The Catholic Thing has an article about the Nazi and Soviet invasions of Poland, the first of which began 70 years ago today.

"By the time Polish resistance ended on October 5, 200,000 Poles were dead or wounded and 400,000 were taken prisoner....Hitler, who despised Poland and held that all Poles were subhuman, ordered his invading army to kill “without pity or mercy, all men, women and children of Polish descent or language.” In the first thirty days of occupation, the Wehrmacht destroyed 531 towns and villages and murdered over 16,000 civilians. Hitler’s aim was more than expanding Germany’s borders; he wanted the “annihilation of living forces” by means of extermination and enslavement."

Indeed, the Poles fought valiantly against the Nazis, ultimately falling because they lacked the military technology of the Germans. They fought unaided--the British declared war though were unable to stop the Germans, and the French sat by idly--and were eventually "liberated" by the Soviets, who treated them every bit as cruelly.

"The Soviets, who were driven out of their sector by the Germans in 1941, were as cruel as the Nazis. During their occupation, they deported approximately one million Poles to Siberian slave labor camps. On Stalin’s orders, over 21,000 members of the Polish officers corp were shot in April 1940. Most of them perished in the Katyn Forest.

When the Russians reconquered eastern Poland in 1944, Stalin halted the invasion only miles away from the capital at the Vistula River and for sixty-three days the Russian forces sat by silently as the Germans crushed the Warsaw uprising. Obeying Hitler’s command that Warsaw be nothing more than a point on the map, Himmler ordered 'every inhabitant to be killed. . .every single house to be blown up and burned.' Two-hundred-thousand civilians perished, 17,000 of the Polish Home Guard were killed and 95 percent of homes were turned into rubble. As Archbishop Fulton Sheen was to say, Poland had been 'crucified between two thieves.' "

Yet, this adversity created an underground resistance--cultural, political, economic, military, and even religious--to both conquerors. The Nazis (and later Soviets) did all in their power to destroy the Church, imprisoning or murdering outright thousands of clergy and religious. Yet, in spite of this, the Church was at the very heart of the resistance to these regimes:

"The persecuted Church did, however, play a major role in the resistance. It housed Christians and Jews pursued by the Gestapo and issued thousands of false baptismal records. Convents and rectories printed underground newspapers. Money from abroad was distributed by the Church to fund resistance activities. Church-sponsored underground seminaries, schools, theater, music, and literary groups, kept alive Catholic and Polish culture."

At the end of the war, and indeed after decades of the Cold War, the Polish culture survived. Even now, the new dictatorship--that of relativism--which is attempting to conquer all cultures today has had difficulty in Poland. They, at least, have not been totally assimilated by the European secular culture, which has grown in most western countries and permeates the European Union at all levels.

What is so interesting to me about this is that the Soviets and Nazis faced off in another country prior to the war: Spain. Spain remained neutral during the war itself, by was embroiled in a civil war between the Nazi-backed fascists and the Soviet backed communist--neither of which was the legitimate authority in that country. As in Poland, the body which suffered most in this war was Christ's--His Church. Tens of thousands of priests were killed, most of them innocent civilians in this war. Unlike in Poland, the Church (and what was truly good in the culture) did not survive the war in Spain.