Wojciech Jaruzelski

THE line dividing a hero from a traitor has been a thin one throughout much of Polish history, and Poles never quite worked out into which category to place General Wojciech Jaruzelski, who died Sunday aged 90.

The stiff-backed general wearing dark sunglasses was the face of the military regime, which seized power in 1981 and crushed Solidarity, the communist bloc’s first independent labour union, because it had become a threat to Communist Party rule in Poland and even to the Kremlin’s control over its central European empire.

But Jaruzelski was more than the Soviet Union's loyal factotum. He was born in 1923 to a noble Polish family and grew up steeped in the Catholic faith and anti-Russian mythology that was a hallmark of his class. The world of privilege collapsed in 1939, when Poland was carved up between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.

As class enemies, the Jaruzelskis were deported to Siberia along with hundreds of thousands of other suspect Poles. He buried his father there and his eyes were burned by the glare of the Siberian snow, forcing him to wear dark glasses for the rest of his life. Despite his family's suffering, Jaruzelski never lost his affection for the Russian people.

Joining a Polish army being formed in the USSR, he fought the Nazi troops and watched as Warsaw was destroyed during a hopeless 1944 uprising against...Continue reading