This has been another difficult book to review because of its subject matter - see my previous blog. Dr. Goska, whose book I reviewed in that blog, deals with a whole spectrum of vilification, while Curtis Urness has concentrated on the way Poland is now being held responsible for the crimes of its Nazi occupiers. Which may of course have been the purpose of all the vilification... but who knows, politics is a devious business.
The levels of prejudice and hatred he has to deal with are distressing, but thankfully the author knows how to tell a story, and he structures it well. For example he sketches in the marital disaster that has befallen his hero with a light hand, so we can understand just enough to place him emotionally.
And I, for one, feel there might be a novel to be written about that marriage and its ending, as I think it would be a story that many would relate to.
"Stars & Crosses" however is a book about a different relationship, a relationship between two peoples, Jews and Poles. The author has chosen to tackle the way the history of Poland in WW2 is being revised through the relationship between two protagonists, Ruth and Chic, one Jewish and one Polish. And he tackles it head on, by having them meet on a visit to Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp in German occupied Poland where his grandfather was murdered.
At the airport Chic meets Ruth, an attractive Jewish lady, also on her way to visit the camp. But where Chic is alone, she is with a group, the Rally of Holocaust Survivors. As Chic begins to meet the members of this group, he is shocked to find out that he and his people who were also targeted and murdered by Hitler, and whose army fought on the Allied Side, have been re-defined as Nazis.
He finds out that there is no common cause. He is told that "the Poles are just as responsible as the Germans for the mass murder of the Jews". Interestingly, the countries that actually were in the Axis with Hitler are never mentioned in this context these days. They were sent down the Memory Hole years ago.
The author makes us feel this shock - and he also weaves a lot of history into his narrative without being too didactic. It is important history as it stands as a testimony against this revised version of World War Two.
And he does make us care about the growing relationship between his two protagonists, both of whom are believable and likeable.
The book echoes my own shock at what was happening as for many years I had naively supposed that the two peoples, Jews and Poles, had gone through a horror together that others could not be expected to understand.
However I must have grown up, as, sadly, these days I am no longer surprised to find that us Poles/Polonians are the villains of the piece. I have come to expect it. In fact I try to take a doubleplusgood from it, in that it does help me in my struggle to be "no part" of the world - to take no sides in its devious politics and its cruel wars. For example, I am continually forced to notice that the countries that did manage to stay out of WW2 and stay neutral did not suffer as Poland did, are not blamed for anything, and are treated with much more respect.
I have to admire Curtis Urness for not only tackling this, but for the way he has done so, being fair and balanced.
The title - Stars & Crosses - is important here - in other words, it is a good title. Two peoples whose symbols those are - Jews and Catholic Poles - were among those targeted for destruction under Hitler's race laws and they suffered and died in his camps because of it.
Yet the suffering of those whose religious symbol was the cross of Christendom is denied, in that the cross that had been erected in Auschwitz as a memorial to the many Catholic Poles who were murdered there had to be taken down. While I do not believe it to be a Christian symbol (a point I hope to discuss in another blogpost) it was the symbol of so many of the victims.
It makes me feel that they do not count - which I guess in political terms, they don't. And I could accept that given that most victims of most atrocities in the ongoing tragedy that has been human history since the loss of Eden don't count much to "the world". And us Poles/Polonians are of no more, or less, importance than anyone else. But to be blamed for the crimes of those who murdered us by the million is almost beyond belief.
But, while Nazi racial ideology is the exact opposite of Christian teaching, which teaches us that the human race is one family, all brothers and sisters, wasn't the cross also the symbol of the people who murdered both Jews and Poles, and so many others, in the name of that ideology, with its "superior" and its "inferior"? Wasn't Germany - together with the other (nameless) countries in the Axis - part of Christendom? And isn't the cross the symbol of Christendom? Therefore in fairness, I can understand the objection to it... just as I can see how much hurt its removal must have caused.
We do not live in a kind world system. There are many lovely people within it, but the system itself is not kind.
Nor do we live in a truthful one. For example, isn't the truth about WW2 that both sides did some terrible ungodly things - Hitler on one side, Stalin on the other, both killing millions in the service of their mad "isms"?
And if the millions killed by Stalin should ever come to have any political weight, am I being too cynical in supposing that Poland will find itself catapulted back to the Allied Side at the speed of light so it can take the blame? If - or maybe when - that happens, I think Curtis Urness may be just the writer to tackle it.
So please Curtis, wherever you are, stay well, and be on standby!
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