Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw Read Free Page A

dawdling and dipping whenever they wished to do so.
    Faced with Rising ’44 , therefore, I decided yet again that the conventional linear approach was not suitable. The subject matter was unfamiliar to English-language readers; and a series of solid introductory chapters was unavoidable. As a result, the first part, ‘Before the Rising’, would be bulkier than one might have wished; and the reader’s pace would be under threat. The solution was to start with a dramatic Prologue, and then to write four linear chapters in parallel, each presenting a different route towards the outbreak of the Rising on 1 August 1944. The readers may follow each of these routes in turn if they wish, absorbing the narrative and the informational passages as they meet them.
    The Rising itself was always going to constitute the main focus of the story. Yet here I had to solve another problem. Having interviewed a large number of participants and survivors, and read numerous personal accounts, I had gained possession of a mass of fascinating memoir material, which was necessarily subjective and anecdotal but which nonetheless threw true and telling light on the human ordeals with which the story abounded. It would have been possible to weave parts of this material into the main text. But remembering the precedent of Europe: a history , I decided to keep it separate, and to place it in a series of eyewitness ‘capsules’, each presenting one person’s view of a particular episode. These capsules may be read alongside and in conjunction with my own historian’s narrative; or they may be picked from the tree at random as the tastebuds dictate.
    The last part of the book, ‘After the Rising’, contains three chronological chapters, taking the reader from 1944 to the present. I am happy to say that each of them is written in standard linear fashion. They are rounded off by a concluding Interim Report:

    From hard experience, I know that foreign names and places can create havoc in the psyche of English-speaking readers. Indeed, in the case of some languages like Polish, I believe they constitute a near insurmountable barrier to a full understanding of the country’s affairs. For it is not just a problem of unfamiliarity. It is unfamiliarity compounded by an incomprehensible system of orthography and by unique, jaw-breaking combinations of consonants and syllables that are uniquely disturbing. Charles Dickens, who met a number of Polish émigrés in London after the Rising of 1863, had a wonderful ear for this problem: ‘A gentleman called on me this morning,’ he once remarked, ‘with two thirds of all the English consonants in his name, and none of the vowels.’ 5 The joke is that God created Polish by dropping his Scrabble box. But this is not just a laughing matter. If readers cannot retain the names in a narrative, they cannot follow the plot. And if they cannot follow the plot, they cannot be expected to analyse or to understand it. 6
    At all events, I have decided to conduct an experiment. Wherever possible I have refrained from using foreign names altogether. I have referred to people’s positions – saying the ‘Premier’ instead of Mikołajczyk, or the ‘President’ instead of Raczkiewicz, and I have been greatly helped by the wartime practice whereby many members of the Underground and Government were known by pseudonyms, nicknames, or noms de guerre , which can either be anglicized or translated into short, manageable forms. Hence Gen. Bór-Komorowski becomes ‘Boor’, Gen. Okulicki becomes ‘Bear Cub’, Premier Mikołajczyk becomes Premier ‘Mick’, and Lt. Fleischfarb becomes Lt. ‘Light’. I also took the liberty of modifying the spelling of Polish place names, thereby rendering them more readily pronounceable. I have no idea how my noble translator will cope with these eccentric forms when working on the Polish edition.
    The modifications in the spellings of Polish names are aimed exclusively at easing the path