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Eighteen years after Bismarck's death, the Germans got the chance to "help Poland a little." In World War I they gave Poland its independence under Pilsudski, on condition that it fight Russia. Germany was defeated, but the Allies at Versailles recognized the Republic of Poland. The Bolsheviks also recognized Poland, but a couple of years later Stalin bared Soviet imperialist policy in a speech to the Polish comrades in which he insisted that they must understand "the Russian problem," and consider Russia's dominance "primordial to the entire revolutionary movement . . . because Soviet power is the basis and backbone of the world revolution."
Poland enjoyed 18 all-too-brief years of peaceful independence, but Hitler and Stalin finally did it in. Poland had a non-aggression pact with Russia dating from 1929, and after Hitler's rise it contracted alliances with the West and signed a ten-year nonaggression pact with Germany. But in 1939 Molotov and Hitler got together, signed a secret protocol arranging to attack Poland simultaneously from both sides and to partition it out of existence. After a 26-day fight, Poland was no more. Said Molotov: "Nothing is left of that monstrous bastard, the Versailles Treaty."
Wladyslaw Gomulka, the son of a hardworking Socialist oil worker from Krosno, was 38 when the Russians and Germans invaded Poland. (Before he was born, his father had emigrated to the U.S., but returned when he discovered that the streets were not paved with gold.) Wladyslaw Gomulka in twelve years in the party had done all the things that Communists do, infiltrated trade unions, spread propaganda under the name of Comrade Duniak. He had been sentenced to four years "for arousing mobs to a dangerous state" and for conspiracy against the state, and shared a cell with six other Communists. Differing with them on minor ideological grounds, he refrained from speaking to them for 18 months.
He was luckily in jail in 1937 when Stalin, mistrusting the Polish Communists, ordered the Polish leadership to come to Moscow. None of them ever got back alive. Gomulka was likewise in jail when the Nazis and Communists invaded Poland. His jailers fled, and he was free. He went to Warsaw, rescued his wife and child, and headed for Lvov, the outpost of the Soviet army.
The legal government of Poland had its own plans for continuing Poland's fight, and ably executed them. During World War II, some 250,000 Poles and Polish soldiers, escaping through neighboring states, put on Allied uniforms and fought with the French, British and U.S. armies with great distinction and one of the highest casualty records of the war. In addition, the exiled government, resident in Britain, set up an underground Home Army which numbered 300,000 men and women, organized on a military basis, with courts to try collaborators.