The Polish poet Czesław Miłosz (1911–2004) had a complicated Second World War. He was in Warsaw when the Germans invaded, fleeing then to Ukraine. But then, discovering that his wife had been unable to escape Poland, he tried to return to her by way of Romania, then Ukraine again—the Germans were coming from one direction, the Russians from another—then Lithuania. By the summer of 1940, he was back in Warsaw. There, he participated in various underground activities, including the sheltering and transportation of Jews. In 1944, he was captured and briefly held in an internment camp. As the Red Army moved closer to Warsaw and the Nazis burned the city in anticipatory vengeance, Miłosz and his wife, with little more than the clothes on their backs, made their way to a village near Kraków, finding a brief respite from history, though not from poverty. Then:
One afternoon in January 1945 I was standing in the doorway of a peasant’s cottage; a few small-caliber shells had just landed in the village street. Then, in the low ground between the snow-covered hills, I saw a file of men slowly advancing. It was the first detachment of the Red Army. It was led by a young woman, felt-booted and carrying a submachine gun. Like all my compatriots, I was thus liberated from the domination of Berlin—in other words, brought under the domination of Moscow.
History had once again found him. But how strict and severe its newest embodiment would be he did not yet realize.
Already known as a significant young poet, he was seen by the new Polish Communist government as an attractive representative of their cause, even though he was not himself a Communist. He agreed to serve that government as a cultural attaché, first briefly in New York, then in Washington, DC, and eventually in Paris. Throughout this period, there grew in his mind a conviction that his own deeply held literary humanism was incompatible with obedience to the Polish regime. Defection was always a possibility, but the costs of defection were high:
My mother tongue, work in my mother tongue, is for me the most important thing in life. And my country, where what I wrote could be printed and could reach the public, lay within the Eastern Empire. My aim and purpose was to keep alive freedom of thought in my own special field; I sought in full knowledge and conscience to subordinate my conduct to the fulfillment of that aim. I served abroad because I was thus relieved from direct pressure and, in the material which I sent to my publishers, could be bolder than my colleagues at home.
His difficulties were made even worse by the Red Scare in the United States, which left him stuck in Paris while his wife and children remained in Washington. US officials thought him a Communist, but of course a Communist is precisely what he wasn’t: thus his misery in working for the Polish government, whose leaders were dismayed by his lack of commitment to the cause and, at one point, even withheld his passport. In early 1951, the tensions became too great, and he requested, and received, political asylum in France. He would not visit Poland again until, in the aftermath of his winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980, the Polish People’s Republic began to see him as an asset. They even allowed some of his work to be published there.