The Torpedo Season: Growing Up During World War II

We might be prone to forget that anybody with military experience of World War II must be at least in their mid-nineties, and that our few remaining connections with the "Greatest Generation" are those who were children during the Second World War. Many who played important roles relevant to American Polonia—the late Michael Novak and the late Rev. Leonard Chrobot in the urban ethnic movement of the 1970s and 1980s—fall into the latter category. So does our colleague in history, Richard Conrad Lukas.Lukas's academic career focused on World War II, Poland, and the Western Allies. His 1986 book, The Forgotten Holocaust, ignited a firestorm: Jewish American writers attacked him for applying the word "Holocaust" to describe the gentile—largely Catholic—extermination of Polish civilians as part of a systematic wartime German racial plan. Convinced the story of Polish Christian martyrdom under German occupation could remain neither unnamed nor untold, Lukas followed up with oral histories of Polish Christian witnesses and survivors as well as a book on Polish Christian and Jewish children at Nazi hands.Torpedo Season is an octogenarian's memoirs of a childhood in a Polish American home in Massachusetts. It also perhaps explains something of Lukas's subsequent academic career. He discusses World War II from the vantage point of a four- to eight-year-old, then follows up with postwar experiences until he and his family moved to Florida just before eighth grade.While not every boy who grew up playing with toy soldiers during World War II turned into a war historian, not every child grew up in a Polish American home where the fate of the homeland was an existential concern. Not every child had a socially active mother: how else do you explain five Polish RAF pilots using your house as a base for a speaking tour of the Boston area on behalf of Poland's cause?Apart from the peculiar circumstances of wartime, Lukas also gives us insight into growing up in a Polish American household of the era, an experience decidedly not the "white Wonder Bread" experience of later Father Knows Best or Leave It to Beaver inscenation. Indeed, Lukas's encounters with bigotry came from that difference of background. As a little boy in Lynn, he encountered prejudice from Protestant peers who occasionally called him a "papist" while confessing they didn't know what that meant. When his family moved to a neighboring town, he recalls a WASP neighbor lowering the porch shades when a relative showed up in a truck, showing off loudly the produce she brought from her victory garden. For the neighbor, the Bielany Hillbillies had moved to Swampscott.Other than that, Lukas's relatively happy childhood seemed replete with the experiences of Polish American kids of his generation. They included the parish church (St. Michael's) and parochial school, staffed by priests and sisters his parents didn't mind having over regularly to the house. (One Protestant kid who saw the gaggle remarked: "there are penguins in your yard!") They included the various relatives, strange and un-strange, who made up a loving Polish family with all its quirks. ("'Why is it so many of our relatives have these feelings they're going to die?' I asked [my father] . . . . 'It's probably a Polish thing,' Dad chuckled. 'Well, I think it's terrible!' I proclaimed. 'Leave it alone, son,' Dad said . . . . I got the message" [p. 128].) Polish American women were "liberated" long before it was in fashion: Lukas's father ran a bar (the White Eagle), his mother managed the books, along with the house, the family, the war bond sales, and the get-out-the-FDR vote.Lukas's family—like any good Polish American family—made sure he was absolutely steeped in Polish history, another reason his eventual career choice should not surprise us. Polish language was a greater challenge. Lukas attended parochial school when Polish was still part of the curriculum. His summary of Polish says it all: "When you realize there are seventeen ways to say the number two in Polish, you know you're about to learn a language on steroids" (p. 53).Of course, Lukas shares with us those episodes helping him come of age: Uncle Charlie, on whose farm Lukas got his first horseback ride, fell off, and got put back on; Uncle Stanley, who ran a restaurant where little Richard mooched on lobster and got an education in horseracing; his father, who kept the secret of Richard sipping soda at his bar after school when his mother forbade him ever to enter the White Eagle; his first cigarette smoke with friend Billy under a railroad track bridge on V-J Day.The title of the book—and Lukas's greatest coming of age experience—comes from an episode on the shore in Swampscott. One of the lad's favorite pastimes was combing the beach with a friend. One morning, they stumbled upon a cylinder that the two boys tried to turn into a teeter-totter. A fisherman plucked them from their game atop a live German torpedo later disarmed by the military. "I had come too close to dying to see war as anything but horrible. I was seven years old, but I had suddenly grown up" (p. 101).Some might write off a review like this as a perfunctory tribute to a colleague. We shouldn't. The experience of growing up and seeing the world as a Polish American kid—perhaps something many PAHA members knew from family experience—is increasingly an historical insight that, not written down, will be lost. Growing up as a Polish American kid in the United States during World War II was radically different than growing up as a Polish kid in Poland at the same time. In an America ostensibly committed to cherishing its diversity, the experience of Polish American kids was in some sense sui generis. We admire Dylan Thomas's "A Child's Christmas in Wales." Thank you, Richard Lukas, for insights into "A Polish-American Childhood in Massachusetts."