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A killing field

杀戮之地

英文部分选自经济学人190907Books and arts版块

Forgotten history

被遗忘的历史

A killing field

杀戮之地

First to Fight: The Polish War 1939. By Roger Moorhouse. Bodley Head; 400 pages; £25

Everyone agrees that the second world war was seismic. Ask when it started, however, and views differ, revealingly. For Chinese, it was the Japanese attack of July 1937. Soviet and Russian histories mark June 22nd 1941, when the perfidious Nazi invasion began. Britain and France regard the period between the declaration of hostilities in 1939 and May 1940 as the “phoney war”, or drôle de guerre.

所有人都认同第二次世界大战影响深远。但是关于二战始于何时，大家却观点各异。对中国人来说，1939年7月日本入侵打响了二战的第一炮；苏联和俄罗斯则将1941年6月22号纳粹背信弃义、入侵苏联视作二战的开端；而英法则认为，从1939年对德宣战到1940年5月的这段时间处属于“虚假战争”（处于战争状态但并未实际交战的时期）。

注：
Perfidious adj, If you describe someone as perfidious, you mean that they have betrayed someone or cannot be trusted.

phoney war：a period during which a state of war officially exists but there is no actual fighting

But as Roger Moorhouse, a British historian, notes, there was nothing phoney about the war in Poland. The opening five weeks of slaughter were a gory template for the 300 that followed: 200,000 people died, the overwhelming majority of them Poles, and mostly civilians. Poles would be “exposed to every horror that modern conflict could devise”, including indiscriminate aerial bombing, and massacres of civilians and pows.

但是，正如英国历史学家罗杰·穆尔豪斯(Roger Moorhouse)所指出的那样，这段所谓的“虚假战争”对波兰来说却是血淋淋的“真实”。战争序幕以一场长达五周的残酷屠杀拉开，接下来的是300起类似的杀戮：总计有20万人丧生，死者几乎全部都是波兰人，其中大部分还是平民。波兰人几乎经历了“现代战争所能制造的所有恐怖”，包括无差别空袭，对百姓和战俘的肆意屠杀。

Yet the campaign fought by Nazi Germany from September 1st 1939, the associated Soviet invasion on September 17th, and the brave, chaotic and doomed defence launched by Poland, are strangely absent from standard histories, in any language. The last serious British study of this aspect of the war was published in 1972. The biggest television history of the conflict, “The World at War”, a 26-part documentary broadcast in 1973, interviewed most of the surviving decision-makers—but did not include a single Polish contributor.

但奇怪的是，1939年9月1号德国纳粹发起的这场战争，连同随之而来的9月17号苏联入侵以及波兰人英勇忙乱的徒劳抵抗，在所有语言的书面记载中都销声匿迹了。英国关于这场战争的最后一项严肃研究发表于1972年。1973年，讲述二战的26集大型纪录片——“战争中的世界”（《二战全史》）播出，该纪录片采访了大部分幸存下来的二战决策者——其中没有一位是波兰人。

Mr Moorhouse’s book remedies that gap, weaving together archival material, first-hand accounts, perceptive analysis and heartbreaking descriptions of Poland’s betrayal, defeat and dismemberment. Prewar Poland was a big country, with the world’s fifth-largest armed forces. But it was an economic weakling. The combined Polish defence budget for the five years before the outbreak of war was just one-tenth of the Luftwaffe’s allocation for 1939 alone. The Poles had courage, flair and grit. But they lacked the decisive elements: armour and air-power. Military planning was plagued by secrecy and mistaken assumptions. Some of the top commanders were notable duds.

穆尔豪斯的著作填补了这段空缺，该书整合了与波兰遭受的背叛、战败和瓜分相关的档案材料、第一手记录，深入分析和令人心碎的采访。战前波兰是一个大国，拥有世界第五大规模的武装部队。但是经济实力却非常虚弱。战争爆发前五年波兰的国防预算加在一起仅是德国纳粹空军1939年预算的10%。波兰人骁勇坚毅、不乏战争天分，但他们缺少的却是至关重要的东西——装甲车和空中力量。军事计划也因泄密和误判毁于一旦。一些高级指挥官蠢钝如猪。

Despite that, Hitler’s stuttering war machine was repeatedly halted, bloodied and on occasion even defeated by the Polish defenders. The myth of invincible Blitzkrieg was burnished, self-interestedly, by the Nazis themselves. For their part, the Western allies, Britain and France, portrayed Poland as a hopeless cause to justify their defence of their ally “using vowels and consonants alone”. One of many striking anecdotes on this score concerns Britain’s reluctance to bomb Germany—on the ground (seriously) that it risked damaging private property.

尽管如此，波兰的保卫者们一次又一次地重击或逼停希特勒大军，偶尔甚至能击败他们。德军所谓的战无不胜的“闪电战”神话多数是自我美化和宣传。然而英法方面，作为波兰的西方盟友，却将波兰描绘成无可救药，以此来为自己对盟国仅作“口头支援”的无耻行径加以辩护。关于英军不愿轰炸德国的原因有个令人啼笑皆非的轶闻——他们（严肃地）担心轰炸会破坏德国土地上的私人住宅。

Kremlin self-interest skewed the story, too. Stalin’s march into eastern Poland, under a secret deal with Hitler, was justified on the (fictitious) basis that the Polish state had already ceased to exist, and that only Soviet intervention could restore order. In fact, the savagery of the Soviet occupiers matched, and sometimes even exceeded, that of the Nazis. Both invaders, writes Mr Moorhouse, applied a “brutal, binary, totalitarian logic: a racist binary in the German case, a class binary in the Soviet.” In the eyes of the Nazis, a circumcised penis justified execution. For the Soviets, a soft, uncallused palm signalled an intellectual who ought to be eliminated. In all, 5.5m Polish citizens (including 3m Jews), or a fifth of the entire pre-war population, would perish.

为了自身利益，苏联也歪曲了事实。斯大林与希特勒暗中达成协议，入侵波兰东部，对外却将自己的行动解释为：波兰作为一个国家已经不复存在，只有苏联的介入才能维持秩序。实际上，苏联侵略者的野蛮程度跟纳粹不相上下，有时甚至有过之而无不及。作者穆尔豪斯写道，两个入侵者都采用了“蛮横的，二元论的极权主义逻辑：德国纳粹以种族划分，苏联以阶级划分”。在纳粹看来，犹太人的身份就足够构成死刑，在苏联人眼里不事生产的知识分子阶层就应当被消灭。结合两者的逻辑划分，总共有550万波兰公民（包括300万犹太人），也就是战前整个波兰人口的五分之一，合该死亡。

The surrender of Poland’s regular forces on October 6th did not mark the end of the fighting. A well-organised underground army, reporting to the government-in-exile in London, continued the struggle until the further and final betrayal of Poland’s interests by the Western allies at Yalta. It all deserves more than the simplistic but widespread caricature of a country which met the invading tanks with a cavalry charge. As Mr Moorhouse admirably explains, Poland’s cavalry was in fact remarkably effective. The blame for defeat, and for the subsequent distortion and neglect of Poland’s story, lies elsewhere.

10月6日，波兰正规军投降，但这并不意味着战斗的结束。一支组织良好的地下军队仍然在抵抗，由远在伦敦的流亡政府遥控指挥，直到西方盟友进一步在雅尔塔彻底的“出卖”波兰，这一反抗才宣告失败。波兰的抗争，远比史书中一笔带过的“用骑兵冲锋挑战装甲坦克”的夸张描述更值得歌颂书写。就像穆尔豪斯先生所揭示的那样，波兰骑兵实际上在战争中出奇的有效。波兰的最终战败，以及其随后一段被歪曲被遗忘的屈辱史，其实另有他因。

翻译组：

Frank，男，小硕，经济学人的死侍

Lee ，爱骑行的妇女之友，Timberland粉

校核组：

Alex，男，工科研究生，文学与科学爱好者，经济学人忠实读者

Helen，女，坐标武汉，职业翻译，翻硕已毕业英语二笔二口，爱好陶笛洞箫古诗词