Abstract
Reviewed by: A. J. Prazmowska, London School of Economics, UK
Professor Dembowski is the author of an earlier history book in which he discussed a topic with which he had become familiar during the war when he lived in occupied Poland. Christians in the Warsaw Ghetto: An Epitaph for the Unremembered was published by Notre Dame Press in 2005. But his academic reputation rests on his work as a linguist, particularly in French and Provencal. In his later years Dembowski has returned to his roots and the present book is a memoir and an account of his own personal experiences. As he explains in the Preface, the first section of the book, which is entitled ‘Red’, deals with the painful memoirs of the war, stained as they were with blood. The second, entitled ‘White’, focuses entirely on his life in Canada and the USA, his marriage, family and professional successes.
Dembowski’s book is not unusual. With the passage of time, many war-time survivors have finally decided to explain to their families and to convey to posterity accounts of what they had witnessed. Migration studies have further fuelled the list of publications dealing with uprooted communities and their subsequent fate. The occupation of Poland by Nazi Germany and Soviet–German collaboration meant that the Poles, of all the occupied people, experienced the worst fate. After the war, there was little sense of relief because the defeat of Germany was followed by the continuing trauma of post-war reconstruction. In that picture. Soviet domination of the region defined the future, though it was hardly wholly responsible for the hardship experienced by the civilians.
Dembowski is exceptional for conveying a truthful picture of what he witnessed during the war. He avoids the trap of obviously interpreting his memories through the prism of subsequent accounts. He is impressively balanced and objective even though the account of his war-time experiences are harrowing and in many ways complex. He saw Poland occupied and he observed how society adjusted. He was aware of the distinct fate of the Polish Jews. The presence of the Jewish Ghetto in the middle of Warsaw, the town in which he lived until the end, forms part of his narrative. His ability to observe and to see beyond the horrors is confirmed by his unwillingness to refer to all Germans as Nazis. At times this must have been at times a difficult distinction to maintain.
But the second section of the book is equally interesting, because he admits that once he left Poland he never looked back, instead making the most of the opportunities offered by Canada and then the USA to complete his education and embark on a professional career. If the first half of the book is dominated by recollections of how he and his contemporaries coped with the horrors of occupation, the second part of the book is one where the author indicates that he went forth to a new life and in that chosen path, never looked back. A story of war-time Poland is followed by an account of how as an immigrant he coped in a new environment. Intriguingly, Dembowski appears not to have ever gone back to Poland after the war. His new life was in North America and that is the subject of the second section of the book.
For all its merits and even though the book is written in a very personal and easy to follow style, it will inevitably mean more to those for whom he wrote it, namely his family. To a wider audience, this is a book that deals with well-known events. Even though Dembowski is an impartial and objective witness, his account adds little that was not known on both subjects: life under occupation, and migration and assimilation into a new world.