The File (16 page)

Another close search at Warsaw airport. Avoiding the pirate taxi drivers at the arrivals gate, who will charge you the earth in deutsche marks or dollars, I take an ordinary, battered Lada taxi through gray, snow-covered streets to my usual haunt, the Hotel Europejski, once the smartest hotel in town but now quite seedy. (How pleasing to find that Graham Greene, the high priest of seediness, also stayed here.) A few telephone calls from my hotel room, with strange background noises on the line. Then the film speeds up.

Frantic bustle at the Solidarity offices in Szpitalna Street, ancient duplicating machines pounding away in the corner, a babble of excited conversation louder than at any cocktail party, workers jostling professors to get at the latest barely legible communiqué laid out on a makeshift trestle table. Around the corner, at the café, Janek, Joanna, Andrzej, chain-smoking, drinking endless glasses of tea, joking and talking all at once.
“Cześć!” “Hej!”
and off to the tram drivers’ depot, where a public transport strike is threatened. The transport workers’ leader is twenty-eight-year-old Wojciech Kamiński, mustachioed, leather-jacketed, bright-eyed. His father fought against Hitler with the Polish army in the West, then, returning to Poland, was imprisoned by the communists. The son is now spoiling for his fight.

Race down to the remote southeastern corner of the
country, where the farmers are demanding their own Solidarity. Wood-built villages, picturesque under thick snow, broad peasant faces, women making baskets by hand: which century are we in? Dash back to Warsaw for another crisis meeting of Solidarity’s national leadership, rough-faced miners and steelworkers amid the polished wood and genteel secretaries of the Club of the Catholic Intelligentsia. Excitement, laughter, beautiful women and a great cause. What more could I want? And, everywhere, the wonderful logo of this peaceful revolution:
SOLIDARNOŚĆ
in bright red, jumbly letters, positively bouncing across the page, with the sturdy letter
n
bearing aloft the national flag, red on white.

Poland was what journalists call a “breaking story.” To follow such a story is like being lashed to the saddle straps of a racehorse at full gallop—very exciting, but you don’t get the best view of the race. Yet I tried also to achieve a view from the grandstand, even an aerial view, and to understand the story as part of history. The history of the present.

For me, Poland was also a cause. “Poland is my Spain,” I wrote in my diary on Christmas Eve, 1980. In my reports and commentaries, I tried always to be strictly accurate, fair to all sides and critical of all sides. Impartial I was not. I wanted Solidarity to win. I wanted Poland to be free.

Many of those I spent time with belonged to the Polish generation of 1968. Several would become, and remain, good friends. Helena Luczywo, the diminutive, tireless editor of samizdat and Solidarity papers, chain-smoking, chain-talking, was a constant guide and helper.
Wojciech Karpiński, literary critic, aesthete, connoisseur of Nabokov and Gombrowicz, became my informal tutor in Polish cultural history. Then there was Adam Michnik, with his extraordinary energy, his verbal brilliance and bewitching display of bad teeth; Marcin Król, the most eloquent advocate of liberal conservatism among that generation; and the poet Ryszard Krynicki, weighing every word as if the moral condition of the world might hang upon it.

There were things, important things, that they had in common with the sixty-eighters in Germany: the casual way of dressing, the programmatic informality (straight to
ty
, rather than the formal
pan)
, the attitude to sex and to personal relations more generally. But other, more important things were utterly different. The German sixty-eighters had never themselves lived under Nazism. The Polish sixty-eighters had lived and still lived under communism.

The year 1968 in Poland had seen a horrible campaign by the ruling Party against those of Jewish origin, both within its own ranks and among the students—especially those who were themselves the children of Jewish communists. Now these children of the Polish counterparts of Red Lizzy and Frau R. played a part in the anti-communist opposition out of all proportion to their numbers: one more chapter in the extraordinary Jewish contribution to the history of Central Europe.

Those who had gone on to join the opposition, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, had tales to tell of secret-police harassment, discrimination and imprisonment beside which the German sixty-eighters’ stories of
Berufsverbot
and “structural violence” seemed to me, for the most
part, trivial and hysterical. I loved these Polish tales of opposition. I hugely admired the older intellectual leaders of Solidarity, men like Bronislaw Geremek, the historian who now turned his hand to making history, and Father Józef Tischner, with his unending supply of earthy jokes from the villagers of his native mountains. Those who impressed me most of all, however, were the steelworkers and peasant farmers and office clerks and housewives who now found their own voice and used it to speak simple but deeply moving words. It was a pentecostal moment: they spoke with tongues.

The revolutions of 1989 would be like that all over Central Europe, but Poland in 1980–81 was where I saw it first. It was not a poet but a worker in Poznan, a small man with a pale face and dirty black jacket, who told me, “This is a revolution of the soul.” There was also, of course, real hardship, roaring inflation, a good deal of chaos and the fear of Soviet invasion. But this fear was often more acute outside the country than it was in Poland itself. Zbigniew Herbert, the great poet of Polish resistance, returned to Warsaw early in 1981 joking that he couldn’t stand the tension abroad. I have since encountered this strange optical shift in traveling to other crisis spots—Nicaragua, El Salvador, even Bosnia. From outside, you imagine that everyone must be living every minute on the edge. Come inside, and there are normally dressed people going about their usual business, shopping, flirting, gossiping, in a tranquil main street.

This particular winter journey ended with three burly secret-police men knocking on the door of my hotel room, driving me to the police station in their battered Polonez, and giving me twenty-four hours to leave
the country. I then flew to Hamburg for a meeting with the publisher and senior editors of
Der Spiegel
, and a conversation I shall never forget. According to my notebook it went something like this. Editor, to me: “Will the Russians invade next week?” I explain that Warsaw is the worst place from which to make that judgment. Publisher, to editor: “Do we have tanks?” After a moment, I realize he means photographs of tanks for a cover story. Editor: “Actually the Russian tank didn’t sell so well.” (An earlier cover had shown a Russian tank crushing a white Polish eagle.) Publisher, sprawled back in his chair, musing half to himself: “Blood must flow properly, so we have a good cover story….”

There was a special sharpness to the contrast between Germany and Poland. Generally speaking, in Poland the experience and hope of freedom outweighed the fear of war; in Germany it was the other way around. There were many reasons for this—different histories, different approaches to Russia—but one particular German fear was that if the Warsaw Pact did invade Poland, the East German army would have to be involved, as it had been in the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia. German soldiers would again cross the Polish frontier, forty-one years after Hitler’s Wehrmacht. On the day I left East Berlin, my diary records: “It seems to me now oddson that the Russians will march into Poland. (And the Germans? Dr. D. today says Ja.)” Dr. D. was, of course, Dr. Demps, who had just given me a farewell lunch and that handsome volume of Zilie drawings.

It is so difficult to transport yourself back into the fears of that time. Because it did not actually happen, we
somehow feel that it could never have happened. Yet today, as I write this, I have before me the official record of what the East German leader, Erich Honecker, told the Polish Politburo member Stefan Olszowski on November 20, 1980: “We do not favor bloodshed. That is the last resort. But even this last resort must be applied when the Workers’ and Peasants’ Power must be defended. That was our experience in 1953 and it was also the case during the 1956 events in Hungary and in 1968 in Czechoslovakia.” I also have before me a graphic diagram, from the archives of the East German Defense Ministry, showing the army’s contingency plan for crossing the Polish frontier. How close the Soviet Union actually came to invading Poland, and what German participation was seriously considered, will always remain a matter for historical speculation, but this fear certainly did not come from thin air.

There was also, in the West, a larger fear that seems even more incredible today. This was the fear that in the heightened tension of the so-called Second Cold War—Reagan versus Brezhnev, American Cruise missiles against Soviet SS20s—the Polish revolution might light the fuse for a nuclear war. This was the time of the huge peace demos in Bonn, London and Amsterdam. People put stickers on their cars saying “It’s five minutes to midnight.”

I certainly had more sympathy with the movement for freedom in Eastern Europe than with the peace movement in Western Europe, and I conducted a polemical exchange with the historian E. P. Thompson, that great Old Testament prophet of the British peace movement, on the relationship between the two. As I recall it
now, I thought the danger of nuclear war was greatly, even hysterically, exaggerated. But again, memory has played tricks. I am startled to find that on the last page of my diary for 1980 I myself wrote: “There will be a nuclear war in the next decade.” And then in capital letters, as if the lower-case formulation was still inadequate: “WE WILL SEE A NUCLEAR WAR IN THIS DECADE.”

Against this backdrop of revolution and looming apocalypse, my own private life was transformed. I fell in love. Danuta had lived in the dissident intellectual milieu of beautiful Kraków, before coming to West Berlin. She was full of poetry and wonder, very pretty, very alive, infectious in her enthusiasms and in her sadness. Between those hectic trips to Poland, there were summer bicycle rides, sunlit afternoons in the beautiful woods along the Wannsee, evenings at the Greek restaurant up the road. But then, when we returned to the Uhlandstrasse flat, a telephone call or radio bulletin brought more news of crisis in the East.

Dashing to deliver another article to the main post office in the Winterfeldstrasse, for telex transmission to London, I listen on the car cassette player to the voice of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, vaulting through Schubert songs:

Laughing one moment, crying the next, that’s how it is in love. In love, and in revolution. In my diary the record of
our own moments of rapture and crisis alternates with entries like “high anxiety about Poland.” Our own fate and Poland’s seemed completely intertwined.

Today, our sons like us to tell them stories, preferably funny ones, about life under communism and particularly about the secret police. “Go on, Mama, tell us another story about the stupid police!” For them these are like tales from Narnia. As for the painted fragment of the Berlin Wall which now props up some books on the landing cupboard, that might as well have come from Pompeii.

Even I need a large effort of memory—or is it imagination?—to recover the experience. For the first time, I personally discovered what it is like to be prevented by a government from doing something that you really want to do. Prevented by a parent, a headmaster, by some private authority—that I had known; but prevented by the government, no. I had read about it, of course, then seen it at first hand in Eastern Europe; but now it was actually happening to me. To me, and to someone I loved.

Frontiers, visas, permits, became the stuff of everyday life, as they had never been before. Our very dreams were dogged by frontier guards. According to my diary, one night in March 1981, I dream that we are on a train crossing Poland, discussing how to get out. Forge the date stamps on our visas? Then a guard is charging along beside the train on a horse-drawn wooden cart, such as you still see in the Polish countryside, whooping “Ustrzyki Alarm!” The same night, Danuta dreams that we are walking with a group of friends through a wood, to a frontier. We are caught by East German frontier guards. They order the group to divide: those
for
the German
Democratic Republic to the left, those
against
to the right. Then they start shooting both sides. She escapes, taking, as she crosses the line, an eggplant canapé from a silver tray held by a black man in East German uniform.

The last surreal detail was probably influenced by Peter Zadek’s exuberantly staged
Fallada-Revue
, which we had seen at the theater a few days before. It was hardly less surreal for me to find myself, within a few hours, flying back to England for
The Spectator’s
annual cocktail party. Or, on another brief return, dropping in to the launch of the Social Democratic Party, at the Connaught Rooms in central London. “A rather lacklustre affair,” my diary notes. And I record David Owen’s plangent declaration: “Our country is in
real trouble.”

General Jaruzelski’s imposition of martial law in Poland, on December 13, 1981, struck us both in England, staying with James in his new house in Bartlemas Road, Oxford. On the first evening of martial law, Danuta was trembling uncontrollably Her country was in real trouble. I raged with professional frustration and sheer guilt at not being there while our friends were thrown into camps. I tried to get back in with an aid convoy but, just as I feared, the embassy refused me a visa. “In Poland [he] is already on the black list,” a note on my file now confirms.

It was not a merry Christmas. This reversion to dictatorship, an iron gate slamming shut across the bridge to Poland, further sharpened the finality of the decision Danuta had taken to make her life with me. And the huge, the incalculable personal cost of starting again in another country. One night she dreamed that she returned
to her old home in Kraków. There was a tree in front of the house. She cut it down.