Volume 43, Number 19 · November 28, 1996
The Man in the Otter Collar
By Neal Ascherson
Aleksander Wat: Life and Art of an Iconoclast
by Tomas Venclova
Yale University Press, 369 pp., $35.00
The recorder of that surreal vision was a Polish-Jewish student who had just been released from a Soviet camp. The time was late 1941. Hitler had attacked the Soviet Union in June. Under the terms of Stalin's agreement with the Polish government-in-exile, the gigantic penal empire of labor camps and prisons was reluctantly beginning to disgorge some of the two million Poles who had been deported into slavery after the Soviet invasion and annexation of eastern Poland in September 1939. The destination of the cattle-car—seething with lice and crammed with Poles and their families—was Alma-Ata. In Soviet Asia, there was rumored to be food. Almost as important, offices of the Polish government had been set up there, and General Wladyslaw Anders was gathering around his standard the nucleus of a free Polish army, nursing and feeding tattered skeletons until they could become soldiers.
Review, 3877 words
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