Vignettes of Poland in 1956
WANKOWICZ, MELCHIOR
On the Road to October vignettes of poland in 1956 By Melchior Wankowicz Please give me two wafers A with my ice cream," I asked the waiter in a first-class hotel in Warsaw. I was treating two...
...A Warsaw streetcar conductor told me this story: A Russian received a 10-year cumulative sentence for shouting, "Khrushchev is a drunken idiot...
...It's because of Russia," he exclaimed excitedly...
...The people chiefly responsible for the October Revolution were Communists who wanted to preserve these gains...
...We sell cars for 70,000 zlotys which it costs us 90,000 to produce...
...Against a background of hardship and misery, the privileged bureaucracy grows by leaps and bounds...
...Once the crisis had passed and it was apparent that Moscow had decided to accept the new Party leadership under Wladyslaw Gomulka, one could almost hear a sigh of relief pass through the entire city of Warsaw...
...Gradually, tongues loosened more and more, and the thaw began to assume its own national forms...
...At Christmas in 1955, fully a thousand state-owned, chauffeur-driven cars brought Party and Government officials to the famous Zakopane resort in the Tatra mountains for a winter vacation...
...There are three kinds of unnatural love," Poles were saying during the last "Polish-Soviet Friendship Month": "the love of a man for a man, the love of a woman for a woman, and love of Russia...
...A crowd had thereupon proceeded to Party headquarters...
...In Poland, all shopping except that for food is done in the first two days of the month, when people have cash in their pockets...
...The student on guard told me that 6,000 zlotvs (about $300) were dropped into this one every hour...
...one of the leaders of the Warsaw uprising of 1944, to the cemetery...
...Their preparation was obviously inadequate, but each summer these raw teachers take additional courses...
...And, indeed, human rivers were soon pouring down the streets of Warsaw...
...One clerk was complaining about the new wage scale...
...They steal everything from us...
...he travels constantly throughout tho country...
...They went down one after another: Brodzinski, the First Secretary in Cracow, with whom I had talked only a few days before...
...I climbed onto one of the empty trucks...
...Because he got three years for offending a high state official and seven for betraying a state secret...
...Anti-Russian slogans started appearing everywhere...
...By way of reply, he raised his foot and showed me what had once been a shoe but was now a crazy-quilt of patches and holes...
...Captured by the Russians in 1939, he escaped to cover the Allied campaign in Italy...
...On my arrival, I could clearly sense the impending October upheaval...
...As a result, everyone has to find additional sources of income...
...I wondered whether this 25-year-old's faith would be justified...
...Unarmed and wearing red armbands, the workers jumped into the angry crowd, gently pushed it back, persuaded, begged and explained...
...Country people have acquired a new social consciousness...
...On November 1, I accompanied Colonel Radoslaw...
...Gozdzik seems almost superhuman at times...
...The people on the blacklist, those who were preparing to man the barricades, were not "fascists" or "capitalists...
...he smiled bitterly—"We work for planned losses...
...A revolution, scarcely visible from across the ocean, was in full swing...
...Melchior Wankowicz, who witnessed it, was the John Gunther of prewar Poland...
...The conveyor belt was motionless, for its operation is economically feasible only when production is geared to 30,000 cars a year, and a bare 7,000 are produced now...
...People in Poland work hopelessly, madly, inefficiently...
...I wondered how many stories she climbed in a day, how many miles she walked, this little squirrel chained in a cage...
...Here lay row on row of soldiers of the old Polish Home Army, deliberately abandoned to Nazi extermination on Stalin's order and denounced as bandits by the postwar regimes...
...Do you think you can succeed...
...Comrades," he said, "I resign...
...Then he exclaimed: "Impossible, sir...
...All sorts of jokes circulate about Communism...
...The overcrowded streetcars are the scene of constant angry outbursts, and nerves shattered by overwork are strained almost beyond endurance by appalling housing...
...Yet, contrary to Khrushchev's wild charges on his sudden flying visit to Warsaw, none of them favored cutting Poland off from the Soviet bloc...
...An auto plant is a very precarious enterprise...
...the Polish equivalent of "For he's a jolly good fellow...
...The waiter, recognizing a prewar connoisseur, officiated with gusto until I asked for the wafers...
...I watched with amazement a girl feeding sheets of metal under the die...
...Had the Army or police intervened at that point, Warsaw's fate would have been the same as that of Budapest...
...The First Secretary appeared on the balcony...
...The following week, I visited the Zeran Works...
...now these benefits have been extended to the rural population...
...Instead, truckloads of workers arrived from the Zeran Auto Works, the citadel of the revolution...
...Prescriptions...
...There is terrible poverty, and it will be very hard to pull the country up...
...For, despite everything I have said, there have been undeniable advances in Poland since 1945...
...The author of 20 books, he had seen the Russian Revolution, lived in the Baltic and Balkan states, predicted (in 1936) the German attack on Poland...
...It was blood of redemption...
...Russia is there, and we have to be on friendly terms with our mighty neighbor...
...Once, I visited a leading department sore...
...and many others...
...The first is the Secretary of the District Council...
...We talked for two hours, while two limousines with their chauffeurs waited...
...The menu may list "ham, butter, eggs," but that does not mean you can have scrambled eggs with fried ham if the combination has not been foreseen by the bureaucrats who write the "prescriptions...
...In tiny villages that had never known a school, I found young teachers who had been taken straight from their thatched cottages and put on the job after a six-week training course...
...Once they understand what is at stake and what is required, they will literally give of themselves without regard to cost...
...You see what I mean...
...I was treating two Polish friends to dinner in one of the few restaurants where a high-class cuisine can still be enjoyed by the lucky few and by foreign tourists...
...Zeran's influence radiates all over Poland...
...I heard the first sermon of newly released Cardinal Wyszynski...
...Since this was the middle of the month, the store was virtually deserted and the sales staff had nothing to do...
...Now an American citizen, he still writes for Polish papers...
...Gomulka goes to sleep each night with tons of Polish coal stolen by Russia weighing heavily on his I'hcst...
...Government employes are far better off in Poland than in America, and there must be ten times as many official cars for their use...
...Why was it cumulative...
...An inefficient, wasteful bureaucracy —there is said to be one supervisor for every five workers—is maintained at the price of extremely low wages, which start at $25 a month and reach $50-75 for a skilled worker...
...everything earned is spent...
...On arriving in Hell, the hotel maid told me, Poles rush past the big gate marked "Capitalist Hell" and join the long line outside the entrance to the "Socialist Hell...
...Years of doctrinaire experiments had driven Poland to depths of misery from which it would be difficult for her to extricate herself...
...Their ideological opposition to the West was reinforced by the realization that geography left Poland no choice but to cooperate with the mighty nation to the east...
...Like all Polish industry nowadays, it suffers from overinvestment...
...They are overTo understand East Europe today and tomorrow, one must understand the Polish upheaval last fall...
...Zeran, the pride of Poland's "socialist construction," seemed little more than a huge blacksmith's shop...
...The whole nation was behind Gomulka at that moment...
...He had just received half his monthly salary and promptly had to spend a third of it on a long-overdue milk bill...
...In part, this was because there is no way to save or invest one's money...
...I asked Gozdzik...
...The Hungarians acted like Poles and the Poles like Czechs" was a current remark...
...The Khrushchev regime is not only hated but held in contempt...
...While I was there, a delegation arrived from the port of Gydnia...
...The reason: Fuel deliveries are sure to be late, broken pitchforks will not be replaced, and the devils will be drunk most of the time...
...it was an ecclesiastical version of Gomulka's speech...
...I'll pick up the first stick or stone I can lay my hands on and mount the barricades, 50 years old though I am...
...The Stalin regime was hated, but a non-Russian could at least feel that it possessed a certain ghastly grandeur...
...The driver assigned to me by the Ministry of Culture told me he drove a taxi in his spare time...
...He meant that he could not alter the rigid portions—derisively referred to as "prescriptions"—which are printed on the menu after each item of food: steak 131 grams, salmon 117 grams, etc...
...They told us how during the crisis 26 Soviet warships, including two cruisers, had appeared at the outer edge of Poland's territorial waters...
...Such was my introduction to the Polish economy...
...An angry mob moved on the Soviet Embassy...
...At last came the fateful night of October 19-20...
...But they were determined to defend something dearer than their own lives: the achievements of the postwar years...
...As I paddled down rivers in a little canoe, slept in cottages, and talked with peasants and country schoolteachers, I found that the rural masses were better fed and dressed than before the war...
...The mob shouted for the Second Secretary, and the same thing happened...
...In the last 18 years, he has toured 16 countries on four continents...
...Thousands gathered in the huge square and greeted Gomulka, not with a revolutionary song or the national anthem but with "May he live a hundred years...
...A blacklist had been drawn up by the Stalinist clique in the Communist party — a list of those slated for prisons, slave-labor camps or worse...
...Gomulka spoke quietly and soberly to the crowd: "This is no time for excessive rejoicing...
...some people take as many as three part-time jobs...
...tired to a point bordering on hysteria...
...Aren't you afraid to say so...
...Many had been thrown in jail during the Stalinist purges and tortured...
...At last, all was quiet once more and Warsaw went peacefully to sleep...
...Near the central common grave stood a large urn adorned with a dove of peace and the words: "Help Hungary...
...I saw a letter of complaint from a small provincial town: "We have five cults of the individual here...
...A ring of Soviet troops stood around Warsaw...
...Gozdzik, the First Secretary of the Party Committee at Zeran, is a calm young man of only 25, the son of a weaver and a skilled lathe operator, lie is the idol of Warsaw and of all Poland...
...What more can they do to me...
...Previously neglected, the cemetery was now a vast sea of glowing candles with an official guard of honor...
...he shouted angrily...
...By now we were surrounded by a circle of somber faces, nodding approval...
...It was getting dark, and in the twilight I saw the tense faces, knotty necks and hollow cheeks of hardworking people...
...In addition to poverty and bureaucracy, modern Poland is characterized by bitter hatred of everything Russian...
...Groups of volunteers rushed to the main highways, ready to defend their city against Soviet tanks with gasoline bottles...
...Nurses maintaining a blood bank for Hungary were fainting of exhaustion while thousands of donors stood on line...
...A family with a room and a private kitchen is wallowing in almost unheard-of luxury...
...Once, on my way to lunch with two officials, I suggested that we pick up a third man who was to join us...
...In Warsaw in those days, a man could obtain a pack of Poznanskie cigarettes (a popular brand named after the city) by asking for "a pack of Heroes.'" The thaw started according to the Khrushchev model—with a drive against "the cult of the individual...
...I was informed that he would be brought by a car from his own department...
...Planned economy...
...But I was also told by an old teacher, an avowed enemy of the regime, that three-quarters of his students, instead of returning to their cowbarns and illiteracy, had received state scholarships and entered trade schools...
...Before the war, Poland was outstanding in the field of social and medical insurance, but only urban dwellers benefited...
...The current joke in Warsaw was that Our Saviour's Square would have to be renamed All Saints' Square...
...It was a second victory —a victory over self...
...Rural workers, like others, also enjoy summer vacations at nominal fees in the finest seaside or mountain resorts...
...How, he asked, could he possibly manage for the next two weeks with his family of five...
...An economist friend defined it for me: "It's a regime that borrows its techniques from the stone age, its organization from slavery, its hierarchic structure from feudalism, its exploitation from capitalism, and from socialism its name...
...When he uttered the last sentence, my first thought was: "Now he is certain to lose his unanimous support...
...Chel-chowski, the head of the Wroclaw District...
...immediately, Polish sailors had mined the harbor entrance...
...most of them were Communists...
...so many other factories on which you must depend for materials and parts may fail you...
...Let them deport me to Siberia—at least I'll know what for...
...I arrived in Poland shortly after the nation's accumulated resentments had erupted in the Poznan riots, which helped initiate the present "thaw" in Polish Communism...
...After centuries of semi-feudal existence, they have begun to produce a whole crop of vigorous leaders, and the circulation of books and periodicals outside the cities has increased tremendously...
...But Gozdzik's biggest problem is Zeran itself, which is now administered by a workers' council in a striking experiment in economic self-government...
...Such urns were to be found all over Poland...
...We take very good care of him," Premier Jozef Cyrankiewicz told inc...
...She had to step high up on the machine-stand, place the sheet, step down, take two steps to push a button, walk back two steps, climb up again to remove the stamped metal, and step down to put it on a pile...
...The Hungarian events brought mixed feelings in Poland: shame and embarrassment that brothers were dying alone—but also relief...
...You know," he continued with a warm smile, "'our Polish people are as good as gold...
...He raised his tired eyes and said: "We have nothing to lose...
Vol. 40 • April 1957 • No. 16
