406 PARTIA
The trauma of the Polish Communists between 1938 and 1942 must surely
arouse the compassion of their bitterest enemies. Their fate has been likened to
that of some imaginary Jewish Nazi Party, which, having failed to recruit a
significant number of Jews to the Hitlerjugend, was then condemned to the
ovens of Auschwitz. Rejected from the start by their Polish homeland, the sur-
viving members of the KPP had to come to terms with the fact that they were
equally unwelcome in the great Soviet Homeland of Socialism. The agonizing
paradox was nicely recorded by the communist poet, Wladyslaw Broniewski
(1897-1962), from his Soviet cell in the Zamarstynow Prison in Lwow:'A Word with History' (1940)
Old Mother History, Queen of Them All,
how you do love raising a stink!
Orion peeps through the bars in the wall,
as we crouch on the bucket, in clink.
You sing me the same old patter-song
with the same half-derisive leer.
So, side by side, we go clanking along —
you since Time was, I since last year.
Immortal madam, why and whence
This passion for paradox that you display?
Do you really think that it makes good sense
to poison the world's bloodstream in this way?
For in the whole wide world I see
nothing but conflict, crisis and war.
It's hardly the moment, would you agree,
for us both to be doing 'stir'?
Why should a revolutionary poet
rot to death in this Soviet hole?
Dear History, it strikes a jarring note.
Surely, one of us is playing the fool.
Shame on you, madam, Queen of Them All!
Let me out of Zamarstynov! (Then,
on the other side of the wall,
we can both be arrested again).^13For the time being there was no possibility of relief. So long as the Nazi-Soviet
Pact was in operation, Stalin had no care for Polish prisoners or for Polish orga-
nizations of any kind. Only at the very end of 1941, after Hitler's attack on
Russia, and Stalin's subsequent change of heart towards Poland, could there be
any question of restoring the Polish Communist movement to a place in the
over-all Soviet scheme.
The task of reconstructing the shattered remains of the movement fell to a
courageous band of Poles in Moscow - the so-called Initiative Group headed by
Marceli Nowotko (1893-1942), Pawel Finder (1904-44), and Bolestaw Molojec