James Albert Michener 1907 – 1997

James A. Michener’s Poland is one of the hardest books I’ve ever read — 556 pages of unrelenting war and oppression, occasionally lightened by marvelous descriptions of classical music and art.  I’m now within 125 pages of the end but with almost every paragraph,  I need to put the book aside for a while.  I have to take deep breaths before I go on.  It is 1943,  Poland is under Nazi occupation and its citizens are being systematically eliminated so that the country can be re-populated with Germans.

Michener describes the holocaust extermination methods — the shootings, the hangings, the torture methods, the death camps, the gas chambers — in excruciating detail.  It will probably take me quite a while to finish the book given my need to set it aside now and again.  Published in 1983, Michener appears to have drawn heavily from information disclosed during the thirteen Nuremberg Trials, 1945 -1949.

I have to confess that my knowledge of Poland and its history is, or at least has been, extremely limited.  That it is a country in Eastern Europe, that the names are hard to pronounce, that Pope John Paul II was not only the first Polish pope but the first non-Italian Pope in 400 years — are about the extent of it.  Otherwise, the sum total of my understanding is confined to the great admiration I had for two Polish men I taught with in Hayward, California — Stan Laird, a 5th grade teacher, and Paul Gowack, a speech therapist, and to the music of Chopin, especially as played by my father’s favorite composer/pianist, Ignacy Jan Paderewski.

This is the third (and most difficult) Michener book I have read.  I loved Hawaii; I liked The Source so much that I read it twice.  With each, I vowed to read all (is there still time?)  of Michener’s  forty-some books, most of which are long, fictional family sagas covering the lives of many generations in particular geographic locales and incorporating detailed history. Many of his works were bestsellers and were chosen by the Book of the Month Club; he was known for the meticulous research that went into his books.  He won  he Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1948 for Tales of the South Pacific (1947), his first book, published when he was 40.  Rodgers and Hammerstein adapted it as the hit Broadway musical “South Pacific” which premiered on Broadway in New York City in 1949.

There are other Michener books I think I’d enjoy more than this one, but I must say that Poland has been an eye-opener.  I only wish that my friends Stan and Paul were still around to talk with me about it and, you can be sure that I am slogging through this last hundred pages with the two of them and their families much in my thoughts.