SOLIDARITY AT WORK IN PARIS
Levitas, Tony
In the Paris office of the Coordinating Committee of Solidarnok, 'Jacek xeroxes pages of the underground press recently smuggled into France. "We are a clearing house for most of the...
...The Committee was set up on December 16, thanks principally to the aid of the Socialistaligned trade union, the CFDT...
...The shipment also brought cassettes...
...THESE ARE NOT the only Poles in Paris, nor are they the first...
...And yet he was quick to point out that "We are not emigres...
...Imprisoned periodically since the student demonstrations in 1968, Blumsztajn was in France the day martial law was declared...
...JACEK, AND 30 OTHER MEMBERS Of Solidarnok who were caught behind the lines when martial law was declared in Poland on December 13, 1981, are the heart of the Paris Coordinating Committee of Solidarnok...
...There are no more copies in the office, but the visitor settles for the latest issue of the primarily political, Paris-based magazine Kontact...
...Like those who came in '68, and without whom Solidarity would have been inconceivable, we will continue to respond to the concrete needs of the opposition...
...The soft-spoken couple has played a quiet role in getting Polish literature banned in Poland back into the country—most importantly the works of Czeslaw Milosz and Witold Gombrowicz—while the gallery has aided Polish artists by providing them with a market abroad...
...As in the 19th century, intellectuals gather here after business hours to discuss art, politics and, in recent years, how to get the Institut's page proofs of banned books to underground presses in Poland...
...Estimates of the number of French of Polish origin now run as high as 1.2 million, and although these communities are fully integrated into French life— there are strong Polish sections of both the CGT and CFDT—they have provided a social bedrock upon which more recent emigres could build...
...Politically, we have more in common with those who arrived after World War II...
...The bookstore is the main European distributor of the Institut Literacki's publications...
...Both the publishing house and the journal are the children of Jerzy Giedroyc, who sensed that the struggle in Poland would be long and that the nation's interests would best be served not by continually denying the legal legitimacy of the new Communist government, but by trying to give Poland what was rapidly being taken away: a critical voice...
...But living in the relative freedom of France we have been useful to Poland...
...Milosz had defected to France in 1951 from his position as the Polish cultural attache in Paris, and for most emigres the beauty of his prose did not compensate for the lateness of his break with the party, while the content of the book seemed to them like an apology for having been blind to the obvious...
...In November 1831, following the overthrow of the "July monarchy" in France, an insurrection erupted—and failed—in Poland, forcing thousands to seek refuge in Paris...
...they wanted to hold on to every word...
...experience has taught us that in general the `Emigracja' can be, in the long run, stronger only on the cultural level—not the political...
...It was as if they couldn't believe they had a voice...
...Yes," she continues, amused and a bit slyly, "the young Poles who come to us today are very well educated...
...a peasant dance from Mazowse, a Polish pope, a Nobel laureate, that is enough for them...
...But there is a big difference," he adds...
...We are the ambassadors of Solidarnoge and hope never to lose contact with the needs of our country...
...The bookshop and the library these emigres established exist to this day, and their Polish Democratic Society was, throughout the mid-19th century, one of the main links in the European network of revolutionary democrats...
...A graying poet, sporting a button of the "World Union of Intellectuals," says angrily to a small crowd, "All the Poles want is freedom...
...Each week the Committee publishes its Bulletin d'Information (Biuletyn Informacyjny, in the Polish edition), a collection of articles from the underground press...
...But the left was not waiting with open arms either...
...money continues to flow in from individuals and other unions...
...Despite the older emigres' support of Solidarnoid, the relationship between them and the younger activists has often been strained...
...It is the last thing we want and our greatest fear...
...The French reception of the dissidents who arrived in 1968, after the Polish Communist party's offensive against "Zionists and counterrevolutionaries," was also ambiguous...
...We are a clearing house for most of the information coming out of Poland," he says...
...Like most Poles he speaks of the "state of war," but as time goes on it seems that a more apt 243 phrase might be the state of siege...
...Many of these exiles had until recently been members of the party and were thus given the cold shoulder by the French right...
...November 1982...
...Somebody arrives searching for the first issue of a Polish literary journal just published in Paris...
...Now the tapes are like chain letters—one person makes copies and passes them out for others to do the same...
...Seweryn Blumsztajn, a founding member of KOR, was one of those who went into the factories...
...A middle-aged woman looking more Parisian than the French says, "Everybody comes here instinctively...
...He is proud that Adam Michnik, a dissident now charged with treason, once told him that he'd "never seen so many books defended...
...THE SCENE IN PARIS, however, is dominated by the more politicized post-World War II generations...
...He now edits the Bulletin...
...When I first got here I would say that I was Polish, then that I was French...
...These words, almost 100 years later, still haunt Poland and its various diasporic communities...
...I don't think we can be compared to the 19thcentury emigres on a political level," he continues, "but culturally we feel quite close and see ourselves nurturing the development of a democratic society whose evolution was interrupted by force...
...After World War II, some 50,000 Poles—many former soldiers—were warmly received by France...
...For us it is not...
...Across the Seine, in the heart of the Left Bank, stands Ksiengarnia Polska, or the Polish Bookstore, founded in 1833...
...On the Ile St...
...Look at this," says the bookstore's Elizabeth Rybczynska, holding up a catalog from 1835 and pointing out that the greatest number of titles appear under the heading "Moral Education...
...The tactical debates of the clandestine leadership, descriptions of life under martial law—currently "suspended"—and essays smuggled out from the internment camps make the Bulletin, now in its 54th number, an invaluable journal of a society in revolt...
...That remains the responsibility of those at home...
...And what if the opposition in its present form should be dismantled...
...This "education" is owed in no small part to the Institut Literacki and its Polish-language journal Kultura, which until Solidarnoga arrived in Paris was the most important of all the diasporic institutions in France...
...The union provided the Poles with an office in their headquarters on Rue Montholon and with 500,000 francs...
...Only the Mitterrand government has called into question the legitimacy of Yalta...
...The Committee, while acting as Solidarnok's publicists in the West and serving as the hub of emigre cultural projects, also provides crucial aid to the underground itself: through its networks funds and printing equipment are sent to Poland...
...Louis, Casimir Romanowicz, a novelist, and his wife Zofia run the Polish bookstore Libella and the adjoining Gallery Lambert...
...Since the pope's election, Milosz's winning of the Nobel Prize, and the birth of Solidarnok, their Polish identity has become more vocal, and their Polish language press more lively...
...The group minding the Solidark table watch, a little bemused...
...Now my heart is balanced between the two countries...
...The problem was, said English Lord Brougham, that "They all want peace, whilst to take up the cause of Poland means war...
...Since the mid-'70s, however, the relationship has taken on its old 19th-century coloring and French and emigre intellectuals collaborated in aiding both Solidarnok and such groups as the Social Self-Defense Committee (KOR...
...Holding up a flyer from the city of Wroclaw, he adds, "This must have come out of the country in a pack of cigarettes...
...People add their thoughts and the tapes become stories...
...These people were able to set up their own Polands abroad, often losing sight of the real state of their nation...
...But their repeated calls for a rectification of the "Betrayal at Yalta" proved to be an embarrassment for most French governments, which, like virtually everyone else, were unwilling to challenge the new boundaries of Europe...
...The heart of our institution is home, while the postwar generation carried theirs around with them...
...Honore...
...No telling how many people read it before it got here...
...The distance between Giedroyc and other emigres became apparent in the early '50s when the Institut published Milosz's The Captive Mind, an analysis of what moved Polish intellectuals to collaborate with the Communist party in the immediate postwar years...
...NONETHELESS, THE YOUNG ACTIVISTS have come to well tended soil, tilled since World War II by older emigres...
...We have always fought for freedom and we always will...
...I'm not overly politicized," says Romanowicz...
...Here begins a historical romance between the stateless Polish nation and the various incarnations of the French Republic...
...These are fairly new...
...They are the crest of the most recent wave in a history of immigration that stretches back to the late 18th-century partitions of Poland by Russia, Prussia, and the Habsburg monarchy, and to the Napoleonic wars...
...We have been able to survive so long because the Poles are a people who read...
...Since the declaration of martial law, large amounts of money have flowed from these working-class communities to Poland...
...Eventually they lost touch, and this we will not do...
...Beneath the intellectual tip of this Polish iceberg is a mass of working-class emigrants who came to France at the end of World War I, settling in the mining districts of Pas-de-Calais and Le Nord...
...I'm an editor and I run a bookstore...
...They started in 1980 at the shipyards when people began recording everything...
...The Institut's office in Paris became a necessary stop for Poles lucky enough to travel and Giedroyc's contacts held fast...
...A group within the Committee monitors the conditions of Poland's political prisoners and passes this information to Amnesty International and the International Red Cross...
...You must understand 242 that this has been going on for a long, long time...
...In the 1790s, thousands of Poles joined the Napoleonic legions hoping that the exportation of the French Revolution would reestablish an independent Polish state...
...Of the 74,000 Poles in the city, a fair number can be seen on any Sunday at the Polish church on Rue St...
...In Poland, the churches were the only place you could get anything that resembled truth...
...Its rambling second story is reminiscent of Shakespeare & Co...
...The Institut, also based in Paris, is the major publisher of censored Polish titles, and the bookstore carries its full list of some 250 books, as well as 330 French works on Poland...
...By the '70s, the settings of the Institut's books were finding their way to underground presses such as NOVA, and there is many a private library in Poland that can boast a complete set of Kultura...
...Children and grandchildren of these immigrants are showing up with increasing frequency at the Polish Library in Paris and at the multitude of Solidarnok support committees...
...Smollar notes that the mass immigrations after the two world wars were "very strong, perhaps too strong...
...The relationship between France and its Polish patriots has had its ups and downs...
...There is also a program that allows the French to "adopt" distressed, or dismembered, Polish families...
...The 241 quarterly, Zeszyty Literackie, is the collective effort of leading East European intellectuals, including Polish Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz, the Czech writer Milan Kundera, and the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky...
...and, like its American counterpart, it too has at times served as hotel and salon, but with a distinctly political accent...
...And when asked if Polish officials ever bought books unavailable in Poland, Romanowicz smiles and says "Well, I don't ask names, but some of them I recognize...
...So we come, believers or not...
...They find the older generation hard to take at times and are less inclined to talk about the past than they are to play the latest tape of a banned comedian...
...And in the late 19th century, as massive amounts of French capital were being invested in Czarist Russia, the Parisian authorities' tolerance of Polish revolutionaries waned...
...Napoleon, for instance, never made clear what his plans for Poland were in his attempt to redraw the map of Europe...
...Jacek adds that for many "the symbols of Poland are more important than the reality...
...After the bloody worker demonstrations in 1970, Giedroyc was one of the first to suggest that the intellectuals "go into the factories," a notion that "struck many of us as farfetched," recalled Karpinski...
...This," says Blumsztajn, "cannot be, thankfully, our problem...
...Initially," said Alexander Smollar, "the left took us in socially, but wouldn't—to use Brezhnev's phrase—listen to our critique of 'really existing socialism.' They thought we were just bitter...
...Emigre historian Wojtek Karpinski adds that "it wasn't until the left had digested Solzhenitzyn and finished its romance with Mao, that they began to hear us...
Vol. 30 • April 1983 • No. 2
