The book that started it all for me.

Polish history fascinates me. When I was 18, I picked up a copy of James Michner's historical fiction "Poland" -- Amazon.com link: James Michner, "Poland" (1984) -- and was permanently hooked. The book itself traces two families of Poles -- one nobility, one peasantry -- through a thousand years of Polish history up through the earliest days of Solidarity. If you're looking for a good book to read before getting there, this is it.

The one thing that comes out during any survey of Polish history is that the Poles as a nation are absolutely indomitable. Geographically, Poland for the most part is a relatively flat and fertile river plain situated between Germany, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic. A small chunk of Russia sits at the northeaster corner of the country, with the rest of the great bear lurking just beyond Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine. Historically and militarily, this has proved a dangerous place to put a country since the other great powers of Europe have often sought to use Poland as a buffer state, a satellite state, or a road to get at each other. For much of its history, Poland has dealt with this problem simply by being stronger than its neighbors.

At other times, it has been controlled, partitioned, and destroyed in turn by the Russians, Prussians, Austrians, Germans, and the Soviets. As a general historical proposition, once a nation state or a people have been overrun like this even once, they don't get back up again. Poland, in contrast, despite being erased from map for 123 years after the Russians, Prussians, and Austrians decided they needed a buffer zone (1795-1918), and then turned into a German-occupied and Soviet-occupied nation from 1939 through 1990, got back up and rebuilt itself as a vibrant economic, political, and cultural entity that remains very distinctively and proudly Polish.

I'll blog more about this phenomenon from a Rule of Law perspective later, but in the meantime thinking about what it took to retain the Polish identity for eight generations of Russian, Soviet, and Prussian attempts to destroy the entire language and culture sometimes puts a lump in my throat.