A Polish-American Polemic
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| Francis Casimir Kajencki (1918-2008) |
A puzzling circumstance of the Second World War is
that it reached the status of a global conflict when the British and French
empires, ostensibly out of concern for Polish sovereignty, declared war on
Germany in the wake of its September 1939 invasion of Poland, but that these
same powers not only did not declare war on the Soviet Union, which also
invaded Poland that month, but joined forces with Stalin’s government in an
alliance to defeat the Axis. Allied “victory” in Europe, moreover, resulted not
in the restoration of Polish independence, but Soviet occupation of Poland along
with the rest of Eastern Europe.
A little-known book, American Betrayal: Franklin
Roosevelt Casts Poland into Communist Captivity, grapples with this
problematic legacy of the war. Self-published by Francis Casimir Kajencki in
2007, the year before he died, the book is a patriotic Polish-American’s pained
assessment of his country’s treacherous treatment of its beleaguered ally. A
West Point graduate and career military man who served in the Pacific during
the war and turned to historical research in retirement, Kajencki is not a
proper academic historian, his Master’s Degree in History from George Mason
University notwithstanding, and most of the material in American Betrayal
is drawn from previously published books, notably Death in the Forest: The
Story of the Katyn Forest Massacre by J.K. Zawodny; The Polish
Underground State 1939-1945 by Stefan Korbonski; The Rape of Poland by
Stanislaw Mikolajczyk; and I Saw Poland Betrayed by Arthur Bliss Lane.
Kajencki’s recounting of Polish struggles during and
after the war is generally engaging, if hardly impartial, as he discusses the
Soviet Union’s mass deportations of Poles, the conduct of the Katyn massacre
and subsequent investigations, the Soviet formation of the Polish Second Army
Corps, the operations of the Polish Underground, the Warsaw Uprising of 1944,
the disastrous outcomes of FDR’s secret diplomacy, and the consolidation of
Communist rule in Poland during the postwar period. An appendix, meanwhile,
details the efforts of Polish-Americans to establish the National Katyn
Memorial in Baltimore.
Most prominent among Kajencki’s idiosyncrasies as a
writer is his strong Russophobic bias. He seldom if ever refers to the Soviet
Union as such, preferring to point the finger at “Russia”, with even Stalin, a
Georgian, being labeled “the Russian”. He further condemns “the vile character
of Russia” [1] and the “low mentality of the Russian” [2]. Writing in the
present tense, he even gives the impression that Putin’s Russia in 2007
remained an international Marxist menace:
Thousands of citizens of
various nationalities train in Russia and in other countries. The Russians then
give secret orders to established cells in the various countries. These
Communist agents pass the orders to public figures, coating all slogans with
the flower of patriotism, independence, and sovereignty. [3]
Most embarrassingly, he contends that “Communist
methods appear to have been adopted by Islamic fascism in the twentieth-first
[sic] century” [4].
Kajencki also does not hesitate to note the prominence
of Jews among the pro-Soviet rulers of Poland during the years immediately
after the war. These include Minister of Public Safety Stanislaw Radkiewicz, “of
Russian-Jewish origin” and “a good-looking man with oily black hair, a keen and
aesthetic face” [8]; Undersecretary of State of the Council of Ministers Jakub
Berman, whose “complexion was swarthy” and whose “nose revealed his Jewish origin”
as he “directed the puppets” [9]; and General Marian Spychalski, “a Jew and
Moscow-trained” and “the real directing force in the Polish Army” [10].
These welcome aspects of American Betrayal,
however, are counterbalanced by the author’s frustrating insistence on perpetuating
the mainstream demonization of the Germans. He suggests that members of the
Polish intelligentsia “were transported to German extermination camps” as part
of a “German master plan for the eventual extermination of the Polish race”
[11], and he also adheres to hokey Holocaust lore with respect to Jews. At
Majdanek, he relates, “the undressed victims, thinking they were getting a
cleansing bath, were killed by cyanide gas flowing from jets in the ceiling of
the room”, their bodies then cremated and “carted off to Germany as fertilizer”
[12]. The “very efficient” Germans were even “able to cremate up to ten
thousand people daily at Oswiecim (Auschwitz)” [13].
Eager to equalize the heroic sufferings of Jews and
Poles, Kajencki asserts that “Poland lost one-fifth of its population:
3,000,000 Christian Poles and 3,000,000 Polish Jews” [14], and he makes a point
of highlighting that among those murdered in Katyn Forest was the Chief Rabbi
of Warsaw [15]. “My nation was not supposed to live,” the author quotes Katyn
survivor Zdzislaw Peszkowski, whose next words carry some irony: “Two symbols
of that tragedy are Katyn and Auschwitz, with all their apocalyptic terror and
perversion of truth” [16].
American Betrayal
successfully skewers the legend of Roosevelt’s world-savior status and offers a
much more complex picture of World War II than that handed down by America’s
education system. Because of its endorsement of other falsehoods about the war,
however, Kajencki’s book is at best recommendable only as a first, feeble, stumbling
step in the necessary direction of historical revisionism.
Rainer Chlodwig von K.
Rainer is the author of Drugs, Jungles, and Jingoism.
Endnotes
[1] Kajencki, Francis Casimir. American Betrayal:
Franklin Roosevelt Casts Poland into Communist Captivity. El Paso, TX:
Southwest Polonia Press, 2007, p. 88.
[2] Ibid., p. 135.
[3] Ibid., p. 209.
[4] Ibid., p. 208.
[5] Ibid., p. 182.
[6] Ibid., p. 30.
[7] Ibid., p. 73.
[8] Ibid., p. 137.
[9] Ibid., p. 132.
[10] Ibid., p. 134.
[11] Ibid., p. 52.
[12] Ibid., p. 135.
[13] Ibid., p. 209.
[14] Ibid., p. 221.
[15] Ibid., p. 225.
[16] Ibid., p. 245.
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