A Reporter Returns to Poland
GLASS, ANDREW J.
CARTER'S VISIT AND AFTER A Reporter Returns to Poland BY ANDREW J. GLASS Warsaw Poles tell each other that when Jimmy Carter came through here last month he asked his host, Polish Communist...
...Could you send me a picture of Zbigniew Brzezinski...
...Yet it accurately reflects the abundant contradictions in Polish life today...
...An earnest effort to convince the stolid guards that the man in the Brooks Brothers suit indeed has an appointment with a high Party official proves unavailing...
...The sculptor defected some years ago and is at present living in New York—a fact tastefully excluded from the otherwise extensive press releases both the White House and the Poles provided to reporters...
...As a light snow fell, I stood in several long lines to buy postcards, tram tickets, an orange, a slice of ham, and the Polish newspaper with the press conference text...
...For Poles stolling by, this musi have seemed a rather ironic counterpoint to Edward Gierek's holiday message to the country: "The only solution for us is work and more work...
...In the gathering gloom of mid-afternoon, I set off by tram and by foot to see if I could find it...
...Restaurants around the market square in the nearly restored "New Old Town" serve such delicacies as venison, wild boar and roast pheasant...
...Occasionally, a sharpie would go to the head of the line, bypassing 100 or more people, and flash an official-looking pass...
...At that moment, Brzezinski was with Carter aboard Air Force One on his way to see the Shah of Iran...
...In internal politics, they pretty much go their own way...
...But Mr...
...What would you like...
...Despite anti-Semitic laws, some Jews, including my parents, had successfully assimilated into the fabric of Polish society...
...Asked how he could afford such a car on his $3,600 annual salary, he shrugs and simply says, in his best Peter Lorre manner: "In Poland, there are always arrangements that can be made...
...This embarrassed the Poles and they made sure nothing like it would happen again with Carter...
...Now I had returned with Jimmy Carter and another former Pole, National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, to crank up a rather rusty Polish to the amazement of my colleagues in the White House press corps...
...The fixed-price tab is 3,000 zlotys per couple (slightly over $90 at the official exchange rate, employed mainly by fools and super-cautious journalists...
...the regime arranged for a shipload of fruit to arrive from Morocco in time for Christmas...
...This also happened at another hallowed shrine commemorating an uprising by the Polish Home Army, a force the Germans practically wiped out in 1944...
...Everyone I've met here agrees with this analysis...
...no effort is made to hinder their contacts with Israel and the West...
...One sees scores of magnificent palaces, museums, churches, parks, and market squares, supposedly quite old, but that in fact are brand new...
...The few dissidents I met here all proclaimed themselves Communists who are simply unhappy with the way the system is working...
...No one—least of all the Russians— knows what the Polish Army would do in such a situation...
...When the Polish Home Army finally fell, Hitler ordered Warsaw wiped off the map of Europe...
...But there are few visible Russian soldiers, beggars or prostitutes...
...The number of cars has tripled in the last seven years, bringing Warsaw the twin problems of parking and pollution...
...In the second place, the Russians would never go along with a truly independent Poland...
...But of course I practice it...
...Well, I believe in it, but of course I don't practice it," Gierek was supposed to have replied...
...The story is probably fanciful...
...I left this city 38 years ago as a child, a few days before Nazi artillery and the Luftwaffe's Stuka dive bombers knocked out the bridges across the Vistula, the last escape path to the East...
...The Polish government takes an ambivalent attitude toward this remnant...
...Sometimes as a reward, at some international forum, the Poles get to float a change in Russian thinking before it is absorbed into official Communist doctrine...
...On all foreign policy issues, though, including the Middle East, Poland faithfully toes the Soviet line...
...Today, in a nation of some 40 million, less than 5,000 Jews remain (an anti-Jewish campaign in the late 1960s sent into exile most of those who had survived the Nazi camps...
...The German headquarters was just around the corner, in the high school, and they used this place to billet their field and general-grade officers...
...Some men arrive in formal evening dress—worn only by waiters and musicians in other Communist lands...
...CARTER'S VISIT AND AFTER A Reporter Returns to Poland BY ANDREW J. GLASS Warsaw Poles tell each other that when Jimmy Carter came through here last month he asked his host, Polish Communist Party Secretary Edward Gierek, whether he was a religious man...
...Almost every public building and many private ones have been resurrected, insofar as possible, precisely as they stood before World War II...
...Elsewhere, bundled up against the freezing cold moving in from the Baltic, Poles wait patiently in long lines to buy a few oranges...
...Well," said Gierek, "I don't believe in Communism...
...The holocaust, though, is always portrayed as having swept away Poles and Jews alike...
...Having stayed behind when the Carter party left for Teheran that same morning, I wandered down Marszalkowska...
...Imagine, a Pole holding such an important office in the United States...
...No one had bothered to patch the large chunks torn by wartime bullets from the sandstone facade of the bottom three stories...
...It is tolerated...
...During the Carter visit, the display on the embassy gates showed a happy American family, presumably headed by a department store heir, opening a cornucopia of Christmas presents...
...That's the way the game is played in Communist Poland, even with an American President who cherishes "people-to-people" contact...
...Since the glitter of American life is on continual view in the common rooms of often shabby and crowded dwelling places, expectations inevitably rise and the regime comes under ever-increasing pressure to distribute more goods of better quality...
...They keep harping on the thought that the Germans could unite again and come after us," an elderly retired professor of engineering said on a tram...
...standards, although they would cost an average Pole a week's pay...
...Several months ago, when UN Secretary General Kurt Waldheim visited Warsaw, a young dissident slipped through the security cordon to hand him a "human rights" letter...
...Nobody is arrested for saying his piece, 90 per cent of the people are baptized Roman Catholics, 80 per cent of the agriculture remains in private hands...
...The systematic destruction that took place before the Russians entered the city was responsible for more damage than the actual fighting in 1939 and 1944...
...So the Poles, under Gierek, continue to maintain their delicate balance...
...Surveying the scene briefly, in the wake of the President's 35-hour stay, the American visitor is struck by vivid contrasts...
...Unkempt, hard-eyed security men, looking as if they had just stepped off the set of Mission Impossible, shoo a reporter from Communist Party headquarters, a huge and ugly box-shaped building in the city's central square with an enormous all-red banner fluttering from the rooftop...
...After having seized Warsaw, Stalin refused to let his troops cross the Vistula and come to their aid...
...In 1939, every fourth Warsaw citizen was Jewish...
...This astronomic sum notwithstanding, only four well-heeled Westerners are to be seen in a dining room otherwise given over to Polish apparatchicks enjoying, with their girl friends and wives, the best vodka, champagne, ham, turkey, and smoked salmon Warsaw has to offer...
...Let it not be said that the American embassy, an imposing structure near the Polish Parliament dwarfed only by the Soviet colussus, doesn't do its share to keep this process moving along...
...The Soviet Union has only two tank divisions stationed on Polish soil—about 40,000 men...
...In the first place, back then, when you were a boy here, this was an unjust society—a few well off people and many poor ones...
...The meals are cheap by U.S...
...Food shortages persist, despite the effort to stock up and make the best possible impression on the Carter entourage...
...Summing it all up, a knowing Pole tells an acquaintance: "For the East we are the West and for the West we are the East...
...Then again, no one really wants to find out...
...Does he have white hair or black...
...While I understood all that was being said, I felt enough of a mess had been made in translations without volunteering my services...
...In the best Central European style, a small ensemble plays classical favorities for the dinner guests...
...Secretary, if you are a Catholic how can you also be a Communist...
...Although the section of Warsaw we lived in had been virtually destroyed, our six-story house, by some miracle, was still standing...
...An elderly lady answered the door, and when I explained why I had come, she invited me in...
...To help keep things in proper perspective, not a day goes by on Polish radio or television, or in the press, without some reminder of what happened nearly four decades ago...
...The streetfighters of the Warsaw ghetto, moreover, are said to have received substantial help from partisan bands beyond the walls, especially those under the red banner...
...10—except now it was four apartments, partioned off a central corridor...
...In a move that clearly grated on the sensibilities of the ruling Polish Politburo, White House schedulers insisted that Carter visit the site of the Warsaw ghetto, where nearly a half-million Jews perished by 1943...
...the fanciest places made do with artificial whipped cream...
...I've no idea what he looks like...
...During the President's visit and for sometime thereafter, a container of milk was unobtainable in Warsaw...
...Gestapo, Gestapo," the young Poles had chanted at the police and soldiers who refused to let them near Carter...
...I thanked her for showing me her cramped quarters in our once commodious apartment and offered to send her a gift once I returned to America...
...Even the Nazis needed someplace to live...
...My parents and I somehow eluded the marauding Red Army, then meeting up with Hitler's panzer divisions for the final kill...
...The troubled Polish economy remains closely linked to the Soviet Union, too...
...But the next morning, when Varsovians who had learned the authorities were permitting publication of Carter's news conference in weekend newspapers formed long lines at the kiosks on Mars-zalkowska Street, the main shopping area, the word "alone" in the President's reference to the ghetto Jews was deleted from the transcript...
...That way, it's easier to tolerate Gierek and his Russians friends...
...Poles grumble that the Russians take the best of everything, but without Russian aid their system would quickly collapse...
...In his opening remarks at an unprecedented press conference where questions from American and Polish reporters were answered, the President said: "I also visited the Ghetto Monument, a memorial to Polish Jews who stood alone to face the Nazis but who will forever live to the conscience of the world...
...A half-hour later, I was there...
...Taking nothing of value with us, we made our away across the vast Siberian tundra, through an antagonistic Japan and arrived safely in San Francisco in 1941...
...The first priority the Poles had set for themselves—that of rebuilding a devastated Warsaw—is today nearly accomplished...
...We can't go back to the way it was," said a young journalist who supports himself as a French translator...
...This creates a curious Dis-neyworld effect...
...A monument erected there in 1948 is not mentioned in tourist folders...
...At the same time, 46 per cent of all Polish trade these days is with the West and, ignoring Soviet hand-wringing, Gierek has borrowed $10 billion from Western bankers to finance new steel mills, auto plants and much-in-demand consumer goods...
...You know why it's still standing, don't you" she said...
...The intelligence cables he was reading, radioed to the plane from the American embassy in Warsaw, noted that the police had kept the crowds away— somehow Carter's schedule had leaked out—during the visit to the Ghetto Monument...
...Is he an old man or young...
...Others claimed they deserved special treatment because of their age, veteran status or because they had small children with them...
...Still, on New Year's Eve, one of the best restaurants, the Krodydl, closes its doors for a private party...
...The Mercedes splashes a flock of nuns in flowing black robes as they scurry back to the curb...
...They would move in with their tanks—exactly as they did in Prague in 1968...
...A middle-level Polish official speeds through the winter slush along a wide boulevard in his new diesel-powered Mercedes...
...An usher invites a visitor to tour a small museum off the central hall that features pictures of the prewar glitter and the theater ruins of 1945...
...The Poles seem not to have forgotten their courtly manners, but such tactics inevitably led to verbal arguments, punctuated by a few pokes in the ribs...
...Elsewhere, one sees plenty of fashionably dressed women and there is no shortage of well-mannered, hand-kissing men...
...However, more could be quickly moved in from East Germany and from the new Polish frontier along the Bug River...
...The difference, of course," he concluded matter-of-factly, "is that we'd give them a fight...
...I took the creaky prewar elevator to the fourth floor and rang the bell of apartment No...
...Other signs of progress are evident as well...
...she said...
...Elsewhere in Warsaw, the prewar red-and-white Polish flag, now stripped of the Royal eagle, flies from restored public buildings...
...I asked...
...Along the elegant street known as Nowy Swial (New World), where West German businessmen buy Polish do-dads for hard currency, a "Hamburgery" fast-food stand has recently opened near the Polish-Soviet friendship center...
...And less than a mile from Communist headquarters, sophisticated Poles patronize a splendidly rebuilt opera house, where the best seats cost 50 cents at the current black market exchange rate...
...My father had given me the address of the apartment building where I was born...
...Leading American Jews also are invited, at official expense, to tour the crematoriums at Auschwitz and Treblinka...
...Even the poorest Poles watch American films and serials on Polish TV, interspersed with ads for the state perfume monopoly...
Vol. 61 • January 1978 • No. 3
