Tuesday 28 January 2025
“Ten years. Today is my tenth anniversary teaching this war class here,” I began. I started teaching last Wednesday, and I was more nervous than usual. To be honest, I haven’t felt nervous before starting a new semester in years. I felt something more than “first-day jitters.” This mood felt different. Although last Wednesday was an important date in my career, selfhood, and intellectual and creative endeavors, I wasn’t necessarily feeling nostalgic or mawkish; I was feeling something else.
I wasn’t arrogantly congratulating myself for ten years of teaching this war class which has become such a part of me; even prospective students have come to know me as the “war professor.” I had invested such profound importance on this occasion that the emotions filling me felt like “everything;” in other words, I had allowed myself to be overwhelmed by this moment.
I wanted that day to be meaningful and monumental. The commemoration was supposed to be celebratory. Damn it, I worked hard to reach this moment; however, once standing there at the summit of this achievement, I didn’t know how to express myself. Too many emotions and thoughts surged through me. Whatever I was feeling, clearly wasn’t “nerves.”
That Wednesday was to be both solemn and happy. So much has happened in that span of ten years. The Katyn manuscript has been completed. I now am entering the next phase of the project: eventual publication. This tenth year anniversary also made me realize that life is different since then, not just because I am older and more experienced, but also because Steve no longer is here. I would have liked to have Steve see my achievement. These ten years have come and have gone, and now what will this next phase of my war class era now bring for me?
To mark this ceremony of personal significance, I didn’t need to alter my teaching focus entirely or radically; teaching the war class is a successful and satisfying undertaking. Sure, with this particular course theme, my so-called occupational hazards have become more existential and mental in scope over the years, and because of these perils, I need to be—and I have modified my outlook and practice for teaching this class in response to past episodes of emotional strain—to be even more mindful of them and respond to them more robustly than I have done during previous semesters. I guess I have cultivated a burgeoning resiliency, accepting the ever-changing conditions of teaching such an emotionally demanding course theme and fostering self-protecting tactics to counter those confrontations with those challenges. Teaching my self-designed war class also matured my outlook on philosophy, politics, and life. These insights also needed to be acknowledged in my remembrance of ten years past.
Now that the intense and all-encompassing odyssey of finalizing my Katyn memoir has drawn itself to an end, or so it seems, I stood there before my war class students wondering to myself: “Well… what’s next? How should I be feeling? What should I say right now?”
During the holiday break, my family and I watched Uberto Pasolini’s 2024 film, The Return, starring both Ralph Fiennes as Odysseus and Juliette Binoche as Penelope. An excellent and important film for me because the movie illustrates and explores the consequences of devoting oneself to war way too long, too fully, and too seriously.
The film begins with a semi-conscious Odysseus awakening from being washed upon the beach of his island kingdom. Not only is he physically tired and bears multiple serious-looking scars, but he also looks emotionally tired and broken. Throughout the film he also exhibits signs of and discusses what we would now call post-traumatic stress disorder, or even “moral injuries,” wounds to his conscience, his personal code of morality, caused by other warriors and Greek leaders whose own respective moralities conflicted with Odysseus’ own during the Trojan War.
There is no triumphant or gratifying or even loving welcome when Fiennes’ Odysseus returns; neither his wife nor son receive him warmly. Something worse than disappointment is the mood. Binoche’s Penelope is broken, too, despite her otherworldly patience and hope. Once she sees the old beggar who has shown up to the palace and recognizes that he is her husband, she scolds, not embraces him. Disgusted with his self-pity, Binoche’s Penelope’s guilt-tripping is righteous and ruthless: “Has all this waiting been for nothing?” Her merciless castigations of her husband’s war-time behavior: “Lost? Lost? How can men find a war but not find their own home? … Did my husband rape? Did he murder women and children?” land hard like precision strikes. Fiennes’ Odysseus has no answers, has no justifications for his war crimes, has no rationalizations for his excuses of finding a home in war, and not with her.
Quickly, he becomes mute, and his face speaks all we need to know: she is right about everything. I can’t not think of British heavy metal band Iron Maiden’s song, “Wasted Years,” and the following poignant lyrics:
So understand
Don’t waste your time always searching for those wasted years
Face up, make your stand
Realize you’re living in the golden years, hey!
With these lyrics in mind, Binoche’s Penelope’s searing remonstrance scorches and pierces more painfully down to the core of Fiennes’ Odysseus war wounds and disillusionment.
Although “Homer” seems to suggest that Odysseus’ bloody clearing of the suitors from his home is justice, when the executions are over, Binoche’s Penelope is horrified, not pleased. Odysseus the warrior kills again, and his son Telemachus now is schooled in the art of mass murder.
Civilians, too, can undergo “moral injuries” and not only PTSD during times of war; moreover, civilians who work as photo and print journalists and who have been brutalized by war do suffer from moral and psychological war wounds. And civilians who are historians and scholars can be afflicted by war’s moral injuries, too. What I’m saying isn’t a cover for “stolen valor,” the disrespectful and fraudulent impersonation of being a veteran military service person. No; war’s insidiousness doesn’t discriminate. When anyone stares into the abyss, that abyss of war also doesn’t privilege one kind of person over the other with its returning stare.
I refer to Nietzsche quite often in my classrooms and writings, and frequently doing so could lose its significance, but his axiom speaks such a profound and scathing truth that, in the end, once war’s abyss begins to stare back at you, you feel it. It’s unavoidable, no matter who that person is feeling its stare. And I learned the hard way: when the abyss returns your gaze, the experience will wound and terrify you.
During these past two years, I have been thinking of another civilian writer who, like me, has stared too deeply, too long into the abyss of war and suffered terribly—and in her case, tragically: Iris Chang. Certainly, Chang’s sleep insufficiency and misuse of herbal supplements and prescription medications played influential roles in her August 2004 nervous breakdown and hospital stay. Nonetheless, we need to consider how the writing of her The Rape Of Nanking The Forgotten Holocaust Of World War II (1997) and the consequences of continuing to focus on war crimes as future book projects (before her suicide, she was researching for a book about the Bataan Death March) affected her emotionally and mentally.
Studying and writing (and teaching) about war and war crimes without a doubt is soul lacerating, and frightening. Staring into the abyss and the abyss staring back isn’t just an intellectual and philosophical musing—in other words, theoretical and abstruse, even poetic—it is an urgent and dire warning—in other words, very real and deadly. The abyss can and will kill you, if you give it a chance. And I am thinking of Iris Chang right now. If it doesn’t, it can and will maim you; for sure… and believe me… I am thinking of myself.
I must insist: the wounds of war aren’t just physical ones; they’re mental ones, too. Even intellectual and creative ones. Whether or not “Homer” was a Trojan War veteran who wrote about his soldierly experiences, or even if “he” were just a humble but empathetic civilian, non-combatant poet who witnessed battlefield scenes, he did write of immense and psychologically real war matters and very likely doing so had to have changed “him.” How could they not? In what way(s)? No writer or artist could remain unchanged after creating TWO masterpiece works of epic poetry about war. As for myself, after completing my Katyn manuscript, I am still exploring, discovering, excavating, and disinterring what those differences within me are. Even after completing my manuscript, I am now realizing that my Katyn journey has just begun, not ended.
I stood before my Wednesday morning first-section students and thought to myself: “Look how far I have come since Spring 2015 when I desperately needed a catalyst, something to re-energize my Katyn project because at that point I had reached a dead, brick wall of writer’s block. I thought then that teaching this class will force me to return to writing the Katyn memoir manuscript.” I had invested such enormous meaning in this war class that I could have easily become plagued even more by writer’s block. The expectations to FINISH my Katyn manuscript at times felt unbearable.
I convinced myself when I started this new job ten years ago that I needed to make an “impact statement,” one that announced my intellectual and scholarly intentions not only for the new institution employing me but also for myself. If I were writing, reportedly, a war themed book, then damn it, I needed to HAVE a war themed book published. If I were claiming to be a “war professor,” then I needed to earn my credentials to be one by publishing as one.
Since the first day of that Spring 2015 war class, I considered my war classes to be my “graduate studies courses,” “dissertation-like” preparations to become a “war professor.” Steve was skeptical if I even needed to “prepare myself” or to “train myself” to become one, but I thought so, regardless of what he thought. His worry was I would distract myself even further, not concentrate more deeply on writing about Katyn by teaching the war class for the purpose of finishing the Katyn manuscript. He was both right and wrong.
Those early semesters of teaching the war class were, in hindsight, bolsterers, illusory supports that fooled me into thinking I was working on my Katyn project when in actuality I wasn’t. No writing occurred. “I need to read and teach that book…” or “I need to watch and teach this movie,” and “then I’ll have what I need to finish the book.” What exactly I needed to accomplish that task I never was able to articulate then. Even now, after having completed the Katyn manuscript—after ten years when I ordered myself to teach these war classes, I still don’t know what I was chasing after.
What were those things I hoped to uncover in “that book” and “this movie” that would settle things for me? What was it that I supposedly needed to find in the book or movie to FINISH the manuscript? In my fantasy of completing the book, “that book” and “this movie” were “research” for the Katyn book. Perhaps if I were honest with myself then, I should have asked the more difficult questions that Steve shied away from asking me, I could have disillusioned myself and just had written the book. My Katyn book was a memoir; therefore, I didn’t need “research.” My lived Katyn experiences were my “research.” Why was that reality so difficult to see?
Before the war classes, the Holocaust courses I taught were supposed to do that, too—train me to write about the Katyn war crimes; they didn’t either. Steve was right then, as well. If I weren’t writing a memoir, then, of course, I would have been doing the right things; however, since I had decided not to write a scholarly book on Katyn, I needed to demonstrate that I knew what I was doing somehow. Nothing… absolutely nothing I came across was similar to what I imagined I wanted to write in the Katyn book. I searched for something that wasn’t even there, but the illusion of searching for it relieved temporarily the reality of doing nothing—no writing but I was “researching,” the grand writer’s delusion.
I was writing something entirely different but lacked the vision of what that “different” was. If I were writing a scholarly, researched book on Katyn, then teaching the Holocaust and war classes would have helped me to zero in on my subject matter. Teaching war and Holocaust memoirs also tricked me into thinking that “I was on to something.” I wasn’t. Different experiences, different motives for writing… everything was different for different reasons.
Sure, in one sense, on that Spring 2025 Wednesday morning, I felt like Ishmael at the end of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, feeling that after the drama of my Katyn writing journey had come to an end, and the telling of my tales had also reached their end, I now thought: what do I do now, right now, right here? What do I say to these eager students waiting to learn about war?
The Katyn manuscript is so tied with this war class. I can’t separate the Katyn book from this war class; they are really one and the same. For that reason, I needed to teach “that book” and “this movie.” This war class, in its own strange and “different” way, did help me to write my Katyn memoir.
What have I taken away personally from completing my Katyn project, and by extension, what have I taken away from teaching these war classes? And what should these undergraduates understand about war and the teaching (and learning) of war?
Perhaps I was more emotional, reflective, and personal than usual as “Professor Paliwoda” on that Wednesday morning. The head and heart spaces I found myself in were moving me to be vocal about my takeaways from teaching war classes for ten years there and from teaching Holocaust courses for several years elsewhere, too.
On that Spring 2025 Wednesday morning class, I was overly excited and scared—and yes, tired—because, after all, I did it! I finished writing the Katyn memoir, and I needed to give credit, somehow, to the occasion. And the students were my audience. Again, without the Katyn manuscript, there would have been no war class. Without both the Katyn manuscript and this war-themed course, I wouldn’t have been standing there as the professor and person I am now. Unknowingly, they, too, the ten years’ tally of students, have become parts of my Katyn journey. I needed to acknowledge and thank them for their resolve, patience, and willingness to be both participants and observers of my Katyn journey.
I was happy and meditative but not melancholy. Maybe some of you, Readers, may argue that I probably felt a tinge of sadness. War isn’t a cheery subject matter! Regardless, I had reached the summit! Throughout the morning class’s introductory remarks, I heard in my mind King Arthur’s exclamation: “This is your Mount Everest moment! Spend time to enjoy the view!” I did. The “views” were breathtaking, both because what I have seen, the sites, throughout the years of working on war as a writing project were frightening and encouraging. Like peaking the real summit of Mount Everest, reaching the apex of my Katyn “mountain” was thrilling but dangerous. There were times I thought I couldn’t go any further, like so many other Mount Everest climbers. The symbolic “frostbite,” “altitude sickness,” and all the other deadly aspects of scaling my mountain—writing my Katyn memoir—were as psychologically real, in their own ways, as any other mountaineering expedition.
And when I had just used the word, “encouraging” to describe war, I mean the life-affirming actions of the Righteous Gentiles, the few courageous ones who risked their lives to save lives during the Holocaust. I also mean the heroic defiance of Anna Politkovskaya, the journalist who inspired her readers not to slip into the stinking swamp of Putin’s racism during the Second Chechen War. My war classes aren’t only all “doom and gloom;” rather, as Khaled Hosseini in his The Kite Runner (2003) writes: “War doesn’t negate decency. It demands it, even more than in times of peace.”
And I also mean the magnificent and stupendous expression of love and compassion shown by my Holocaust course students who had noticed that one of their own was terribly frightened by a horrific scene in Tadeusz Borowski’s This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen (1946), which… apparently… made the scene even more real for her… and them… and me.
Five female friends taking my Holocaust course who believed in experiencing a shared experience by taking my Holocaust course also sat together. One of these students was in a wheelchair. And the scene in Borowski’s book I was about to address featured a Jewish girl who also was disabled.
My student in the wheelchair immediately noticed my hesitation. What felt like an eternity, but in reality probably lasted only mere seconds, I debated privately whether or not to read aloud the passage, with all of its hate and violence toward the Jewish girl with one leg being manhandled and thrown into a heap of corpses by Auschwitz-Birkenau forced laborers; they will burn the corpses… and the one-legged child, too, while she is still alive.
“Should I, do it? Do I make this moment in this student’s Holocaust course experience—my Holocaust course; and because it was my Holocaust course, was I instigating and causing this particular course experience? —even more dreadfully real because the death camp workers would have done the same to this student… manhandle her and throw her into…. You get the point.”
And during last Wednesday’s introductory first day of my war class, I finished the rest of that story. “I looked at the Borowski book, then looked at the female student, then looked again at the book, and looked at her. She was watching me, too.” I quivered while telling my tale as I had trembled years ago, questioning myself if I were going to do the right thing. “What was the right thing to do? Should I have been objective and teach the lesson and analyze the scene… or should I have skipped over the passage because, well… you know,” I told the Spring 2025 students, repeating the moral dilemma I faced years ago. “On that day, the Holocaust no longer was just a historical fact in a history textbook; it was real… fucking deadly real for this student,” I whispered…. “and for me.”
“It was real because she… she… saw herself there… in Auschwitz…like the girl with one leg… and she saw that I saw that, too. And I saw the tears welling in the student’s eyes, and she saw mine. Her friends—along with the other students—saw what was happening, too. Her friends stood up, surrounding the wheelchair. Some held the hands of the student sitting in the wheelchair, and the others hugged her. As my voice is cracking right now, I stammered, too, then, as I recited the lines from Borowski. Yea, I did it. I taught the scene with the one-legged girl. The whole book is filled with scenes which any one of us could have experienced. Borowski really is unsparing. Few years after publishing his Auschwitz stories… and days after his wife gave birth to their daughter, he sticks his head inside the kitchen gas oven and commits suicide. Some scholars believe he took his own life due to ‘survivor’s guilt,’ the shame he felt for making it out alive from Hitler’s camps… for writing about the camps. And this book caused my nervous breakdown back in Fall 2016… just twenty-minutes before I had to teach it. That Fall semester was the last time I taught the book in my war classes… the last time I taught it…period! I’ve seen enough students cry, hold hands by Borowski’s book, and… I hurt myself, too by teaching that book. So, I don’t teach it anymore. I also don’t know if that decision is right or wrong.”
My Spring 2025 war class students absorbed my story. I felt their eyes on me. After providing more details about the emotional toll of teaching Borowski and the corresponding nervous breakdown it caused me, I said, “I get it. If you think what I have just said is too much, too intense for you… and you decide to drop out and find another class… I get it. Some students in the past have done so. I completely empathize with their decisions, and yours, if you decide, too. There will be times when class ends, and you walk through that door and feel depressed; but also know that there will be other times when class ends, and you walk through that door you will feel uplifted, knowing that humanity isn’t completely evil… I tried over the years to balance those two feelings. Balance. As I write in our course syllabus, this class neither celebrates nor condemns war. It took an army to liberate Hitler’s camps. Like other aspects of life, war is complicated. Shades of gray,” I said, repeating what I have told myself so often.
I looked at my watch, and it happened… as it always happens during class moments like the one above… I was running out of time. I had so many other things to say; I had so many other presentation-slides to show my war class students. “If anything, I’ll continue this slideshow next class,” I told myself. The last determined pangs of anxiety quivered in me, and I clicked the button to bring up the next slide in my class presentation, the entitled: “What Is War’s Power over Us that Disturbs, Frightens?” slide.
Where to begin in describing my “What Is War’s Power over Us that Disturbs, Frightens?” slide? Five images: a black-and-white photograph of the “Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo,” the nonviolent resistance movement led by the Argentine mothers of the “disappeared;” the mushroom cloud of the Hiroshima bomb; the gate of Auschwitz-Birkenau; war criminal investigators uncovering a Srebrenica Genocide mass grave; and the side profile photograph of a young Rwandan man bearing numerous facial scars caused by the machete of his attacker. Moreover, I placed on the same slide the following Ernest Hemingway quote:
“No catalogue of horrors ever kept men from war. Before the war, you always think that it’s not you that dies. But you will die, brother, if you go to it long enough.” “Notes on the Next War,” (1935)
After providing some information about each of the five images, I attempted to answer the slide’s title which also was a question I wanted my students to answer: “Is it this or that or… [pointing to the images on the slide] that scares you about war? Do you worry that instead of those Argentine mothers searching for their lost children, they are your mothers looking for you? Do you worry that you might be made to disappear?”
I may be unsparing in my analysis of these war images; after all, I consider Borowski to be one of my most important teachers, hence the relentlessness of getting to the heart of their fears, the students’… and mine. If war is to be considered as “real” by my students, not as “literary” or “artistic” symbols, motifs… in other words, imaginary, then I need to make the interpretations and lessons as “real” as possible. “War is horrible for a reason,” I added, realizing that the slide’s images were getting to my students.
But wait; before you, Reader, criticize me harshly for being too “tough” on the students, I must also tell you of the subsequent slide: “War’s Ability to Save, Liberate, Unify, and Heal, Sometimes.” Also five images: Soviet Red Army soldiers rescuing people in Auschwitz; a Righteous Gentiles memorial; a prosthetics advertisement for World War I veterans; the International Committee of the Red Cross insignia; and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. I explained how each of these five images, in varying ways, demonstrates war’s more affirming qualities.
These two slides were new additions to my first-day presentations. I didn’t realize how mesmerizing and engaging these slides would end up being for the students in my war class. The students began to speak more. I still had several more slides to go through: Eugene Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People (1830); Emanuel Leutze, Washington Crossing the Delaware (1850); Jan Matejko, Battle of Grunwald (1878); Otto Dix, Stormtroopers Advancing Under Gas, (1924); and many more. I really had no time to discuss these slides.
At first, I considered not being able to analyze those paintings as a blunder… poor time management… dwelling too long on the earlier slides. On the other hand, the more I reflected on the pacing and the interactions with several students responding to those other slides, especially the slide asking them what they fear about war, I considered the first day to be a success because I think I was able to alleviate some of the natural and normal anxiety the students felt about a topic like war. If they were now able to articulate, for example, what might frighten them about war, they would then be able to feel less helpless, less powerless, less voiceless when the specter of war tries to rob them of their ability to speak, respond, and resist. Given that my course rosters haven’t altered significantly are promising signs.
This week, I begin teaching my students Francisco Goya’s Disasters of War. I have included this work since my first version of my war class, since Spring semester 2015. Goya, too, is among my most important teachers. Fleeting moments of hope can be found in Goya’s plates. There are rare moments of hope, just like in Borowski’s short story collection, and at first, they seem hard for us to recognize them in Goya. Again, you, Reader, may be skeptical that any good can be found in those awful drawings. Nonetheless, if Goya were utterly a pessimist, or worse, a cynic, then he would have not left us with the final image: “Will She [Truth] Live Again?” A hopeless hope but hope regardless. All is not entirely lost. And truly, that insight is what I have tried to convey since Spring 2015 and even with my Katyn manuscript. And so, as I continue to reflect upon these past ten years of teaching my war class, I cherish the hard-won lessons and truths I have discovered in my classrooms, and I recognize that more are still to be mined.