LITMIR.BIZ

      INTRODUCTION

      Danuta Mostwin’s Puzzles of Identity

      “EXILE IS IN FASHION,” writes Ian Buruma, himself an exile from several countries and cultures, in his essay “The Romance of Exile.” “Today,” he goes on to quote the Polish-Jewish writer Eva Hoffman, “‘at least within the framework of postmodern theory, we have come to value exactly those qualities of experience that exile demands—uncertainty, displacement, the fragmented identity. Within this conceptual framework, exile becomes, well, sexy, glamorous, interesting.’”¹ And, of course, an exile is an ultimate other, but in ways more complex and, for the majority of exiles and emigrants, far less glamorous than their image in postmodern theories.

      To begin with, few exiles today are called by this romantic name. They are much more likely to fall into the crowded category of “refugees” and soon thereafter to merge into the even less significant mass of “immigrants.” Even now, despite enormous progress in the Western democracies toward cultural open-mindedness, some exiles are more acceptable—and more fashionable—than others. After World War II, refugees from Poland came to the United States with at least somewhat justified expectations of an appreciative welcome, if only because they had fought the Nazis for the longest period of time and on all fronts. If not glamorous, they were certainly—most of them—heroic. Yet they came to a world whose knowledge of what they had done and experienced was very limited. The Americans knew next to nothing about the near extermination of European Jewish communities (the term “Holocaust” did not appear until the late 1950s), and they had but a vague notion of the horrors that had been inflicted on Poland by both her totalitarian neighbors, Nazi Germany and the communist Soviet Union. Few had heard about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943 or the Warsaw Uprising in 1944, and practically no information existed in the West about Soviet wartime crimes against non-Russian populations in the occupied territories stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea. When such information did emerge—as in the case of the Katyń Forest Massacre, in which fourteen thousand Polish military officers were executed—it was vigorously suppressed for reasons of realpolitik and pro-Russian sentiment: the Soviet Union was then, if only for a short time, a deservedly celebrated ally.

      In his speech accepting the 1980 Nobel Prize for Literature, Czesław Miłosz said that “those who come from the ‘other Europe,’ wherever they find themselves, notice to what extent their experience isolates them from their new milieu—and this may become the source of a new obsession.” The effects of this isolation on the majority of post–World War II Polish (and not only Polish) émigré writers were quite predictable: severe depression, suicide, and a creative output limited to themes of recent national traumas, which, one should add, could not be explored freely in Soviet-controlled postwar Poland. Gradually, though, some of the younger or emotionally stronger writers and poets began to involve their art with the immediate reality of the immigrant condition and, therefore, with the reality of America. The most remarkable voice in this small group belongs to Danuta Mostwin, a former Warsaw medical student who began her writing career in this country in the city of Baltimore—away from the Polish émigré enclaves of New York and Washington and, therefore, away from any semblance of exile’s glamour.

      Born in 1921 in Lublin, Danuta Mostwin came of age in wartime Warsaw, where, after graduating from the prestigious Emilia Plater Gymnasium, she enrolled in the clandestine medical academy.² Her father, a professional military officer, fought in the 1939 campaign and during the remaining years of World War II participated in Allied war efforts on the western front. Danuta’s mother, from her Warsaw apartment in the Saska Kępa district, joined the Armia Krajowa (Home Army) network of underground resistance operations. Her address became a haven for military emissaries of the Polish government in exile. One of them, a young captain named Stanisław Bask-Mostwin, parachuted into Poland in the spring of 1944 to deliver two hundred thousand dollars to Żegota,³ but stayed on and married Danuta. After the war, fearing arrest by the new communist authorities, the couple and Danuta’s mother illegally crossed the border into Czechoslovakia and then trekked to Western Europe, where they were reunited with Danuta’s father.

      They had intended to settle in London but, like hundreds of other demobilized Polish soldiers, they felt stranded in England, where, after an abrupt transition from military to civilian status, they were regarded with a mixture of guilt and xenophobia. Their military pensions running out, they were left to their own pitiable devices. In 1951 the entire family, which by then included the young couple’s son, left for the United States. Although they no longer expected a hero’s welcome, they were not prepared for the air of general indifference manifested, above all, in a total lack of assistance in their efforts to find employment. As foreigners,

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