InsideCUA Online

October 8, 2004

Chris Wheatley’s New Book:
How the Poles Enriched Civilization

By Richard Wilkinson

Actually it was the Poles who saved civilization, not the Irish, says Vice Provost and Dean of Undergraduate Studies Chris Wheatley, who happens to be half Polish and half Irish. Wheatley also happens to have just published a book about Polish history and culture.

The contention of Thomas Cahill’s 1996 best seller, How the Irish Saved Civilization, is “that Irish monks from the 4th to 8th centuries were responsible for preserving classical Greek and Latin learning,” says Wheatley. “In point of fact, however, there was Greek and Latin being preserved all over Europe.

“By contrast, in 1683 the Poles genuinely did save Western Christian civilization at the battle of Vienna. A huge army of Turks had laid siege to Vienna. The Poles, although vastly outnumbered, rode up in defense of Vienna, and the Hussaria — the Polish cavalry — swept the Turks away. It was like the riders of Rohan coming to the defense of Minas Tirith in The Lord of the Rings.”

If the Poles hadn’t won, the Turks certainly would have conquered Central Europe and attacked Western Europe, according to Wheatley.

It wasn’t really a new role for Poland — the saving of civilization. For hundreds of years, Poland was known as “the bulwark of Christianity,” its army holding off European incursions by Tartars and Muslim invaders.

Wheatley’s new book, Poland Is Not Yet Lost: Heroic and Tragic Tales for the Polish Diaspora, is about much more than that, however. It’s an introduction to all of Polish history, culture, art and literature from A.D. 966 (when the Polish royalty converted to Christianity) to today. A large and colorful coffee-table book, it combines Wheatley’s text and photos of Poland taken by his second cousin, professional photographer Liz Lynch. It’s also the first book that Wheatley has written for a popular audience. His previous book, 2000’s Beneath Ierne's Banners: Irish Protestant Drama of the Restoration and Eighteenth Century, won the Rhodes Prize for that year’s best book on Irish literature, awarded by the American Conference for Irish Studies.

As the new book’s subtitle indicates, it was written for the Polish diaspora, to enlighten the 11 million Polish-Americans about the riches of Polish history and culture.

“Most Polish-Americans have no idea that Poland — far from being a primitive, backward place — enjoyed religious tolerance hundreds of years before the rest of Europe,” Wheatley says.

Polish-Americans also don’t realize the former power and extent of their ancestral homeland. “They have no idea that the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth of the 15th and 16th centuries stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea,” explains the vice provost.

“Most Polish-Americans have a vision of Poland as a collection of horrible factory towns. But Kraków is one of the prettiest cities you’ll ever see, and Gdańsk and Toruń are beautiful cities.

“That Polish-Americans should know something about Poland strikes me as important. It’s a nation of 38 million people, right at the center of Europe. It’s the place where it all intersects: Ukraine and Byelorussia on the one side and Germany on the other.

Wheatley's book seeks to show the beauty of Poland, as witnessed by the charming town of Wroclaw.

Wheatley continues with a 20th-century example of Polish genius: “Just as Paris was the international center for literature in the 1920s, much of the most interesting work in mathematics during that decade was being done by mathematicians in Polish cities like Poznań and Lwów.” He gives the example of the three Polish mathematicians who figured out Germany’s military encryption code in the 1930s and were able to build a replica of the German Enigma code machine. When Poland fell in 1939, the duplicate code machine was smuggled to England, giving the Allies the inestimable advantage of being able to decipher encrypted Nazi military orders. This “probably shortened WWII by years,” Wheatley writes.

Structurally, the book goes from city to city, recounting Polish history and telling the stories of famous Poles who lived in each place. Thus the chapter on Warsaw tells the story of Madame Curie (born Maria Sklodowska), who won two Nobel Prizes for her discoveries concerning the nature of radioactivity. The chapter on Toruń features that city’s favorite son, Nicholas Copernicus, who discovered that the earth revolves around the sun. The chapter on Lublin recounts that Pope John Paul II studied at the Catholic University of Poland located in that city. Another chapter, “The Historical Stain,” discusses anti-Semitism in Poland, which was fanned by the 19th-century rise of social Darwinism and romantic nationalism.

Professor Wheatley wrote the book while on a 2001 Fulbright fellowship teaching at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland. Published in English by a Polish press, the book is available for purchase in Poland and at our own CUA bookstore.