More than 60 years after it devastated Europe, World War II does not inspire feelings of ambiguity or uncertainty in most of the children and grandchildren of those who fought and survived it. World War II - in contrast to Vietnam, Iraq, or even World War I - is remembered in the former Allied countries as the "good war," the war we knew why we were fighting, the war that had a clear purpose, the war that achieved what it was supposed to achieve. World War II is fixed in the historical canon. Nothing about it seems vague or uncertain any more at all.

For those who actually lived through the war, the experience was far more confusing and certainly more morally ambiguous. Nowhere is this clearer than in the writings of Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004), the Polish Nobel laureate who wrote some of the finest poetry about the war and its destructive aftermath in central Europe. Milosz, already an established writer by 1939, lived through the war in Warsaw, which experienced some of the most profound physical and psychological destruction. He wrote for the underground press, and witnessed both the Holocaust - the destruction of Warsaw's Jews - and the Warsaw Uprising - the destruction of Warsaw's intellectual and political leadership. He also witnessed the "victory" - a new occupation, by communists - and briefly collaborated with the new communist regime before defecting to the West in 1951.

This is cache, read story here