One might even judge,’ the embassy summed up, ‘that the Polish authorities had the worst of the bargain, by putting themselves seriously out of pocket for something of no real gain but possible loss to themselves, since the Communists in the foreign delegations merely remained Communists, while the non-Communists went away warned, roused and enlightened by this personal demonstration of Communist intrigue.’
Berman himself recalls that ‘we lost Huxley among others, who issued a protest and left for London, and we were never able to exploit him for the Communist movement again.’ In the intellectuals’ attitude to the Cold War, this was a turning-point.
Some righteous fellows will now rush into print and denounce any Westerner who goes to Warsaw as a traitor to freedom. Three valiant Poles in prison, Adam Michnik, Władysław Frasyniuk and Bogdan Lis, have warned the delegates that they are ‘participating in a totalitarian farce’ and ‘legitimising those who sent tanks against a defenceless people.’
My own feeling is different. People should go and say what they think, as A. J. P. Taylor did, and see that their words are not suppressed. Among the working groups are two covering ‘cultural values’ and ‘intellectual responsibility. Here are opportunities which should be loudly taken.
Someone has written on a Warsaw wall: ‘A Fight for Peace is like a Fuck … for Chastity.’ I know what he means, but in this case it is better to fight than to stay chaste.
[1986
The Polish Ghosts
Not long ago, a diplomat told me that ‘relations between Poland and France have hit bottom.’ This is always an unwise sort of announcement. The Polish aphorist Stanisław Jerzy Lec, once wrote: ‘I hit bottom – and then I heard someone tapping from underneath.’
Never assume that things cannot get worse. And, sure enough, they have. France now has only a charge d’affaires in Warsaw, but he was summoned to the Foreign Ministry the other day and handed a furious protest about ‘the anti-Polish campaign developing in France.’
Genuine quarrels between European nations across the dividing line, as opposed to dutiful variations on whatever abuse the Soviet Union and the United States are exchanging, are surprisingly rare. Czechoslovakia and Austria are conducting a noisy feud, mostly about shootings on the border and Austrian television programmes. But the Franco-Polish row, which has been going on since General Jaruzelski’s imposition of martial law in 1981, has deeper roots.
Mr Jerzy Urban, the Polish spokesman, gave the game away when he accused France of being ‘painfully treacherous.’ This is a row about unrequited love.
Ever since Poland was partitioned in 1795, Poles have looked to France as their true friend in the struggle to regain independence. In practice, the French did little to help. But sentiment survived disillusion. In 1939, France left Poland in the lurch by promising an offensive against the Germans which was never carried out. And yet, when General de Gaulle visited Poland in 1966, people wept in the streets for joy.
Incredible as it sounds, General Jaruzelski and his men were at first staggered and then outraged, when President Mitterrand’s France condemned their December military putsch in 1981. They had imagined, on no rational grounds whatever, that a socialist France would be the first to be understanding and forgiving about what they had done. Instead, there was freezing official reproof from Paris, and the biggest upsurge of spontaneous public protest of any nation in Western Europe.
Since then, reproaching and abusing President Mitterrand has become almost a routine for Polish officials. The latest outbursts from Warsaw relate to two events. First of all, Laurent Fabius, the French Prime Minister, has invited Lech Walesa to take part in a conference in Paris on ‘Human Rights and Liberties.’ But worse, far worse, is a new film called ‘Shoah.’
The film, by the French director Claude Lanzmann, purports to be an account of the murder of the Polish Jews during the Nazi occupation. But it is also an attempt to show that the Poles themselves shared responsibility for the Holocaust. Lanzmann states that Polish anti-semitism was one of the main reasons why the Nazis established the extermination camps on Polish soil: ‘The Germans could expect the Polish people’s silent approval…. They were indifferent witnesses to actions committed before their eyes. Those few Jews who escaped were then mostly denounced.’
Nothing is harder to discuss with Polish friends, I have long ago discovered, than anti-semitism. The terrible charge levelled by ‘Shoah’ is in no way new; it is widely accepted, for instance, by Jews in the United States. Novelists like Leon Uris and William Styron have spread it to their readers. Some – not all – Zionist leaders have insisted on this version of history, mostly because it justifies their campaign before the war to persuade the Jewish population of Poland to emigrate to Palestine.
And yet Lanzmann’s accusation is a cruel distortion of the truth. The biggest concentration of European Jews settled in the lands of the ancient Polish Commonwealth because Polish kings invited them. Anti-semitism became strong only during the partitions, when some Polish nationalists accused the Jews of transferring their loyalty to Tsarist Russia and when the peasantry blamed its misery not only on Polish landlords but on the largely Jewish middle class.
When Poland became independent in 1918, most Jews proclaimed their loyalty to the new republic. But the small Communist Party, which at first opposed independence and preached fusion with Bolshevik Russia, was overwhelmingly Jewish in its leadership. This made it easier for right-wing parties to foment anti-semitism, with support from the Catholic hierarchy in many cases. By 1939, discrimination against Jews was government policy, although it was nothing like as brutal as the persecution of other minorities such as the Ukrainians and Byelorussians.
A few years ago, I picked up on a bookstall a novel by the pre-war writer Zofia Kossak-Szczuczka. ‘Blaze’ is one of the most viciously anti-semitic books I have ever read. But later I discovered that during the war the author joined ‘2egota,’ the underground group devoted to saving Jews from the Nazis, and was herself sent to Auschwitz. It was a warning to me of the complexity, the intimate mix of tragedy and heroism, which was the relationship between Catholic Poles and Jews. Even between the wars, most political parties saw anti-Jewish demagogy as an evil irrelevance.
Just over six million Polish citizens, a fifth of the population, were killed or murdered during the Nazi occupation; 2.9 million of those victims were Polish Jews. There were cases in which Polish resistance units shot Jewish fugitives, where Poles made a profession of spotting disguised Jews and denouncing them, where peasants sold Jewish children. But there were also Poles like those who hid a friend of mine smuggled out of the Ghetto as a little girl, or like the Catholic peasants who brought up the Jewish boy who was to become Roman Polanski. The penalty for this was death, and thousands paid that penalty. Claude Lanzmann’s generalisation about a whole people is a lie.
In Poland today, where almost no Jews remain, anti-semitism survives as an outrageous ghost, kept walking by political manipulation. For this, the regime itself has been responsible; in at least three times of crisis since the war, a party faction has tried to blame Poland’s failures on ‘Zionists’ and ‘cosmopolitans.’ The worst occasion was 1967-68, when a hysterical campaign led by the security police drove thousands of Poles ‘of Jewish extraction’ into exile. The damage done to Poland’s good name in the world has never been healed.
Who can calculate whether the Poles took a quarter, a half or most of their pathetically slight opportunities to save the Jews? The historian Norman Davies has called this ‘one of the meanest of modern historical controversies.’
And yet it is still being fought by politicians. On May Day, General Jaruzelski referred to ‘Shoah’ as ‘a hideous libel against our nation designed to cover up the shameful chapters of (the French) past.’ In other words, the French – even French Jews – have no right to criticise Poland, because the Vichy Government enthusiastically helped the Nazis to send Jews to the gas chambers.
While insults like this f
ly, the Poles will go on being denied the full, merciless, honest confrontation with their own past which they so deeply desire. And yet there are signs of hope. Last year at Oxford, a conference of international historians met to discuss the topic of Poles and Jews. Most delegates were one or the other – or both.
There were tense moments. But, by the end, the scholars from Poland and a new generation of young historians from Israel were drawing together. They saw that this was a single history, common to all of them. They put aside bitterness and – at last – began to put together the truth.
[1985
Piłsudski, or How to Ignore Defeat
A columnist is a sort of unlicensed dentist. One pokes about in the national subconscious, and sometimes the patient yelps or twists his feet. All the same, I was surprised when some readers wrote crossly the other day about the Polish-Soviet war of 1920. They said I had been too kind to the ‘Fascist dictator of Poland, Piłsudski.’
One of those buried British folk-memories lies here. It goes a bit like this: ‘Churchill, the old warmonger, wanted to smash the Russian Revolution. He got Piłsudski, dictator of Poland, to invade Russia. But the British working class said “Hands off Russia!” and refused to load arms onto that ship bound for Poland called – yes, I’ve got it – the “Jolly George.” That settled Piłsudski’s hash.’
It’s 50 years since Piłsudski died. It’s exactly 65 years ago last week that, with a dazzling counter-stroke, he checked and utterly routed the Bolshevik invasion of Poland at the Battle of Warsaw, as the Red Cavalry headed for Berlin. This seems a fair moment to talk about that choleric but gifted man, and to dispel a few of the myths.
I remember how, when President de Gaulle visited Poland in 1966, he acutely embarrassed his Communist hosts by stopping at a plain stone slab in the Wawel cathedral at Cracow. He looked down at the engraved word ‘Piłsudski’ and grunted, to no one in particular, ‘J’ai connu cet homme.’
He had indeed. The young de Gaulle had served on the French military mission in Warsaw in 1920. Older people could remember his stork-like figure, advancing down Nowy Swiat with a small packet of cakes from Blikle’s dangling from one gloved finger. Piłsudski ignored French advice and won the war his own way, but de Gaulle learned a lot from Piłsudski’s lofty, irascible style of leadership and his emphasis on patriotic unity. His own long exile at Colombey-les-deux-Eglises was a parallel to Piłsudski’s disgusted retirement to his country house at Sule-jowek in 1923, waiting for the call to return and save the nation which came three years later.
And there are unexpected parallels, too, between the lives of Józef Piłsudski and Lenin. Both were born to families of the minor aristocracy of the Russian empire. Both were caught up in the 1887 plot to murder the Tsar; Lenin’s brother Alexander was hanged for it, while Piłsudski’s brother Bronislaw received a prison sentence of 15 years. Both spent periods of political exile in Siberia, and both split their parties and led a minority to victory.
To summarise the tangles of Polish history, Piłsudski was born when the nation was still partitioned between Germany, Russia and Austria. He was a founder of the Polish Socialist Party, but a socialist who set the goal of independence before international revolution. In 1905, he broke with the party majority to lead an armed-struggle faction which fought the Tsarist authorities with bombs, pistols and robbery.
For him, Russia was the great enemy. In the First World War, he raised Polish legions to fight alongside the Austrians and Germans against Russia, bargaining for the independence of Poland. In 1918, with all three empires dead or dying, he returned to Warsaw as the leader of a free nation.
He dreamed of a grand federation with the Ukraine, Byelorussia and Lithuania. Piłsuldski’s march into the Ukraine, which provoked the Bolshevik invasion of Poland in 1920, was an attempt to build this federation. But the Treaty of Riga was a disastrous half measure. No federation emerged, but the new Poland acquired huge and resentful non-Polish minorities and earned the hatred of both Germany and the Soviet Union, a hatred which led to the destruction of Poland by Hitler and Stalin in 1939, four years after Piłsudski’s death.
After a century of suppression, Polish democracy emerged brawling and unstable. Piłsudski, a highly intelligent man with a very short fuse, never learned to live with Parliament, an ‘assembly of whores’ whose speeches, he once told the chamber, made the flies fall dead with boredom. In 1926, he led a military coup. Parliament survived, but opposition leaders were imprisoned and, as he grew old, Poland degenerated into an authoritarian state run by uninspired veterans of his legions.
Why, then, is Piłsudski’s legend so potent in his country today? In so much, he failed. The Tsardom survived his terrorism. Poland was not freed by his legions but by the simultaneous collapse of three empires. His hopes of dismembering Russia failed, like his dream of an eastern federation. His army proved hopelessly under-equipped in 1939, and his policy of balancing Germany against Russia died in the same disaster.
I think it is because he was the man who said: ‘To be defeated, and not to give in, is victory.’ It is also because he saw Russia as Poland’s historic enemy, and because his nationalism was not Fascist but – badly as things went after 1918 – included a vision of social justice and tolerance. But the main thing, for young Poles today, is Piłsudski’s faith that the struggle is worthwhile, that even through defeats, like the fall of Solidarity in 1981, the nation grows steadily wiser, better equipped to take and use freedom when it comes.
The Piłsudski cult is about the conspirator, not so much about the ageing Marshal on his war-horse, ‘Kasztanka.’ His pre-1914 world is simply the world of many Poles today. When he writes (and he was a brilliant essayist), about how he produced the clandestine socialist paper Robotnik in the 1890s -problems of noisy machines, of paper, of setting up chains of devoted boys and girls to distribute it – this is just 1985 for hundreds doing the same job now.
When he writes about smuggling forbidden literature -women were best, and one managed to transport 75 copies of August Bebel’s tome on ‘Woman’ under her dress, each Weighing a pound – these are still the brave comedies of beating the censor. When he recalls the stress of hiding – the pacing, chain-smoking, the glasses of tea – he is writing for the underground Solidarity committee today.
Piłsudski wrote a textbook, still used, on standing up to imprisonment. To him, it was part of being a Pole. But he asked himself whether ‘all those prison experiences of Poland with all their sacrifices and terror, with all the beauty of the human soul tormented in abnormal conditions, garrotted, beaten, tired out and yet prompt to rebel, whether this beauty is not one of the traits peculiar to our generation.’ He foresaw a free Poland whose young people would not understand this. ‘May they forget us … may they advance to a new life where the charm of prisons will not bring a smile to the lips nor poison to the heart.’
Poland has certainly changed. As a society, it is more at peace with itself (though not with its Government), more confident about its ability to manage itself in times of liberty, than it was in Józef Piłsudski’s time.
But not long ago I received a handsome card announcing a wedding. An invitation was not possible. Two young people were getting married in Warsaw, but in the prison on Rakowiecka Street. The bridegroom was Janusz Onyszkiewicz, once the spokesman for Solidarity. And the bride, tasting for herself the ‘charm of prisons’ – she was Józef Piłsudski’s granddaughter.
[1985
1956: How Poland Got Away With It
Thirty years ago this month… I had half made a resolution not to be captured by anniversaries, those meaningless indicator-boards in decimals which command us to exhume feelings. But the three words ‘nineteen fifty-six’ break through all common-sense, like a tank – British, Polish, Hungarian, Israeli, Soviet – lurching through one of the flimsy barricades of that year.
I was far from all that, a reporter in Manchester. But I remember the first trainload of Hungarian refugees, many still wearing crus
ted bandages, sitting down to supper at the Styal Homes. A silly Red Cross woman went to the piano and suddenly struck up the Hungarian national anthem. When she had finished, she turned round with a proud smile which vanished instantly. All over the hall, men and women had flung down their spoons and – faces in their hands or even on the bleak wood of the table – were weeping as I have never seen people weep.
In the Suez demonstration in Whitehall, after Aneurin Bevan spoke, I was next to a friend of mine who had been badly wounded as an officer in Korea. A mounted policeman hit a woman with a baton. My friend beside himself, shouted: ‘You can’t do that – I saw you, I’ve got your number!’ The policeman heard him, turned his horse and rode him down. There went a fragment of the enormous innocence that a young British generation lost in those weeks.
It is right to remember all this with horror and contrition: the tragedies and the crimes which – as one of their side effects – left Britain rather less of an island. But images of Budapest and of Egypt encourage us to overlook what happened in Poland, that October. There, too, a ‘captive nation’ broke with Stalinist tyranny and sent the Russian controllers home. Poland, however, got away with it.
That should be qualified, of course. Nearly 80 people were killed in the riots at Poznan on 28 June, the event which pushed the Polish crisis into top gear. Although a reforming party leadership replaced the Stalinists that October, some Soviet troops remained in Poland, and the Soviet Union retained a general control – indirect, rather than direct – over policy. The new Communists, although a much more engaging bunch than the gang they threw out, still kept a monopoly of political power, and eventually misused it so grossly that a far bigger workers’ rising took place 14 years later.
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