When Russia Crushed Poland

"Do not save me,” read the note that the Polish poet Aleksander Wat left by his Paris bedside in 1967, after taking the overdose of sleeping pills that would kill him. The twentieth century was unkind to Wat. As a Jew, and as the onetime editor of the Marxist Literary Monthly, he was unlikely to flee westward when Nazi armies and their Soviet allies converged on his country in 1939. But he found no welcome either when he fled eastward to Lwów. He was arrested by the secret police and exiled with his family to Kazakhstan. Wat was a man of conscience. Although among the twentieth century’s victims, he would be racked with guilt over the part he had played as a perpetrator—as one who had made the intellectual world safe for Stalinism.