566
PAUL NEUBURG
The next, now central, generation was still at school or just out
when the war began. A part of it saw active service, each year mak–
ing up more and more of the soldiery both at the front and in the under–
ground. The Polish resistance had whole scout regiments, the older ones
fighting, the younger ones engaging in sabotage, reconna,issance, and
other auxiliary activities while the youngest ch ildren joined the under–
ground simply by going to school : "I was nine then," a thirty-eight-year–
old doctor in Warsaw remembered, "and we used to meet in small groups
at a different person's house each da y for our lessons. We knew we
mustn't talk about what we did, because the whole school network had
been organized by the resistance, and if the Germans found out they'd
take away our teachers and perhaps us too. "
The war over, the generation then in its mid-teens to mid-twenties
found itself facing not just the task of physically reconstructing each
country, but also the chance of effecting enormous changes. Unlike its im–
mediate elders, conditioned by a wodd the war had swept away, it had
truly historic choices in politics. Almost inevitab ly it shifted toward the
Left, its conservatives becoming centrists (o ften even in their formal
religious organizations ) and its left reformers turning into revolutionaries.
Once the Party had acquired full power in each country, however,
this generation went through a " younge r" yersion of the same Stalinist
experience as its parents. It profitted , or suffered, from discrimination at
universities, had its norms raised in factories and went on free holidays
to workers' rest homes, saw its peasant elders being whipped into col–
lectives or persecuted, and learned from its own experience to dread and
hate the police. Non-Communists saw in a ll this the confirmation of their
worst fears, and more often than not turned back to the Right. But
many of the Communists of the same generation , e\'en if they recognized
terror as terror, remained faithful to their leftist visions for quite some
time: "I very much believed that here at last something good was hap–
pening," a forty-two-year-old construction engineer told me in 1969 in
Romania. "In 1947 I was at university and we went in yoluntary bri–
gades to build a railway and we were real \·olunteers. not like the stu–
dents today who go because they ha\'e to. It was a joint project with
the Yugoslavs, and eyen when, at the time of the quarrel with Tito,
it was denounced and I think some of its organizers disappeared, I went
on believing.... Perhaps it was that I \'e ry much wanted to believe,
because I thought this country needed a revolution. and this seemed to
be it." Once de-Stalinization set in, howe\'er, \\'hile it gave new strength
to the non-Communists, it also shook many of those who still "believed"
in terrible and often fruitful ways.
Meanwhile, the need for modernizatioll in each East European
