy'
or of 'megalomania' at once misrepresents the man and his motives and inflates
the role of Polish diplomacy. Attempts to cast him as the villain of the pre-war
tragedy serve no purpose but to hide the culpability of much more prominent
actors. Beck's cardinal sin, like that of Pifcudski before him, was to march out
of step with his would-be Allied patrons. In 1934, he considered the merits of a
preventive war against Hitler at a time when any such fighting talk was anath-
ema in Paris and London. In 1937-8, he was thinking of protecting Poland's
national and strategic interests in face of Nazi aggression at a time when
Chamberlain and Daladier were seeking to appease Hitler at other people's
expense. In 1939, he refused to make concessions to the Soviet Union, at a time
when the appeasers were hoping that they might be rescued from Hitler by the
Red Army. Beck's reluctance to trade Poland's freedom of action for doubtful
advantages may have been inflexible, but was certainly even-handed. He
resisted the advances of Goering and Ribbentrop no less than those of Litvinov
and Molotov. The fate of neighbouring Czechoslovakia, whose government had
followed the advice of the Allies, did not inspire confidence. If Beck was at fault
as a diplomat, the fault lay not in his very appropriate suspicions of Hitler and