It is frightening that there are people for whom the history of the 20th century remains a virtual blank
Published 10 April 2000
Most of my days are spent ensconced in my library, where I toil on a topic that must seem obscure to all but a small band of fellow enthusiasts. I am on the eve of completing a book about the compilation of the oldest surviving vernacular literature in the British Isles: the medieval Welsh tales commonly known as Mabinogion, more correctly Mabinogi. A vexed question among Celtic scholars is the date of their composition, a century-old conundrum which, in my vanity, I believe I may have cracked. The only problem is that what began as a 40-minute lecture delivered to the International Arthurian Society in Oxford some years ago has now expanded to 70,000 words.
A childhood delight in the legends of King Arthur led me to explore what of an historical nature might lie behind these magical tales, and my days as a student at Trinity College Dublin afforded me the opportunity to pursue them to their prime source: the medieval Celtic literature of Britain and Ireland. Since then, I have collected every book and article remotely bearing on this and related topics, and I am never happier than when immured in my library, able to pursue every clue (almost) from the resources of my own bookshelves. It is a magical treasure hunt, its only drawback being the temptation to pursue the research just that little bit further. But life is short, and one must draw a halt somewhere.
Recent history draws me with a different passion. At the cinema in the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, I attended a showing of a documentary film made by an indomitably enterprising Polish lady, Jagna Wright. A Forgotten Odyssey is the story of the 1.7 million Poles deported by the Soviets in 1939 and 1940, following the combined invasion of their country by the Nazi and Soviet armies.
The majority were deported to work and die in conditions inconceivable to people living in comfortable western countries. Their sufferings and losses are movingly described by surviving eyewitnesses, a handful of whom were among the audience. Wright explained that, so far, no British television network had shown interest in screening the film. Grounds advanced for polite rejection ranged from the assertion that people are not interested in events of such obscurity, to the fear that audiences would not be able to credit a crime of such magnitude.
I am old enough to recall how, in 1945, many found it difficult to accept the full horror of Nazi crimes, but if it be really true that, 55 years later, there exist people for whom the history of the 20th century remains a virtual blank, the future does indeed appear frightening.
The single most terrible crime in this dreadful story was that of the 15,000 Polish officers slaughtered at Katyn and elsewhere. They were the cream of the Polish intellectual elite, and it was essential to Soviet policy that they be eliminated. By 1943, Hitler having fallen out with his former ally, German troops had occupied Poland. At the now notorious site of Katyn, they discovered the bodies of thousands of murdered Polish officers. Delighted at finding an atrocity for once not perpetrated by itself, the German government invited international observers to inspect the site and to decide who were the culprits.
Though the evidence was overwhelming that the killing had occurred in 1940 when the area was under Soviet control, Churchill and Roosevelt were too frightened of upsetting their powerful ally to press the issue.
But what is truly horrifying about the British attitude was the refusal to acknowledge reality long after the war was over. Polish troops, reluctantly released by Stalin to fight in the west after Hitler's invasion in 1941, died in their thousands fighting valiantly with the Allied armies at Tobruk, Monte Cassino, Arnhem and elsewhere. The reward for those who survived was to be refused permission to participate in the Victory Parade in London.
Thereafter, the Foreign Office declined to accept evidence plain to all that it was the Soviets who had perpetrated the massacres at Katyn, Kozielsk and elsewhere.The FO was absolving its Soviet friends as late as 1990, until an ungrateful Russian government publicly acknowledged Soviet perpetration of the crime.
By chance, I had recently raised with the Foreign Office the barbaric treatment of thousands of Russian and Yugoslav prisoners of war and refugees in southern Austria in 1945, suggesting that the British government should now make some public gesture of regret, and recompense the few surviving victims. The FO responded by assuring me that no such event had ever occurred and that, even if it had, it was authorised by the Yalta Agreement.
I passed copies of this correspondence to Zoe Polanska who, as a 16-year-old girl, had been among those flung by British troops into cattle trucks for despatch to the Gulag. Her war had been spent in Auschwitz and Dachau, and she wrote to the "Human Rights Department" of the FO to explain that she had been there, and to ask how anyone could assert that cruelties on such a scale had not occurred.
Polanska received a patronising reply, explaining that she was mistaken and implying that she had imagined the affair. Anyone who doubts the arrogance and inhumanity of our diplomatic representatives may consult this correspondence on my website: www.uvsc.edu/tolstoy.
I seek to cheer myself by returning to investigate the cult of the raven as manifestation of the departing soul among early Celtic peoples.
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