POLAND
Milosz, Czeslaw & Laurie, Richard & Kott, Jan & Michnik, Adam
You who wronged a simple man Bursting into laughter at the crime, And kept a crowd of fools around you Mixing good and evil, to blur the line, Though everyone bowed down before you, Saying...
...When from behind the stage a Jewish lullaby was briefly heard amidst the rising and falling of the Viennese waltz "Francoise," it struck me that several of the spectators in that small East Village theater had been sung to sleep by their mother or grandmother to that Yiddish lullaby...
...And also much patience so that they may learn the difficult art of forgiving...
...In 1973, during a short-lived "thaw," 17 of Milosz's poems were published in an anthology in Poland, "You Who Wronged" among them...
...THE FUNDAMENTAL-althOUgh never exactly defined—quarrel within "Solidarity" pertained to the pace and extent of changes...
...In my youth many of us had an uncle, an aunt, or some distant relative living in America...
...On the streets of Tel Aviv Polish is spoken...
...A police radio car pulled up to the monument and people shouted: "Get out of here, this is a sacred place...
...At least 20 Congress participants were among them...
...Once in Poland, the poem entered the invisible world, the world denied by the official view, and it mixed with the rage, hope, and faith that would in time give birth to the Solidarity movement...
...Its only remnants are found in the diaspora, beyond Poland's borders...
...Contrary to the contentions of official propaganda, this was by no means a response to an attempt to seize political power...
...No statistics have been compiled or, at any rate, published...
...Three years ago I was invited to participate in the World Congress of Scholars and Scientists of Polish Descent...
...A mere 25 years ago, Ukrainian and Polish vegetable and potato farms flourished field-by-field on Long Island, where I live...
...The consideration of our guards is that a broken man is no longer capable of resistance...
...Others said: "No irrelevant strikes anymore...
...it had full command of the technique of frontal attack but not of withdrawal...
...Thus what was involved here was not just power but absolute power, meaning limits to the party nomenclatura...
...In the beginning the advocates of compromise solutions held a majority, but as time went on it became evident that the power apparatus interpreted any inclination toward agreement as weakness...
...They were the other "class" in the production— the trampled "ethos" of that corner This is the text of a speech delivered at the Congress on Polish Culture in Warsaw, December 12, 1981...
...For the past two decades it has sometimes been easier to leave this country than to return, even if only for a short visit...
...It was a colossus on steel legs, but with hands of clay...
...Students are discovering the achievements of Polish emigre thought and science at the Flying University, where the tradition of an independent academia, dating back to the old Russian partition, has been revived...
...Like all the others we, too, have gotten into a new situation as a result of the "Polish war against Jaruzelski," as the Warsaw people call it...
...Adam Michnik, one of the founders of KOR, told Milosz that he knew many of his works by heart...
...In the first sat students about to matriculate from the Galician gymnasium of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy on the eve of the First World War...
...The mere fact that an independent and self-administered institution supported by the people existed was in itself unacceptable...
...Almost without exception, the prerequisite for an emigre writer's resurrection in this country has been his physical death...
...It faced an adversary who was incapable of telling the truth, keeping the economy going, or even living up to his own commitments, but who could only do one thing—smash social solidarity...
...The failure to bring about positive consequences in the form of tangible improvements in the quality of life led to a polarization and cast doubt on the sense of these tactics...
...Every good news helps us to live...
...The December putsch was certainly not aimed at implementing a Communist utopia...
...THE CENSOR AND THE POLICE have divided Polish culture...
...Mannequins representing these boys and girls were seated behind desks...
...ALMOST EVERY SPEAKER at this first free and independent Congress on Polish Culture has referred to the unity of Polish culture...
...Recently this exodus was described as a blood drain from the brain...
...And like the DPs of that war, the new emigrants pass through refugee camps...
...But there is another diaspora, not without significance for the future of Polish culture...
...Czeslaw Milosz's poem "You Who Wronged" was written in 1950 in Washington, D.C., when he was still Polish cultural attache to the United States...
...He was interrupted by a woman worker in her middle thirties who exclaimed: "And until Milosz won the prize, you know I had never even heard his name...
...I delivered it on Saturday, December 12, 1981, at the morning session of the Congress on Polish Culture...
...I am sure, I will not be able to speak again very soon...
...it had fundamental ideas but no program for gradual action...
...The Congress's third and last session was to be held on Sunday, December 13...
...In time the authorities may decide that the monument cannot be allowed to stand because it is a source of too much spiritual energy and courage...
...For detained and persecuted people this is an injection of hope, a true light in the dark tunnel of Polish everyday life in this state of war...
...Before the war, three-and-a-half million human beings belonged to this "class...
...The authorities may also confiscate the thousands of volumes printed by Poland's independent, "samizdat" publishers over the last years, and Milosz's books may again disappear from the shelves in libraries and bookstores...
...For how many years...
...When the Solidarity functionaries demanded democratic elections for parliament and for the people's councils, they seemed to forget that such slogans were a cause for alarm to the rulers and signaled that their end was close...
...Our culture's continuity depends on the survival of the dead diaspora within the memory of the living...
...I would like to share with you the reflections of an emigre about this production...
...Their answer to this was the coup of December, the last response they had...
...And you'd have done better with a winter dawn, A rope, and a branch bowed beneath your weight...
...Here are a few crucial excerpts...
...For years emigrê writers, activists, and even many emigre scholars and scientists have been "nonpersons" in Poland...
...what we need is a general strike that will force the government to make basic concessions...
...Poles and many members of Poland's ethnic groups have left Poland...
...From the largest and most renowned institutions to modest provincial colleges, I have invariably found Poles among the professors and lecturers...
...Reestablishment of contacts between the academics' diaspora and the Country is imperative, not only for Polish science and scholarship, but also for the depleted university system...
...It had originated in Cracow, then toured all over the world...
...It was 11:15 PM, and three-quarters of an hour later martial law was declared...
...The Congress was officially postponed...
...IN 1979, TWO YEARS before Czeslaw Milosz, Isaac Bashevis Singer received the Nobel Prize for Literature...
...The text seems to have been written early this year...
...I have lectured or participated in professional conferences at over a hundred American universities and at about a dozen European ones...
...And if we are to insist upon the unity of Polish culture, we must defend the dialogue between the Country and its emigration—or, to be more precise, between the Country and its emigrations...
...HERE, BEHIND BARS, every gesture of human solidarity is like a breath of fresh air...
...One older worker told me that some of them had always known Milosz's work and the truth about his exile...
...of the world where Poles, Jews, and Ukrainians once lived side by side...
...And it is these very people who swell the ranks of the academics' diaspora...
...We did not think that the power apparatus would try to solve social conflicts with military force by putting the argument of strength in the place of the strength of argument...
...Between 1:00 and 2:00 AM, in Warsaw alone, 2,000 people were arrested...
...This country's most tragic "dead class" are Jews...
...But two things are certain...
...For years I took daily walks through the garden...
...Yet until the most recent wave of emigration, the universality of our shared diaspora has not been acknowledged...
...it was the style of exercising power, meaning the state of justice...
...each of us can be released at any time, if he is prepared to sign a statement of loyalty and play the role of a police confidant...
...And that woman in the shipyard, and hundreds of thousands of others like her, will forget neither the dark they had once been kept in nor the world they discovered in those 17 bright months of something like freedom...
...These people, mostly young workers from large plants, demanded that the Solidarity leaders take radical action, and it became increasingly difficult to prevent such radical action (even though Walesa as well as Kuron tried to do this...
...It requires the transmission of knowledge through the unhindered exchange between scholars and students across borders dividing nations and political systems...
...The preceding months had consolidated in the social mind a picture of the course of the conflicts between state and society in which there was no room for clear victories...
...Poles, like the Jews, are a nation in diaspora...
...Solidarity did not expect a military coup d'etat and was taken by surprise...
...A moment later the same desks were occupied by the returning dead...
...This poem was part of that discovery, and it appears here, in my translation, for the first time in English...
...If I remember correctly, Singer was about ten or twelve years old when he made his journey, and to him the Saxon Garden was as distant and magnificent as Paris...
...It is not the workers who are responsible for this but all those who (like the author himself), owing to their intellectual activities, were called upon to shape the political vision of the trade union...
...The power apparatus was held in increasing contempt and not taken seriously enough...
...The process by which mental rhythms become poems is itself mysterious enough but the role poetry plays in Polish history is too complex an equation ever to be cracked...
...Poles are a nation in diaspora, with its peoples scattered throughout the world's continents...
...Their emigrant condition promises to have a universalizing effect upon Polish culture, which has always been threatened by 299 nationalism and provincialism...
...In the last decade the Polish diaspora has become a diaspora of Polish academics...
...You who wronged a simple man Bursting into laughter at the crime, And kept a crowd of fools around you Mixing good and evil, to blur the line, Though everyone bowed down before you, Saying virtue and wisdom lit your way, Striking gold medals in your honor, Glad to have survived another day, Do not feel safe...
...However, we believed that they would take a different course...
...The ethnic and religious minorities that once populated the enormous plains north and east of the river Bug now also live in a diaspora, spread throughout the world...
...But my conservative estimate would be that, within the last decade, at least 20 percent of those graduating from the universities have moved to the West, some for a "temporary" stay...
...Hardly anybody believed that it would be possible to use Polish soldiers to attack Polish workers...
...It was never convened...
...NOBODY IN POLAND EXPECTED help from the West, so that the strong reaction from the Western public and governments has been a rather pleasant surprise...
...Now, for the first time, emigre writers' books, and not just the works of the dead, are being published by Nowa, a censor-free publishing house...
...THE GREAT SUSTAINING RESOURCE Of Polish culture, of all the cultures on Polish territory, has been Poland's multinational, multireligious, and multilingual composition...
...The poem was printed in Polish in Paris, and then began to make its way to Poland where Milosz had become an "unperson...
...Yet for 37 years, native and emigre culture have been divided...
...He was born in Warsaw's ghetto...
...In the moment of silence that followed, the doubleness of her emotion could be felt—exhilaration at the freedom Solidarity had won, and a raging amazement at how great a darkness she had been kept in all those years...
...295 We have received a copy of an article written by Adam Michnik, one of the intellectual leaders in the struggle of Polish Solidarity...
...But it is precisely the "slightness" of a poem that allows it to slip through the net of the border control, for it can be conveniently carried in that secret compartment called memory...
...After reading his story, I realized we could easily have met in the Saxon Garden...
...The outrage of the world public has an important moral dimension because it stresses that democratic values are indivisible, that these values are defended throughout the world and do not cease to be values even if they are trampled on by soldiers' boots...
...Translated by MICHAEL KOTT and ANN MURPHY 300...
...it was powerful in the factories, within the labor force, but it was helpless at the negotiating table...
...The story of this poem is far from over...
...And so they will remain for decades, if not for centuries...
...But there are also more difficult moments...
...The ban on reentry has been most consistently imposed on the post-1968 "Jewish" emigres, who paid for their departure with renunciation of their citizenship...
...He spoke with the quiet pride of a worker aware that he was the lawful heir of Poland's cultural traditions, once so thoroughly aristocratic...
...This adversary had learned this skill to perfection in 37 years of power...
...I declined, replying it wasn't for me—I am not an American scholar of Polish descent, but a Polish scholar of Jewish descent...
...Solidarity was able to strike, to be sure, but was unable to wait...
...It was obvious that the apparatus would not voluntarily give up even a small amount of power and thus conflicts were inevitable...
...For to do so would mean to reproduce everything that bore Milosz's words across an ocean and 30 years of time to manifest in stone outside the Lenin shipyard...
...The treatment of Milosz's work in post martial-law Poland will be one exact gauge of the intellectual freedom allowed by that new social mutation...
...For this reason, dialogue between the new emigration and the homeland is indispensable...
...All concessions had to be enforced by strikes or threats to strike...
...The words are written down, the deed, the date...
...The ruling apparatchiks sensed the widespread urge to dissolve the party committees in the factories, they were frightened by the specter of elections to the people's councils, they had nightmares about a national referendum on the form of self-government, and they saw that drastic price hikes were due...
...But now the neighborly coexistence of distinct cultures has been all but lost to Polish tradition...
...This echo is encouraging and in the long run can contribute to containing the wave of repression...
...And in the 1970s, the plight of refugees fleeing poverty, racial, religious, or class persecution became as universal throughout the world as it had been in Europe after the Second World War...
...Every individual must answer the question before his own conscience as to how he is to resist evil...
...Science is not furthered merely by the free flow of information...
...It was a classic antiworker counterrevolution, defending the conservative interests of the old regime...
...Yet it is a problem that the ruling apparatchiks found such a program in the statements by Solidarity...
...Alongside the living diaspora there is the diaspora of the dead...
...Kantor's imagination resurrected two different and forgotten "classes...
...The continuous strikes, skillfully provoked by the power apparatus, wore down the society, which had already been exhausted by the difficulties of everyday life...
...The plans for gallows and proscription lists, on the other hand, existed solely in the minds of party notables...
...In 1950 Milosz broke with the Polish Communist government and went into exile in France...
...I don't know how many have left...
...It is unimportant now why this is so...
...On January 15, 1982, the New York Times carried an interview with a young worker from Gdansk who described the crackdown there: I went to the monument and offered a short prayer...
...298 "Only the dead can arise," wrote Stanislaw Jerzy Lec a quarter of a century ago, "it's much more difficult for the living...
...The poet remembers...
...The passionate analysis of the new totalitarian mentality in his book The Captive Mind had been raging in him for some time but the decision to break with Stalinist Poland, when it came, "proceeded not from the functioning of the reasoning mind but from a revolt of the stomach...
...Today Poland is a country without Jews, Germans, Ukrainians, Belorussians, or Lithuanians...
...Polish emigrants have learned one of the 20th century's most universal experiences the hard way...
...POSTSCRIPT: This speech was reconstructed from notes and memory...
...And none of us knows whether that will be the last mass emigration...
...You can slay one, but another is born...
...But it is a very long distance from the literary cafes of Warsaw to the workers' cafeterias in Gdansk, and so when I was in the shipyards in late November 1981 I could not help asking how they had chosen his poem, those lines...
...It is my share of this war...
...We are prisoners without a prosecutor's warrant of 297 arrest...
...Therefore, I wish my friends, above all those who are persecuted and fighting, much strength enabling them to pass through the darkness between despair and hope...
...Solidarity had neither a shadow cabinet nor a program for a coup d'état...
...The origins of the December chaos start with the fundamentally insoluble conflict between a social movement supported by millions and organized in Solidarity, and the totalitarian structures of a Communist state...
...It mixed so intimately with all those emotions and aspirations that when the shipyard workers in Gdansk, in 1980, erected a monument to their coworkers killed by the police in 1970, they chose to set three lines from this poem in stone at the base of the monument...
...At the shipyard the workers had put 40-ton trucks behind the gate to block it...
...It was my first invitation to the homeland since my departure 13 years ago...
...Soldiers were posted at the entrance to the Dramatic Theater, where the session was to take place...
...The cause of this was naivete and wishful thinking, as well as a long tradition in Poland's history...
...Only in rare periods of thaw has the quarantine been penetrated by books published by emigre presses...
...Considering this, any attempt to terrorize the Polish society with the help of the Polish army seemed hard to imagine...
...The dialogue between the Country and the Polish diaspora will decide the future of our culture in the world...
...In one of his stories he describes a long and lonely expedition, first on foot and then by carriage, to the Saxon Garden, which at the time was in the very center of Warsaw...
...hardly anybody believed in the option of a military putsch...
...It is hard to tell who outnumbered whom, although the latter definitely could be heard more distinctly...
...It would be worthwhile at this Congress to reflect upon the common fate of Poles, and of all refugees from Poland, both those who left freely and those who were driven out...
...After a brief incarnation in stone his poem may be driven back into mind and memory...
...many of them are still in internment camps...
...Today it is children, and especially the children of the intelligentsia, who are living abroad...
...Some said: "No more strikes, this won't gain us anything...
...After World War II, all of Central and half of Western Europe were teeming with Displaced Persons—refugees, fugitives, liberated prisoners, and ex-soldiers—who were either returning to their countries or fleeing from them...
...When I speak of emigrations in the plural, I am referring not only to the successive war and postwar emigrations of refugees, who established pockets of Polonia in France and across the oceans in the U.S., Canada, and Australia, but also to the most recent post-March and post-Gierek emigrations of tens of thousands of young Polish men and women...
...This is a bit of optimism...
...Let us reiterate, therefore, that there are no definite victories in this struggle, but also no definite defeats...
...It is difficult today to come to a uniform formula of behavior...
...Again, there are no reliable statistics, but a guarded assessment would number the Polish emigrants teaching at American and Canadian universities at 2,000, alongside several hundred first- or second-generation Polish Americans...
...The streets bordering its northern edge were inhabited primarily by Jews...
...Isaac Bashevis Singer is my senior by about ten years...
...it was the content of the compromise concluded between the ruling and the ruled, meaning pluralism in social life and the organization of self-management in the enterprises and on a territorial level...
...Let me repeat: Solidarity never demanded that the Communists be expelled from the government and that the state be replaced by 296 the trade union apparatus...
...One step in that decision, one moment of that revulsion, "You Who 294 Wronged," was published in Paris in 1953 in a book of Milosz's poetry entitled The Light of Day...
...Even so, the neighborhood was relatively wealthy...
...But apart from the damage that despotism and Communist arrogance have inflicted upon the living membrane, real differences and divisions remain...
...Everyone can only decide for himself how he will defend human dignity and how he will behave in this strange war that—and this must always be remembered— is a new embodiment of the struggle lasting for centuries between truth and lie, freedom and force, dignity and humiliation...
...The poem was a product of his despair at the worsening situation at home, the increasing pressure of Stalinism, and the use of language to construct a new mental universe with good and evil so blurred that people would lose their moral orientation to life...
...The real Jewish ghetto, with its poverty, began about 15 blocks further to the north...
...A few words about the internees...
...Since my early childhood and through my student days at a Warsaw gymnasium, I lived with my grandparents on Senatorska Street, in a district that flanked the other, "Polish" side of the Saxon Garden...
...Last year I saw Tadeusz Kantor's famous production of the Dead Class in New York at La Mama...
...The Polish diaspora is becoming younger, with increasingly higher professional qualifications...
...In Brooklyn, Chicago, and Buffalo, it is still not uncommon to find neighboring Polish and Ukrainian parishes on the periphery of the Jewish quarter...
...Milosz's poems were always known to the intellectual elite...
...Three million of them were murdered, and only a few thousand, most of whom are old, remain in Poland today...
...Some of the points along that way are, however, visible...
...I express my cordial thanks for this on behalf of my colleagues and myself...
...The belief in the latter has made me write down these reflections...
...EDS...
...The implementation of the reform program, which encompassed all these spheres of life, called into question the fundamental principle of the Communist domination of state and society...
...That evening a television broadcast of the speech was interrupted mid-sentence, "I am not an American scholar of Polish descent, but...
...THE COMMUNIST SYSTEM in Poland was a colossus with feet of clay but hands of steel...
...For example, when a German Social Democrat says with reference to statements made by the vice-premier of the People's Republic of Poland that the situation of the internees is satisfactory, I remember with bitterness the fate of German Social Democrats 45 years ago and the assertions of various foreign statesmen that everything was okay in Germany and that the enemies of law and order were being treated humanely...
...But first, respect for the emigrant must be restored, and sundry manipulations serving immediate political ends must stop...
Vol. 29 • July 1982 • No. 3
