by Marci Shore
The good side, they both told me, was that the new director would likely succeed in procuring Władysław Broniewski’s secret police file from the Institute of National Remembrance. As an archivist, Pan Sławek was eager to see it—yet as a person sentimentally attached to the famous poet who had loved both Poland and socialism, he was fearful as well.
“Most likely someone from his family …,” the assistant curator explained.
I understood. I would not believe it of Janina Broniewska, though; she was too principled.
At Café Brama on Krucza Street, Mikołaj and I talked about lustration. In the dozen or so years that had passed between the publication of Cibulka’s List in Czechoslovakia and the publication of Wildstein’s List in Poland, a new generation had come of age—and into politics. As German chancellor Helmut Kohl had once said of the generation in Germany too young to have taken part in Nazi crimes, this generation in postcommunist Poland had been “graced by a late birth.” Many of these people—too young to have been implicated themselves—were very eager for this kind of “national cleansing.”
“They have the least right,” Mikołaj said of this younger generation, his own.
ONE DAY A friend loaned me the film Trzech kumpli (Three Buddies), a documentary about Bronisław Wildstein, the maverick journalist responsible for Wildstein’s List. In the 1970s, Bronisław Wildstein had been part of a trio of young friends, opposition-minded university students in Krakow. One of the three, Stanisław Pyjas, was in all probability murdered in 1977 by the communist secret police. The other—Lesław Maleszka—was then a secret police informer, who quite possibly bore some responsibility for his friend’s death.
The three friends belonged to a circle of students critical of the communist regime and interested in banned literature. Lesław Maleszka was “turned” after they were arrested. He was young and scared, and the secret police intimidated him—that was all.
The filmmakers interviewed Lesław Maleszka’s secret police handler, an unexceptional man in late middle age who had obviously been quite attached to Lesław Maleszka, or at least to the idea that he had recruited an authentic intellectual. Their encounters, the handler insisted, were not—or not only—intimidation sessions. On the contrary: they were social occasions, and the handler had looked forward to them. Even now, it remained a point of pride that he, a working-class man, had become so friendly with a Jagiellonian University student. He was flattered by their rapport, by the congeniality of their meetings, by Lesław Maleszka’s company.
Lesław Maleszka’s double life lasted for a long time. After university, he had remained in dissident circles—and in the service of the secret police. The truth emerged only more than a decade after communism had ended, when the archives began to open. For twenty years Bronisław Wildstein had been obsessed with finding out who was responsible for Stanisław Pyjas’s murder. Now it turned out to be their closest friend. This was the context for Wildstein’s List—a demonic gesture motivated by a very real betrayal.
Before Stanisław Pyjas’s murder, the wider circle of their friends had received anonymous letters accusing Pyjas of being a secret police informer. The secret police was playing a game with the students: someone was an informer. No one knew who. The letters contained personal information, intimate details that only someone very close to them would know. A quarter century later, Bronisław Wildstein was still overcome with revulsion at the ugliness of it all, letters written by someone who could see into their bedrooms …
Now I felt sorry for Wildstein.
“I would like for my life to have some weight,” Bronisław Wildstein said.
Here was Milan Kundera’s distinction between people for whom life was heavy and people for whom life was light: Perhaps for Lesław Maleszka life was light?
Again and again the filmmaker who interviewed Lesław Maleszka asked him, “Why?” Why had he betrayed his closest friends? Why had he kept silent for so many years?
And each time he responded, “An excellent question.”
Lesław Maleszka had no answer.
“A truly Dostoevskian character,” my friend who loaned me the film described him.
When in 1976 Lesław Maleszka had been “turned,” he’d chosen “Ketman” for his pseudonym. It was a reference to Czesław Miłosz’s famous book The Captive Mind, a story of Polish writers seduced into collaboration with the new communist regime in the postwar years. “Ketman” was a kind of splitting of the self.
In November 2001, after the opening of the archives had exposed him as an informer and a quarter century after he had made his decision to collaborate, Lesław Maleszka wrote a long essay for Gazeta Wyborcza titled “I Was Ketman …”
“I seek no justifications,” Lesław Maleszka began. He only wanted to explain.
It was 1976; the room was dark and the interrogation was brutal: the light shining directly in his eyes, the three interrogators in rotation, the curses and threats, the promises of beatings to come.
For several hours he dissimulated, trying to fabricate a story, but the interrogators already seemed to know so much. And he knew that in other rooms, at the very same moment, his friends were being interrogated; he was convinced that the secret police must already know everything about them.
So he began to plead with his interrogators not to expel him from the university. And by pleading, he made them understand he was weak.
Nothing justified what he had done, Lesław Maleszka acknowledged, neither the fact that he had made the dean’s list from his first year at university, nor the talk in the Polish philology department of his being awarded a teaching assistantship after graduation, nor his fascination with literary theory.
“Do you want to study?” the interrogators asked him. “You don’t get something for nothing.”
They gave him a sheet of paper and a pen, and they dictated his declaration of cooperation.
Then they ordered him to choose a pseudonym. That was when Lesław Maleszka remembered “Ketman” from Czesław Miłosz’s The Captive Mind. “A person of two religions, who conceals his true views, feigning loyalty to the oppressive power. It seemed to me that such a game would be possible. At the time it didn’t enter my mind that Ketman had to plunge into an internal lie, which in the end would penetrate his entire essence.”
The secret police were interested in everything. That they regarded him as their own did not deter them from foraging for material in his private life. They always wanted to know who drank vodka with whom, and where. They wanted to know if the priest who sympathized with the students had a lover—or lovers. Sometimes they paid Lesław Maleszka.
Nineteen seventy-six was the beginning of the Workers’ Defense Committee, the moment when intellectuals truly reached out to workers. It was the moment that in Czechoslovakia never came: to the very end, Charter 77 remained a ghetto of intellectuals. But in Poland, the Workers’ Defense Committee was the beginning of a real solidarity.
Lesław Maleszka and his friends were involved in the Workers’ Defense Committee from the beginning. While Lesław Maleszka distributed underground literature, collected money, and gathered signatures, “Ketman” reported these activities to the secret police.
“I lived thus for years,” Lesław Maleszka now wrote, “in a psychic and moral schizophrenia.”
On 7 May 1977 Stanisław Pyjas was murdered. To this day no one knew exactly why—or exactly by whom. Perhaps Stanisław Pyjas had discovered that Lesław Maleszka was an informer and had threatened to expose him. Perhaps the secret police had only meant to frighten Pyjas away from the opposition with beatings but had lost control. Perhaps they had killed him as a warning to others.
In any case, after Pyjas’s murder Lesław Maleszka—alias Ketman—realized: Who was he to think he could trust his handlers? To them he was just a kid to be exploited, “a small, blackmailed and brow-beaten pawn, who plays a meager role in a theater not his own.”
This is how his illusion about the possibilities of Ketman came t
o an end.
A quarter century had passed since he had succumbed. A dozen years had passed since communism had ended. But Lesław Maleszka knew that he would carry the burden of what he had done to the end of his life.
How could he have betrayed his closest friends? How could he have continued to work with the secret police after they had killed Staszek Pyjas? Even today, all those years later, he was unable to answer that question, unable to understand his own motivations. He’d been very afraid, he’d lived with a fear he was unable to overcome. But still, he knew, this failed to explain it all.
In 1962, when the poet Aleksander Wat was living in exile in France, Adam Ważyk came to Paris. There he and Wat sat in a café and spoke about Stalinism. How was it possible—Wat wanted to know—that after everything Ważyk had experienced in the Soviet Union, he had still returned to Poland after the war as a Stalinist?
“I suffered from a splitting of the self,” Adam Ważyk answered him.
This was true of Lesław Maleszka as well: he had suffered from a splitting of the self. And it suggested another question: Once a self was split in two, was either half real? Did any authentic self remain?
“I have only one wish,” Lesław Maleszka wrote in conclusion. “I would like my personal file amassed by State Security to be the first—and the last—to be made public. By means of blackmail, fear, provocation, beatings, the political police in a communist state broke the moral backbones of many people. They didn’t always manage to break everyone as easily as they did me, but the results must have been equally lamentable. For the past dozen years each of those people has tried to forget about the drama he lived through. About the fact that he did evil to those closest to him—at the same time living with the feeling that he himself had fallen victim to violence. Today each of those people awaits his judgment day—when the opening of his file will tear apart the circle of people he knows, perhaps his family, when it will render him a villain.”
Now Lesław Maleszka posed the question: Were the devastating social costs of making public the secret police files truly worth the advantages that opening the files would bring?
I remembered the line that my historian friend Dariusz had once quoted me from Wisława Szymborska’s poetry: “Tyle wiemy o sobie, ile nas sprawdzono.”
We know ourselves only insofar as we have been tested.
BY SPRING OF 2007 Poland’s nationalist-populist government succeeded in passing a lustration law. It was to take effect in May of that year: all Polish citizens working in government, education, journalism, or similar professions had to sign a declaration stating that they had not cooperated with the secret police during the communist period. If they refused to sign, or were proven to have lied, they were subject to loss of their positions for a period of ten years. It was the Institute of National Remembrance that was vested with the authority to verify declarations. Those born after 1 August 1972 were exempted—and thus was a single day determined to be a mark of generational divide.
Lustration reflected a public demand for accounting with people like Lesław Maleszka. In what other way, after all, could horrors like the murder of Stanisław Pyjas be avenged?
More broadly, lustration reflected a public demand for accounting with those who had benefited under the communist regime at the expense of others who had suffered. Communism in Poland had lasted for over forty years. There were people prominent in postcommunist public life—people like Kostek Gebert and Adam Michnik—who, as the young children of communists, had enjoyed privileged childhoods. Once they had been called the “banana youth,” bananas having been a rare luxury item under communism.
There was yet a further layer of complication. Often these same privileged children had later sat in prison. For the “banana youth” had engaged in a collective Oedipal revolt against their communist parents: the children of Stalinists—and even more particularly, the children of Jewish Stalinists—were disproportionately overrepresented among Solidarity activists. In this sense lustration was directed, not so subtly, against former dissidents, many of whom were now opponents of the populists. After all, it was precisely the former dissidents who had files; it was they who had been of such intense interest to the secret police. There was an irony in this: for it was safer now—as it had been then—to have been one of Havel’s greengrocers.
In an editorial for Gazeta Wyborcza, Kostek explained why he would not submit to lustration.
“I won’t demonstrate that I’m not a camel,” Kostek wrote.
This was a Russian phrase popular during Stalinist times: “Prove that you’re not a camel.” It was a way of expressing the absurd impossibility of ever proving one’s innocence.
Kostek’s friend Staszek Krajewski, the mathematician working to improve Jewish-Christian understanding, wrote an editorial too, also stating his refusal to sign on principle. And Kostek and Staszek were not alone.
That April, just a month after Kostek’s and Staszek’s editorials appeared, Adam Michnik came to Yale University, where I now taught, to give a paper on “the new populism” in Poland. Over lunch I asked him about Antoni Słonimski. From Słonimski’s secret police file I knew that they had spent much time together in Słonimski’s last years, when Adam Michnik was a young man and Słonimski, long recovered from his postwar communist sympathies, had become the grand old man of the opposition. Słonimski had been full of sentiment for him. The affection had been reciprocated: now at a French restaurant on Chapel Street in New Haven, Adam Michnik spoke of Słonimski as “mój szef” (“my boss”).
“In 1987,” Adam Michnik said during his seminar, “Poles had three requests of God: that communism end; that the Soviet army leave; and that the Soviet Union fall.
“Suddenly we woke up in a new world,” he went on.
To this day he still feared that he would open his eyes in the morning and realize it was only a dream—and that Poland was still living under communism.
Communism had taken away freedom, he pointed out, but in exchange it had provided security. This was the classic Hobbesian trade-off. Liberty and security were in a zero-sum relationship: more of one meant less of the other.
Adam Michnik believed that the current populism arose through a nostalgia for security, a longing for the past. A Catholic radio station, Radio Maryja, had returned to the xenophobic language of the 1930s. New populist leaders understood people whom Adam and Kostek and their friends did not. It was the populists who understood the Poles who imagined the European Union as Babylon: pornography, homosexuality, abortion.
Adam Michnik spoke, too, about lustration. He thought it absurd to judge people on the basis of the material in the secret police files—a single source, and still worse, a source “begot with the worst of intentions.” By agreeing to it, the former dissidents were letting themselves be judged by their enemies. Suddenly, fifteen years after the fall of the Iron Curtain, it was the communist secret police functionaries—so many of whom were opportunistic, uneducated, self-interested, or simply stupid—whose word counted most.
Then in May 2007, just a month after his visit to New Haven, Adam Michnik broke. In an essay titled “Otwórzmy teczki” (Let’s Open the Files), he called for all the files to be made public at once.
He had not ceased to regard it as absurd that “our biographies will be written by our mortal enemies.” He had not ceased to think it relevant that those secret police functionaries who had tracked and interrogated, blackmailed and imprisoned so many people—including himself and his friends—had not been after truth. Their goal had been precisely to compromise people, to taint them, to humiliate them.
And now it was continuing. The current regime at the Institute of National Remembrance, “acting on the directives of their political sponsors, are capable in the course of a single night of finding a ‘hook’ on every one of us. And then the next day the media publicizes these ‘hooks’ urbi et orbi. Every one of us can be defamed at any given moment.”
Adam Michnik wanted the files opened because
it was not the case that the files were currently closed—it was rather the case that the powers that be at the Institute of National Remembrance had privileged access to them and moreover used them as “a baseball bat to strike down those who think differently.” He used a still more colorful analogy: at the moment the secret police archives were like repositories of narcotics, guarded by drug addicts.
It’s necessary, finally, to curtail the omnipotence of this nightmarish police of memory and blackmail, for after all this is what the present leadership of the Institute of National Remembrance is.… For this reason, today the files should be publicly accessible to everyone, with all the terrible consequences that will bring. It will be better than the present situation. We have to make the files public in order—this sounds paradoxical—not to live under the control of the files, which are toyed with, whose contents “leak out,” which are ostentatiously used in a political game.
“I don’t see another way out. Better an end to the horror than horror without an end,” he concluded.
The lustration law was overturned by Poland’s constitutional court at the eleventh hour.
IN JULY 2007, at Krakow’s Jewish Cultural Festival, Tim and I saw my former professor Stefan M. amid the crowd on Szeroka Street. It was already dark, and the festival’s finale—a huge klezmer concert in the open air—had just begun.
I asked him about Henry Dasko’s death. Had he been in Toronto then?
“I was there,” he said, “sitting by his bed. It was awful. A nightmare. I cannot talk about it. Someday we’ll talk about it.”
He looked into the crowd, and then again at me, and repeated, “Someday we’ll talk about it.”