Adam Zamoyski: Famous Historian on Poland

in today's episode of hearts of Poland will speak to journalist and best-selling author Adams Amoy ski one of the foremost writers in the English language about Poland a person whose life in so many respects reflects that of Poland in the 20th century and indeed beyond will hear the fascinating story of the lives of his parents when they came to the United Kingdom and indeed his reflections on Poland polish history and the way that poles talk and reflect on their difficult and troubled past [Music] Adam thank you very much for joining us today and as a reader of some of your many books I have to say it's a personal privilege to have you in the chair today these a mighty name is one with great meaning in Poland your family has a long lineage in Poland can we start maybe by talking about that who was your father and indeed who was your mother well my father was before the war he was a Polish farmer and a reserve officer but he encapsulate so much what happened to particularly to his sort of melee er the people who were the landowners he was born in before the first world war in Russian Poland and actually briefly war that's ours uniform as a cadet in st. Petersburg but somehow my grandmother managed to get him shipped out to England in 1916 on a very very perilous boat journey and he went to school in England and stayed there for throughout the war but then he came back to Poland and did his military service and and went to the Jagiellonian University and clerical front got his doctorate and then farmed his land and his subsidy typical because the house he inherited in in what smile Southwest southeast Poland was totally demolished during the First World War and he spent his whole time rebuilding it and every bit of profit of the estate went to restoring the house and they they moved in in Easter 1939 and of course there was blitz did the Second World War but anyway they go and he then he had a distinguished war record he was a ADC to general Tchaikovsky and yeah and he was the go-between between Tchaikovsky and church a big score my father knew English perfectly and knew all these people because it spent so much time in England and he did its staff course and he fought he fought at Narvik you fought in the fall of France he then fought with the first Parrish armored division so he had quite quite what's known as a good war but landed up as an émigré in in England but he did at the end of the war also because he was such a an expert he was given the chance of recovering all the horses the blood stock the Germans had looted from very various countries from France from from southern South Eastern Europe from you know that the Hungarian and Romanian studs and of course all the polish studs and yeun of podlaski and so on and he brought all those horses back to Poland in in the late 40s and your mother was also a countess well then actually she was the princess was born and that she was born of course in the Western German occupied part of Poland before the First World War and so she they had a mixed experience of that and much they did they meet each other I'm in Poland and they married in Berlin before the war and they had me very late they were they were almost you know two world wars and two generations away from me and two revolutions actually you described your childhood as being belonging rather more in the 19th century than in the 20th as a result of that yes I mean III really feel like well you're on this one I wonder it's often said that the people of that generation that polish generation were were particularly patriotic that they particularly cared about bringing their children up in in the what was seen as traditional patriotic Polish tradition of resistance expressed through cultural forms songs poems activities did you have that kind of job well yes and no because actually my parents partly because my father's a huge pool of English friends and also my mother who had a French grandmother had a huge pool of relatives all over Europe and so we used to we didn't sort of live in in you know polish London in South Kensington and then Chizik and all that and so I didn't join the Polish Boy Scouts I did briefly go to page Saturday school but and you know now has brought up my mother reading Sienkiewicz to me and so on and we were certainly brought up in a very patriotic way but not quite as sort of regimented as a lot of the others and it was an easier thing and funnily enough I think it helped me because I know quite a few of my contemporaries brought up in London with baby parents and they sort of they felt they were being brought up in a ghetto they felt they were and they a lot of them just felt they had to break out and and rebelled against it whereas ours was much more it was more relaxed and it was you know it was as though our polish nurse was not something special and hid and a kind of faith that one had to worship it was a natural part of of the european heritage and as a result i think it's helped me enormous ly to when I write about Parrish subjects in my polish history because you know so many people who write about Parrish history whether they're poles or whether they're foreigners I mean look at Norman Davis you know they get tremendously sentimental and emotional about the whole thing and you know their eyes are sort of fighting the Polish corner or they're saying the pearls are frightful useless time to see mites whatever whereas I am I'm quite dispassionate about these things you know I mean they're just part of the great European jigsaw and at times they were they did quite well at times they didn't do so well like everybody else every nation has its detestable aspects and it's charming ones and I think that that's why people always tell me that I've written the only readable history of Poland it's not trying to fly any flags or or apologize or or boast so so that was a that was a help but also the moment I could in my first summer vac from Oxford I decided was gonna have a look at this place and so I got on a train and this was 1968 and my god the train journey was quite a grim thing yes going through East Germany with all these fretful border guards looking like extras from a film about Nazis with their you know pulsations sniffing every bit of here and their machine guns and and then and I saw again I found I had a wonderful time in Poland even though living conditions were unbelievable and and one was followed and one was very much aware of the of the brutality and the fear and yet you know Polish society seemed was you know also marvelous in those days was that if you met one writer or musician or actor or just fairly educated person within a couple of weeks you met the entire cultural elite of poker so as a teenager I met you know if I dance and knew see and that most of the actors of that time and most of them you know the convex keys in the band the things and and it was extraordinary because you just became part of a gang and you'd arrive and they say oh right in this evening we're all going off to sound so sore and that was incredible privilege and did your parents ever go back - no they didn't they felt or my father died before communism ended and in a sense the whole the Emma graves had always said you they they'll only go back in uniform and I always think it's so nice because my father died in the 70s and I gave all his uniforms to the Tchaikovsky Institute in London books so quite historic but for some reason there was a very elegant dress jacket is that I kept a cocky one but it was very elegantly cut in London in 1940 and I'd kept that and somehow it didn't seem to fit me but it fits my wife and every time and she likes she wears it to go riding and every time she Cantor's across the British countryside and that I always think that my father must be looking down and thinking right you know my uniforms returned so that's let's move on to your to your journalistic career in your your career as an author what what took you in that ball in that direction on that path well I was always interested in history and you know when I was a prep school I was interested in British history because that's what one was doing talking but I found that more and more what annoyed me was the fact that even when anglo-saxon historians or French historians were writing about Europe that Europe always ended on the ill and I felt this disconnect very strongly and I thought this is this is ridiculous I'd like to find out why there is this break you know how it happened and for me every book I write is always written out of curiosity to discover to sort out for myself what happened because you know we all haven't accepted some idea about some event and you may you think you know about what happened at the Battle of Waterloo but the minute you start researching it you suddenly realize you know nothing and actually you begin to realize that most of the people whose books you're reading also don't know so I find that writing particularly writing the history of Poland was for me a way of you know laying out all the facts one could get the hard facts looking at the sort of cultural aspects of it and looking at the literature and you know the mindsets of the people in order to actually discover what on earth was going on and who were these people and what did they think they were doing and that's what was the most interesting part of writing writing a book I mean I just now published a biography of Napoleon which again you know there are thousands of and I've read quite a few and they've always left me wondering what it was this guy and and to me it was a source of immense satisfaction to be able to just reading what he wrote and his letters and just getting to looking at the firsthand sources and realising trying to work out who he thought he was and what on earth he thought he was doing so that's that's what wooden drawers meet dead history is his quest a quest for curiosity really there can be few battles which I think best evidence the the fact that history seems to stop before it gets the part in them the Battle of war sir in 1920 one of the subjects that you covered in your books about Poland I wonder how much do you think the onus is on Poland to fix this problem in other words to somehow bring these enormous great certainly European why is battles of European significance to the out and wider world's attention it's it's a very difficult subject trying to [Music] you know trying to spread knowledge about Poland around and what-what post polls don't seem to understand and I tried to explain this at a conference in the presidential palace hosted by president dude I'm in a couple of years ago I try to explain that you know nobody likes bad news you know when when you ask me you meet me in the street and you say hi how are you am i start saying well you know I've got chilblains and I've got a bit of arthritis in my leg and actually I've got a headache you don't really want to hear that you lose interest whereas if I tell you well actually you know I've just done this and I've done that and it's like you're interested and I can tell you about the arthritis and the sholde lines later and so rather than dwelling on the fact that more poles were slaughtered in the Second World War than anybody else and that we suffered more and more things which immediately make people feel uneasy one should actually start with with the positive things with the things that are that at least interesting and fun and then you can bring on the other staff and by then people will listen to the science story because they already sympathize with as it were the hero of the story the main character whereas if you know if you just sort of um you know you see a in the street lying there in his vomit you know you're not going to say this man's story is very interesting and get a lot of people interested but you know if you start telling the story of a bright young man who marries a beautiful girl and then she gets killed in a car crash or she dies of cancer and he goes down here and to drugs or something and then you go on to that you know you you can begin to bring them in it's a very simple it's normal in a way but okay so I imagine that at that conference probably everybody agreed with what you said no no no there was the general feeling for it no no no no we must tell them about how awful the Warsaw Uprising was no no you know WHMIS told them about the Martyrology do you think that somehow you know the past has been just so painful that it's not possible well I think the problem is and and it's it's wrong you know everything is always understandable and this is the the first role of a historian is to try and understand how ever ghastly somebody is all people are you have to try and understand what Starling was up to what Hitler was up here on just saying they're so frightful they're you know forget what happened to this society in this country was absolutely unspeakable and it went on happening in various ways and after 1989 before 1989 things were lots of things were not spoken about we're not allowed Facebook then after 89 it was possible to start the archeology of the past and for very for all sorts of reasons which were completely understandable the then elites the the then dominant elites which included most of the ruling parties but also most of the opinion-forming journalists and writers were not so much in had been brought up not in sympathy with the tourism all had been going on and their attitude was come on we're joining the real world let's look to the future and let's go ahead and the great number of in this country possibly the majority of population felt hang on well we're free now but somehow we're not you know we haven't got down to the dirty washing which should be washed there's there's a there is some kind of a reckoning to be made of some sort or coming to terms with things and this was rather sort of pushed aside as being you know more beard and so on and so suddenly there's been a great reaction in the last ten years or so and everybody wants to read about the most frightful things and all the conspiracy theories have come out and so on and so there's this tremendous you know and he's gone over to the other extreme which is again very unhealthy because there's a lot of wallowing in in the misery which is which is not good and also a lot of it is exaggerated and it's too simplistic and again you know people are being painted as heroes and martyrs when you know they were just people we're recording this episode in a week in which it would be fair to say that Polish Israeli relations have not been good with comments from various sides around the actions of certain Polish individuals and groups during the Second World War do you think this is the epitome of what you've just described the inability to sort of a look at some of the less pleasant and more unfortunate aspects of the Second World War yes I mean I think there's a there's a huge problem there's you know what's been going on this last week I think is largely politicians trying to grandstand each other and don't pose as defenders of their respective nations both in Israel and in Poland it's incredibly silly and immature and regrettable generally speaking the problem is it's a huge problem because it's a human relationship gone wrong in most countries there wasn't anything you could possibly define as a relationship if there was a Jewish community very often there wasn't a community there were Jews around the place and and yes there was anti-semitism everywhere but if there wasn't a nation in Poland there was this huge community and though there was a Jewish community and there was the Polish nation and there was a relationship between the two which lasted 800 years and that relationship was blown apart with the partitions because in each of the partitions the third element came into it either the new the new power and both sides felt betrayed by the other and you know it's a bit like when an love affair goes wrong there can never be a horror marriage breaks up there can never be a an easy divorce or an or a dispassionate divorce there is always terrible there are terrible blame games and in this case it's it's you know ok the metaphor may be a bit bit stunk but that is what has happened is that you know two communities that lived together for you know centuries and okay it wasn't always rosy but it was not too bad and frankly you know it was amazing that they lived so harmoniously together for so long and given what happened in every other country and then it all got blown apart and what happened in these lands between really in the 1930s and the 1950s not to mention then the Communists the next decades was so frightful so dehumanizing so morally discombobulating and people lost their moral compasses there on both sides and you know people in every community behaved some unbelievably badly and some unbelievably heroically and just to wade into this and start blaming people or accusing people is pointless and a historical and-and-and just idiotic but once somebody says oh you know some pole did something awful then other poles will say well you know the Jews did something awful here or but we did this and so on you know it's just very sad there seems to be very much a sensation or from the polar side that if people only knew the other good things that the poles did we've been so dampened by the fact that there was a communist yes and of course what is monstrous and had really nobody should make these comments I'd like people talking about you know concentration camps or anything as you know any serious survived of concentration camp will always say you cannot judge if you were ever in that position the dehumanizing nature of the surroundings you can never ever judge what people did in order to survive in order to get a bit of bread in order to you know or just sub me you were so dehumanized so demoralized you thought we'll the whole world's gone mad well you know why shouldn't I make some money by denouncing a Jew if I'm you know the whole world's been turned upside down morality has been turned upside down you know and and after all they were also Jews handing in Druze who knows well because their moral system they said where is God you know one shouldn't charge one should you know people like us who are fortunate and everybody was fortunate enough not to have lived through those things should never ever ever point fingers at anybody in closing Adam Poland is a country full of undiscovered stories stories yet to be found it even about the people who who are known but also the people who are I wonder is there any period of Polish history that you think still has a lot to offer historians and indeed the general reader yes I mean I love the whole slightly benighted period of the first Republic from the middle of the sixteenth century to the end of the 18th century because although it was all politically conceptually experiment ended in tears it was a time in which the poles really sort of it was like party time I mean there if you look at the architecture of the times the art of the times that the social history of the times is fascinating it became such an extraordinary amalgam of east and west and and you know extraordinary cultural mixtures and and ideological and also racial mixtures going on you know there you know the nobility contained Muslims and Jews and Protestants and Catholics you know and this in a Europe which is becoming much more conformist and and state ridden and here were all these people kind of trying to create a sort of riotous mad Republic in which everybody was theoretically equal of course they weren't but to me it's a very exciting period and much more interesting than is generally represented because in the 19th century was very much swept aside as being you know it was the time when we made mistakes and and it led to the downfall of Poland but I think actually I think for for today it's um it's much more attractive attitude of you know rejection of the state and the whole idea that as as little government as you can have his is a good thing and so I like that period Adam's voice keep thank you very much for being on the heart of Poland you can find Adams Moy ski and his enormous collection of work journalism and books his I can call it a love affair I think with with France and Napoleon and the Napoleonic era but also his many books on but in which I heartily recommend you act your your book Poland actually made number two on my favorite poet well it is the only history of poems ever been on the bestseller list quite ingenious division yes yes so you can find Adam online and don't forget to share the hot opponent wherever you find it be Facebook YouTube Instagram LinkedIn snapchat or and any other social media platforms that seem to sprout as publish sake Eddie Cheever Podesta - we'll see you next time on husband Poland [Music]

Channel: The First News

Views: 12,530

Rating: 4.9189873 out of 5

Keywords: Adam Zamoyski, Heart of Poland, Zamoyski, Poland, Polish, Ney, Patrick Ney, author, book, Britain, British, war, read, reading, history

Id: sC_k_OnF-ns

Length: 28min 39sec (1719 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 22 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/CultistHeadpiece]

They're sitting pretty far apart.