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During German and Russian occupation celebration of November 11th was forbidden and punishment for any attempt was severe indeed. In London, the Polish Government in Exile, led by Sikorski, a long-time opponent of Piłsudski, tried to de-emphasize November 11th and remove Piłsudskiite elements from its celebrations. Even songs traditionally sung on the occasion were either forbidden or actively discouraged. This attempt was widely resented in the army where there existed a cult of Piłsudski. November 11th regained some of its previous attention after Sikorski's death in July 1943 when Gen. Sosnkowski, a close comrade of Piłsudski's, came to head the Polish armed forces. This proved a brief episode because he was removed from office under British pressure in 1944. Piłsudskiites in exile were unable to contest the gradual diminution of November 11th because their regime bore the obloquy of a lost war and no leader emerged to replace Piłsudski. They were scattered and bereft. November 11th was in danger of being jettisoned as the national holiday. Its only power lay in inertia, and the sad fact that the Poles no longer had anything positive to celebrate. When the Russians moved into eastern Poland they initially treated the 11th with conspicuous respect, even trying to link it with the November 7th celebration of the Bolshevik Revolution as a kind of extended independence celebration. This toleration proved short-lived and by 1945 November 11th was effectively banned and July 22^nd, the date the Lublin Committee declared its existence was proffered as the new national holiday. It never gained much support.

This chapter looks at language choice within the context of Franco-Polish relations in the Resistance in Romain Gary’s novel Éducation européenne. It draws on Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of heteroglossia to analyze characters who speak in multiple languages but whom Gary represents in French. Gary’s use of heteroglossic French and of multilingualism in the novel is a response to the politics of La France libre, the journal where excerpts from his novel were first published. French and Polish authors of numerous articles focus on links between France and Poland—especially through a shared history of Romantic Revolution—as an expression of European democracy, one that could pave the way for a united Europe in the postwar period. Gary represents this link through language, but he also inserts Jewish language into the discussion, including the Jewish people in a European Resistance.

The Nazi destruction of Polish Jewry progressed incrementally from 1939 to 1945 through legal restrictions, confiscations, deportations, ghettoization, slave labor, death camps, and death marches. Knowledge of the Nazi programs increased in Poland and in the West over time, but the way this knowledge was comprehended and responded to by different actors varied. This chapter argues that the ‘spaces of engagement’ where knowledge of the unfolding Jewish tragedy was acquired crucially influenced responses to it. To illustrate this point it focuses on the reactions of the British Foreign Office, the Polish Government in Exile (based in London) and the Polish Underground in Poland itself. In addition, understandings of the Holocaust were heavily influenced by geographies of obligation - that is, the hierarchies of responsibility and consideration between different groups at various spatial scales. This issue has been extensively debated in the last decades, but largely in the context of Polish-Jewish relations. This chapter expands the scale of analysis and explores how the notion of geographies of obligation can help deepen understandings of the way different institutions and key actors responded to the Holocaust as it was taking place.

The chapter discusses the expectations that Greek (Giorgos Tsolakoglou, Konstantinos Logothetopoulos, Ioannes Ralles, EAM, Greek Government-in-Exile) and foreign (Axis Authorities) actors had of the church, and how these expectations influenced the relationship between these various interest groups and the church. It also explores the nature and impact of this relationship in determining the ability of the clergy to achieve its goals. Damaskinos and other church leaders worked with the occupation authorities, their Greek allies, and, in some places, with Greek resistance movements to mitigate the suffering of the population. Expectations of the church by all the major actors remained high, and in most cases unrealistic. Based on the actual historical record, the church failed utterly in shielding the population from the impact of the occupation and its consequences. However, despite its failure (largely for reasons beyond its control) the church won considerable praise for its effort.

The Tibet issue is still a sensitive and intractable issue for China’s diplomacy. This Chapter provides a brief account of China’s ‘liberation’ of Tibet, pointing out India’s special role and Tibet’s significance for China. As will be suggested in this chapter, the Chinese are not satisfied with India’s approach to the Tibet issue, particularly its accommodation of the Dalai Lama and the government-in-exile. Although the Indian side has said in explicit terms that Tibet is a part of China and has stated that the Dalai Lama cannot carry out political activities in India, Beijing remains intensely suspicious of India’s Tibetan policy, and levels the criticism that India has been very reluctant to recognise Chinese sovereignty over Tibet. On the other hand, India has adopted a cautious approach in dealing with the Tibet issue, and faces a dilemma about playing the ‘Tibet card’.

This chapter traces the life of refugee scholar Jacobs Leib Teicher from archives and family sources. Born a Polish Jew, Teicher studied Arabic and Jewish philosophy in Italy, gaining his degree in philosophy and oriental languages at Florence University, while also completing a course of study at the Italian Rabbinical College. The chapter traces his precarious status as a foreign Jew in Italy and then in Britain until his post-war appointment to a Lectureship in Rabbinics at Cambridge. Supported by the SPSL, Teicher spent parts of the war in the cosmopolitan circles of Oxford, though he had difficulties adapting. He worked on the Corpus Platonicum project with philosopher Raymond Klibansky, before moving to London as secretary to the Jewish representative on the National Council of the Polish Government-in-Exile.

This chapter concentrates initially on the efforts of Czech exiles, and in particular their president, Edvard Beneš, to win over Allied opinion to the idea of a restored post-war Czechoslovakia without national minorities. The wider resonance of Czech advocacy for transfer is explored in the second part of the chapter, which discusses European exile thinking on minorities and transfer during the Second World War, and how these views were shaped not only by the trauma of war, occupation, exile, and the pre-war experience of the minorities problem, but also by parochial concerns centred on the very conception of the state. While all European governments-in-exile broadly accepted the principle of population transfer, there were differences of opinion over its practical and geographical application that meant that it came to be regarded as an ‘eastern’ measure which set the ‘other Europe’ off from the more established nation states in western Europe.