Wipszycka, years later a professor of ancient history, remembers it like this: ‘From the start it was a known fact that the shock-headed boy with the flirtatious look was a poet who wrote for the newspaper Sztandar Młodych (The Banner of Youth). Talking to him, you could feel at once that he had more experience of life than many of his peers.’
To my left was Z. – a taciturn peasant from a village near Radomsko, the kind of place where, as he once told me, a household would keep a piece of dried kielbasa as medicine: if an infant fell ill, it would be given the kielbasa to suck. ‘Did that help?’ I asked, skeptically. ‘Of course,’ he replied with conviction and fell into gloomy silence again. To my right sat skinny W., with his emaciated, pockmarked face. He moaned with pain whenever the weather changed; he said he had taken a bullet in the knee during a forest battle. But who was fighting against whom, and exactly who shot him, this he would not say. There were also several students from better families among us. They were neatly attired, had nicer clothes, and the girls wore high heels. Yet they were striking exceptions, rare occurrences – the poor, uncouth countryside predominated: wrinkled coats from army surplus, patched sweaters, percale dresses.1
Autumn 1951. President of the ZMP in the history faculty, colleague Kapuściński, summons colleague Wipszycka for a chat. Wipszycka, who like him has belonged to the organization since high school days, serves as deputy president of the students’ union in their faculty. She is not the activist type, and her colleagues have been muttering in the corridors that she is not coping very well. Kapuściński has an instructive chat with her.
‘It was like going to confession!’
During the ‘confession’, Kapuściński encourages Wipszycka to make a self-critical report at a meeting of the faculty’s ZMP. Self-criticism is a form of ritual, a public admission of one’s sins and negligence with regard to the Party, the ZMP, and the ideals of socialism.
‘I cannot remember the details of the conversation, only that just as Kapuściński wished, I made the self-critical report. In fact, my work as an activist for the student union really wasn’t going well. However, Kapuściński’s persuasion and insistence were so embarrassing that for a long time afterwards I retained the image of him as a fanatic who had played the leading role in some regrettable proceedings.’
Another time Kapuściński and a few other ZMP members from the faculty give two female students a public grilling. They knock out of their heads the young women’s faith in God and the idea of going to church on Sundays. ‘He was furious that the girls dared to stick to their guns. I myself was a non-believer, but I thought it disgraceful to force someone to drop their faith. I don’t think he understood that,’ Wipszycka relates.
In the second or third year, one of the women students edits a newsletter consisting of satirical epitaphs for the male students and lecturers who were giving others a hard time. The epitaph for Kapuściński reads thus: ‘Here Kapuściński was put to rest, / but not long had he lain / Before he was suddenly summoned / to rush off to work again’. (A decade later, in his reportage The Junk Room, Kapuściński makes use of this couplet to describe the hero of his text: ‘Here lay Grzegorz Stępik / But not long had he lain /When they pulled him from his grave / To rush off to work again’2).
‘That epitaph describes Kapuściński perfectly in those days,’ says Wipszycka. ‘An activist who is always being summoned somewhere, and then comes back with the task of mobilizing us into action. I must clarify that he was basically liked. Even though he had something of the zeal of an inquisitor in him, you never felt any malice in anything he did, and he never acted in a way meant to harm or upset anyone. What mattered to him was the cause, and he believed in it deeply.’
. . . fighting the counterrevolution. Yes, they knew at last what to do and what to say. You don’t have anything to eat? You have nowhere to live? We will show you who is to blame. It’s that counterrevolutionary. Destroy him, and you can start living like a human being.3
Years later, this quotation from Shah of Shahs, one of Kapuściński’s most famous books, sounds like a self-ironical comment . He understood what he was writing about – and not just because of the observations he made in Iran.
The years 1949 and 1950, when Kapuściński is completing his high school studies and starting at Warsaw University, are the beginning of several of the grimmest years in Poland’s post-war history. After the Second World War, Eastern Europe has ended up in the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence. Under the protection of Stalin’s troops, homegrown communists assume power in Poland. Initially they tolerate pluralism and a political and cultural opposition, but after a few years they establish the dictatorship of the Polish United Workers’ Party (PZPR). Thousands of opponents of the new system are put in prison; even the most moderate criticism in the press, in literature or on the theatrical stage is quashed.
However, millions of Poles alive in that era would not agree to only this memory of the earliest post-war years. Their account might sound like this: We emerged from the war as a destroyed, damaged society – everyone had lost someone close to them – and at the same time we were full of hope and enthusiasm that the end of the war meant the end of hell on earth. For the small number of people who took up the fight against the new regime, hell did not end – they went to prison or were deported to Siberia. Yet the majority entered ‘life’s new stream’, as the poet wrote;4 they dreamed of a normal life, of finding their loved ones, of settling down, founding or rebuilding their families, and devoting themselves to the joys of life in peacetime and to reconstructing Poland out of the ruins.
These circumstances, plus the communists’ appealing social slogans – a fairer Poland than before the war, agricultural reform, social advancement for peasants and workers – make it easier for the new regime to gain support and to strengthen its initially weak position within society. The communists take repressive measures against their political opponents, but at the same time they introduce reforms that are met with wide-spread enthusiasm. They overturn the old social structure and improve the social status of the masses of peasants and proletarians.
There may have been talk about terror, the camps and the UB [the secret police], but every debate led to the conclusion that regardless of the darker aspects of this reality, socialization would entail social cleansing, and everything bad would disappear. It was assumed that we would manage to make Poland socialist, but not Soviet.5
This is how Jacek Kuroń – a man of Kapuściński’s generation, then a young communist and later a prominent dissident – reconstructs the atmosphere of the years immediately following the war.
From the beginning of the 1950s there is increasing fear and, gradually, less enthusiasm for the regime, which stifles criticism, centralizes decisions and ever more frequently applies instruments of repression. This turn in communist policy can be plainly seen in the countryside. During the first few years after the war, by giving the peasants land of their own, the communists win their gratitude. However, in the 1950s they start to oppose these very same peasants, whom they gifted with land, as private owners and producers. They force them to provide compulsory supplies of food; those who refuse are subjected to torture, arrest, fines and imprisonment.
The Party’s policy towards young people undergoes a similar shift. Until the end of the 1940s, reasonably free debates are held within youth organizations, but in the 1950s fear starts to dominate, and even those who are most loyal to the regime are afraid to express critical views. In 1950 almost half the young people arrested are ZMP members; they usually end up in custody cells and prisons because they dare to have their own opinion, different from official directives.
To end up in prison, you do not have to plan an armed rebellion – it is enough to tell jokes about the Party rank and file, the Soviet Union, or Stalin. The authorities find out about these jokes from denunciations – Poland’s Stalinist era is the heyday of the informer. As Kuroń recalls years later:
Out of fear, sometimes even school friends who sat at the same desk would start to inform on each other. The Soviet pioneer Pavel Morozov, the boy who informed on his own parents, was promoted by the propaganda as a positive hero. The authorities not only rewarded denunciations, but expected and demanded them. The social education was geared towards creating the conviction