VOICES FROM POLAND: FROM A WARSAW DIARY
Brandys, Kasimierz
Kazimierz Brandys is a distinguished, veteran Polish writer who, for several years before the rise of Solidarity, had been prohibited from publishing in his country by the Polish government. From...
...who does not recall the forest of hands rising in exemplary, unanimous elections...
...today I would be able to answer that question—for me Poland is a necessity and that is why I return...
...I think it's the first time since the war that I have not eaten my fill...
...Over the years I had reconciled myself to the thought that the concept of a struggle for justice or freedom was beyond the mass of society today and only put people on the defensive...
...When I expressed my concern that he was accompanying me out of politeness, he explained that he wanted to see the street where I lived...
...Thus far there is considerable satisfaction about the political and organizational accomplishments, and satisfaction about the strengthened condition of the nation as a whole, a nation that did not submit...
...The People's State Council has received motions that the members of the former ruling group be stripped of the state honors they had been awarded...
...The 15th day back...
...When the evening was over, one of its organizers, a tall, good-looking young man, led me out through the dark to the Obozna Street sidegate, which was guarded by students wearing red and white armbands...
...Later they invited me to the cafeteria for tea...
...In the course of the last 200 years, other peoples have extricated themselves from the oppression of empires—the Americans, the Greeks, the Italians, the Belgians—and it has never been written anywhere that Poland is condemned to always bear the burden of futility and defeat...
...Hard years were coming, all the possibilities, the good and the bad, were open, as well as those that no one could imagine or foresee, things unpredictable from our narrow vantage...
...July 1981 Acertain revelation of which I had no inkling has forced me to do some thinking...
...People had been given nothing for their spirit...
...The author commends the cause of renewal but immediately warns of the danger involved: a democracy that is extended too far threatens to weaken the state...
...Duplicity is sprouting up everywhere again...
...Three years ago, people smiled as they explained to me that of the 100 signatures on the protest concerning the Constitution, 90 would have dropped off had the government taken more repressive measures...
...You could feel the fear in the air—the fear of collective death...
...That is a matter of psychology...
...Six weeks later we returned to Warsaw in an empty train, and M. asked me whether I was sure we were headed in the right direction...
...51 November 1981 YESTERDAY I spoke to the students who have been on strike for two weeks in one of the buildings of Warsaw University...
...And regardless of what seems bad or laughable or brazen to us...
...That was all the answer I could muster...
...That's only one side of things, of course...
...Sometimes a nation wins such battles over two or three generations (in India, which showed the world the power of passive resistance, it was the generation of Gandhi and Nehru that won the decisive victory...
...I remember a fragment of Milosz's conversations with Wat in My Century about the auto-da-fé of the Polish uprisings, when the heaviest burden of responsibility fell, in the end, on the children...
...It could not have been otherwise...
...No, remember...
...For the first time in my life I feel a fear that is more than personal, fear on a national scale...
...After this bulletin, there was a deadly silence in the television room...
...Little sandwiches were served...
...On the contrary," I answer...
...I am not well informed about them now and I will not attempt to become better informed...
...The party commission, convened to examine the corrupt practices of the now-discredited party and government leaders, is now at work...
...To secure food from the earth with one's own hands as in the days of old, perhaps that is more dependable than being in the forefront of steel production...
...The realization that 10 million people have succeeded in organizing themselves, have their own publications, are operating at the workplace and in the schools, that corruption and lies can be brought to light and people cannot be trampled upon—that realization improves one's frame of mind...
...Scythes...
...In time, however, collective psychology is transformed into a real value and enters the equation of history on a par with reforms and rights wrested by force...
...This I read in a country where the idea of general democratic elections is sheer fantasy and where any schoolchild knows what in fact threatens to weaken this state...
...And it is worth the effort regardless of any further developments...
...but, at the same time, things were different...
...September 1981 RESPONSIBILITY...
...Everything has been painted with protective colors, concealed in civic-sounding phrases, but in every sentence you can feel the arms and legs trembling...
...Just like Russia—this smacks of Slavophile peasantomania...
...In a word, says the columnist and teacher of the nation, disinterested beauty, art, which should outlast the theater of life and not stand in a servile relation to it, is on the verge of being reduced once again to socialist realism...
...And indeed they were...
...There are others that keep you going...
...Oh, those columnists who write for the weeklies . . . One of them, a gray-haired young man who two years ago performed monologues on television with a parrot on his shoulder, is today writing about the "need for disinterested beauty" and says that we are being oppressed by stupidity: "Both anti-Semitic and philoSemitic stupidity, stupidity about renewal and hard-line stupidity, stupidity about egalitarianism and about voluntarism...
...Now, however, for the first time, I see a new kind of phenomenon—society fearing the end of its own life as a society...
...I can see it before me, vast and vague: I foresee long years of labor, a labor of character and mind, struggle, effort, fatigue...
...Where there is no hope for society, the church becomes an earthly force, a social body...
...He had been present two days earlier, when I had met with the students on strike at the Drama School...
...The students seemed to take pity on me, and someone asked what I considered to be the role of the contemporary writer...
...The same faces on television, the names in the newspapers unchanged...
...I also maintained that what has been achieved since August, what has already been achieved, is and will remain inscribed in European history as a memorable struggle fought for a society's soul and its rights, and whatever happens, no one can take that spiritual possession away from us...
...In one summer month an irresistible desire for freedom burst forth from the mass of humanity here, and suddenly it turned out that every other person was ready to fight for justice...
...A friend whom we used to meet at the Golden Hive offered me an American cigarette the other day...
...Thirty-five years ago, a pogrom, instigated by the police, erupted in Kielce...
...We did not know, and we still do not know, to what degree human nature can hide from itself, how much it can deny itself...
...When bicycles were delivered to a sportinggoods store, the line surged forward and broke the door down...
...You should find yourself some village for the winter," I was advised by the far-sighted Tadeusz Konwicki, "some village where there are still huts with woodburning stoves...
...Now at least a little light is being shed on the matter...
...Some factory had produced 60,000 scythes for farmers instead of the machinery they lacked...
...The corpses in Kielce were Jewish...
...You wrote about those places in your Warsaw Diary...
...In the evening, on the terrace in Obory, a long conversation, "This is an abnormal country," someone says...
...In printings numbering tens of thousands, on paper, which is in short supply, they castigate the Jews, who are in even shorter supply...
...One of the people involved in the discussion had used the epithet "intellectual weakness...
...For me the "job" of literature is the work a writer does on himself, the working out of the truth of oneself as a human being, a person, a choice of self among the many that one can become...
...On Sunday, at the Bruners' house, I had to exercise moderation at the sight of the homemade tea biscuits and jams...
...We ourselves are transformed in it...
...The void began to fill...
...But a trace will remain in the depths of collective memory, a faint reflection of the ideal...
...There the discussion had gone beyond purely literary matters...
...And it is of no great importance whether I might be able to elucidate psychologically what motivated me then or even whether I would want to...
...He further states that everything depends on the sort of art we have, the way our artists behave, and, says the writer, they behave abominably: "The majority of them have made it a point of honor to run panting after every little incident, to multiply its echoes, to copy everything they read in the papers or hear at meetings or in lines for cigarettes...
...And perhaps not all of it was...
...The religious ceremonies, the Catholicism of the movement, the 50 proclivity for church services and processions— I cannot feel very close to all that, but it's understandable...
...the waiting list was torn out of someone's hands, and a woman crumpled it up and swallowed it...
...I do, however, know that over a period of a few months the country has been flooded with publications and clubs whose slogans are straight out of the Stiirmer...
...For some time now, nightmares have been troubling society's unconscious...
...You have to be on your toes now to check certain automatic gestures and habits...
...It casts back onto the past and one lives with that shadow...
...I think that this was my final 52 remark...
...We must bet on good and against evil, but we must play the game wisely and patiently...
...Only the simplistic interpretations and the incorrect beliefs can be repudiated, but the error allows for no deletion...
...The Polish intellectuals— those two words signify moral and mental energy, the source of Poland's vital powers during the last 200 years of its history...
...August 1981 EVERY GROWNUP must come to terms with the prospect that he will cease to be...
...Then a bright, articulate young man, blond and wearing glasses, spoke up from the last row: "I understand...
...The strike has spread to schools throughout the country, the students protesting the fact that the Engineering Institute in Radom is being forced to accept as its chancellor someone chosen by the party...
...The rest is just oppressive stupidity from which one should keep one's distance—anti-Semitic or philo-Semitic stupidity, that's not the point...
...Around a hundred people had gathered in the university's Polish studies auditorium...
...The plans for our destruction may run aground on that other plan...
...I'm not, however, and what I see and hear makes me sick...
...I had not elaborated on my answer: it had been too brief...
...What would Poland be today had it not been for the work of the Enlightenment, the Romantic intellectual imagination, and the social labors performed by the intellectuals during the period of positivism—Poland without the intellectuals in the Legions and in the Socialist independence movement, the peasant, educational, and cooperative movements...
...None of this is serious...
...Many questions concerning A Question of Reality, A Warsaw Diary, and some of my other books...
...I ought to be curious about further develop49 ments...
...And thus the state grows stronger...
...It lasted three hours...
...This is the hard work of creating a new configuration of Polish experience...
...For three hours, 60 or so students on benches arranged in amphitheater fashion and me down below at a table...
...At the time I shrugged my shoulders...
...But today, after my latest return home, I find my name in an anonymously published pamphlet that lists me as one of the members of a secret Zionist group whose aim is the destruction of the Polish nation...
...I should not have accepted that cigarette...
...It is a struggle for oneself...
...It's all too easy to guess who put this crap together and who picked up the tab for it...
...Come to your senses...
...I foresee society becoming more acutely aware that the evil of those years is the source and the beginning of the evils that now exist...
...It's a perfectly normal one between two abnormal ones...
...For the love of God, who put that idea in their heads, the idea that the word "intellectual" has a pejorative meaning and can be used slightingly...
...We wish to thank Random House, Inc., the publisher of A Warsaw Diary, 1978-1981, copyright © 1983 by Kazimierz Brandys, for permission to excerpt the following portions...
...I don't know if there are any philo-Semites in Poland today, and if there are, what they are doing...
...The room grew still...
...I took it, thanked him, and then caught a furtive gleam of exasperation in his eyes...
...Will the State Council request that it be sent back...
...Poland without the intellectuals in KOR and in the "Flying University...
...Children with rifles in their hands...
...Everyone is afraid, afraid now to think about the void that threatens them...
...Scythes, sickles, nails...
...I am still unable to distinguish between the groupings and factions within the movement...
...When, a moment later, there was news about this year's auspicious harvest, everyone breathed a sigh of hope...
...I am not advocating self-destruction...
...But that night I kept thinking about the blond young man and how I could have answered him better...
...That's the real danger...
...An emigration center had been established in Paris, and Polish could be heard among those waiting there...
...Perhaps any society, if skillfully trained with a stick, or a stick and a carrot, will renounce every truth...
...No," I said, "you've misunderstood me...
...I will be responsible for the worst that can happen, since it will have been caused by a political system that I at one time accepted...
...Again the journalists in Paris had something to write about: un pogrom polonais...
...I don't know...
...Yesterday I read the lead article in a paper that has the reputation of speaking for the liberal center, an article written by an advocate of reform...
...Yesterday the government announced that it was withdrawing a few dozen trains from service and that production has declined as much as 50 percent in certain branches of industry...
...I have borne that knowledge within me for 20-odd years...
...He said that perhaps the doubts and fears people felt stemmed from that weakness...
...That was, supposedly, the way things were...
...As in "intellectual wishy-washiness," "intellectual liabilities...
...I think that of all the things that have happened and come to pass, this is the most important...
...such ambiguity and impurity hang in the air, such hypocrisy, that it makes you want to flee and hide in some forgotten corner of the world...
...My mind had suddenly gone blank...
...From 1978 onward, he kept a diary of events in Warsaw, which is being published this winter in an English translation by RICHARD LOURIE...
...Fine...
...EDS...
...It was not an easy moment...
...it offered people what they had been deprived of...
...Concocted reviews of the foreign press, moronic reportage on the domestic scene, and the more astute columnists already sniffing out the new currents...
...That means there are values for which one must pay the highest price, regardless of the consequences, including the sacrifice of one's own life...
...What is important is that one cannot cast off the responsibility for those years and that one's later actions do not set one free from it...
...We're not breaking down doors yet...
...Today I refused to watch the evening news, and I haven't looked at a newspaper since yesterday...
...Not all that long ago they had been silent...
...A struggle of this sort depends on enormous, sustained efforts of mind and will...
...I fell silent...
...Now, however, it becomes clear that in one respect it was serious, more serious than we had thought...
...Not only a struggle for freedom...
...In September of that year I traveled to France on a train packed with Jewish families fleeing Poland...
...I only wonder if it's going to be like this for the rest of my life...
...He walked with me as far as the Old City, asking various questions, speaking intelligently and with a certain judicious tact...
...Furthermore, I said that the greatest error would be to hypnotize oneself by analogies with the age of the partitions and the age of the uprisings...
...We can lose today, but we cannot lose forever...
...No doubt, plans to destroy us already exist, but it is impossible to foresee the mysterious plan of other, still-undisclosed elements and the dispensations concealed in the nature of the world, in the future...
...In some of the questions they asked, I detected a touch of anxiety: questions about the reality of winning, the chances in the short run, the long run...
...two charming young ladies sat down with me and we discussed the theater...
...The church, in its wisdom, was able to draw the right conclusions...
...What will happen to the Virtuti Militari awarded to the leader of the U.S.S.R...
...q 53...
...At this moment, a person with the gift of making logical associations has to think, Will the medals be stripped only from those who were pinning them on themselves or also from those other people who received them from their hands...
...To nod my head and say, "Yes, including the sacrifice of one's own life, regardless of the consequences," would have been disgraceful...
...I said that I would prefer to cross out the word "role" and replace it with another, "job...
...It would have been a hundred times better to have admitted to my own uncertainty and to have answered that I did not know or that I did not know any more than they did...
...Which does not mean that I have lost hope...
...Two saleswomen were beaten...
...That same hand prepared the murders of several dozen Jews in 1946, and five years later the execution of a group of Polish army officers, falsely accused of conspiracy against the party...
...And then that shadow will grow longer...
...For three hours I tried to assure them that there was a real chance...
...Certainly they had expected more from me...
Vol. 31 • January 1984 • No. 1
