There are still places and moments in Cracow where the twenties or the thirties are just around the corner. Four and a half decades of communism preserved the received world--although not in amber, for things ran down and fell into disrepair. Nevertheless, since Cracow suffered little physical damage to its urban fabric during the Second World War, and since the communists had trouble getting new construction or restoration projects done, the city we see around us is very much the city of 1939, with postmodern, post-communist additions.

In human terms, however, the world of Cracow from before the war is sunken almost out of sight. Few of its denizens remain. The German invaders systematically murdered the city's Jewish residents, who constituted one-quarter of the population. For the other three-quarters, the Reaper has been at work with the usual ruthlessness. Anyone who finished secondary school in the Second Polish Republic (the country that the Germans conquered in September, 1939) is over 80 today. 

With memory having almost lost the battle to legend or ignorance, this volume, published in 1997 as the fourth in the monumental Dzieje Krakowa [History of Cracow] series, is a useful compendium of information on the period. Far be it from Cracow Letters, which aspires to nothing beyond a moment's diversion for its educated general readership, to dare to pass critical judgment on this work. The twelve authors are all professional historians holding posts at institutions of higher education in Cracow. So, rather than being presumptuous, we shall only summarize some of the salient features in that historical landscape from the early twentieth century. 

What do most of us know about the period between the recovery of independence in 1918 and the German conquest less than twenty-one years later? Many, especially those who have little busts of him atop their desks or portraits of him on their walls, regard Marshal Jozef Pilsudski as the representative icon of those two decades. Beyond that,  conversation with Cracovians frequently indicates that they regard the city of their grandparents and great-grandparents as having been aristocratic, affluent, dynamic, conservative, ever so Catholic, and solid. 

There was more to it, and it was not so simple. The story holds some surprises for those coming to it fresh.

The Pilsudski Controversy

In the first place, Pilsudski was hardly a universally loved figure. He divided people. He was not only a patriot but also, for most of his life, a declared socialist. This alone earned him the hatred of the far right. On the other hand, his moves after the recovery of independence alienated mainstream socialists to the point that they gave up hoping he would ever return to the good, left-wing instincts of his youth. After Pilsudski stage managed the coup that clipped the wings of Poland's fledgling parliamentary democracy, he was elevated into a semi-deified symbol of national power, but neither he nor the "Colonels" who held the reins after his death ever managed to reconcile either the right or the left.

It should therefore not really come as a surprise to consider that one of the bitterest political controversies in the Cracow of this period broke out when the Prince-Archbishop (not yet Cardinal), Adam Sapieha, decided in 1936, a year after the Marshal's gala funeral, to move Pilsudski's sarcophagus out of the holiest place in Wawel, the Crypt of St. Leonard, and into the new Crypt of the Silver Bells. It is still there. Sapieha complained that (organized) pilgrimages to Pilsudski's tomb were disrupting the genteel, reflective atmosphere of the Wawel necropolis. The new resting place struck the upholders of the Pilsudski cult, who happened to run the country and based their legitimacy on having served in his Legions, as at best marginal. At worst, like the least desirable table in a restaurant, it was simply too close to the door. Yet Sapieha held his ground, ignoring orchestrated protests and calls for him to be stripped of his state honors. This victory in the most serious church-state conflict since the martyrdom of St. Stanislaw might have something to do with the Church's subsequent self-assured power.

Socialists

It might also surprise some to learn that the political party that most consistently held onto its Cracow electorate throughout the period was the PPS, the Polish Socialist Party. The city, like the rest of Poland, had a strong labor movement in a time when ideology still meant more than ethnic, national, or other varieties of "identity." Suffice it to notice that, in Cracow as in the rest of the country, the socialists were going from electoral strength to strength with their old-fashioned (from today's perspective, at least) class politics at the end of the period, while the party of government, despite commanding the full panoply of political weapons available in a modern corrupt democracy, were struggling to keep up, even as they played the modern (again, from today's vantage) cards of jingoism, national security, fear, and, at the end, ethnic hatred. The socialists remained  strong between the first and second world wars, and neither the colonels nor, later, the Nazis could finish them off. Only the communists managed to do so, after the Second World War, under Stalinism. 

Between the wars, however, Cracow saw two bloody street battles involving unions. In 1923, a cavalry detachment was called down from Wawel Hill and charged along Dunajewskiego, where workers were gathered in front of their headquarters. Armed proletarians fired on the galloping uhlans from the Planty, and the toll of fatalities was almost equal on both sides. 

In 1936, police massacred workers marching on ulica Basztowa in support of strikers at the Semperit tire factory. 

Celebrations of Glory

More peaceful mass events included a series of grand military reviews on the Blonia, culminating in Pilsudski's review of a "Cavalry Festival" in 1933, to mark the 250th anniversary of the relief of Vienna by Sobieski. Similar events took place right up to the end: 

"Reunions of legionnaires [the veterans of Pilsudski's original formation] were held in Cracow. The last of them took place on . . . August 6, 1939, in an atmosphere already heated with the approaching catastrophe of war. An attempt was made, with rich decorations throughout the city, illuminations, appearances by orchestras, and so on, to create a jubilant mood of total national unity in the face of the German threat. It was then that Marshal Edward Rydz-Smigly delivered his speech to the thousands assembled on the Blonia, also transmitted by radio, calling on them to fight 'right up to victory'"(p. 449). 

A few weeks later, Rydz-Smigly was slipping across the border into Hungary and disgrace, fleeing the unstoppable  German invaders. 

Defying an overwhelmingly superior enemy is one thing, but what Cracow has always thrown itself into with the most enthusiasm is a good funeral. Nothing in the period could top Pilsudski's 1935 obsequies, attended by tout le monde, including a couple of luminaries who would achieve increasing prominence over the following decade, Marshal Petain and Hermann Goering. Soon afterwards, work began on the Pilsudski mound on Sowiniec hill behind the zoo. Only in the following year did Archbishop Sapieha apparently conclude that this cult of personality was going too far, as described above. 

Growth

Just before the first World War, "Greater Cracow" expanded far beyond the old town and absorbed formerly  peripheral villages. After the war, new construction filled in the areas around the "Aleje" and beyond. Jacek Purchla's essay on urban planning and architecture shows how the present look of much of the city arose between 1918 and 1939. Monumental new edifices, such as the Jagiellonian library, arose along the boulevards (or were planned, as in the case of the National Museum building). Institutional complexes went up and apartment buildings filled most of the remaining vacant lots. Early in the period, there were two main tendencies. One, monumental and classical, characterized many public institutions. A competing modernistic tendency accounted for structures like the Feniks building on the Rynek at the corner of ul. Sw. Jana, the "skyscraper" office building on Plac Szczepanski, or the buildings around Plac Inwalidow. Hitler's persecutions brought young Jewish architects trained in the Bauhaus tradition to town, and their work can be seen in some of the apartment buildings around Park Krakowski. 

Even if Warsaw became the capital, Cracow began the interwar period as the pre-eminent Polish city. This was due in part to its established status as the national shrine and repository of culture and history, and in part to the fact that only the former Austrian province of Galicia, which included Cracow and had Lwow as its capital, had enjoyed political autonomy and a Polish-language administration and universities in the period of the partitions. 

Independence

Independence dawned at the end of October, 1918, when Polish units peacefully disarmed and took over from the Austrian soldiers standing guard at the now-demolished watch station at the foot of the old Town Hall tower (Ratusz). It was also in Cracow that Pilsudski, head of the Polish legions, and General Haller, commander of the Polish emigre army formed on the Western front, met to merge their forces and establish the Polish army. A grand parade on the Blonia marked the occasion.

Independent Poland was born in uncertainty and contention. None of its borders had been fixed. The first years saw constant patriotic demonstrations and fundraising drives in Cracow to support the Polish territorial aspirations in Silesia (against the Germans and Czechs), and, more ominously, in the east, first against the Ukrainian nationalists who attempted to set up their own government in Lwow, and then against the Soviets. Full-scale war broke out and raged catastrophically back and forth as the Poles first marched into Kiev and then rapidly found themselves in headlong retreat as the Red Army surged westwards. The Soviet goal was to smash Poland and break through to Germany in order to instigate a communist revolution there. The conflict threatened to turn into a new world war, a revolutionary one. Indeed, this was the single moment, despite all the later scare-mongering, when the Soviets were confident enough in their historical destiny to actually launch a "Red march on the West" and set about sweeping across Europe. "Through Kiev runs the direct road to linking up with the Austro-Hungarian revolution, just as [the road] through Pskov and Vilna leads to direct contact with the revolution in Germany," wrote Trotsky.

Then came the "Miracle on the Vistula," when Pilsudski and the Polish army stopped the Bolshevik advance near Warsaw on August 15, 1920. "The enemy, taken totally by surprise . . . is fleeing in disarray or surrendering in entire units . . . Ah, what a beautiful maneuver!" sighed a junior French observer, Charles de Gaulle. 

Yet the Soviet Union was only one of many threats against the new Polish state. It seems strange from today's perspective to read about belligerent mass demonstrations in Cracow against the Czechs, for instance, who were denounced for oppressing the Polish natives of Cieszyn. It was an uneasy time in Cracow. The police made continual arrests of suspected Bolshevik agitators (mostly Jewish -- this pattern would continue throughout the period). The military sent wartime internees from the Eastern front to a camp in the Dabie district. These were mostly anti-Bolshevik Russians. They existed in horrible conditions and epidemics swept the camps. Circassian officers in exotic uniforms appeared on the streets of Cracow, begging for food or offering to sell their sabres. The head of the Kuban Cossacks wasted away and died in the Cracow camp. 

Most people had it rough in those first years. On the Eastern Front, World War I saw a less systematic slaughter of soldiers, but a far greater degree of civilian privation than in the West. The fighting was stunningly fluid in the 1919-1920 war, when the fledgling Polish and Red Soviet Armies raced back and forth in weeks over territory that it would take years to conquer in World War II. Taking the World War I Eastern Front, the Polish-Bolshevik War, and the various other conflicts in eastern Poland together, including skirmishes and pillage related to the Russian Civil War, Europe had not seen such devastation since the Thirty Years' War. The new Polish Republic inherited most of the worst affected areas. All national and ethnic groups suffered, and all needed help from outside, including from America. Herbert Hoover, in charge of relief operations, visited Cracow; his name was on the lips of millions of children when they contemplated the prospect of having a slice of bread as opposed to going hungry. 

Inventing a Country

The new Polish state consisted of three former peripheral provinces of suddenly defunct empires; each Polish region was now cut off from its former transport and commercial links, and it took a long time to unify the new state, even in such practical matters as currency. Not until 1934 did direct rail service begin between Cracow and Warsaw. 

The first years were a time of shortages, rationing, and general confusion in Cracow. Aside from hunting down Bolsheviks, the police kept busy raiding shops, whose owners could be arrested for hoarding food or importing or exporting it. Inflation ran unchecked. It was not uncommon for the prices to go up between the first and second cup of coffee during a rendezvous in a cafe. Refugees from the east streamed into town. Strikes broke out. Unemployment abounded. The results included such confrontations as the 1923 cavalry charge against the workers on Dunajewskiego. 

Later, conditions became more stable. Yet Cracow continued to suffer. Now the problem was a brain drain, as the expanding government institutions in Warsaw siphoned off the best young talent. Professors left to take posts at new universities in other parts of the country. Warsaw also drew creative talent. In the end, even Cracow's oldest newspaper, Czas, moved to the capitol before ceasing publication altogether. The city's status as the capital of Polish intellectual life was wavering. 

But not lost, of course. New talents and artistic movements kept rising up. There were futurists, avant-gardeists, and modernists among the poets, writers, sculptors, painters, and people of the theatre, and then there was that one-of-a-kind phenomenon, Witkacy. The city never became a thriving industrial center and did not have to support the country's civil administration, but the creative impulses of the long walks and pleasant gatherings in the cafes continued. Leon Chwistek described the atmosphere as "not overly exciting [but rather] gentle, conducive to a lack of cares and to dreams." Therefore, the city had "an enormous percentage of people occupied with abstract matters, overwhelming in proportion to other Polish, and perhaps foreign, cities" (p. 344). 

Multiple Perspectives

Because it is the work of many authors, Volume Four of the History of Cracow sometimes covers the same events from several different perspectives. The reader may feel lucky, in places, to be enjoying several books for the price of one. This is especially true when the subject is local politics. Because of the long period during which the old Austrian charter remained in force, the city went for a long time without local council elections. Then, when the council proved unable to elect an executive board, the central authorities in Warsaw had to impose, or threaten to impose, government by appointed commissars. 

The local political battles had to do with the fact that the electorate remained basically divided into four power blocks. The Christian Democrats attempted to occupy a centrist position, but had trouble expanding beyond it, despite support from powerful media groups and, later, despite submissiveness to the ruling clique of "Colonels" in Warsaw. On the right was the National Democratic party. Generally regarded throughout Poland as at best a party of the lower middle classes, the National Democrats won the backing of some of the Cracow aristocracy. Anathema, to them, were both the socialists of the PPS and the Jewish bloc, itself accused in the gutter press of leftist, if not downright Bolshevik tendencies, despite the fact that the major contention within local Jewish politics in later years pitted the General Zionists against the Jewish War Veterans Association, a front for the "Colonels." 

Traditionally, Cracow had a Jewish vice-mayor. This was a holdover from the old Austrian curial system of voting that became enshrined in the political practice of the interwar period. 

At the end of the period, the Colonels used all the means at their disposal to try to hold onto power. Notoriously, they resorted to anti-Semitism in an effort to cut into that quarter of the electorate that remained anchored on the far right. They also used "administrative" means -- what would later be known, in another context, as an "enemies' list." For instance, they asked the owner of a newspaper associated with the Catholic center and the archdiocese to support their line. He refused. When they showed him a newly prepared list of the back taxes they had conveniently discovered that he owed, he yielded and sold out. This is the functioning of corrupt democracy. 

Dictatorship?

It is frequently asserted that the Polish state within which Cracow lay was "totalitarian" or "fascist" between the wars. At the height of Stalinism in the early 1950s, indeed, the communists sentenced some prewar political figures for "fascistization." 

On the one hand, there can be no doubt that Marshal Pilsudski ruled as a dictator after the 1926 coup that was advertised as a "cure" [sanacja] for a fractious, inefficient  parliament. Military officers appeared in the parliament to intimidate (and sometimes remove) opposition members. In 1930, the government arrested over a dozen prominent political leaders of an opposition coalition. In 1934, after the assassination of the interior ministrer by Ukrainian "terrorists," the government opened a concentration camp at Bereza-Kartuska. A year later, Poland had 16,000 political prisoners. This is a dreadful record even by the standards of a Central Europe in which Hitler had just come to power. 

On the other hand, Pilsudski never overthrew the existing political system (and never, like the Nazis in Germany, simply ignored it). The Polish government leaned on the press and applied preventive censorship, but never enforced total uniformity of public expression. Opposition members continued to sit in parliament. Rather than being cowed, public opinion continued to react with outrage to strong-arm government tactics, and the authorities reacted in turn to public opinion. True totalitarians and fascists are able to arrange their elections in such a way that they win, usually with over 99% of the vote. Or they manage to dispense with elections altogether. Pilsudski and the "Colonels" who ruled after his death could not meet these criteria. They had to keep holding elections, and failed to get the results they were after. 

This was the state within which Cracow existed between the wars: dictatorial while Pilsudski was alive, definitely authoritarian, but never determined to crush all individualism, personal independence, and differences of opinion, as was the case in Germany to the west or Soviet Russia to the east. 

While fighting a continual two-front internal war against Polish communists associated with one neighbor (the Soviets), and fascists, associated with the other neighbor (Germany), the Colonels never managed to consolidate the support of their own populace. Least of all in Cracow. "The Catholics of Cracow should blush in shame. The whole world is fighting against socialism and getting rid of the Jews. At this very time, Cracow has turned the rule of the city over to precisely socialism and Jewry." Thus the anti-Semitic Glos Narodu reacted to the last pre-war municipal council elections in December 1938. The socialists and the Zionists did far better than expected in those elections, together winning half the seats in the city council, and stood on the verge of electing a mayor of their choice.

Such facts are uncomfortable to those who either cherish the illusion that the city was a bastion of hoary right-wing traditionalism, or brandish the stereotype that, by dint of being attached to its past, largely Catholic, and--need we say more?--European, Cracow was automatically unenlightened, unfree, and dedicated to oppressing ethnic minorities and political dissidents. 

While plagued by the pure political ugliness that was endemic in Europe and beyond during the 1930s, Cracow was diverse, reasonably creative, and had a mind of its own. One of the wisest figures on the Polish scene, Jerzy Giedroyc, lamented in the 1990s, near the end of his long career that 50 percent of the Polish electorate is naturally aligned with the far right. In Cracow between the wars, it was more like a quarter of the electorate. 

Bedside Reading

The quotation about Catholics blushing in shame comes from Krakow Miedzy Wojnami [Cracow Between the Wars]. Its author, Czeslaw Brzoza, also wrote the chapter on politics, the largest section of The History of Cracow, Volume IV. Then, apparently, he took the notes he had made while combing the newspaper archives and put them together as a separate book, consisting of brief press cuttings, sometimes with a minimal commentary, assembled in chronological order. So this is a day-by-day account of the period, as it appeared in the papers. Everyday municipal happenings, obituaries, notes about visitors to the city, and local reactions to world-shaking events follow one another in the order in which the papers wrote about them. 

It is annoying in a minor way that not only many of the quotations from the press, but also some of Brzoza's brief commentaries appear verbatim in both books. His highly efficient recycling mechanism may at moments provoke the observation that, in this case, we are dealing with one book for the price of two. But it doesn't really matter. Cracow Between the Wars is one of the best bedside books about the city. All you have to do is pick it up, open it at random, and you find yourself transported back through the years, into that Cracow of the twenties and thirties through whose streets and in the shadows of whose buildings you might have walked a few hours before. 
 

Trotsky and de Gaulle quoted in Tomasz Gasowski, Wojna Polsko-Bolszewicka [The Polish-Bolshevik War] (Cracow, 1990). 

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