Stocktaking in Poland
GRUBER, RUTH ELLEN
Letter from Warsaw Stocktaking in Poland By Ruth Ellen Gruber Warsaw Ihad last seen Jerzy Urban in January 1983, when I was the chief United Press International correspondent here...
...He looked trim and tanned, thanks to a stringent weight-reducing regimen that was apparently the talk of Warsaw...
...Poland is not what it was 20 years ago...
...I also asked the various leaders we met, including the three presidents-Kwasniewski, Walesa and Jaruzelski-about the burden of history and memory borne by Poles and Poland...
...One night we correspondents were the guests of honor at a huge party for an exhibition about the role of the foreign press' coverage of Poland in the 1980s...
...Letter from Warsaw Stocktaking in Poland By Ruth Ellen Gruber Warsaw Ihad last seen Jerzy Urban in January 1983, when I was the chief United Press International correspondent here covering the Solidarity movement and the martial law regime that crushed it...
...It was held at the striking new headquarters of Gazeta Wyborcza, the country's leading newspaper, which began as an anti-Communist publication in the late 1980s...
...It is hard to remember this in a city of new skyscrapers, cell phones, shopping malls, fine restaurants, ATM machines, traffic jams, fat cats, and movie multiplexes...
...Broadcast back to Poland by foreign radio stations, our stories also formed an important news source for the Poles...
...The poster was for Roman Polanski's new film, The Pianist, based on the memoirs of Wladyslaw Szpilman, a Jew who survived World War II...
...Ruth Ellen Gruber is a regular NL contributor...
...You can never run away from your history, and there are chapters to be proud of, chapters that can be debated, and very, very black chapters...
...All Warsaw seemed to be at the party-former dissidents who are now mainstream politicians...
...The few who remain appear to haunt the city, rather than live there...
...Moreover, the distortions decreed by the official ideology were often counterbalanced by memories, rumors and ambivalent feelings which contributed to further distortion...
...When I lived here from 1980 to '83 strikes, shortages of virtually every kind, political ferment, and the perpetual state of crisis were front page news every morning...
...Seeing The Pianist prompted me to take it off the shelf...
...But when I asked him if he considered himself a politician or a revolutionary, he had no hesitation...
...POLAND is now a normal country," President Kwasniewski said the day he greeted us...
...I cannot shun making statements...
...Such, though, are the vicissitudes of history...
...Its editor, Adam Michnik, was a leading dissident...
...This polarized the country...
...In 1983, he won the Nobel Peace Prize...
...One of them, a woman in her 20s, asked me during a television interview, "Has Poland changed...
...Never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined that nearly 20 years later, Urban would become what he is todaythe fabulously successful publisher of a controversial scandal sheet called Nie ("No"), which laces off-color pictures with raunchy political satire...
...They suffer instead what one Polish writer called the "guilt of neglect," of having been victims of the Nazis themselves but at the same time witnesses, frequently indifferent or even complacent witnesses, to genocide...
...Normal" was a movable concept...
...former senior Communist officials who are now retired...
...A friend of mine owns a book called Warsaw 1945 that was published in 1985 to mark the 40th anniversary of the end of the War...
...Nor could I have imagined that I would be a guest in his mansion in a posh Warsaw suburb, dining on sturgeon and drinking two types of champagne with him and General Jaruzelski-and listening to Jaruzelski tell anti-Communist political jokes...
...Poles did not and, for the most part, do not suffer the guilt of Germans as perpetrators of the Holocaust...
...It is harder to remember the specifics of conditions once Adolf Hitler's troops took over...
...I remember asking him at the last news conference that I attended prior to my being kicked out...
...Example: A Polish, a French and an English surgeon met at a conference in 1982...
...It doesn't make international headlines," he added, with what almost sounded like a tinge of regret...
...According to Jewish survivors, it provides the most realistic picture to date of daily life in the Warsaw Ghetto...
...The Pole said: "That's nothing...
...The ensuing back and forth represented the first time that these highly charged issues, incorporating a full range of philo- and anti-Se mitic views, were aired in a public forum...
...Sample: A Soviet citizen visiting Warsaw in the early 1980s picks up a phone to make a call, only to hear the recorded message martial law authorities substituted for the dial tone: "This conversation is being monitored...
...People loved to hate Urban, and he seemed to relish being hated...
...Throughout the reunion weekend, Polish journalists half our age sought us out for interviews...
...The last time I saw him, two years ago, he had a striking resemblance to Porky Pig...
...in 1990, he was elected head of state in Poland's first post-Communist presidential election...
...They tell you in advance...
...Kwasniewski's response was the most memorable: "Poles are very attached to their history, more so than elsewhere...
...For the first time in my life I really felt like a battle-scarred old-timer, recounting my war stories for the kids...
...The occasion was a news conference shortly before I was arrested by Poland's Communist authorities, accused of espionage, thrown into jail, and then kicked out of the country...
...This conversation is being monitored...
...And neither are we who chronicled its changes...
...I could not take my eyes off the monogram on his shirt pocket: " JU...
...IN CONTRAST to other Eastern bloc countries, the Communist regime did not simply crumble in Poland...
...I responded that it is probably just as difficult to explain how things were to her generation of Poles, who came of age amid the cathartic post-Communist expansion of the 1990s...
...He told me how, when he was a small child, he and his family hid in a Ukrainian village...
...Actually, Walesa has been relegated to the margins of mainstream politics...
...The exhibition, titled "Poland on the Front Page 1979-1989,' compared selected reproductions of front pages from the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Jonrnal with corresponding front pages from Poland's Communist press...
...Almost no building stands...
...Not without good reason: In the days before the Internet, satellite phones, cable TV and other forms of modern telecommunication, our reports were practically the only way people in what we called the West learned about developments in Poland...
...At the time Urban, a short, round man famous for his floppy ears, was the spokesman for General Wojciech Jaruzelski's hard-line government, which had imposed martial law in December 1981...
...Its most memorable scene is reproduced on the poster: a small human figure dwarfed amid the utter ruins of Warsaw after the Germans torched, blew up and otherwise razed the heart of the city...
...Iusedto think of Warsaw then as existing in a state of sensory deprivation -gray, gray, gray...
...In the postwar Communist periodespecially after the regime's "anti-Zionist" campaign in 1968 forced more than 20,000 remaining Jews to leave the country-self-examination was repressed...
...It has hundreds of photographs that were shot just after the Nazi defeat...
...He travels the lecture circuit, speaking about globalization, and recently landed a job as host of a Polish TV show-about fishing...
...About 30 of us came to the reunion from all over the world...
...The resulting vacuum in knowledge was profound and lent itself readily to manipulation...
...Its salvation was its people, their intense friendships, their indomitable spirit that fueled the peaceful Solidarity revolution, which in turn initiated the drive toward the general collapse of Communism a decade later...
...At his news conferences, Jerzy Urban used to insist that the Solidarity challenge had to be stopped so that the country could return to "normality...
...We need to change the way of thinking, especially among the young...
...Her newest book is Virtually Jewish: Reinventing Jewish Culture in Europe...
...I dictated some pieces in the middle of a rock music cassette tape that I gave to someone who was leaving...
...This led to distortions...
...The Holocaust and postwar Communist rule created new layers of complexity and anguish in an intense, and intensely troubled, relationship...
...Not until the 1980s did taboos against exploring the Jewish past and objective analysis of the Holocaust slowly begin to be broken...
...Poles have an extensive historical memory, but it was very manipulated over the past 50 years...
...Revolutionary," he said...
...As he spoke, he seemed to focus his gaze on the Star of David I was wearing around my neck...
...After martial law was enforced, we had to literally smuggle out our stories...
...Someone once told me he even collected caricatures and jokes about himself...
...The postwar physical absence of Jews in Poland coincided with, and aided in the implementation of, the official Communist agenda...
...former underground journalists who are now media moguls...
...The 14-year-old daughter of friends went to see the movie with her class...
...And remarkable changes like these provided a dramatic backdrop for a recent reunion in Warsaw of correspondents who covered Poland in the 1980s...
...One of the most contentious questions concerns the Jewish place in Poland...
...Claude Lanzmann's film Shoah sparked debate in the mid1980s...
...This deepened in 1987, when Krakow scholar Jan Blonski published an article in the liberal Catholic weekly Tygodnik Powszechny that declared Poles should feel some complicity in the Holocaust, if only because of their indifference...
...I didn't like Polanski's film very much, but it was a powerful reminder of this past...
...The movie recounts his experiences both inside the Warsaw Ghetto and while hiding outside...
...No sooner had we arrived than we were received by President Aleksander Kwasniewski, who got his political start as a Communist youth leader and is at present the country's most popular politician...
...But the broader issues of memory and history figure prominently-very prominently-over here...
...Millions of people linked to the Solidarity movement were already actively working toward its demise in the early 1980s...
...in my own name, and in the name of those Poles whose conscience is shattered by that crime...
...I recall smuggling a camera into a Warsaw prison back in 1982 to get a picture of him in jail...
...Walesa is portly now, and his trademark moustache is white...
...In a sense, our entire five-day reunion was an exercise in stocktaking, both personal and political...
...Many Poles could not, and would not, accept the evidence...
...In several photos deep snow blankets the ruins, like desert sand covering the archeological remains of an ancient civilization...
...They loom large in Polish myth and memory-just as, for the vast majority of North American Jews with Polish roots, Poles and Poland loom large in Jewish mythology, both as "the old country" and as the anti-Semitic archetype...
...I don't look like that anymore," Walesa muttered...
...Indeed, during our reunion they were right out there on a huge poster one saw everywhere...
...I have come to understand that the task of a president is to bring order to people's minds-a history, stocktaking on various issues...
...What a fantastic country," the Soviet visitor exclaims...
...Poland is different from when you were covering it," he told us proudly as he welcomed us to the President's Palace...
...They are so sensitive about symbols...
...Well before Solidarity emerged there were long lines for food, the city's air reeked of pollution, people had to wait years to obtain an apartment, and even if you had local currency there was little to buy Luxury goods-these included items like coffee and even condoms -were only available in special dollar shops...
...But some were making their first trip back in 20 years...
...Is it difficult to explain to the outside world how things were back then...
...almost everyone is gone...
...One colleague secreted his copy amid the bedclothes of the British ambassador, who was being medivacked following a heart attack...
...We had meetings, too, with the Foreign Minister and the Prime Minister...
...The debate peaked in the summer of 2001, when President Kwasniewski addressed a commemorative ceremony at Jedwabne on the 60th anniversary of the massacre...
...I was certainly impressed...
...The most lacerating exchanges have taken place in the past two years, triggered by revelations that Polish neighbors, not German occupiers, brutally murdered the Jews in the small eastern town of Jedwabne...
...The Cold War's conclusion gave rise to idealistic new visions of an undivided Continent and sparked efforts to redefine, re-examine, re-evaluate, and "fill in the blanks" of the nation's history...
...And we talked to Lech Walesa, the fiery Solidarity leader who climbed over the Lenin Shipyard wall in Gdansk in August 1980 to launch a strike that spread to the rest of Poland and shook the foundations of the Communist regime...
...Whatever you do and think about the future, you can't forget the past...
...He was as recognizable a symbol for the Solidarity revolution as the movement's distinctive red and white logo...
...We presented him with a copy of an August 1980 Washington Post front page that had a picture of him in his primesmall and wiry, with his arms raised high in victory...
...I couldn't eat anything for five hours," she told me, singling out as particularly disturbing "those scenes where they were killing the Jews...
...The Frenchman made a similar claim about reconnecting the private parts of France's greatest Don Juan...
...DURING OUR REUNION I asked Jerzy Urban, a staunch atheist who has never, however, denied being from, as he puts it, a "Jewish family," to describe his wartime experiences...
...What do you mean by normality...
...I walked into the hospital after martial law was imposed, was handed a basin with two ears and an asshole, and I had to make a government spokesman...
...The Englishman described in great detail his reconnecting the right leg of England's greatest footballer and swore that he scored more goals than ever afterward...
...Everything unofficial was internalized or went underground, where it sometimes festered...
...He apologized "as a citizen and as the President of the Republic of Poland...
...Warsaw is a deathscape...
...Today he is one of the country's most powerful men...
...Our gathering, in fact, was treated as if it were a national event, and we ourselves were regarded as having been protagonists in heroic times...
...I remember being shocked once, sitting in the bath and hearing my neighbors, through the wall, listening to a story I had written broadcast on Radio Free Europe or something," one reporter reminisced...
...Jews lived in Poland for 1,000 years and made up 10 per cent of the population on the eve of World War II...
...Although I was persona non grata for seven years, since 1990 I have returned frequently to Poland and watched its fascinating, if at times fitful, evolution into a free-market democracy...
Vol. 85 • November 2002 • No. 6
