Today’s word of the day, thanks to Merriam-Webster, is brusque, which can also be spelled brusk, though the first version is preferred. It’s an adjective, and M-W says, “A person may be described as brusque when they are talking or behaving in a very direct, brief, and unfriendly way. Brusque can also describe speech that is noticeably short and abrupt” (https://www.merriam-webster.com/word-of-the-day/brusque-2024-04-13). Yourdictionary.com defines it as “Rough and abrupt in manner or speech; curt” (https://www.yourdictionary.com/brusque).

M-W also says of brusque, “If you’ve ever felt swept aside by someone with a brusque manner, that makes a certain amount of etymological sense. Brusque, you see, comes ultimately from bruscus, the Medieval Latin name for butcher’s broom, a shrub whose bristly, leaf-like twigs have long been used for making brooms. Bruscus was modified to the adjective brusco in Italian, where it meant ‘sour’ or ‘tart.’ French, in turn, changed brusco to brusque, and the word in that form entered English in the 1600s. English speakers initially applied brusque to tartness in wine, but the word soon came to describe a harsh and stiff manner, which is just what you might expect of a word bristling with associations to stiff, scratchy brooms” (https://www.merriam-webster.com/word-of-the-day/brusque-2024-04-13).

It appears in the language in the “1650s, from French brusque ‘lively, fierce,’ introduced 16c. from Italian adjective brusco ‘sharp, tart, rough,’ which is perhaps from Vulgar Latin *bruscum ‘butcher’s broom plant,’ from Late Latin brucus ‘heather,’ from Gaulish *bruko– (compare Breton brug ‘heath,’ Old Irish froech)” (https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=brusque). Just as a reminder, the asterisk before a word indicates that it is a reconstructed word, that we don’t actually have a written example of it. All Proto-IndoEuropean (PIE) words are reconstructed. Gaulish is a now-extinct Celtic language, and there are some written examples of it, but the word *bruko– is not in any of those fragments.

According to the On This Day website (https://www.onthisday.com/events/april/13), on this date in 1943, the German occupying army discovered “eight large graves containing the remains of thousands of the Polish Army officers and intellectual leaders who had been interned at the prisoner-of-war camp at Kozielsk” (https://www.archives.gov/research/foreign-policy/katyn-massacre).

In August of 1939, Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler signed what is called the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, an agreement between the two dictatorships to divide Poland between them. The Soviet Union got the easter half of Poland, and the Nazis got the western half. Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, while the Soviet Union delayed its invasion until after the Supreme Soviet had agreed to the treaty. In March of 1940, a supplement to the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact agreed on the new boarder between Germany and the Soviet Union.

The border between Poland and the Soviet Union was determined by a treaty signed in 1921, after the Polish-Soviet War, which took place from early 1919 to early 1921, following the end of World War I. This war helped to establish the modern nation of Poland, which, along with Lithuania, had been partitioned between the Russian Empire and the Hapsburg (Austro-Hungarian) Empire in the late 18^th century. In the decades of the 20s and 30s, the Polish government was repressive of its Ukrainian, Belarussian, and Jewish minorities.

The Soviets took over land that they felt belonged to them, but they were also antagonistic toward the Poles. In fact, the territories taken by the Soviet Union in large part remained part of Ukraine and Belarus.

But when the Nazis decided to disregard the Molotov-Ribbentrop Non-Aggression Pact, the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union in June of 1941. It was after this invasion had progressed that the Nazis discovered the mass graves near concentration camps run by the Soviets in Poland: “In April 1943, in the Katyn Forest near Smolensk in the Soviet Union, occupying German troops discovered eight large graves containing the remains of thousands of the Polish Army officers and intellectual leaders who had been interned at the prisoner-of-war camp at Kozielsk. Bodies of the prisoners who had been housed at Ostashkov and Starobielsk were discovered near Piatykhatky and Mednoye, respectively. Collectively, these murders are known as the Katyn Forest Massacre” (https://www.archives.gov/research/foreign-policy/katyn-massacre).

The Germans brought in international experts to excavate the sites, and they determined that the burials happened in 1940, when the Soviets were in control of those sections of Poland. In 1943, after the Soviet Union had retaken Smolensk, they did their own excavation and investigation and determined that the killings had taken place in 1941. Both sides used the Katyn Forest massacre as propaganda.

In 1951, the US Congress established a commission to look into the Katyn Forest massacre, and they determined that the Soviet Union was responsible (ibid.). But during the war, despite knowing that the Soviets were probably responsible for the Katyn Forest massacre, the US kept quiet about it: “In a June 1943 telegram to Churchill, Roosevelt expressed approval that the British approach to Stalin was grounded ‘upon the obvious necessity of creating the most favorable conditions for bringing the full weight of the armed forces of all the United Nations to bear upon the common enemy….The winning of the war is the paramount objective for all of us. For this unity is necessary’” (ibid.).

I guess during a war is not the time to be brusque with one of your allies. And I guess the fault lies with both the Soviets and the Nazis for the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, agreeing to divide up another country. Maybe it’s just a pipe-dream, but I look forward to a time in human history where people are willing to let other people live their lives, where some people do not act upon the urge to control other people’s lives.

The image today is of “Stalin and Ribbentrop shaking hands after the signing of the pact in the Kremlin” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pact). I thought about using a photograph showing the bodies exhumed by the Germans near the Katyn Forest, but I decided that it was too horrible. And I thought it might be instructive to see what kind of men can casually destroy the lives of millions.