by Marci Shore
But Galina did not see it this way. For her, Christianity was ultimately less about will than about love. Love was always painful—Galina insisted—this was the unavoidable price we had to pay for the love of a human being, as opposed to the love of God.
“The longer I live,” she wrote, “the better I understand that our only hope is God. He is the only one whom you could trust completely, who will never leave you, who loves you as no human being is able to love. Meeting people is like a chain of painful experiences. The best possible man or woman is just a weak creature.”
“The distance between people here is too big,” Galina wrote after she had arrived in Leeds. “And in Russia it is too small.”
Galina did not stay in Britain for very long. She soon left Leeds to join a convent in British Columbia. There she finally felt at peace.
IN 2008, MY Czech political theorist friend Pavel and his wife came to Yale for several months. In New Haven that summer, I showed them Todd James’s letters from 1996, telling me of his struggle against the communist regime, his struggle for truth and for his own self. It was a case of the Russian weakness bogoiskatel’stvo: a kind of spiritual seeking, a relentless, despairing God-searching.
The letters reminded Pavel of their friend Petr Cibulka from Brno. He, too, had been a dissident; he, too, had signed Charter 77. In prison, under interrogation, Petr Cibulka had been daring, courageous, and enduring. In 1992, it had been Petr Cibulka—despite the opposition of Václav Havel—who took it upon himself to publish the unconfirmed list of secret police agents, collaborators, and informers: he was the Bronisław Wildstein of Czechoslovakia. And it was only then, in the years that followed the Velvet Revolution, that Pavel and his wife slowly realized that Petr Cibulka’s in fact was a certain kind of personality with an insatiable craving for Manichaean divisions. Of his heroism during the communist years they now wondered: Where was the line between moral clarity and madness?
IN SEPTEMBER OF 2006, Dariusz had written from Warsaw, “Dear Marci and Tim, You may be interested in an article that I published in Gazeta Wyborcza. A new act on the Institute of National Remembrance may make you criminals too. I will be delighted to share a cell with you.”
The Institute of National Remembrance had come into being as a result of a December 1998 statute. It was a state institution, charged with educating the Polish public; investigating Nazi and communist crimes against the Polish nation; and overseeing the archives of the communist security organs. It was now the caretaker of approximately fifty miles of archival files. Dariusz’s editorial in Gazeta Wyborcza concerned the statute on the Institute of National Remembrance being debated in the Senate. The statute included the provision: “Whoever publicly imputes to the Polish nation participation in, organization of, or responsibility for communist or Nazi crimes is liable to up to three years in prison.”
Dariusz warned the legislators who were so concerned with protecting Poland’s reputation that this law would have the opposite effect.
The original project authored by the Senate Legislative Office was unambiguous: It enjoined the prosecutor to act in every “case of imputing to the Nation or the Polish State, or a group of Polish citizens and/or individual persons being Polish citizens.” With this the authors claimed that no Polish citizen has ever taken part in any Nazi or communist crime.… As a history professor I hope that such an opinion results only from thoughtlessness and not from a complete lack of knowledge about Polish history in the twentieth century, or an equally harmful desire to deprive Poles of a fundamental aspect of human dignity: the capacity to choose good or evil. For if neither groups of nor individual Polish citizens had anything to do with these crimes, then why all the ado about the iniquities of the communist regime? After all, everything bad was done by some alien creatures, most likely Martians.
By then the proponents of a hard-line “historical policy” in Poland were waiting for Jan’s new book. Fear had been published in English in 2006. It was scheduled to appear in Polish the following year—but was delayed: the Polish publisher was afraid of releasing the book before the October 2007 parliamentary elections and thereby possibly swinging the election to the populists. It was a not unreasonable concern.
And so the Polish version of Fear appeared in print only in January 2008. Shortly thereafter, a Krakow district attorney initiated an inquiry into the book on the basis of the new law. Jan appeared unfazed.
“It’s nice,” he told the press, “that the district attorney is reading my book.”
The president of the Institute of National Remembrance called Jan “the vampire of historiography.”
“Man is a savage, evil beast,” said Marek Edelman, the hero of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, who was now well into his eighties.
Moreover, for Marek Edelman the pathology of those who had lived through the Second World War—the ease with which the prospect of personal gain or revenge could inspire murder—was a particular one.
“In my opinion the problem will end only when the generation who witnessed the Holocaust has died,” Marek Edelman added.
I thought of Arnošt Lustig, so much more jovial and less cynical than Marek Edelman, who nonetheless felt similarly.
“No one who survived the war is normal,” Arnošt once said, “it’s impossible.”
Adam Michnik was sitting around the same table with Marek Edelman that day in a Jagiellonian University auditorium.
“I would like,” Adam Michnik said, “to treat the discussion about Gross’s book as a Polish-Polish discussion and not a Polish-Jewish one.”
It was not a trivial distinction. In Jan’s mind, the discussion had always been a Polish-Polish one. It was his Polishness that had shaped him.
“I wrote this book as a Pole,” Jan said.
And despite what his critics—and many of his American friends—believed, this was the truth. For this book, like Neighbors, was all about his Polishness, about wanting the Polish intelligentsia to be what it ought to be, what he’d grown up believing it should be: the conscience of the nation.
The journalist Anna Bikont wrote a long article about Jan—not about Fear but about Jan himself. It was the most personal, and the best one I’d read.
“The first person I saw back in Poland from the March emigration was Janek’s father, Zygmunt Gross,” one of Jan’s friends remembered. “He’d come with the ashes of his wife, Hanna Szumańska, which he wanted to bury in Poland. Many years later Janek buried his father in Poland.”
Adam Michnik told Anna Bikont that in the apartment where Jan grew up, it was if there were no communism. Inside that apartment people talked about poetry.
It created a difference between Adam and Jan—for Jan, Adam believed, didn’t understand “Judeo-Bolshevism,” he didn’t perceive it. It wasn’t Jan’s world. It was, though, Adam’s world: Adam Michnik was a child of Polish Jewish communists.
“But I, when I read in Fear, that the lives of Jews in Poland after the war were a nightmare,” Adam Michnik said, “I have in the back of my mind that the people my father knew, Jewish communists who had sat in prison before the war, were getting apartments on the Alley of Roses, while in the meantime the Home Army soldiers in detention and in prison were kept up to their ankles in shit.”
Adam and Jan had known each other for a very long time.
“When we founded the Club of the Seekers of Contradictions,” Adam Michnik remembered, “Janek was fourteen, I was fifteen … We knew that in Poland there was a dictatorship based on lies, only I was a rebellious communist, I was interested in Trotsky and the differences between the young Marx and the older Marx, while Jan didn’t care about that. He was interested in Thomas Mann.”
At a Starbucks in midtown Manhattan, Anna Bikont told me that her friends from the 1968 “March emigration”—even now, after forty years in the United States—“still live Poland.” She had come to New York to escape from Poland for a while—but there was no escape.
IN 2007, ANDRZEJ Wajda, the same Polish directo
r who had made the films Ashes and Diamonds and Korczak, completed a film about the 1940 Soviet massacre of thousands of Polish officers near the Katyń forest. Toward the film’s end there was a scene involving two sisters. The war had just ended. The German occupation was over, and the communists were coming to power in Poland. One sister chose cooperation with the new communist regime; the other chose resistance. And just before the principled and rebellious sister was arrested, the one who had opted for accommodation said to her, “There will be no free Poland—not in our lifetime, not in the lifetimes of our children.”
That was almost true.
For in the end, the revolution did come in the lifetimes of the children of those women who were young in 1945.
Nineteen years after the fall of communism, Adam Michnik published in Gazeta Wyborcza an interview with his old friend Václav Havel. Both men had been among the victors of 1989. They had won: Václav Havel had become president of postcommunist Czechoslovakia; Adam Michnik had become the founder and editor in chief of Poland’s most important newspaper. Yet the imprisoned playwright who had gone to live in the castle was not enamored of this new, postcommunist world.
“With the evolution of this global, consumer civilization masses of people are advancing who are not creating any values,” Havel said. “I feel a need for some kind of existential revolution. Something has to change in people’s consciousness.”
Adam Michnik and Václav Havel had known each other for thirty years: they had first met in the mountains, in 1978, at a secret, illegal gathering of Czechoslovak and Polish dissidents. Out of that meeting came Havel’s essay “The Power of the Powerless,” the tale of the greengrocer, who every morning put the sign in his shop window saying, “Workers of the world unite!” If a twenty-year-old today were to read “The Power of the Powerless”—Adam Michnik wanted to know—what could he take from it?
“The fundamental imperative,” Havel answered, “to live in truth.”
GENERATION, AN UNUSUALLY important category in communist times, remained so in the postcommunist years.
Adrian, a Polish poet from Łódź, was my own age.
“Our generation won the lottery,” he told me in the summer of 2008. Adrian’s friends, by and large, were living much better than their parents had. In 1989 they had been just about to enter the university. And so they had a chance: a chance to make practical choices, to study economics and foreign languages, to find well-paying jobs at multinational firms.
Adrian told me of one friend in particular, a devout Catholic who would not allow a critical word to be said about the pope in his house. It was an impressive house, outside of Łódź, on a large property bought with the profits from his business: an “erotic network,” which offered services by e-mail and text message.
“The biggest secret,” Adrian told me, “only guys work there. Because guys know what guys want.”
This was the generation Havel believed was creating no new values.
My Lithuanian graduate student Jolanta was born in 1977—fourteen years before the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991. In her mind her own generation was a transitional one, with one foot in the Soviet world of her parents and the other in the new world of cell phones. It gave her, she believed, a unique perspective: for she understood both of those worlds, both the older generations formed by Soviet times and the younger ones formed by high-speed internet.
“Some of my friends, mostly those older than me by four or five years, did not come out of the changes as unscathed as I did,” Jolanta wrote. “They had already finished high school and were at university when the Soviet system collapsed. Some had just started new jobs that became redundant with the gusts of strong new winds. Even now, lots of them find it difficult to live in the Soviet-free Lithuania, and it’s difficult for me to explain why.… Iskalechennye sud’boi, that’s how my friends call them. Broken by fate.”
Another of my graduate students, Ania from Gdańsk, was also of Jolanta’s generation, born in the mid-1970s. In the 1990s, Ania had studied in Gdańsk and in Geneva before beginning her doctoral work in the United States. Like Jolanta, Ania had been too young to take an active part in 1989, yet too old not to realize that something momentous was happening. She felt closer to the generation older than her own than she did to the generation only a few years younger.
“Those just several years younger already knew how to think about Europe without that absurd mixture of superiority and inferiority complexes,” she wrote to me. “I have the feeling that twenty-five-year-olds perceive Europe as part of their horizon, as something their own, as a self-evident element in their lives. For those in their thirties—Europe is still more a divertissement, an ornament in their lives, than it is a foregone conclusion.”
One day that summer of 2008, my Czech political theorist friend Pavel and I talked about “Eastern Europe.” Pavel had never been among those offended by that description—he’d always presented himself as an East European. Now, though, “Eastern Europe” was a vanishing category, and Pavel was finding that he needed that label less and less. So, too, did he no longer conceal the Marxist-Leninist part of his philosophy degree: the nineties were over, some shame had passed. For Pavel this was a critical distinction: guilt versus shame. About communism—about having studied Marxism-Leninism at the university—he felt no guilt. But for a long time he had felt shame.
Pavel and I talked about Václav Havel, who told Adam Michnik that only when a new generation matured, a generation wholly untainted by communism, would there be a chance for real change, a chance to escape the influence of the opportunists, a chance to bring new values into public life. This was how Marek Edelman and Arnošt Lustig felt about the generation who had lived through the war. The twentieth century had not been a good one.
That summer Pavel’s sister and her family came to visit New Haven. Pavel’s nephew was born in 1991; his niece was born in 1993. They were of the new, untainted generation in which Havel placed his hopes. Multilingual, cosmopolitan teenagers from Prague, they had gone to school in England and Spain and traveled in the United States. The distinction between Eastern and Western Europe was not something they rejected: rather, they were not especially aware that such a distinction existed at all.
One day I asked Pavel’s sixteen-year-old nephew what he thought about communism.
“Everything belonged to the state,” he answered, “that’s the main thing.”
After a moment he added, “It sounds good, but it was proven not so good.”
“Socialism with a human face”—the slogan encapsulating the hopes of 1968—brought no associations at all. Pavel’s nephew and niece had an idea that tanks had arrived in Prague in 1968 but were not certain from where. And they knew that Jan Palach was someone who’d set himself on fire but were unsure why. They knew, too, that Charter 77 was something people had signed, but they had no idea what it said.
“Do you know who Stalin was?” Pavel’s sister asked her son.
“A dictator?” he answered after some hesitation.
“And Stalinism?”
“Probably the rule of Stalin … I don’t know.”
Tragedy and Romance
In the spring of 2009, Vlasta came to Boston. And there, for the first time in fourteen years, we talked about Oskar’s suicide. It was a long time before Amanda had told Vlasta exactly how it had happened: Oskar had gassed himself with carbon monoxide.
Vlasta told me, too, that during that year at Stanford from 1993 to 1994—the year Amanda and I were studying Czech with her, the year we all met—she had tried to dissuade Oskar from thoughts of returning to Prague. Already then Vlasta saw that returning would not be what he imagined it would be. His friends had made compromises Oskar would never understand; they had suffered things Oskar could never share.
Nearly fifteen years had passed since then; now it was a cool spring day in New England, with just a little bit of rain. Walking through Boston Vlasta and I talked for the first time about Oskar’s memorial service
, that awful scene in the pub, the awfulness of which Vlasta did not believe Amanda had even been able to absorb. And Vlasta remembered in particular something Honza, then still her husband, had said to her there. Amanda was talking—trying to talk—to Oskar’s friends, middle-aged Czech men who did not want to listen to her. And when, as Amanda talked, the first one stood up to leave, Honza said to Vlasta, “Go over and slap him.” Vlasta was struck by this: it was somehow very sensitive and very insensitive at once, and so very uncharacteristic of the lighthearted Honza.
I WAS IN Warsaw for a week that spring of 2009 when Adam Michnik published an essay about Henry Dasko, my friend from Toronto who had died of brain cancer two and a half years before. Adam remembered Henry from the years before March 1968, when Henry Dasko was still Henryk Daszkiewicz: diabolically bright and wildly handsome, an artist and a dreamer, a playboy with literary passions.
“One had to be a bit of a wanderer and an exile, a survivor of one of the dead worlds, of which there were so many in our century,” Henry wrote much later, “in order to fully understand Lolita, in order to truly decipher Nabokov.”
Henry had been born in Warsaw in 1946. His parents had been active members of the Communist Party since their youth.
The same was true of Adam Michnik—and just for that reason it was not easy for him to write about his friend Henry Dasko. This was especially so because he could never forget that both of their parents were “Polish communists of Jewish origin.”
“All of us,” Adam continued, “of that generation, from that background … despise the communist system; we reject the notion that at one time it was good but later it got spoiled. No: we believe that communism was a falsehood from the beginning. We try, though, to understand the people who were engaged in communism, their heterogeneous motivations and their biographies, sometimes heroic and tragic, always naïve and brought to naught. We do this, driven perhaps by a conviction hidden somewhere in our subconscious that it’s necessary to distinguish the sin from the sinner: the sin we condemn—the sinner we try to listen to, to understand.”