A Week in Warsaw
Engelstein, Stanley & Komisar, Lucy
Aside from the request at Passport Control that I remove my cap to confirm that I was the bald man in the picture, entering Warsaw was uneventful. I was waved through after having had to buy...
...To be sure, Lipski and Geremek are relatively safe because of their international stature, but lesser known activists were equally uninhibited in talking with us...
...From him and others, a picture of this underground network emerged...
...Nobody signed it, but it had the appearance of a formal agreement...
...only 13 percent said yes...
...This laxity was a relief in that I was carrying books and letters that might have raised questions, but also a disappointment in that my concealments of encoded names, addresses, and telephone numbers were not put to the test...
...It would have been hard to be more conspicuous...
...I had come from Paris for the Helsinki Watch Committee to observe a Solidarity-organized week of protest against political imprisonment, November 3-10, 1985...
...The operative scheme of Gierek's team was that in relations with society you can't use violence...
...It was surprising how freely activists talked in apartments that were presumed to be bugged or in hotel lobbies...
...Warsaw KOS is distinctive for its consistent secular criticism of the Church and of American intervention in Central and South America...
...That was the main reason Solidarity could start, not the only reason, but a basic one...
...Twenty-five percent of the respondents answered as supporters of the government...
...Gomulka did a similar thing in 1956...
...A Solidarity leader told me they had considered but rejected setting up picket lines and demonstrations...
...He hadn't known exactly what to expect and what he saw had made him sick...
...This team never tried to reach any agreement with the people...
...Now as to the hope of a new eruption: there is no hope, because the state of affairs in the government is such that they will answer with violence...
...One law provided for accelerated procedures for many crimes, except for the most serious ones...
...Tens of thousands of people are involved in getting materials, stencils, paper, ink...
...It is a catastrophe...
...When asked whether anti-Semitism was endemic in Polish culture, Onyszkiewicz replied that he thought it was but that it was decreasing rapidly...
...When I asked Geremek what political perspective Solidarity could have in Poland today, he replied that it must keep pressing for a dialogue with the regime to begin the democratization of public life...
...He is clamping down on the centers of free thought in the university so as to assure both East and West that there will be no turmoil in Poland to disturb the peace of Europe...
...Of course, anything can happen in the future...
...there was no place for any compromise...
...At the proper time during the Mass, as liturgical music filled the church, a priest and an assistant threaded their way through the aisles dispensing the Communion wafer...
...They don't have a strategy, because the governing power is not sensitive to pressure...
...What follows is an abbreviated transcript of comments made by Kurbn in a conversation with journalist Lucy Komisar at his apartment in Warsaw on August 24, 1985...
...All this time, up front and visible to all, two young people dressed in a Polish national costume held aloft a Solidarity banner with its blazing red logo...
...This lack of any hope leads people to desperation...
...The opposition can't have a strategy...
...PROTEST WEEK...
...The meter for the fifteen-minute drive from the airport to the Europejska Hotel ran to about 300 zlotys...
...The man worked for the hotel and was asking whether he could clear the ash tray...
...I asked Onyszkiewicz why 217 Solidarity, though always pressing for a dialogue with the regime, refused to cooperate with the new trade unions which were theoretically independent, at least on economic matters...
...I am not saying that they are right or wrong, only that that is how they operate...
...Though this "lawfulness" codifies injustice, it is still useful to the opposition...
...It is not possible to go back to December 12 to avoid catastrophe in the future...
...That was not efficient, and opposition began to grow...
...This is very important, but it can't do anything in a political sense...
...As he said with a smile, the point is to free political prisoners, not generate new ones...
...When I suggested that this was more an antipolitics than a politics, he answered that he had a profound distrust of parties, organizations, and centralized leadership...
...The government's motive in showing only the "anti-Polish" segments of the film, it was agreed, was to provide the people with another example of the way life in Poland is distorted by the West...
...Some university sources have spoken of the possible removal of several hundred staff members...
...When I asked a law professor I was to meet later how she managed to live on 20,000 zlotys a month (about thirty dollars at the unofficial rate) she replied that she had a brother in Chicago...
...If you are caught with one piece of underground literature, you are a reader and safe (unless the government wants you specifically...
...They may be the same people, but their consciousness is different...
...There's a bigger and bigger gap between the activists of Solidarity and the general society...
...About an hour later a short, stocky man walked over to our table...
...When KOS published an article attacking the U.S...
...The soil is devastated...
...There are two possibilities...
...Gierek could play games with manipulation, because people on the other side were not organized...
...W. Departure AFTER CHECKING IN, passengers line up to pass inspection and make a currency declaration...
...If you look at the election statistics, more than 25 percent abstain, so some part of this 50 percent doesn't go to vote either...
...Then the young people holding the Solidarity banner followed the same path through the crowd as the music continued to fill the church...
...When he was asked how he would describe the underground politically, he said it could be divided into two categories: those who are for radical goals and moderate means and those who are for radical means and moderate goals...
...Factory newsletters appear regularly...
...Talk is open, but public criticism of the regime is a crime...
...Five of us, three Americans, Lipski, and an interpreter, sat huddled around a coffee table...
...On the airplane smoking and nonsmoking sections are divided by a center aisle: left for smoking, right for nonsmoking...
...As of November 10, there had been little enforcement of this law, but the two law professors we spoke to were concerned that enforcement would begin in the near future, primarily against middlerank and little-known faculty...
...He replied that even assuming an element of genuine independence in these new unions, Solidarity would lose its credibility within its own trade union base if it cooperated...
...Previously, discipline of a faculty member could be appealed to faculty committees...
...I did not ask whether her theory explained why three million Poles were annihilated by the Nazis...
...None of these agreements were signed or formal, but in society's consciousness they seemed like agreements...
...There are two important differences: first, the group in power is different from any other that has held power in Poland...
...They were members of an evangelical church who had been distributing special milk to diabetic children...
...The idea of ten-year cycles is not correct...
...They know that manipulating society is impossible...
...Under the new law a rector can fire a faculty member without hearing or appeal...
...The cab driver, a friendly young man, lit up a cigarette and offered me one...
...You didn't have to know Polish to feel the power of the priest's thunder...
...Such a vast outpouring requires an extensive printing and distribution system...
...When I asked a young woman activist about political possibilities in Poland, she answered that her work was not political but moral...
...They are a small minority with no ideas about how to change life in Poland...
...Repressive laws continuing martial law by legislative means after its nominal ending on July 22, 1983, still were being selectively enforced...
...The conversation stopped...
...He spoke to Lipski...
...This was their second trip to Poland...
...they know too much...
...the underground press is distributed, and materials necessary to print and distribute the literature are "organized...
...Resistance had to fight arbitrary, "lawless" oppression, which meant direct political confrontations...
...Taking it with a thank you, he earned in fifteen minutes 25 percent more than a woman worker in a Lodz textile plant and two-thirds of what a law professor in Warsaw University earns in a day...
...Only a very democratic society can do that...
...Gierek came up with a completely new idea—to talk with the workers who were rioting...
...To symbolize its legitimacy, the underground prints postage stamps and mints coins which are sold to raise money...
...Onyszkiewicz pointed out that it was better now than in the Stalinist period in Poland precisely because of a general adherence to legal norms...
...Michnik has called them the "fundamentalists" whose "radical thinking is peculiarly vulnerable to paper designs and to emotions that block sight of reality...
...Another piece of ominous legislation of May 1985 was a law empowering the Minister of Higher Education to select rectors, vice-rectors, and deans, thereby ending a long tradition of university selfgovernment...
...He rejects organization on principle and believes that people should try to carry on their lives in the freedom of small autonomous groups...
...More recent legislation of May 1985 was a source of real concern to the opposition...
...Till his last days Gierek thought he could go to the workers and talk to them, because he had lived up to the agreement...
...This nonexplosive situation can last, but for how long, nobody can say...
...In front of me was a Polish woman who had about 5,000 zlotys which she had not declared...
...That was a mistake, because they cannot possibly destroy Solidarity...
...To the question, "Is there any hope Poland will recover from the crisis...
...And generally the whole government establishment is different...
...25 percent answered as opponents...
...There was also to be an exhibition of graphic arts and dramatic performances...
...When the situation was worsening in Poland, the government resorted to repression...
...judges are poorly paid, many are women, and they are not independent of the government...
...This is the experience of this Jaruzelski team and the whole establishment...
...While this law was designed primarily to expedite proceedings against common criminals, 70 percent of the political prisoners, according to Solidarity people, have been processed by accelerated procedures...
...President Jaruzelski seems intent on telling the party at home and the West in general that he is in full control...
...When I asked Warshawsky about the program of his influential Warsaw KOS, he replied that it was simply to tell the truth about life in Poland and abroad...
...Testing dollar power, I offered the driver one dollar, which cut my fare in half at the official rate and more than doubled it at the unofficial rate...
...Nothing...
...if you have two copies, you are a distributor, guilty of the crime of "disrupting public order...
...This was to be a protest, not a confrontation...
...Still another oppositionist, a literary critic who had lost his job and was now full time in the underground, said that the task was not to overthrow this government— which was impossible—but to learn to live within it...
...Social resistance, Solidarity, can find its way through any hole in legislation...
...To risk that support for an elusive, probably illusory, legal independent trade union would be to fall into a government trap...
...While conversations could take place more or less prudently above ground, it was only in the underground— that extraordinary parallel society in Poland—that the publication and distribution of opposition ideas could take place...
...The two Lawyers' Committee lawyers and I attended the Mass at St...
...In Silesia you have towns where water is brought by trucks...
...In addition to underground presses, government presses are often used secretively with the help of sympathetic workers...
...They are probably tired of fighting and have no hope, because there is a broad feeling that the system will endure and there's no way of changing it...
...If anything happens, they will lead the situation...
...The "No Smoking" sign on the Polish airline on which I had flown in from Paris was my first experience of the way the law of contradiction is disregarded in Poland...
...He exchanged his general's uniform and the post of prime minister for a blue suit and the presidency to normalize the appearance of the regime...
...Our Polish friends, in snippets of simultaneous translation, said he was protesting against imprisonment for political beliefs and stressed that it was belief in God that can truly withstand political oppression...
...On November 30 the New York Times reported that "The Polish authorities have begun a nationwide purge of political opponents in universities and colleges by removing more than 20 senior scholars from influential administrative posts, opposition sources said today...
...These laws give almost unlimited authority to police and security forces to protect "state security and public order...
...As I took my seat on the Swissair plane, I reflected on the paradoxes of Polish history...
...The Jaruzelski team can provide some more liberal regulations for self-government in enterprises...
...The government, as Geremek put it, was pragmatic, not ideological...
...H. The State of Repression THE GENERAL RESPONSE by such important oppositional figures as Jan Josef Lipski, Janusz Onyszkiewicz, Bronislaw Geremek, Zbigniew Romaszewski, and others to questions about government repression was that things were no better but not much worse than the previous year...
...A Temporary Coordinating Committee (TKK) coordinates activities...
...The government knows that...
...And he is announcing that, with a technocrat as prime minister, Poland's economic problems are ready for the fix for which only some few billion dollars of credits are required...
...But since legal forms are up216 held, it is possible to fight back by legal means, although this will now be more difficult with the accelerated procedures...
...So far, however, there have been no wholesale arrests of oppositionists...
...The 25 percent against are probably young people up to thirty, workers in big industry, and intellectuals...
...Despite the common name, each group is completely independent...
...However, a December 14 report in the New York Times indicated that Onyszkiewicz "was now under threat of dismissal for his views...
...Opposition, however, is having an influence on the national consciousness...
...When I entered Geremek's studio, his first remark was that the room was a public place and though we could say anything we wanted to, we should not name names...
...When I asked Onyszkiewicz why the government allowed him, a Solidarity spokesman, to stay on as a professor, he replied that he was too well known for them to dismiss him...
...The other group shuns programs and schemes for an ideal society and concentrates on telling the truth about this one, while trying to build autonomous cooperative movements and a free culture within the society...
...Would you believe that there was a mountain of human hair on display...
...International protest after the dismissal of Geremek earlier that year had made the government more cautious...
...Clements church on Sunday night, November 3. The church is in a working-class quarter and over 2,000 people occupied all the seats and standing room in the large, 215 bare interior...
...That was a general question, not "in one or two years, etc...
...That's a paradox, but the activity of underground Solidarity causes the outburst to be less and less possible...
...invasion of Grenada, underground printers refused to print it...
...Buildings, roads, railroads haven't been renovated for forty years...
...Rebuilding the country is possible in just one situation: when people work hard and get paid little...
...Behind me were three young Americans who had just come from two weeks in a small town near Cracow...
...From the viewpoint of water resources, we are in last place among European countries with a moderate climate...
...If we start a demonstration, people will fight the police all over Poland...
...They would manipulate, but avoid violence...
...Good work and low wages...
...From the viewpoint of the government, manipulation is impossible...
...Most were between the ages of twenty and fifty...
...Either they will pacify the riot with lots of violence, or the "neighbors" will come...
...New construction can't cover these losses...
...Except from time to time when it doesn't, as in the trial of Michnik, Lis, and Frasyniuk, where the state violated its own norms...
...After Warsaw KOS appeared for the first time, 40 other publications called KOS sprouted throughout Poland...
...So extensive a network means that the government has lost its monopoly of information...
...Meanwhile, the clerk returned with forms, which the woman signed...
...People look to Solidarity with less and less hope...
...In some of these talks I was joined by representatives of the Lawyers' Committee for International Human Rights...
...If there's an eruptive situation, people look at the few men considered to be the leaders...
...This crisis which we live under is the result of forty years of completely ruinous economics, forty years of ruining the country...
...The legal profession has a low status in Poland...
...The Tygodnik Mazowsze is the Solidarity underground weekly which everyone in Poland who wants to know what is going on must read...
...This has caused Warshawsky no end of grief in an underground that views the United States as the only force that might deliver Poland from the oppression of Russia...
...A strict enforcement of the laws would have meant the regime had decided upon Stalinist "solutions" and would have had to put up concentration camps for the lawbreakers...
...The 50 percent are probably "against" but are afraid to answer and so are ready to go along...
...to force Russia to compete and to weaken its economy to the point where it would have to relax its grip on Eastern Europe...
...now they don't have that hope...
...Everything is black and white...
...The visits of Willy Brandt and Francois Mitterrand in December show that the changes of cast and costume have met with some success...
...The professor's fears were realized sooner than he could have expected...
...We know who the enemy is and we have our work to do...
...Talking with society—the people—won't accomplish anything...
...Their experience has taught them that violence in politics is very efficient...
...The sticky issue of Polish anti-Semitism inevitably came up as part of the talk about Shoah...
...This is very difficult to achieve except under conditions where they have the feeling they are building their own society, their own state...
...people are not ready to press the establishment...
...Our meeting with Jan Josef Lipski took place in the lobby of the Europejska Hotel...
...q 219 JACEK KURON, 51, is a founder of KOR (Workers' Defense Committee) and adviser to the leadership of Solidarity...
...that for a brief historical interlude between the wars they were a nation with a state and that today they are a state without the support of a nation...
...THE INSTITUTE OF PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIOLOGY of the Polish Academy of Science did a survey of public opinion...
...The Underground IN POLAND THERE IS FREEDOM Of conversation but not freedom of expression...
...You can manipulate society, but you can't use force, the police...
...Geremek thought that Polish anti-Semitism, while no longer a political problem, remained a moral problem...
...Apart from TM, hundreds of underground publications appear with some regularity...
...We know that Polish coal will be all used up in thirty years...
...This accounts for today's quiet...
...According to those laws, especially articles 282 and 282A, "disrupting public order and provoking disturbances," organizing and directing "protest activities" could lead to sentences of up to three years...
...Hundreds of cells of five to ten people, one person in a cell knowing only one person in another, constitute a small army of distributors...
...This alone, according to Onyszkiewicz, indicates that Poland cannot be called a totalitarian society and is perhaps best described as a dictatorship...
...Lipski, for example, is for a continued arms buildup by the U.S...
...that can never occur...
...Though there were 400 political prisoners and that was 400 too many, he said, it was still only 400 in a society where tens of thousands of people were breaking the law...
...In any case, he added, "We don't make enough to live on as professors...
...There is devastation of water resources...
...Her face lit up and she said: "Life here is exciting...
...This 25 percent is not in favor of "eruption...
...220 IT'S NOT ONLY ECONOMICS...
...The social basis of the underground is still that part of the working class which made up the legal Solidarity movement...
...the rest, 50 percent, answered in ways that can't be classified, or they didn't answer...
...It looked like an agreement between society and the power structure...
...The court assigns an available hack for the charade of a defense...
...She will get her zlotys back when she shows the forms on her return...
...The goals of the former are no less than "independence" from Russia and freedom in Poland...
...There is respect for legal norms even though the laws are so vague that almost anything can be done "legally...
...On that day this hope was killed...
...Government repression can follow the law because the law has legalized the repression...
...It's not a case of hostility between activists and the rest of society, but they are active while others have stopped being active and become quieter...
...After the fiery sermon, the people in the church raised their hands in the two-finger victory salute and started to sing a Polish national song...
...One of them told me of a trip they had made to Auschwitz...
...He then left...
...Viewers were outraged that Poland was represented by primitive peasants in the most backward areas of the country...
...Solidarity, he said, had been an important force in combating political anti-Semitism...
...They know what the result can be...
...It was as if these two young Poles were performing the sacerdotal function of a political communion, perhaps the conversion of a militant trade union movement into a ritual of the Mass...
...But not quite...
...Underground leaders had to persuade them that freedom of speech should prevail over workers' control...
...Whether such a dialogue will ever take place, he added, will depend on the international situation, but at the same time no solution in Poland can take place without the support of the Poles themselves...
...But among this 50 percent which can't say yes or no, the feeling of desperation is growing...
...Solidarity is strongest at big industrial plants and academic institutions...
...Solidarity has left a hunger for democracy in many younger Poles, and this remains a potent factor in the country's political life...
...I was waved through after having had to buy zlotys at the official rate of 147 to the dollar and declare the amount of dollars I was bringing in...
...No sooner did I remind him of Leszek Kolakowski's image that this was like trying to fry snowballs than he shrugged and said: "But what else can we do...
...It was enough for him that he could continue exposing lies and oppression...
...This prevents the person arrested from getting his own attorney...
...In Poland today there are about 400 political prisoners...
...By chance I was able to spend about seven hours in conversation with the man who writes under the name David Warshawsky, one of a five-man committee that puts out a leading underground paper, the Warsaw KOS (Committee for Social Defense...
...The outcome...
...Batches of stamps are sometimes left mischievously at post offices to remind the public of the alternative society...
...They're organized, they're not alone, they discuss the possibilities among themselves...
...A network of aboveground and not-soaboveground people provide safe houses...
...I could not understand why the government should be concerned about a zloty drain...
...clean air and raw material resources are coming to an end...
...I answered "nie palic," and he laughed gently...
...Another important difference is that the state of economic affairs is extremely bad...
...The Polish people were wonderful, they said, but boy, did they hate the Russians...
...They just wanted to win...
...In France, where all nine-and-one-half hours of the film had been running for many months, some Polish exiles thought that Lanzmann's bias marred the film but did not significantly diminish its importance as history or art...
...The inspector was chiding her severely...
...Some probably read illegal publications, but don't do anything...
...In my two-and-a-half days in Paris and week in Warsaw and Lodz, I had conversations with Poles in exile, Solidarity leaders, members of the underground Helsinki Committee, other aboveground and not-so-aboveground oppositionists, law professors, and attorneys who defend political prisoners...
...After an interview with a prominent attorney 218 who had defended political activists since the time of Gomulka, I asked the interpreter what personal life was like in Warsaw...
...If they don't say yes, people won't go...
...On another aspect of Shoah, one sophisticated activist said that people are true to their history and this in part explains why the Jews allowed themselves to be destroyed...
...And this dialogue made them quiet...
...He has spent nearly half of the last twenty years in Polish prisons...
...The plan for Political Prisoners' Week was to have a Mass in a different church each night culminating in a mass at Father Popieluszko's church on Sunday, November 10...
...Gierek's team did abide by the agreement...
...The Gierek [Edward Gierek, former prime minister,] team was born as the result of workers' opposition to the Gomulka government, which had used force to make them quiet...
...The sense of Gierek's agreement was that if workers would be quiet, not take to rioting, he would give them a good life, a comfortable life...
...that from 1795 to 1918 Poles were without a state but thought themselves to be a nation...
...Before, they hoped Solidarity could lead them out of the crisis...
...It was under these articles that Michnik, Lis, and Frasyniuk were imprisoned after a trial in June 1985 in which defense lawyers could not defend and defendants could not speak...
...Political pessimism, however realistic, is irrelevant to the imperative of continued resistance and the need to tell the truth...
...The line moved very slowly as bags were spot-checked...
...Another difference is that society is organized outside the power establishment and official channels of organization...
...There are secret Solidarity trade union branches of between one-half and one million members who pay 1 percent of their salary to the organization...
...but if they really do that, the whole Solidarity movement will use this opening...
...So we know this is a ruined country which has to be rebuilt...
...It made me reflect on conversations I had in Warsaw about the movie Shoah, one-and-one-half hours of which (the Polish parts) had just been shown on television...
...The idea that an explosion will start because of Solidarity is the government's idea and is contrary to the real situation...
...III...
...Yet it troubled some activists I spoke to later that Solidarity might be paying too high a price in loss of autonomy vis-à-vis the church for preserving its autonomy vis-a-vis the regime...
...Just as in Poland one can be free and not free at the same time, so it is possible to be smoking and not smoking at the same time...
...That's the reason why there is no explosion in Poland...
...When we asked one professor what he would do if fired, he said he might drive a taxi and take up legal defense activities...
...Was this another one of those appearance/reality gaps that abound in Poland...
...Where before the police could detain a person without charges for up to 48 hours (and sometimes do detain the same person again after his release at the 47th hour), the new law provided for arrest, trial, sentence, and imprisonment within 48 hours...
...In the Stalinist period, when the party was in full control, the laws were fairly liberal...
...Since the church is the only legal and independent institution accepted by the people, it may have been simply prudent for illegal Solidarity to mount the protest under its protection...
...This is a completely new point in any communist regime...
...Lipski and the interpreter were chain smoking...
...The independence of universities, which had been important centers of free thought in Poland, is now threatened...
...Now look at the Jaruzelski team...
...There's no return to the point before Solidarity...
...Smokers smoke their cigarettes, nonsmokers smoke the smokers' smoke...
...It can't and doesn't want to use anything other than peaceful means...
...But to the degree you can predict anything, you can say that the Jaruzelski team will answer any attempt at rebellion with violence...
...q 221...
...Today, with the decline of the party, the police have the task of maintaining order by repressive laws...
...Ah, I thought, surveillance at last...
...The first 25 percent are government employees and retired people...
...He demonstrated his strength in the party last November when he fired from his government "hard liner" Olszowski and demoted "liberal" Rakowski...
...They're also leaders of this society...
...they didn't use violence...
...Bishops were to speak at two of the Masses...
...We hoped it could be done until December 13, 1981...
...They improved conditions...
...A letter of protest against political imprisonment was to be signed by 200 prominent Polish intellectuals and sent to the U.N...
...However, lawyers who defend political prisoners play an important role in the resistance...
...There was also a survey among students...
...In industry, no more than 60 percent of capacity in machines and equipment is used...
Vol. 33 • April 1986 • No. 2
