Alan Jacobs in The Hedgehog Review:
The Polish poet Czesław Miłosz (1911–2004) had a complicated Second World War. He was in Warsaw when the Germans invaded, fleeing then to Ukraine. But then, discovering that his wife had been unable to escape Poland, he tried to return to her by way of Romania, then Ukraine again—the Germans were coming from one direction, the Russians from another—then Lithuania. By the summer of 1940, he was back in Warsaw. There, he participated in various underground activities, including the sheltering and transportation of Jews. In 1944, he was captured and briefly held in an internment camp. As the Red Army moved closer to Warsaw and the Nazis burned the city in anticipatory vengeance, Miłosz and his wife, with little more than the clothes on their backs, made their way to a village near Kraków, finding a brief respite from history, though not from poverty. Then:
One afternoon in January 1945 I was standing in the doorway of a peasant’s cottage; a few small-caliber shells had just landed in the village street. Then, in the low ground between the snow-covered hills, I saw a file of men slowly advancing. It was the first detachment of the Red Army. It was led by a young woman, felt-booted and carrying a submachine gun. Like all my compatriots, I was thus liberated from the domination of Berlin—in other words, brought under the domination of Moscow.
History had once again found him. But how strict and severe its newest embodiment would be he did not yet realize.
More here.
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