POLAND WAITS
WAITS, POLAND
Poland Waits Hope flickers in the ashes of despair BY DAN SHANAHAN We were standing in the gray light of dawn on the platform of the Poznan railroad station, bound for a weekend in Gdansk, when...
...Please, we'd appreciate it if you would look the other way when the train arrives," the student asked...
...their supplies exhausted, they simply shut down...
...The school stationery carries a notation: "School of the UNESCO Association-Winner of the National Education Commission Medal...
...Brezhnev wanted to make a pact with the devil, one routine went, but when he asked the Moscow telephone operator for the area code of Hades, she told him it was a local call...
...The officers, members of Poland's political police, whisked their quarry away, interrogated him, beat him in the chest and stomach, and threatened to kill his wife and children...
...Nations that exist on the margin between two contesting worlds not only suffer the fate of foreign domination, partition, and exile, they also suffer from the myth of past glory that lives in the collective social memory and obscures a clear understanding of the present...
...One high school teacher I met expressed anger at the excesses of the Communist Party, but in the next breath spoke of the possibility of history play an important role...
...One cross has 1956 in yard-high numerals at its base...
...But even in locales relatively better off than Warsaw, the public mood is bereft of any joy, optimism, or self-confidence...
...They are good," says one instructor...
...By extension, Solidarity represents a romantic swing...
...Neither giddy abandon nor deep despair marks these men...
...After forty-eight hours, Janusz gave in: He told the police he had been distributing illegal bulletins for Solidarity...
...Their sentiment, almost medieval in its romantic idealism about what the country could be, gives them hope—and drives them almost to despair...
...What have they to look forward to...
...Jaruzelski, a realistic one...
...Because many of the waiting travelers had no reservations, the train's arrival would set off a mad scramble for the few unreserved seats...
...The sparsely placed goods in their windows are faded, dust-covered, carelessly knocked askew...
...We express our opinions, of course...
...Many shops lie barren...
...Decades of disappointment and frustration under a nominally socialist system have not engendered a reactionary frame of mind, nor whetted a desire for the apparent freedoms afforded by capitalism...
...Year after year, grade four candidates—the most advanced students-return from Warsaw's academic Olympics with a constellation of first prizes, which entitle them to preferential placement in one of Poland's universities...
...After the humor and the bitterness, however, came professions of sympathy, half rhetorical but half genuine, for those who lived in other parts of the Eastern bloc...
...A monument erected in Poznan during the Solidarity years commemorates those workers who were killed during the first Polish food riots in 1956...
...The government's campaign has found only limited and probably ephemeral success...
...The student's demeanor reflected an entire nation's self-image...
...Underneath, images of the people of Poland burst forth in bas-relief: workers, farmers, students, women in traditional dress, victims of police repression in past rebellions...
...Some of the teachers continue to discuss politics with their students...
...Her husband was demoted from director to guidance officer...
...In a few windows, a hodgepodge of products—perfume, automobile headlights, and toys, perhaps—testifies to the ingenuity of a shopkeeper who has managed to stay open...
...Poles seem to prefer living at such extremes, unable to accommodate themselves to domination by a foreign power...
...This is all very humiliating for us...
...thick coils of rope bind the crossbar to the uprights...
...Poland Waits Hope flickers in the ashes of despair BY DAN SHANAHAN We were standing in the gray light of dawn on the platform of the Poznan railroad station, bound for a weekend in Gdansk, when the young student approached us...
...They keep these talks to themselves...
...we tell them what we think, but always as personal opinion...
...An atmosphere of abject self-torment pervades Poland, and its people seem agonizingly unwilling to accept life under Soviet domination...
...Two days later, Janusz received a telephone call from one of the officers, who proposed a rendezvous...
...The periods of breathing free appear to make up for the periods of bitter realism...
...They are not resigned...
...Two years later, on the third anniversary of Solidarity, she and a group of friends placed a bouquet of red flowers outside Walbrzych's church...
...Five or six heads lean out of a sunny window, laughing when a camera focuses on them...
...the beatings and his anxiety had aggravated an old stomach ulcer...
...The Soviets were the butt of constant, often bitter jokes...
...On the contrary, The Perils of Pedagogy The hallways bustle...
...For this, she spent sixteen months in an internment camp near the Soviet border...
...Since it opened in 1962, General Ka-rola Swierczewskiego High School has consistently turned out bright graduates, particularly in the humanities and social sciences...
...Like the Balkans, the Middle East, and parts of Southeast Asia, Poland has suffered a historic series of interruptions in the evolution of the nation and its culture...
...But the authorities are not pleased with Swierczewskiego High School...
...Drunkenness serves to deaden their senses, to help them deny the bitter realities of daily life, and to quiet for a moment the sadness and humiliation...
...Yet the Poles cling to their national pride despite the latest chapters in centuries of invasion, partition, and oppression...
...But it is flooded by other forces that threaten to stifle change...
...In front of the building lies a grassy field, and across the field stand the low nouses of Walbrzych, a small mining city in the southwest corner of Poland...
...Alcohol is, for many Poles, the true opiate of the socialist masses...
...The products are few and tired: cheap ceramic vases cast off center, coarse and impure soap, furniture coming apart...
...Instead, the teacher entered a hospital...
...The school is three stories tall and, like most, made of red brick...
...Though local education officials say declining enrollment necessitated the change, the students and teachers know otherwise...
...Dan Shanahan is coordinator of North American studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies in Monterey, California...
...Though two or three new and striking skyscrapers creep toward completion, the shops cannot disguise reality...
...While not all Poles would choose socialism—if they had any choice in the matter—many are skeptical of trading the overt suppression of freedom they experience for the more subtle curbs that accompany modern capitalism...
...When Solidarity banned alcohol from the Lenin Shipyards during the height of the strikes there, it was making a political statement against a regime it saw dulling the workers with a free flow of vodka...
...Instead, they drink...
...The attack on Janusz was one episode in a larger assault on the school itself, which began in December 1981 with the arrest of the school director's wife...
...Oh, they can smell the rats," another teacher adds...
...As many as fifteen teaching positions were eliminated as a result...
...She had taught Russian and was vice president of the local Solidarity chapter...
...In the auditorium, two girls sing a Tom Paxton folk song, "What Did You Learn in School Today...
...Some students talk, some read notes, and others gather around the large aquarium situated midway between the main entrance and the principal's office...
...Oh, those poor people," one smartly dressed Polish woman said, after telling me how the Soviets needed to import fresh fruit for the 1980 Summer Olympic Games in Moscow...
...The monument reminds onlookers that Solidarity was not an isolated phenomenon but one rebellion in a series that has spanned at least two generations of Poles, and that is likely to continue...
...Soot from five coal mines settles on the school's windowsills...
...They signify the uprisings that have occurred with almost clocklike regularity in the last three decades...
...Such institutions as Swierczewskiego High School are considered subversive for the same reason they excel academically: The teachers are active, within the school and in the community...
...The student, typically Polish in his extreme deference, was painfully self-conscious about the scene he feared would—and eventually did—ensue...
...Now the Poles have next to nothing...
...Poland ripples with the pressure from forces—both socialist and nonsocialist— that move it toward humane and progressive development...
...In the port of Gdansk, the birthplace of Solidarity, goods are more plentiful and people better dressed...
...As soon as he was released, Janusz had misgivings about his confession...
...After the wilting of the free trade union Solidarity and the withering effects of subsequent state repression, Poland has become a source of embarrassment to its people...
...Hanka Rytko, a physical education teacher, was instrumental in setting up the exchange program...
...building humanistic socialism, "if only the lackeys can be put in their place...
...Another hopeful sign is the coming together within the Solidarity movement of workers and dissident intellectuals...
...That year, there were five individual classes in each of the four grades...
...Four years ago, when Solidarity was born of labor turmoil, Poland boasted an affluent veneer that distinguished it from such Eastern bloc countries as East Germany and Czechoslovakia...
...Outside of Warsaw, things sometimes look up...
...But a political breakthrough can develop no more readily in the stifling atmosphere of Poland than it can in a Western counterpart like Pinochet's Chile or Marcos's Philippines...
...In response, the police placed her in solitary confinement for a day...
...Outside the now-famous Gate Number 2 of the Lenin Shipyards in Gdansk, another Solidarity-era monument consists of three tall crosses like ships' masts, with an anchor crucified on each cross...
...One day last March, two plainclothes police officers entered the faculty lunchroom looking for a mathematics teacher known as "Little Janusz...
...in 1983, it was cut to three, and last fall, the school opened with two...
...After years of alienation from one another—the workers mired in the frustrations of the daily inefficiencies of life and the intellectuals fretting over ways to raise the Polish workers' consciousness—the two groups have discovered their common ground and tasted their potential...
...The decline haunts the streets of Warsaw, the country's once-fashionable capital...
...The dates capsulize Polish political history: long periods of gloomy quiet punctuated by moments of romantic resistance that illuminated the night with their intensity...
...Barbara, a French teacher, was recently denied leave for proficiency training in France...
...on the other, the dates 1968, 1970, 1976, and 1980 are stacked one atop another at the base, the numerals almost fused...
...in 1982, the number of first-grade classes was reduced to four...
...Laws prohibiting alcohol on the premises of state buildings have been passed in the hope that sobriety would increase efficiency in the bureaucracy and state-owned enterprises...
...At least we are able to enjoy some of the nicer things in life...
...He wrote a letter to the procurator's office recanting his statement and declaring that he had been victimized by "Stalinist interrogation techniques...
...As Stewart Steven points out in The Poles, the Committee for the Defense of the Workers (KOR) formed by elements of the intelligentsia in 1976 helped such men as Lech Walesa gain support and became part of a unified front when Solidarity was launched...
...Realism, Adam Bromke suggests that Poland has always swung between the extremes of intense idealism and cynical realism or compromise...
...Perhaps nothing characterizes contemporary Poland better than those erupting figures, struggling to shed the skin of the past...
...In Poland's Politics: Idealism vs...
...The Party bureaucracy regards this consolidation as the most serious threat to its power, and so has tried to undermine the alliance by blaming the "excesses" of the trade union movement on the "meddling" of intellectual malcontents...
...In the Sile-sian coal mining regions, the backbone of what remains of the Polish economy, some people live as well as they did before 1980...
...Two forty-foot cement crosses share the same crossbar...
...Some bright spots relieve the current bleak landscape...
...There, the formerly stylish Poles wear clothes made from drab, cheap fabrics...
...Under the psychic anesthesia of alcohol, the flames of romantic idealism are being guarded and fanned patiently for some inevitable opening...
...David Kattenburg (David Kattenburg has participated in four truck convoys that brought humanitarian aid to Poland...
...But now even officialdom is concerned with epidemic drinking in the workplace...
...Poles took satisfaction from their standard of living, which surpassed that of the Soviet Union...
...But what power do they have...
...When this alliance tempers itself and becomes a true amalgam of common interests and goals, it may turn out to be the most formidable opponent of the Soviet-style government...
...Inside the large department stores, that face the tall, absurdly Stalinesque Palace of Culture—built "as a gift from the Soviet people"—the lighting is dim, and the floors remain filthy...
...The few escalators in the stores stand still, some of them abandoned in various disassembled stages of repair...
...The popular national song, "Let Poland Be Poland," expresses the deeply rooted belief that history has conspired to deprive the country of the stature it deserves...
...These incidents suggest the depth of the Polish regime's hostility to intellectual freedom, and they illustrate the government's contempt for social solidarity...
...Drunkenness is visible in the streets of most Polish cities: Young men sit in small clusters around supermarkets, drinking vodka out of bottles in huge gulps, occasionally wandering off to one side to vomit, and afterward returning to the group to continue drinking...
...Since 1980, her classes have been traveling to Alsace as part of an exchange program, but last spring the Polish Ministry of Education decided to stop issuing visas to the students...
...They have nothing...
...And the vagaries of the average Pole seems surprisingly enlightened about the dangers that lie in the Western direction...
...Shortly after martial law was declared in 1981, she became involved with a support group for the families of local political prisoners...
...The regime of General Wojciech Jaruzelski has obviously chosen to placate those regions that are essential to staving off complete collapse...
...Poland's alcoholism provides a clue to another set of feelings beneath the surface of embitterment and frustration...
...In the groups of vodka-gulping men who dot the landscape, an attitude of quiet conviction takes shape, a deep belief that "the situation," as it is called, is only temporary...
...At the base of each cross, sheet metal appears to be peeling away like old skin...
Vol. 49 • January 1985 • No. 1
