The other play was in the Workers’ Theater at Nowa Huta, a modern steel town built in five years on the outskirts of Krakow. One hundred thousand people live in these giant cement sardine tins, and only the theater is graceful, and it is crowded every night. I saw, there, Camus's allegory against dictatorship, called Siege of the State. The costumes were dazzling in color and shape, made of cheesecloth or cheap rayon stuff; the single décor was strong architecture; the crowd scenes were as beautiful as ballet. You could hear yourself breathe in that audience. This play, among us, would be considered highbrow and difficult. The workers of Nowa Huta like it best of the repertory, which includes, oddly enough, The Rainmaker and Of Mice and Men. A young woman less than thirty years old directs this theater. I asked if anyone had seen the play in Paris; how did they get their ideas for costuming, staging? No one had seen it anywhere. This fresh, compelling production came straight out of their own heads. And there never was a clearer denunciation of tyranny.
My young pals agreed that the government was quite glad to let allegory past the censor; you can't have a political quarrel, with a powerful Eastern neighbor, over allegory. And it is entirely true that anyone can say, if not print, film, or act, what he likes. The freedom of speech is terrifying to an outsider, who fears that at some later date, when perhaps things have tightened up, this freedom will be paid for retroactively.
One night we went to a students’ theater, again a derelict basement which the young had fashioned into a tiny playhouse with their own hands. This play was also an allegory, having to do with prison—"Polish undergraduate Ionesco,” Julek said. The stage was set with ominous spindly black bars, cages, ladders. The theater was a rabbit warren of handmade cement stairs with a small room, not more than twelve by eight feet, at the top. The director, an alarmingly thin boy, sleeps here on a short sofa and also uses his bedroom as the theater office. We sat where we could in this room, the troupe and some other young ones, with a bottle of vodka and time nonexistent.
I don't know how the talk came to Auschwitz, that greatest of all memorials to dictatorship. A young musician said to me, “But they don't know about Auschwitz in the West, do they? They don't believe it?”
“Yes, they do, they do.” Only, of course, I thought, they don't know, they cannot visualize it, they cannot feel it. You have to go yourself; you have to see the mountain of women's hair, the mountain of dead children's shoes, the mountain of pulled-out teeth; you have to pick up a handful of mushy soil near the crematoriums and touch the rotting lumps of white bone in it. A man who had been a prisoner in this place for four years—from the age of twenty-one to twenty-five—guided me over the huge camp. We passed through the execution yard where his father, and tens of thousands of others, had been shot. He led me down narrow stairs to the torture cells beneath and told me in a flat voice what had happened here. There were bunches of field flowers on the doors of some cells, mementos left to the dead. That day I had seen groups of gypsies, nuns, Polish peasants, a few Frenchmen, a few Dutchmen moving silently and with stunned faces around the crude brick buildings. Suddenly, in that dark, empty cellar my guide shivered but said nothing.
On four hundred and thirty-seven acres of swampland (an area smaller than La Guardia Airport), behind this barbed wire, the Nazis murdered four million men, women, and children by hunger, disease, medical experiments, poison gas, shooting, hanging, and injections of phenol to the heart.
No one who has seen Auschwitz will ever forget it. It is a sin that the twenty-eight nations (including our own) whose citizens were killed here do not preserve this prison and raise a noble monument to the dead. Auschwitz should never be forgotten; it is a warning for all mankind.
We stopped talking of Auschwitz because we could not bear it; but still we could not leave the war. The war is always with you in Poland, and even these very young people are incurably scarred by it. One said that they had had such “grave” childhoods, “it is better now to forget.” At ten years of age, he was carrying secret papers for the Home Army in Warsaw, perfectly aware of what the Gestapo did to children too. His parents died in Auschwitz. Another said that as a boy of nine, coming home, he saw German soldiers collect all the people from a big apartment house, line them up against the wall of their home, and mow them down with machine gun fire. “When I was going home,” he said, “just across the street. I remember how afraid I was.” These memories burn in every brain. No one, in Poland, except the very very young, is free of such knowledge. And no one has had ease and safety, in the peace, to heal the memories a little. The wonder of all is the lion-hearted gaiety of these people.
Nothing I know of the war is as appalling as what they know and have lived through, but I have my special heroes and I spoke of them: the Polish Corps in Italy. Suddenly a young actor said, “Words. Nothing but words. The Poles are always brave; they know how to die. They die everywhere, especially well in foreign wars. It is very nice for you; you can admire us. It is useless and it must stop. Better not be brave and live; better be like the Czechs and live. There has been too much dying.”
I said that I knew people in the West who believed that nuclear war was preferable to living under a totalitarian dictatorship, a Russian dictatorship obviously. The whole roomful of them, the quiet gentle girls, who need good food and a hair wash and a rest, and the tense, fiercely alert boys, cried out, “No! No! Not ever!” One said, “Haven't we had enough, in the name of God? Let us just live, no matter how we have to do it. You can do something about life, a little anyhow, or have some fun, if you're still alive.”
The youngest there, an actor of twenty, with a face like a Botticelli angel, said, “Oh, stop it now. Stop talking about war. We have nothing but war films and war books, and we hear about it from our fathers and our brothers, and we can see what it was, any time we go anywhere. Stop. Talk about the future.”
“Good,” I said. “What about the future?”
“Well,” he said, shy now with everyone listening, and this a matter of such importance, “what is the student theater like in America?”
Warsaw frightened me at once, a haunted city, and I never got over a feeling of dread, depression, an irrational anxiety for everyone. Warsaw was destroyed by the Germans in 1944, block by block, using dynamite, fire, bombs; doggedly, the Poles are rebuilding it. Warsaw looks or feels as if the war had ended last week, not some thirteen years ago. There is the wide weed-grown flat where once the ghetto stood; there are everywhere gaping holes in place of buildings; there are other buildings shored-up, half burned, and slashes and holes from shellfire on peeling walls. There are the skinny new trees.
Poland was defeated by the Nazi and Soviet armies in the month of September, 1939; but conquered Poland remained one of the cruelest battlefields of the war, and six million Polish citizens were killed in the five and a half years of World War II. Statistics are always cold, but perhaps if one compares numbers, the statistics take on their true size: the total of dead and missing of the United States Armed Forces in World War II was 407,828.
In Warsaw, you also remember that you are in a Communist-controlled country, though by all accounts the control now is humane and lenient, judged by what it was and what it is in other satellite countries. Still you do hear the incompetent echo in the tapped hotel telephone; you do notice that people look over their shoulders when talking in restaurants—the secret police are dormant but not forgotten; you feel in your bones, as you would feel a threatening change in the weather, every change in Russian mood or action. This is not an air we have ever breathed; I doubt if we would be strong enough to resist such a climate and stay as healthy in spirit as the Poles.
The Old Town of Warsaw has been entirely rebuilt and is an enchanting seventeenth-century village, with pale-painted house fronts, carved doors, squares, small churches. The Poles needed this lovely reminder of their past, for if man does not live by bread alone, Poles particularly do not. I met a few young artists who were lucky enough to be allotted garrets in the Old Town
as studio homes. They were adorable children, as tidy and domesticated and content with their attics as very old people who have at last retired to their dream bungalows in Florida.
One boy who paints fairy-story illustrations (the complete, determined escape) told me something of his life. When he was eleven, he was orphaned; he did not say (one never asks) how his parents died; they were both thirty-six at the time. His fifteen-year-old brother was deported for slave labor in Germany and never again heard of. An unknown family took him in; he stayed with them until he was fourteen. Then he returned to Warsaw alone, frail (he is frail now), and made his own way, working, scrounging, starving, to get an education, to go to the Beaux Arts. At twenty-three, he married. His wife, also a painter, is like a little furry woodland creature, so shy that she cannot speak without blushing, and never in a voice above a whisper. They were married for four years but had no place to live together. Now they have a home, made gay and pretty by their taste, their economies, and their skillful hands. At night they have their evening meal of tea and cookies, sitting together in their garret in a radiance of love. This is such joy, this safety and peace inside four walls, that they think of nothing except how to earn enough to keep what they have. In their lives they have made one trip, for three days to Dresden in East Germany to look at pictures in the museum; they said the pictures were wonderful.
A friend of theirs, a girl who works in a museum, is married to a painter and is also blessed with a garret, spoke of the destruction of Warsaw; she was twelve years old at the time. “It took perhaps thirteen hours to walk through the city, when the Germans drove us all out. There was a great crowd of people, old ones and sick and wounded and children, and the Germans with their guns standing along the streets and saying, ‘Hurry up, hurry up.’ If anyone fell, they had to be left behind, and families got lost from each other. You could hear nothing except the fires and the sound of burning beams falling from houses. Happily, in these circumstances, one has no imagination.”
There is nothing cruel, insane, ugly that they have not seen; and it has made them strangely quiet. Another young man in this group, trying to explain their outlook, spoke of the difference between them and les jeunes, which means people younger than themselves. They are twenty-six, twenty-eight, and do not consider themselves young. He said with pity, with impatience too, “The young have complexes which they show.”
These young ones have had enough and more than enough of politics, the wicked mess their elders have offered them. They believe in art and in their love for each other; they are not like old married couples, they are like Hansel and Gretel clinging together in a hostile world. They are absolutely private individuals and “realists,” as they say. Maybe they feel that having homes, they have more than most and more than they dared hope for, and they hope no further.
Another day I talked with two successful young literary men in the Writers’ Club. Each intellectual craft has its own club, a few modest rooms where you can eat and drink. They wanted to know about good writers in England and America, and I told them what I could, trying to explain styles and characters and plots, and as I talked I saw the novels and stories I was discussing as fantastic carving on cherry stones. I did not miss the polite glaze that came over their old-young faces.
The novelist with one arm, who had been deported to Russia as a child for slave labor and had spent his adolescence in DP camps in India and Africa, said that he did not think such works could be published in Poland. “People would not really understand them. You see, we perhaps don't care so much for purely personal problems. I mean, things you can get over by yourself.”
The young, they said, have learned no ideology; they have learned something else: an interior censorship. There is not only the official censor, but the watchdog inside who tells you in advance what you can get by with. They rebel against this rationed freedom, yet everyone I saw agreed that there is no thought of overthrowing Communism as such. “No one thinks of capitalism again—that's a past dream—they only think of how to make this better.”
Capitalism is another word that has to be redefined. To the Poles, I think it means lavishness, an unimaginable and even undesirable glut of things not needed. I did not find anyone who coveted our two-toned cars. What they wanted was a room—no matter how small, how bare—of one's own; and two suits, not just one; and two weeks’ vacation outside of Poland. They envy us what we value too lightly: our intellectual freedom. Our real richness, in their eyes, is that we can have personal convictions and act on them.
I talked often to a man who seemed to me an encyclopedia of human experience. He was born rich and lived a princeling life until he was deported, as a boy in his early teens, to Russia for slave labor. He stayed on, freely, after the war because he wanted to see Russia. ("It's a fascinating country.”) Still in his teens, he was put in charge of eighty displaced Polish families somewhere at the end of the world, in the hinterland of Russia. When he came back to Europe, he managed to collect what he could of his money and went off to blow it, dazzlingly, in Italy and France. Then he returned to this Polish life which is at once buried and wildly alive. He spends all the money he cannot spare on books, and he knows far more than I do about Western literature.
Above all, I think he wants the West to understand Poland, and he knows how hard that task is. He said, “You Americans don't understand us. We don't envy you. We are glad that there's something young and beautiful and gay and happy in the world. Only we are often disappointed in you. Because you have so much, and you are not à votre hauteur. Not all the time, as you should be. You know, sometimes when I am very sad, I think to myself about English law, and it makes me happy. Just thinking about it. The way they go on, so careful about their law, so respectful of it.”
The Poles love to laugh, and do, and I felt ashamed, for their sakes, because I could not laugh enough. The spectacle of constant bravery does not lead, I find, to laughter; it induces many intense emotions, the simplest of which is awe. But I found one man with whom I laughed at once and steadily, as if some electrical connection of gaiety had been set up between us. He looked irresistibly jolly, for a start, being shortish and roundish, with merry eyes and a face full of loving, laughing kindness. He worked in a small office for a newspaper, and the presses on the floor below shook the building, and the telephone rang all the time, and young people sauntered in and smiled at him and chatted, and you could see he was a benign guardian angel for them. I asked what a girl with enormous dark eyes and a scruffy Sagan haircut had wanted of him, and was told with merriment that she came in to discuss Doctor Zhivago.
He said he had a copy, which was a nice surprise, and we agreed that Pasternak's colleagues, yelping like jackals, were a scandal. “Here,” he said, “we are no longer under the necessity to pronounce ourselves on what we do not understand. It is not much; but it is much,” and he twinkled at me.
He was anxious about the young. “Perhaps they use up all their fantasy in trying to get better living conditions. It is their main great preoccupation. And there have been so many plans and rules, people forget a little how to make their own plans and dreams. Besides, we have not your tradition of private freedom. You are ready to make any sacrifices to do what you want.”
If he liked to believe that, it was not up to me to disillusion him.
“I came here to find out about private freedom,” I said. “I wondered whether the young would talk and think alike. I wondered whether a system, any system, if it's the only one you know, could make minds operate to order or on a pattern. Now I think we could take lessons from Poland on how to be rugged individualists. But I'm repelled by Communist economics. Do you remember that wonderful line in Doctor Zhivago: ’Man was born to live and not to prepare to live'? That's what I've got against Communist economics. One damned steel mill after another, and no joy for the living. I don't understand economics. Does it have to be so ruthless?”
“We were very poor, and the war made us poorer. It is not all as bad as you thi
nk. Some people are better off than before. Perhaps 70 per cent of the people. Not those like us, but others.”
“I don't want to argue this with you,” I said. “I want to get the proper Communist point of view on it. It's too absurd the way I can't seem to find a proper Communist.”
He found this very funny. “But I am a Communist.”
“You!” I said, shouting with laughter.
“No, no,” he insisted, laughing now at both of us. “I am, really. Honestly, I am.”
This confirmed my one certainty about Poland: no labels fit.
The Fifties
For a year and a half, Italy was my fifth foreign country of residence. That was well before the population explosion, the travel explosion, the motor car explosion, the hideous cement building explosion had done their dirty work on Europe. I produced enough serious fiction to keep myself excited, enough bilgers to keep afloat, and saw the glory that was Italy when there was room to see it. My relation to countries seems to be like love affairs, leaving tender memories, no disillusion or regrets and no reason to end except the beckoning next love affair. If that is so, my relation to the United Kingdom of England, Scotland and Wales (excluding Northern Ireland) is like an open marriage; I roam freely and return—to London again, in 1953.
London had revived. The remaining bombsites no longer looked raw and many had bloomed into squatters’ gardens. Houses were being painted and repaired: no amputated halves showed wallpaper on a last exposed inner wall. There were few cars, uncrowded unhurried quietness, the streets were clean and the air smelled like air. Weather permitting, to walk idly around the city and the parks, by day and night, was a constant pleasure. Perhaps it was a time of convalescence, a lull, when the Brits seemed glad to be alive, comfortable enough and taking it easy.
The View from the Ground Page 17