Last Days in Old Europe

by Richard Bassett

  The film had another surprise up its sleeve. Otto was asked whether he could remember taking part as a child in the coronation ceremony of his parents in Budapest in 1916. He began to describe his vivid memories of the occasion. As he spoke, the screen switched to some original footage of the coronation, showing his father, Charles, the last Emperor and King, riding up the Budapest hill wearing the regalia of St Stephen, including the crown with its crooked cross. As Otto continued with his recollections, the film suddenly showed him as a four-year-old wearing his own Hungarian regalia and being lifted by unseen hands so that he could watch through the window of his carriage as his father pointed the Sword of Attila and vowed to defend the four corners of Hungarian territory. In a brilliant cinematographic effect, the film slowed down and the camera lingered on the child Otto. At that moment the frisson of the link Otto embodied across not only generations but different worlds produced an audible intake of breath throughout the cinema.

  Such events were not isolated. A year later, in a gloriously retro display of military solidarity with the West, the Hungarian Ministry of Defence organized a ‘festival of hussars’ inviting officers from every hussar regiment in England to attend. Again, the pageant of an older order appeared to intoxicate the Hungarian population. I was reminded of Osbert Lancaster’s wry description of the Corpus Christi processions of pre-war Budapest. Was Hungary really going to remain a loyal Communist satellite for much longer?

  The Hungarians were not alone in Central and Eastern Europe in seeming ready to embrace change. To the north, across the Carpathians, another great nation was growing restive with Communism and hoping that the arrival of Gorbachev heralded bold new directions for Eastern Europe. As change began to gather speed and the words glasnost and perestroika were heard more frequently, an opportunity arose for me to relocate to Warsaw where The Times had an office which had become suddenly vacant. Five years spent in Vienna had been convivial but a period in Poland was essential if the entire picture of Moscow’s European empire was to be understood. I was under no illusions that Poland would offer more bracing conditions than Vienna: even more than in Hungary or Czechoslovakia, progress in Poland had been severely curtailed by the Communist experiment. Huge tracts of the country had barely changed since the war. In Warsaw a few months later I felt that I had left the Edwardian summer world of 1914 and woken up to the cold realities of 1939 and the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact.

  The End of the Ancien Régime

  Warsaw–Gdańsk–Cetinje–East Berlin–Wolfenbüttel–Leipzig–Gera–Prague

  The farewells to Vienna were long and sometimes tearful, but my friends promised to be there whenever I returned. Remarkably, they also arranged for the Hotel Bristol to allow me, for only a modest sum, to retain a second-floor suite, unchanged since the 1930s and much favoured by the Duke of Windsor who had come regularly to Vienna to consult his oculist. Further douceurs were promised by the local representative of Austrian Airlines in Warsaw, who was instructed by his colleagues in Vienna to ‘look out for me’. Finally, Polish friends in Vienna gave me the telephone numbers of their cousins who would ‘surely have a beautiful sister or two’ to teach me Polish. Thus prepared, and after some happy days on the way in Bad Godesberg and Berlin, I boarded the train one day in late autumn for Warszawa Centralna.

  The carriage was full of Poles who had been shopping in East Berlin and whose vivacity contrasted with the more stolid East Germans who occupied other parts of the train. The Poles’ smiles and laughter halted immediately the East German customs officials and border police entered our compartment. The temperature seemed to plummet as the guttural Prussian accents echoed along the carriage corridor, a vivid example of the hostility these two nations still felt towards each other. An hour later there was palpable relief when the German guards departed to be replaced by the much less formal, green-uniformed Poles. An elderly Polish man in a suit sitting opposite winked at me, saying in heavily accented German as a tall blonde Polish girl in uniform passed by, ‘Jetzt ist alles Scheiss egal!’ (Now who the **** cares?). The train trundled slowly across the plains of Pomerania. Outside the landscape was empty, flat and monotonous in the autumn sun. My eye searched in vain for any north German equivalent of the soft hills of the Alpenvorland or the craggy outcrops of rock on which so many Austrian castles were perched. Inside my compartment, an East German lady, in her early eighties, surveyed the landscape quizzically. Since her seventy-fifth birthday, she declared, she had been ‘allowed to travel’ and she was now preparing to leave the train at the Polish frontier to visit some friends. Her austerity and simplicity were impressive. She had grown up on the island of Rügen and had spent ‘a little time’ in Berlin before the war. She reminded me in a way of Blanka, a similar mien of self-discipline forged by life in a turbulent Europe. Like Blanka she also knew off by heart the old song immortalized by Mozart in The Magic Flute: ‘Üb immer Treu und Redlichkeit bis an dein kühles Grab / Und weich keinen Finger breit von Gottes Wegen ab’ (Be honest and loyal until your grave is cold / And never deviate by as much as a finger’s width from God’s merciful way). I remembered most of the words, sung to the tune of Papageno’s first aria, and my new travelling companion filled in the rest which I quickly scribbled on my Thomas Cook’s timetable.

  After I had thanked her for reminding me of the words she added a detail which Blanka had omitted: this tune, at once so dutiful and cheerful and which I had imagined had been an integral part of a certain Viennese childhood, had in fact another dimension. It had also been rung out twenty-four times a day by the bells of the garrison church at Potsdam after each hour had been struck. This lady, in her simple woollen garments, invested the tune with an unfamiliar gravitas and I was once again struck by the seriousness of Northern Europe after the frivolity of the Danube basin. As we leant out of the windows of our carriage, my companion’s face basked almost hedonistically in the setting sunlight for a few seconds. Then, suddenly, seeming to realize she was ‘on parade’, she stiffened and asked me if I had ever been to Edinburgh. ‘I should like to go to Edinburgh. I have an old friend there but I don’t suppose they will let me go.’ Clearly there were limits to how far she was ‘allowed to travel’. These few words epitomized the bureaucratic oppression of the East German state, the absence of the simple freedoms we took for granted in the West.

  Bidding farewell to this unknown lady – the exchange of names could have implications in the German Democratic Republic – I settled back to enjoy the first glimpses of Poland or, as my recently departed companion would probably have called it, Pommern. At the end of the Second World War, Stalin had secured Western compliance in a colossal reordering of Central and Eastern Europe. Poland had been shunted 300 miles to the west. As a consequence, East Prussia around the historically German city of Königsberg, the old Galicia-Lodomeria to its south and large swathes of eastern Poland had been seized and occupied by the Russians. To compensate for these eastern losses, Poland was given areas which for centuries had been part of Germany: Danzig (Gdańsk), Posen (Poznań), Thorn (Toruń), Stettin (Szczecin). This brutal redrawing of the map, accompanied by huge population transfers and violence, contributed enormously to tension between Poles and East Germans. Today, more than thirty years since my first visit, that particular tension has largely dissipated and one can only wonder at the exemplary way in which the European Union, for all its faults, has succeeded in tending to these wounds.

  By the time the train reached Warsaw a few hours later, I was beginning to understand something of the temperament of the Poles, which was at once brighter and more voluble than the Teutonic world we had left behind. Many of the women wore copious amounts of scent and had dyed their hair pink or blue. They had slim figures and an almost Latin vivacity but seemed wholly absorbed in their own lives and problems, which they discussed loudly in rapid-fire words of dazzling incomprehensibility. The men tended to be more taciturn, almost reluctant to engage with a stranger. The years of martial law in the early 1980s had left deep s
cars but, as I would discover, the Poles were largely united in their opposition to the state and the Communist system. They had bravely learnt how to hold on to their traditional character in their daily interactions with a godless, alien system determined to homogenize them into loyal creatures of the Soviet empire. There was no doubting the moral authority that in those days invested the Roman Catholic Church, which held sway over the minds and souls of most of the Polish population, thanks in part to the country’s isolation. The millions who flocked devotedly to hear the Polish Pope, John Paul II, celebrate mass when he visited Poland in 1979 and subsequently were a powerful warning to the Communist authorities of the scale of civil disobedience which might await them if they pushed their luck.

  I soon learnt, however, that the corrupt practices of the state were also potent forces. After nine hours, the train ran into a deep tunnel and emerged shortly before midnight in a dark and subterranean part of the main Warsaw station. When I tried to get off, a group crowded around me, pinning me against the interconnecting doors of the carriage. I could tell that something was wrong, but long hours of rail travel had blunted my acumen. Instead of using fists I simply raised my voice, without effect. Within two minutes the struggling mass of bodies vanished and I was suddenly alone. I collected my luggage and went up to the main floor of the station where the secretary of the Times office, Małgorzata, was standing with a large sign displaying my name. We went by taxi to the Hotel Europejski, where I was to stay because the office flat needed redecorating after the previous incumbent’s tenure.

  It was only when I reached for my wallet to hand over a credit card to the hotel receptionist that I realized what the rough theatre at the station had been about. For the first time in my life, I had been successfully pickpocketed. Fortunately I had come with travellers’ cheques and had been carrying them separately from my wallet. Still, the loss was annoying and Małgorzata and I rushed off, despite the late hour, to report its theft to the police.

  When I offered to give a description of my assailants, I soon understood that crime in the Communist system was the monopoly of the state and that my pickpocketing could easily have received official encouragement. The police were unhelpful and – a rarity in Poland – unfriendly. After studying mugshots of various criminals, I pointed to some that seemed familiar. The policewoman looked at me pityingly and pointed out that the people I had identified had been in prison for five years or were dead. She said that I should be grateful they had not taken my passport.

  The following morning, I was woken at 7.00 (rather early in those days for a foreign correspondent), to be told by Małgorzata that I had been summoned to the Foreign Ministry for an appointment with the official responsible for the Western press. The meeting was not about my wallet and I could not reschedule the ‘appointment’ because this official had the authority to expel me without notice should I prove ‘uncooperative’ – he had already expelled several foreign correspondents in recent years. Małgorzata was clearly worried but was disinclined to tell me why. I was expected at the ministry within the hour.

  It was still rather dark when I was ushered into a grey Stalinist building. After being kept waiting for fifteen minutes I was shown into a nondescript office where, behind a desk, a short and unsmiling man with glasses was smoking an acrid cigarette. He was dressed in a brown suit and his face was pale with watery eyes. His hands were thick and his nails unmanicured.

  ‘Dzień dobry, Pan!’ (Good day, Sir!), I ventured, practising one of the very few phrases of Polish I had so far mastered. But if I had expected some degree of Viennese politesse or Hungarian courtesy, I was to be disappointed. I suddenly felt like a small boy who had just returned to his school after a long and agreeable holiday to find new prefects in charge.

  ‘Pan Bassett. You work for The Times do you not?’ The official fixed me with a hostile stare. ‘Is it honourable for a newspaper to call for the head of state of a country with which it has amicable relations to be executed? Is this a reasonable way of writing? I ask you, is this how you journalists of the West demonstrate your objectivity and integrity?’

  Briefly I wondered if in an unbuttoned moment I had written something as extreme as this, but my interlocutor soon enlightened me. Handing me a copy of the previous morning’s Times (how had it arrived so much earlier than my own?) he directed me to the centre page where the celebrated columnist Bernard Levin had indeed written that he hoped General Jaruzelski, who had imposed martial law and was the de facto Polish head of state, would be ‘hanged as he deserved for treason to the Polish people’. I silently cursed the luck that had permitted this unfortunate coincidence.

  ‘Pan Bassett, is this objective? Is this quality journalism? Is this your freedom of the press? You will agree that no country can permit its head of state to be insulted in such a crude and violent way. Please show me your accreditation.’ This, even I dimly realized, was a sinister escalation and I silently handed over the black suede-covered document with which I had been issued a few weeks earlier by the Polish consulate in London. Remembering the pat phrases that had tripped off the tongues of countless Western officials at briefings in Vienna I began to point out that as a ‘simple correspondent’ I could hardly be held to blame for the emotional ramblings of a histrionic columnist. This unconvincing appeal made no impact.

  I then tried to recover the moral high ground: the plurality of the Western media, in contrast to that of the Warsaw Pact, I insisted, allowed a very wide spectrum of views to be expressed. This platitude also made no impression. Finally, I recalled the lunch at the Herend factory a few months earlier and took a leaf out of the quick-thinking equerry’s book. Striking a pose of contrition, I apologized unreservedly for any offence caused by my more emotional colleague and explained that Mr Levin had been through a difficult time in recent months. His very public unrequited love affair with a well-known soprano at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, had no doubt disrupted his emotional compass and affected his judgement. As I recounted these intimacies in a matter-of-fact way, referring en passant to various arias in Rosenkavalier and Arabella, the expression on my interrogator’s face turned briefly to one of sullen astonishment. He impatiently indicated he had heard enough.

  Throwing me another withering glance, he turned to a colleague who had been sitting silently in the corner of the room and said something which sounded uncomplimentary. For a moment, he menacingly fingered my small press pass as if uncertain whether to keep it. Then he slowly handed it back and stood up to indicate that the interview was at an end.

  Stepping out into an icy wind beneath a leaden grey sky, I mused on the fact that I had been in Warsaw for rather less than twelve hours and, although I had not yet written a single word or even sat down at my desk, I had already been robbed, dragged from my bed to be given an official dressing down and threatened with expulsion. I had had some unpleasant experiences in Bucharest, but nothing in easy-going Vienna had prepared me for these new realities. I had been eager for challenges after the claustrophobic comforts of Austria and Hungary. But as I returned to my hotel in the half-gloom of an icy November morning, I began to wonder whether Warsaw might not prove a little too spartan.

  In the event, over the following two years, Poland quickly demonstrated that it furnished the best education anyone trying to understand Eastern Europe could hope for. In the lull between 1987 and the storms of 1989 I soon learnt fluent Polish and I came to appreciate and admire the Poles. Once the decorators had moved out of the Times flat, I found myself the happy tenant of a generous suite of rooms on Rozbrat, an avenue overlooking the Arcadian approaches to Łazienki Park. Large windows encompassed a view of ancient trees and huge tracts of sky which turned blood-red at sunset. My apartment block was one of the very few buildings in Warsaw to have escaped complete destruction at the hands of Bach-Zelewski’s SS troops in 1945. Because its bullet-holed façade still bore the scars of that terrible conflict, it was much in demand by Polish television companies making dramas of the Warsa
w Uprising. Over the next two years, I often returned to the flat to find the courtyard bedecked in swastika flags and brutish actors dressed as SS stormtroopers, all of whom looked terrifyingly like the real thing, mowing down civilians with their faux machine guns for the sake of the cameras.

  Otherwise this leafy suburb, barely twenty minutes’ walk from the centre of Warsaw, was notable for its silence. Cars were rare, taxis even rarer. I was optimistically informed that there was a taxi rank just outside the house, but of this there was no sign. Eventually I realized that if you waited at a particular spot you might – after an interval of half an hour or so – pick up a passing cab. Life was too busy and fraught for the few Polish taxi drivers to hang around impoverished buildings. Gradually, I got used to walking the mile and a half into town for press conferences or hiring one of the American correspondents’ drivers for longer journeys. The Americans were well represented, with almost every important US daily having a correspondent in the city. Apart from the FT and The Times, the British papers were conspicuous by their absence.