Category Archives: labor

by Joel | 28 March 2026 · 12:27 am

Polish Realia: On the Farm

Vocabulary from Muzeum Wsi Radomskiej ‘Village Museum of Radom’

dom wiejski ‘farmhouse, country house’
dom ludowy ‘people’s house’ (community center?)
dworek ‘manor house’
chlew ‘pigsty’
kurnik ‘henhouse’
obora ‘cattle barn’
stajnia ‘stable (for horses)’
stodoła ‘barn’
strzecha ‘thatch (roof)’
sławojka ‘outhouse privy’ (named after 1928 PM Felicjan Sławojka Składowski)

ciągnik rolniczy ‘farm tractor’ (cf. ciągnąć ‘pull’, pociąg ‘locomotive’)
brona ‘harrow’ (and ‘portcullis’!)
grabie ‘rake’
kosa ‘sickle’
kosiarka konna ‘horse-drawn mower’
pług konny ‘horse-drawn plow’
sierp ‘scythe’ (cf. Sierpień ‘August’)
widły ‘pitchfork’ (cf. widelec ‘food fork’)
zgrabiarka konna do siana ‘horse-drawn hay rake’
żniwiarka konna ‘horse-drawn harvester’

pszczoła ‘bee’
pszczelarstwo ‘beekeeping in apiaries’
pszczelarka ‘beekeeper’ (pszczelarze ‘beekeepers’)
bartnistwo ‘beekeeping in wild beehives’
bartnistka ‘beekeeper’
pasieka ‘apiary’
ul ‘beehive’
ule rozbieralne ‘movable beehives’

wiatrak koźlak ‘post windmill’ (which swivels on a post)
łopata wiatraka ‘windmill blade’
wał wiatraka ‘windmill shaft’ (blade axle)
wiatr ‘wind’
młyn wodny ‘watermill’
koło wodne ‘waterwheel’
koryto ‘trough, chute’
żuraw studzienny ‘crane well, shadoof’ (cf. żuraw ptak ‘crane bird’)

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Filed under food, labor, language, Poland

by Joel | 14 March 2026 · 8:37 am

Gierek’s Poland Redefines Socialism

From Ryszard Kapuscinski: A Life, by Artur Domoslawski (Verso, 2012) Kindle pp. 225-227:

Kapuściński does not watch the Polish drama from close up, because at the time he is in Mexico. When he comes home from his posting, he finds a totally different atmosphere in Poland.

There is not a trace remaining of Gomułka’s plebeian socialism. At the beginning of the new decade it is far easier than in previous years to get basic goods: food, clothing, household equipment. Life for the Poles becomes more bearable, and Gierek’s slogan in the first years of his government – ‘May Poland grow in strength and may people live more affluently’ – is not far from the daily experience of the decided majority. The miners are thrilled, because they are getting fabulous salaries and bonuses; the farmers complain less, because Gierek does away with compulsory annual supplies of agricultural products to the state at fixed prices.

The Gierek era is also a time when the PRL opens up to the West. It is easier to get a passport, and if someone goes off on a journey to the other side of the Iron Curtain he can officially buy a hundred dollars (earlier this was possible only on the black market, and was a hundred times more expensive). Previously condemned or ridiculed Western popular culture gains ‘civic rights’ – American films and serials on television are virtually one of the trademarks of the decade. Home-grown entertainment of a fairly good standard also appears; a boom in popular songs begins, and a couple of excellent cabarets open. Poland is having a good time drinking and dancing.

His Highness showed particular vivacity and keenness. He received processions of planners, economists, and financial specialists, talking, asking questions, encouraging, and praising.

As the new leader, Gierek has ambitious plans. On the advice of Party experts he considers some sort of semi–market reform but quickly drops these complicated ideas. Why bother? Poland can live on the reserves saved up by the previous first secretary, and shortly afterwards a miracle occurs – Western credits start to pour in.

The capitalist countries of the West are experiencing a boom, there is cheap money looking for an outlet, and socialist Poland willingly accepts loans of any size. There is no need to rationalize anything: abracadabra, and goods which previously you could only dream about appear in the shops. Salaries go up, and the hope returns that finally the affluent life everyone has been waiting for is just around the corner.

If you use foreign capital to build the factories, you don’t need to reform. So there you are – His Majesty didn’t allow reform, yet the factories were going up, they were built. That means development.

Prefabricated concrete construction takes off; people still have to wait for flats, but they are relatively cheap. Young couples get special credits, they buy fridges, washing machines, television sets and furniture – all on hire purchase, and if someone’s really lucky he’ll also get hold of a coupon for a car (still a deficit item).

One was planning, another was building, and so, in a word, development had started.

After a year of hard work there are cheap holidays and, for those who can manage it, even trips abroad – to Bulgaria, Romania or the Crimea. Youth organizations which in the years when the foundations of socialism were being built stood for ideological zeal, altruism and personal sacrifice are now concerned with ‘fixing’: first to arrange the supply of some deficit, hard-to-acquire goods for their activists, then some foreign travel.

Something like a socialist middle class emerges – a broad group consisting of most Poles, geared to consumerism. One of the leading dissidents of the era admits years later that this was the only period when he really did fear society and felt marginalized. Because almost all Poland approves of Gierek’s socialism at the beginning of the decade, very few people are bothered by the lack of elections, the rule of a single party, or the limited freedom of speech. To live and not to die! Long live socialism and Comrade Gierek! Bravo, bravo, bravo!

[H]e even liked progress – his most honourably benevolent desire for action manifested itself in the unconcealed desire to have a satiated and happy people cry for years after, with full approval, ‘Hey! Did he ever develop us!’

Kapuściński comes back from a world where socialism means a heroic struggle, the sacrifice of one’s personal peace and quiet. Latin America is a revolutionary volcano: Cuba sí, yanquis no; the idol of the young is the recently assassinated Che Guevara; Salvador Allende is conducting a peaceful socialist revolution in Chile, which the Americans, the local oligarchs and the middle class want to overthrow.

Over there: For their belief in socialism, the young idealists are ending up in prison, being tortured, or dying in the jungle, and are often completely misunderstood by those whose rights they are demanding. Over here: For their belief in socialism, the young wheeler-dealers are the first to get a flat, a car and a trip to Sochi. There: great ideas, the clank of rifles; here: fairly OK cash, idle gawping at the TV, having a ball. There: rebellion, nonconformism, adrenaline; here: fake smiles, making the right faces for the authorities. If that is socialism, is this socialism too? Where can a man go, where can he find a place, how can he fit into life on this other planet?

Now he is a star on a national scale. During the past few years, while he has been away, several of his books have come out, strengthening the position of the talented reporter and expert on Africa and Latin America. Despite the limitations imposed by the system, it is much easier to write significant texts about the Third World; censorship is not as sensitive to an ‘incorrect’ tone in these as it is in articles and books on national topics or the West.

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Filed under democracy, labor, nationalism, philosophy, Latin America, economics, industry, Poland

by Joel | 7 March 2026 · 8:48 am

The Thaw Hits Poland, 1956

From Ryszard Kapuscinski: A Life, by Artur Domoslawski (Verso, 2012) Kindle pp. 83-85:

When did the cultural dissent, later known as revisionism, cease to be partly fashion and become front-line politics?

It starts with a secret speech by Khrushchev, given in February 1956 in Moscow at the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party. Its content creates a sensation in Poland: here is the Soviet Party admitting to murder, to the destruction of its political opponents, to fabricated trials. Knowledge of similar methods used by the authorities in People’s Poland has already reached certain segments of public opinion: almost two years earlier, Józef Światło, deputy director of Department X at the Ministry of Public Security, defected to the West and exposed crimes committed by the Polish apparatus of repression (his department was involved in eradicating ideological deviations within the Party). The Poles hear these revelations on Radio Free Europe; those who are glued to their wireless sets manage to catch bits of these nightmarish stories despite the jamming devices working at full steam.

Khrushchev’s speech initiates a political earthquake throughout the socialist bloc, most of all in Poland and Hungary. It is discussed at Party meetings, in cultural circles and on the streets. Duplicated using crude methods, the key points of the speech can be bought for an astronomical sum at flea markets and bazaars. At exactly the same time, Polish Party leader Bolesław Bierut dies in mysterious circumstances, prompting a wave of speculation: Was he murdered? Soon there’s a popular saying: ‘He went out in a fur overcoat and came home in a wooden overcoat.’ Straight after that the Party’s number two, Jakub Berman, is thrown out of his job. The Party is bursting from the inside.

There is a clash between two tendencies, later called fractions. One group is known as the ‘Puławians’ – people who seek more civic freedom, relative autonomy in cultural life, more democracy within the Party, less central planning within the economy, and more independence for enterprises. They have the sympathy of opinion-forming circles and of many people in the press and the cultural world. (It is interesting to note that they meet at the flat of Ignacy Loga-Sowiński, secretary of the Central Council of Trade Unions, and Irena Tarłowska, still editor-in-chief of Sztandar Młodych). The other group is called the ‘Natolinians’. They are believed to have connections with the Soviet embassy; they’re not keen on democratization, but they’re not against sacrificing a few scapegoats, preferably of Jewish origin, on the altar of squaring accounts with Stalinism.

The political prisoners are released, including people from the post-war anti-communist underground as well as followers of the ‘new faith’, who were locked up for being critical or as a result of internal power struggles. Functionaries within the apparatus of repression who have been particularly cruel to the prisoners lose their jobs and are accused of abusing their power. The Stalinist system is collapsing . . .

In June the workers’ rebellion in Poznań occurs. After several days of strikes and street demonstrations, the army and the secret police fire on the protestors. Several dozen people are killed, and many are wounded. A Party plenum calls the Poznań revolt ‘counter-revolutionary’ and a campaign by ‘imperialist circles’. Prime Minister Józef Cyrankiewicz warns that any hand raised against the people’s power will be cut off. The entire movement for renewal finds itself under threat. A day after the massacre, on the orders of the Party leadership, Sztandar Młodych – like other papers – writes about the tragedy in a tone ringing with Stalinist propaganda:

…

The Poznań tragedy is a shock, especially for those who still believe in socialism but want it to be thoroughly reformed. As a result, the workers’ protest, the massacre and the Party leadership’s conservative attitude to the tragedy accelerate the impetus for change. At the production plants, workers councils are established, and pro-democratization rallies are held at schools and colleges. The culmination of the political turmoil is a Party plenum held in October. Comrades from Moscow fly to Warsaw, headed by Soviet Communist Party First Secretary Khrushchev, and Soviet troops move towards the capital. There is a fear that their tanks will run down the Polish movement for the renewal of socialism.

The crisis ends with the election of a new Party chief, Władysław Gomułka, who led the communists during the war and who has recently been released from prison. He was sent to jail in the early 1950s for so-called rightist–nationalist leanings. Gomułka – who installed the Stalinist system in post-war Poland, took part in the elimination of the opposition, and agreed to Poland’s becoming subordinate to the Soviet Union – did, however, want Polish socialism to retain some specific national features. He was not a fan of collectivization; he was in no rush to condemn the ‘Yugoslav path to socialism’, which was independent of Stalin; and he was fond of the national features of Polish Socialist Party tradition.

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Filed under democracy, economics, labor, nationalism, philosophy, Poland, USSR

by Joel | 6 March 2026 · 7:15 am

Kapuściński Exposes Nowa Huta

From Ryszard Kapuscinski: A Life, by Artur Domoslawski (Verso, 2012) Kindle pp. 81-83:

Kapuściński and Szczęsnowicz share a rented room in one of Nowa Huta’s small hotels. They expect to have a boring time trudging about the building site and having cliché conversations with the workers. And suddenly they discover an unknown world whose existence they have never imagined.

In his report to the Central Committee, Szczęsnowicz writes that ‘you won’t be able to educate the young people building Nowa Huta with the help of a church and a wretched pub selling vodka’. The image that Kapuściński paints in his report, entitled ‘This Is Also the Truth about Nowa Huta’, prompts the editor-in-chief of Sztandar Młodych to say, ‘This will never get through.’

What won’t get through?

The story about the pimping mother, who sits in one room collecting money for services provided by her daughter in the next room. Or the one about the fourteen-year-old girl who has infected eight boys and ‘described her exploits in such a vulgar way that one felt like vomiting’. Or the young married couples who spend their wedding nights in gateways and ditches (‘whoever thought up the brilliant idea that married couples can only stay together in a hotel room until eight p.m.?’).

A worker friend tells Kapuściński that he will never marry, because in these conditions he would be bound to ‘have no respect for his wife’.

[A]t Huta the bureaucracy reaches a degree of barbarity. For example, a woman living in a workers’ hotel is going to give birth. There are six other girls living in the same room. After three months she is supposed to go back to work. She doesn’t: she works at Huta, several kilometres from the hotel, but she has to feed her baby four times a day. Nevertheless, they tell her to bring a certificate proving that she is working. Yes, but she cannot get one. Then along comes the hotel man, takes away her bedding, takes away everything that is not her property, and the woman and her baby are left on the bare floor-boards.

Kapuściński hears about the fortunes of his friends from a few years earlier who have had enough and refuse to put up with ‘all these obscenities’. One has written complaints and petitions, for which he has been punished by having his accommodation allotment withheld, despite the fact that he has a sick mother and his wife lives out in the countryside because they have no home of their own in the town. Another critic has been sacked from his job. Still another has been stymied by lethal rumours that ‘he is a shirker and troublemaker. Not the worst method either!’ he writes. ‘People can see what’s going on. It is as if some monstrous bureaucratic fungus has sprung up here, which is proliferating and crushing everything, but no one seems at all concerned.’ In his report, Kapuściński reveals that complaints about what is going on at Nowa Huta have reached the ZMP authorities in Warsaw, but no one cares and they have gone unanswered.

Instead of painting the world of Ważyk’s poem in rosy colours, Kapuściński adds even more black to it. He is on the side of the workers, who feel hurt by the poet’s words: ‘rabble’, ‘semi-deranged soul’, ‘inhuman Poland’, ‘a shambles’. ‘To them these expressions,’ writes Kapuściński, ‘are wrongful, untrue and insulting’; they feel as if ‘they are of no use to anyone, as if they are invisible’. ‘But they admit that many of the images in the poem are true, all the more since they all too rarely read the whole truth about themselves.’

Kapuściński ends with a challenge to the Party and the ZMP: ‘At Nowa Huta they must see that we are on the side of the working man every day of the week . . . The people at Nowa Huta are waiting for justice. They cannot wait for long. We have to go there and dig up everything that has been carefully hidden from human sight, and respond to a very large number of different questions.’

…

Now the Party reformers go on the counter-offensive. Jerzy Morawski, one of the leading lights of the thaw (and soon to become Tarłowska’s second husband), devises a Central Committee commission to investigate the situation at Nowa Huta. The commission goes to the site and sees . . . the same things as Kapuściński. The ‘commissars’ try to get in touch with the reporter, but the ZMP members at Nowa Huta, who have given him shelter, say they won’t give up their colleague until the Party provides a guarantee that nothing bad will happen to him. The Party not only provides the guarantee but gives him a national decoration – the Gold Cross of Merit. Tarłowska and the friendly censor return to their jobs. Soon Trybuna Ludu (The People’s Tribune), the organ of the Central Committee, is writing about the social ills at Nowa Huta. The paper brands the local Party organization as the culprits, the board of the conglomerate is replaced, and the local Party authorities offer their resignation.

Kapuściński learns three lessons from this story. He discovers that writing is a risky business and that written words carry consequences. He also becomes convinced that the written word can change reality. Finally, as he learns from the story with the censor, success in the public sphere also depends on taking care of things through informal channels, and on building a network of personal contacts with people in power. If you have friends here and there, they will help you in times of need.

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by Joel | 6 February 2026 · 6:53 am

TGIF Train Talk in Poland

After we settled into our window seats in our 1st class compartment, headed for a weekend in Wrocław on our way to a conference in Szczecin, two men in their 50s settled into their seats at the other end of the 6-seat compartment, by the door to the aisle. They were roofing contractors returning home to Oława after a builders convention in Kielce. (Oława is also the name of a river that flows into the Odra at Wrocław.)

We quickly established that we spoke English but not much Polish, while they spoke Polish but not much English. But they soon proved to know quite a lot of English words, and I had also been exposed to a good bit of Polish vocabulary, even if neither of us could form many coherent sentences in our weaker languages. But we were able to explain why we were living in Kielce for a year, and they explained why they had come to Kielce and were headed home.

They had brought beers on board to enjoy 3 happy hours on their way home. They laughed and raised their beers every time they heard the announcements about the lack of a bar car on that train. We conveyed our regrets that we couldn’t join them. I was still under doctor’s orders. The owner was on my side of the compartment and his top assistant sat opposite him. The owner initiated most of the conversation topics, including that his son was good at math but a slacker at schoolwork and language-learning, and really needed a good English tutor.

Without cell phones, it would have been a quieter ride. But we all resorted to Google translate a good bit, and as the evening wore on, we shared photos of our families and our many travels. The boss was particularly excited when I showed him the photos my father had taken in Gdansk in 1945 (on my Flickr site). He asked for copies and we sent him links to download them. When I showed him a photo of my paternal grandparents holding me as a newborn (in 1949), he got quite wistful, regretting the scarcity of family photographs among Poles of his and earlier generations, apart from rare ceremonial events.

His coworker was an avid fisherman (in lakes, not the Odra or Oława rivers) and showed us photos of a huge pike (szczupak) he had caught and a huge carp (karp) his son had caught. (He couldn’t remember the English word for ‘lake’, but I recognized jezioro.) He never initiated English, but recognized a lot of English words. It turned out that he had worked several years in the U.K. (in London, Manchester, and Bristol). Whenever the boss’s wife would call about plans for their coming-home dinner, the boss would stand up to talk to her, and his coworker and I would smile and exchange military salutes. The coworker had to use the toaleta several times to empty his beers and he explained that his boss had stronger kidneys (nerki). (Cashew nuts are called nerkowiec in Polish.)

Despite our language hurdles, it was a warm and friendly conversation between strangers of a kind that is reputed to be rare in Poland. We all shook hands and hugged and exchanged contact information before they got off at Oława.

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Filed under labor, language, Poland, travel, U.K., U.S.

by Joel | 2 February 2026 · 8:39 pm

Indian Electrical Mechanical Engineers

From Burma ’44: The Battle That Turned World War II in the East, by James Holland (Grove Atlantic, 2024), Kindle pp. 167-169:

Ascham’s small band of brothers was one of the echelon units attached to any infantry brigade. The fighting heart of a brigade was its three 900-man-strong infantry battalions – one British, one Indian and one Gurkha – but there were also support troops, from artillery to mules to engineers and signals to Ascham’s Indian Electrical Mechanical Engineers, who were there directly in support of the brigade’s motor transport – MT – in the field. Ascham’s team were, in essence, a mobile workshop, and here in the jungle they were absolutely essential. In this treacherous fighting terrain, Slim and others had recognized that, as far as was humanly possible, fighting units had to be as self-sufficient at the front as they could be. It was no good a number of Jeeps and trucks slogging their way down Slim’s new brick roads from Bengal, across the newly hewn Ngakyedauk Pass and down into the Kalapanzin Valley only to suffer a collapsed axle or need a new gasket and discover there was no means of rectifying the problem. This, then, was where Ascham’s seventy-five Indian Electrical Mechanical Engineers came in. Their task was to maintain the fighting capacity of the brigade’s MT.

The single most important piece in their armoury was their large, 3-ton, four-wheel-drive workshop lorry. It had a powerful winch at the front and a canvas roof over a mobile workshop behind. This was kitted out with an impressive array of equipment: there was a lathe, a vertical drilling machine, a workbench with vices, racks for heavy tools, oxy-acetylene welding equipment, battery-charging gear, a vat of sulphuric acid, hydraulic jacks, hoisting equipment to lift engines, transmission blocks and other heavy items, as well as awnings, which could be slung from the sides of the truck or between trees. This meant they could, in theory, repair pretty much anything right there, in the field. They also had five further 3-ton lorries, a large-capacity water tank, three Jeeps with trailers and a BSA motorcycle, which helped them little, but to which Ascham had become quite attached. One of the Jeep trailers had been made into a generator from the engine of a wrecked Jeep they had discovered and they used this to power their welding equipment or to provide lighting. A second trailer was used to store spare parts, while the unit also had office equipment, tents, tables, benches, cooking gear, and weapons, including rifles, a machine gun and grenades.

Ascham’s engineers were a disparate bunch of young men, drawn from all corners of India’s vast reach and including Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists. Although some twenty-two different languages were used throughout the country, they had all learned to speak just one, Urdu, and were bound by a different type of language: mechanical and electrical engineering. As their officer, Ascham had made sure he learned Urdu, and fluently too, which understandably gave him a closer bond with his men. They all looked much the same too, after long months working out in the heat and sun; while trousers and shirt sleeves were religiously worn during the evenings, no one bothered much about wearing shirts during the day and so all were tanned the colour of coffee and, of course, everyone wore the same uniforms of olive-drab khaki drill, black boots and – the few Sikhs excepted – black berets.

The hierarchy was easily absorbed: Ascham was the boss, but the Indian NCOs were also held in very high esteem. A jemadar was the equivalent of a warrant officer, a havildar of a sergeant and a naik the same as a corporal, and yet Indian NCOs were accorded a level of respect and status that was higher than their British Army counterparts. ‘You were taught to look up to them,’ noted Ascham. ‘In a way, they were the Indian Army. It could not possibly have functioned without them. They advised, discreetly. They handled awkward incidents, privately. Their personal loyalty to you and the unit was essential.’ It was a system that Ascham certainly believed worked brilliantly well, and he was both proud and fond of his men, who, despite their differences of background, culture, religion and language, were all bound by what he felt was a palpable sense of honour, loyalty and, almost above all, good humour. They would undoubtedly need it in the weeks to come.

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Filed under Britain, labor, language, military, nationalism, religion, South Asia, war

by Joel | 23 December 2025 · 10:56 pm

Liberating Slave Labor Camps

From Victory ’45: The End of the War in Eight Surrenders, by James Holland and Al Murray (Grove Atlantic, 2025), Kindle pp. 135-136:

The 3rd Infantry Division might have been first to Berchtesgaden, first to be able to crawl over the Berghof and first to reach the dizzy 6,000-foot heights of the Kehlsteinhaus, but they were not allowed to remain for long. Colonel Heintges had expected to be there for at least a week, but the following day the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment reached the town, part of the 101st ‘Screamin’ Eagles’ Airborne Division, and much to Heintges’ disappointment the Cottonbalers were relieved, while Leclerc’s men moved in on the Obersalzberg.

Yet while capturing Nazis and vast numbers of German troops was very much the Allies’ ongoing mission and a key part of securing Germany’s surrender, so too was liberating the astonishing number of concentration and forced labour camps. Nordhausen, a vast slave labour camp that fed workers into the Mittelbau-Dora factory where the V-2s had been manufactured, had been liberated on 11 April. The stench had been so bad that the American and British liberators had nearly all started vomiting. Buchenwald had been liberated the same day. A few days later, on 15 April, British troops had reached Bergen-Belsen, where tens of thousands of Jews had been left to starve. The arrival of Allied troops at these places of human degradation, misery and death was a watershed moment. Most found it hard to comprehend that fellow humans could be treated with such untold cruelty. Photographs and film footage of skeletal survivors, but also of piles of dead between the disease-infested huts, were quickly shown around the free world and prompted understandable feelings of shock, outrage and, of course, revulsion against the people responsible for this. It was hardly surprising that feelings towards the Germans hardened further; the enemy had continued fighting long after Germany had lost the war. Needless lives had been lost. Anger had already been rising among Allied troops, who saw no reason why they should risk their lives in this pointlessness. Now they were coming across scales of inhumanity that few could comprehend. Anger, disgust, horror and diminishing compassion for a subjugated enemy were the feelings aroused in many of the liberators.

And there were just so many camps. Every day Allied troops reached another, invariably presaged by the noticeable absence of birdsong and the rising stench that filled the air. On 4 May, the same day that Lieutenant Sherman Pratt and his men reached the Obersalzberg, it was the turn of the 71st ‘Red Circle’ Infantry Division. In sharp contrast to the battle-hardened 3rd Infantry Division, the 71st was one of the newest units to arrive in the ETO, landing in France only on 6 February 1945 and not heading into combat until early March. They’d seen plenty of action since then, however, and done well too, first attached to Patch’s Seventh Army and then moved to join Patton’s Third Army as it swept on into Austria and Czechoslovakia on the northern flank of 6th Army Group. And it was into Upper Austria, on the road to Hitler’s home city of Linz, that the Red Circle Division came across the horrifying site of Gunskirchen Lager.

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Filed under Austria, Britain, disease, Germany, industry, labor, military, slavery, U.S., war

by Joel | 4 December 2025 · 10:50 pm

RLS at Peak Productivity

From Storyteller: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson, by Leo Damrosch (Yale University Press, 2025), Kindle pp. 447-449:

From 1884 to 1887 Louis produced an astonishing number and range of publications. Most notable were Kidnapped and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. In addition there were The Silverado Squatters, Prince Otto, A Child’s Garden of Verses, other poems collected as Underwoods, stories collected as More New Arabian Nights and as The Merry Men and Other Tales and Fables, the essay collection Memories and Portraits, and a Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin (his Edinburgh mentor had died at this time, at the early age of fifty-two). Prolific as this output was, he enjoyed telling friends that he was completing other works as well, such as Herbert and Henrietta: or The Nemesis of Sentiment, Happy Homes and Hairy Faces, and A Pound of Feathers and a Pound of Lead.

This torrent of writing may seem surprising, since as Rosaline Masson noted in her biography of Louis, he had been almost constantly incapacitated by illness since sailing to America in 1879.

He had been a chronic invalid, submitting to an invalid’s life, at Monterey and San Francisco; in the Highlands—Pitlochry and Braemar; at Davos; at Stobo Manse; at Kingussie; again at Davos; in France—St. Marcel and Hyères—ever seeking for health, never finding it. And now at Bournemouth there awaited him a life of accepted invalidism spent chiefly in the sickroom, suffering constant pain and weakness, often forbidden for days or even weeks to speak aloud, and having to whisper or write on paper all he wanted to say to his wife or his friends. And yet these three years proved a very industrious and successful time in Stevenson’s life.

But it’s equally possible that if he had been more active, he would have written less.

George Eliot once wrote, “To know intense joy without a strong bodily frame, one must have an enthusiastic soul.” Louis didn’t care for Eliot’s novels—he thought they were too preachy—but he did have an enthusiastic soul, and experienced joy even at the darkest times. Although he often declared that action was more important than writing, for him writing was action.

Louis remarked that he was living in an age of transition, and that was a widely used term when traditional assumptions about art were giving way to modernism. Reacting against the dense and earnestly moralizing Victorian novels, writers were now emphasizing individuality of vision and skillfully crafted style. The author of Treasure Island and Kidnapped would never have espoused the slogan “Art for art’s sake,” but the contemporary critic William Archer was right to call him “a modern of the moderns, both in his alert self-consciousness and in the particular artistic ideal which he proposes to himself. He professes himself an artist in words.” Alan Sandison takes this statement as the keynote for his Robert Louis Stevenson and the Appearance of Modernism, showing convincingly that “his experiments, his ceaseless questing among forms, ensured that of all his contemporaries his works show the greatest and most radical diversity.”

Louis did take offense at Archer’s suggestion that he indulged too freely in “aggressive optimism.” Louis wrote to Archer to say that far from devoting his life to manly exercise, as Archer had assumed, he had been a perpetual invalid, and his art was compensation for that. “To have suffered, nay, to suffer, sets a keen edge on what remains of the agreeable. This is a great truth, and has to be learned in the fire. Yours very truly, Robert Louis Stevenson.” Archer quickly made amends, and they became friends.

At this time Louis fell under the spell of Dostoevsky, reading Crime and Punishment in French translation since there was no English version as yet. In a letter to Henley he exclaimed, “Dostoieffsky is of course simply immense—it is not reading a book, it is having a brain fever to read it.”

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by Joel | 29 November 2025 · 9:42 am

Death Camp Workforce Induction, 1942

From The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World, by Jonathan Freedland (HarperCollins, 2022), Kindle pp. 71-72:

The next morning brought a 5 a.m. start for Appell at 6 a.m. As he had already learned at Majdanek, roll call was to count both the living and the dead, the latter category understood also to include the dying. If the figures all tallied, and no one was missing or presumed escaped, then the roll call would be declared over and the corpses could be taken away – each body carried by a single prisoner on his back, with the lifeless head lolling over one of his shoulders. As the pairs staggered off, they looked to Walter like double-headed monsters, prisoner and corpse joined together shuffling slowly towards the mortuary: it was hard to tell which one was dead and which alive, because they were both skin and bone.

It was strange for him and the other new arrivals, lined up in their civilian clothes, watching the inmates march off to hard labour while they were to stay behind. They were left to amble around the camp, around its open areas at any rate, trying to make sense of it. It was only on the following day that they were plunged into the ritual of induction, a re-run of the process Walter had undergone two weeks earlier in Majdanek.

It began with a forced trip to the showers. The Kapos beat them in there with clubs, herding 400 into a room built to contain thirty at most, then beat them back out again, kicking and clubbing them until they were standing naked in the cold. After that, still naked and shivering, came something new. They lined up to be tattooed with their Auschwitz number. Two fellow prisoners acted as clerks, taking down the inmates’ names and places of birth: Walter was entered into the ledger as having been born in Pressburg, the old Austro-Hungarian name for Bratislava. He gave his occupation as ‘locksmith’, adopting the trade of the man who was not quite his stepfather but regularly at his mother’s side. That done, it was time to be marked. Previously, the tattooing process had meant being leaned against a wall by a prisoner who then pressed a special stipple, resembling a stamp with metal numbers, into the left side of the chest, just under the collarbone. Often it was done with such brutality that many deportees fainted. But on this day, Walter was offered a choice. He could be branded on the left or right arm, on the outside or the underside. Walter nominated the top of his left forearm, where the mark would be immediately visible, and so it was done. For the next two and a half years, he would not use his name officially again. From that day on, he was 44070. Before long he would learn the importance of numbers in Auschwitz, how a low, ‘old number’ marked you out as a veteran, putting you closer to the top of the camp hierarchy whose strictures and privileges inmates strictly observed.

Eventually, they were given clothes. Their old ones were taken away, never to be returned and they were handed the familiar uniform made of coarse cloth, patterned with dull grey-blue and white stripes. So Walter would be a human zebra like all the others. Yet as he pulled on the tunic-cum-shirt – his number sewn on to it alongside the standard symbol for Jewish inmates, a star formed from two triangles, one the red of a political prisoner, the other yellow – as well as the trousers, baggy cap and wooden clogs, he took comfort, and not only from the fact that he was no longer exposed to the elements. He also liked that he was now indistinguishable, at a glance at least, from the rest of the pack, that he could, if he worked at it, melt unnoticed into the crowd. To disappear was, in its own way, a kind of escape.

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Filed under Germany, labor, migration, military, Poland, religion, Slovakia, war

by Joel | 21 November 2025 · 10:41 pm

RLS in the “Long Depression”

From Storyteller: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson, by Leo Damrosch (Yale University Press, 2025), Kindle pp. 276-277:

This was the time of a “Long Depression” that lasted for six years throughout Europe and the United States. Britain was hardest hit of all. Louis was now confronted with a reality he had been insulated from, and as Furnas says, “There rubbed against him the direct knowledge that to be penniless was more miserable than picturesque; that economic disaster was cruel to individuals as well as abstractly depressing to masses; that alcoholism was incapacitating, not jolly.”

In many ways The Amateur Emigrant anticipates Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London half a century later.

Those around me were for the most part quiet, orderly, obedient citizens, family men broken by adversity, elderly youths who had failed to place themselves in life, and people who had seen better days. . . . Labouring mankind had in the last years, and throughout Great Britain, sustained a prolonged and crushing series of defeats. I had heard vaguely of these reverses; of whole streets of houses standing deserted by the Tyne, the cellar doors broken and removed for firewood; of homeless men loitering at the street-corners of Glasgow with their chests beside them; of closed factories, useless strikes, and starving girls. But I had never taken them home to me, or represented these distresses livingly to my imagination.

In a real sense Louis was escaping from defeats of his own. “We were a company of the rejected. The drunken, the incompetent, the weak, the prodigal, all who had been unable to prevail against circumstances in the one land were now fleeing pitifully to another, and though one or two might still succeed, all had already failed. We were a shipful of failures, the broken men of England.” Of Scotland too, of course. “Skilled mechanics, engineers, millwrights, and carpenters were fleeing as from the native country of starvation.” What skills was he himself bringing?

Yet a surprising optimism prevailed. “It must not be supposed that these people exhibited depression. The scene, on the contrary, was cheerful. Not a tear was shed on board the vessel. All were full of hope for the future, and showed an inclination to innocent gaiety. Some were heard to sing, and all began to scrape acquaintance with small jests and ready laughter.” Louis always enjoyed children, and noted with amusement that they were attracted to each other “like dogs” and went around “all in a band, as thick as thieves at a fair,” while the adults were still “ceremoniously maneuvering on the outskirts of acquaintance.”

As the title of The Amateur Emigrant suggests, he belonged among these people only in a sense. It would be some years before he could support himself by writing, but his parents might resume their subsidies before then, as indeed did happen. His fellow travelers were not just emigrants but immigrants, whereas (despite what the passenger list said) he had no intention of making a home in America. In much the same way, by the time Orwell published his book he had ended his experiment of being down and out. Still, the voyage was a turning point. “Travel is of two kinds, and this voyage of mine across the ocean combined both. ‘Out of my country and myself I go,’ sings the old poet: and I was not only travelling out of my country in latitude and longitude, but out of myself in diet, associates, and consideration.”