“Just as great power conflict looms again, those who witnessed the last one are disappearing.  […]  During the original Cold War, American leaders and citizens knew that survival was not inevitable.  […] Today the United States is again assuming the primary burden of countering the ambitions of governments in Moscow and Beijing. When it did so the first time, it lived in the shadow of world war and acted out of a frank and healthy fear of another. This time, lessons will have to be learned without that experience.”

“World War III Begins With Forgetting,” by Stephen Wertheim - New York Times Opinion Section; December 2nd, 2022.

***

Wertheim is, of course, right: the survivors of World War II are dying out, their first-hand witness grave-bound. Those of us born in the war's penumbra, we children of the Cold War, need to bring forward the stories our parents and grandparents told us, and recall what we can from the days of “duck and cover.”  What do we know that might be useful?

***

December, 1981. Oslo, Norway. “Marsz, marsz, Dąbrowski, Z ziemi włoskiej do Polski...,” the Polish national anthem, “Poland Is Not Yet Lost,” roared repeatedly by dozens of Poles packed into a small apartment, along with a few Norwegians, one Israeli, and a lone American. Vodka fumes, sweat, the smoke of hand-rolled cigarettes stung our eyes. We wolfed pickles and hard-boiled eggs. We strained for every scrap of news: on December 12th, General Jaruzelski had declared martial law. Jacek and Ewa, Tomasz and Danuta, Iwona, Grazyna, Malgorzata...medical students, sociologists, artists thrilled to be on exchange in Norway, as part of a lingering detente, proud of Solidarity's promise – all now faced potentially life or death questions. All Polish men had been ordered home for military service. Tanks rolled in Poland's streets; helicopters hovered  above the roof-tops;the secret police were putting Solidarity leaders in detention camps. Under “shoot to kill” orders, the military killed nine and wounded 21 coal miners striking at Wujek to protest martial law, killed one protester and injured hundreds in Solidarity's birthplace, Gdansk. Poland was writhing, its fate in doubt. We all knew whose troops were massed on the eastern border. Everyone remembered Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968.

The Poles in the Oslo apartment knew that NATO could not help them. They had long since passed through resignation to a unique species of almost cocky stoicism, the latest iteration of spirit that has seen Poland rise several times from the dead.  They took pains to reassure me that they bore no ill will towards the West for its inability to aid them, so long as the West ultimately remembered to count Poland as a member of the family. Everyone had a distant cousin in Chicago, Cleveland or New York.  “Do you know Pulaski?  Do you know Kościuszko? They helped you win your independence, you know this, yes?” And specifically because the Communists did not acknowledge the following: “We Poles fought by your side in Normandy, died with you at Monte Cassino. This you know, yes? We helped win the Battle of Britain, did you know this?”  

Do we know this? Wertheim is right. By forgetting, we increase the risk of stumbling into World War III. Private recollections will help. Even better: we return to public witness; we talk about memories preserved in print; we dwell for a prophylactic season with the words of those who endured the horrors. For my part, I am re-reading "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner," and "Todesfuge." And Czesław Miłosz's The Witness of Poetry, Václav Havel's The Power of the Powerless, the memoirs of Vera Brittain, the poetry of Ingeborg Bachmann, essays and stories by Primo Levi. (The vast landscape of my ignorance extends before me; I need to read Shōhei Ōoka, Kenzaburō Ōe, Bino A. Realuyo, Wing Tek Lum...) Dust off our copies of Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory, and Jane Hirshfield's “Poetry as a Vessel of Remembrance.” What did the dead know? What do we?

***

Coda. Note too the mute witness of anti-poetry. November 16th, 2022. 500 residents evacuated near the town of Sønderborg in Denmark, after two RAF bombs from 1943 were discovered buried in a field, and then neutralized via controlled detonation. // August 2022. 12,000 people evacuated in Berlin after the discovery of a 1,100-pound unexploded World War II bomb. // May 2021. 25,000 people evacuated in Frankfurt after the discovery of a 1,100-pound unexploded … // May 2021. 16,500 people evacuated in Flensburg when a World War II bomb.... // February 2021. 2,600 households and the University of Exeter residence halls evacuated after the discovery of an unexploded 2,200-pound World War II bomb. //  January 2020. 14,000 evacuated in Dortmund, central train station closed... // July 2019. 16,500 people evacuated in Frankfurt... // May 2019. 1,500 houses evacuated at Kingston upon Thames when a German bomb was found and defused. // August 2018. Evacuation of 18,500 people in Ludwigshafen... // April 2018: 12,000 people evacuated in Berlin after a bomb ….  // April 2018: 26,000 in Paderborn... // September 2017. 21,000 in Koblenz... // September 2017. 70,000 in Frankfurt…