POLAND STRANGELY CHANGED

Denis Hills finds an air of

uneasiness in the country where he lived before the War

FORTY-FIVE years had passed since Hit- ler's panzers severed my connection with Poland — where I had been working in Polish journalism in the Corridor and later as a teacher — and I walked over a footbridge across the Dniestr into Roma- nia from Polish Galicia. All l had salvaged was a fibre suitcase with a few scraps of holiday clothing. The German army was already deep in Poland and there were rumours that the Red Army was mobilising along the eastern border. The Polish fron- tier policeman who stamped my passport gave me a memorable goodbye. `Panie profesorze,' he said, 'when you return to Poland come back in a bomber.'

Now, after those many years, I was on my way back, not in a bomber but in an old camping van that had been lying out in a field near Henley-in-Arden. With my store of romantic but rusty memories I was prepared for an emotional experience. That first sight of cobblestones, tumble- down villages and plodding farm carts across the Oder. The endless beet fields. Flaking churches, flower-strewn grave- yards, unpronounceable names. Like Rip Van Winkle. I would find much that was barely recognisable: rebuilt city centres, new ideologies and war memorials. Fore- warned about Iron Curtain shortages I took care to stock up in the supermarkets of Brunswick with provisions.

My passage through the Iron Curtain at Frankfurt-an-der-Oder seemed ominous: a two-hour search by a German customs officer of everything in my van, from tea-bags and tobacco pouch to books. The Polish official was also unhelpful. 'Where is the mleko (milk)?' he insisted, 'How many kilos?' I have no mleko,' I said. `Only enough for my tea.' Perhaps there was a smuggling racket in powdered milk. It was long after midnight before I was allowed to drive off into the welcoming darkness of the Polish countryside and find a gap in a wood for a night's rest.

When I stopped for a morning meal in a small restaurant I was joined by the local photographer. One of the first things he said to me was, 'Why did Churchill and Roosevelt sell Poland to Stalin?' It was a question I was to hear again in Poland. I also learned about the black market. A taxi pulled up while I was resting in a lay-by near Poznan and a smart girl hurried out. `Are your a Hollander?' she asked. 'Where is your woman? Have you dollars?' In Warsaw I parked my van in a tourist camp. The camp was used by Poles with tiny caravan-trailers like boxes, school parties and their teachers, a few foreigners and gypsies. I found the capital greatly changed. Tower blocks and new apartment buildings had shot up everywhere — those in the outskirts ugly conglomerations of prefabricated sections housing thousands of families in small crowded rooms. Streets were much wider. The city centre had been transformed by gouging out a great empty space for the huge Palace of Culture, Soviet Russia's gift to the Polish nation. The restoration of ancient landmarks from war-time rubble has also been (folic on a massive scale. Churches, their baro- que interiors gleaming with gilt, have been rebuilt, the old Market Square with its painted and carved gables meticulously resurrected, broken statues have been pieced together or remade and new war memorials have sprung up. In public places and at street corners tablets to commemo- rate dead heroes hang like tear-drops.

The parks and public places were much as before, crowded with pensioners sitting on benches in the sun, Young mothers with prams, children (very clean and beautifully dressed), people walking their dogs, pi- geons, a few drunks. But the queues waiting outside shops, perhaps in the rag', and the ubiquitous police waving down motorists, watching the crowds at traffic lights, sitting in trucks near public build- ings, were something new. And there were no Jews. There were none in the cinemas, the surgeries or lawyers' chambers. The orthodox Jews — unmistakable in the old days with their ringlets, their long gaber- dines and Russian boots — and the ghetto streets had vanished: with them the cavalry officers bowling along in cabs or bagging the girls in the night clubs. One missed their cloaks, their smart breeches and riding boots and handsome profiles. The old night life is dead. People stay in after dark They entertain their friends at home or watch the television screen.

One of the first things I did was to go to my old address in Hoza Street where I had lived in 1939. Alas, the building had been destroyed during the uprising and a new apartment block stood in its place. The landlady, a greyhaired woman who had been brought up in Moscow, used to talk Russian with me. Over my bed hung a picture of the Tsar's mounted Cossacks slashing at a crowd with sabres.

I went to Father Popieluszko's church where, before he was murdered by police agents, he used to spread his rebellious message to a rapt congregation. The church has been turned into a place of pilgrimage and his grave, lit by guttering candles and swamped with flowers, has become more widely known and honoured among Poles than the Un- known Soldier's Tomb in Warsaw's Vic- tory Square. Inside the church is a gallery of photographs showing Father Popielusz- ko at various stages of his life as he treads the road to Calvary. As a young man, laughing with children and youths. As a sportsman, bare to the waist, sun-tanned, sitting in a boat on a lake. Preaching. Saying Mass. The final photograph shows a car with smashed windows and flat tyres. In the open boot and back seat two dummy infants have been placed with outstretched arms — dead. The grisly pathos of this exhibit and a picture of the dark dam where the priest's body was dumped are calculated to perpetuate anger and a desire to avenge. People come and go all day and long after dark. Their faces show deep piety. The church itself is full of banners and bric-A-brac. Hanging in the yard I counted 50 Solidarnosc posters — the inscriptions turned inwards, not facing the street. One wonders if it is right to build up the murdered man into such a hero, a sort of Hollywood star, to be ready to canonise him?

But the Poles worship their heroes, their warriors and their poets, even though the cause they fought for was often lost, a victory in defeat. (I sometimes think that the only thing they really envy the English for is the charge of the Light Brigade!) One of Poland's best known and admired paint- ings is Matejko's battle scene where the Poles and their allies destroyed the Teuto- nic Knights at Grunwald in 1410. As one looks at these huge men, the Knights on their chargers, the Poles and Lithuanians fighting mostly on foot, one can almost hear the grunts and screams and the thud of steel on crushed bone. All schoolchil- The present Jewish synagogue in Grzy- bowski Square was built after the war. The site of the old synagogue, which was destroyed, has brought bad luck to the builders of the new tower block that now stands on it. The block has been condem- ned as unsafe, a huge white elephant, conspicuously empty. The caretaker gave me a paper skull-cap and took me inside the synagogue. He told me the number of Jews in Warsaw was about 500. There were some 30 regular worshippers. Near the synagogue is the Jewish theatre and news- paper office. An old Jew came and spoke to me. 'Are you a Catholic or a Protes- tant?' he asked. `Protestant.' Protestants are good,' he said.

From-the synagogue I went to the Jewish cemetery in Okopowa. The most recent section of tombs — the dates go up as far as are taken to see the picture. A diagram identifies the warriors: Jan Zyska, enormously strong, one-eyed, bare- headed, is slashing away at the Knights like a man felling trees. The Grand Master is shown at the moment of being slain. dren 1940 — is in fairly good condition. Many are elaborately carved with roofs and railings and costly marble slabs. The in- scriptions are bilingual (Hebrew and Pol- ish). But the older burial ground (the cemetery is large) is a dark, wild place where one can lose one's way in a jungle of undergrowth. The gravestones are rotting, choked by bushes and brambles, the slabs lie at random as though felled by a typhoon, the ground is thick with humus. The inscriptions here are in Hebrew only. All the familiar names are to be found: Feigenblatt, Strumpfmann, Szpacenkopf. Relatives have added fresh names and words to some of the gravestones in the newer section: 'Family burnt in Treblinka'; In memory of the victims of German bestiality'; 'Tortured to death'.

The attendant, who has an office near the gate, told me there had been no serious van- dalism — 'nothing to complain of — just a few youths, louts, not Ger- mans'. But the proper upkeep of the cemetery, he explained, was beyond the resources of the Jewish community in- Warsaw. 'We are poor. Most of the Jews are old, living lonely lives in small rooms with a few tins and bits of furni- ture. Having survived for so long they are de- termined to go on to the bitter end.'

Through my old teaching contacts I got to know a number of Polish lecturers and their friends at the university linguistics department. Like all Polish intellectuals they combined realism — the acceptance of the hard facts of life in a poor country under political pressures — with romantic escapism and cynical wit. Their parties were never dull. There was always some- thing to eat, vodka and Balkan wine. With them I went to films and plays, art exhibi- tions, concerts and a dacha.

One artist had hung his paintings in a derelict factory that used to make gun barrels. We had to climb over rusty machinery to view them. All but one of the paintings showed the violent martyrdom of St Peter, his great muscular body twisted in agony. The exception was the sombre painting of a dead working man. The symbolism was obvious. Two martyrs: the murdered Father Popieluszko and an in- dustrial worker shot by police — the Church and Solidarity. The bizarre setting too — a grimy factory workshop — made its point. To avoid embarrassment with the authorities the exhibition had not been advertised. There were about 50 private guests, and glasses of cheap vermouth.

The Soviet film week was a flop. I saw three of the films — they were not overtly propagandist — but few people came to watch them. At one performance I visited there were only four of us in the cinema: myself and a friend, a youth, and a man who dropped off to sleep. The Red cavalry commander Budyonny, in the person of a Cossack actor, was whirling his sabre to virtually empty houses.

Claude Lanzmann's nine-hour film Shoah received special approval from General Jaruzelski to be performed for a week. It was shown in three separate parts to audiences of about 50. The film was admired but considered controversial. No one wanted to be reminded of the anti- semitic feelings that have been endemic in eastern Europe wherever history shows a pale of Jewish settlement. It was thought that Lanzmann's shrewd interrogation methods had put Polish villagers, who had lived near the death camps, in a poor light. There was, of course, no love lost between the Jews and their Polish neighbours. Their cultures, community lives and occupations were too different. Neither expected to be loved by the other; and they neither gave to each other nor received much love. After the Russian Cossack film and Lanz- mann's epic, the British Council film The Shooting Party (James Mason) seemed tame and contrived.

This morning I talked to a priest on a bench outside the War Museum. 'You will notice great changes,' he remarked. 'Yes, Warsaw is bigger and much busier,' I said cautiously. 'I don't mean that,' he said. `We are not satisfied.' You mean econo- mic problems?' They're not important either'. He raised his voice. 'We are not free. Nie ma wolnosci!' He got up, a big cross swinging over his breast. 'Poland is not free!' he repeated and hurried away. He was wearing a beret, and his black shoes twinkled under his robe.

I thought of the priest's words when I visited the Red Army cemetery near my camp. A tablet at the foot of the memorial obelisk bears the words, 'In honour of the heroes who fought for the independence of Poland and the liberation of our capital'. Poles don't go there except to read the newspaper or stroll with girls. There are two separate burial sections, one for Rus- sian officers, who have plaques and are named, and one for other ranks, who have no plaques and are not named. Under the five-pointed Soviet stars that marked the burial plots there was no equality even in death.

From Warsaw I drove to the death camps at Majdanek, Oswiecim (Au- schwitz) and Treblinka, watched the un- veiling of the Black Goddess at Czestocho- wa, and heard the great resonant voices of the choir at the Russian Orthodox church at Bialystok. Majdanek: soggy beet-fields fertilised by human ash at the end of Lublin's Street of the Tormented. Oswiecim: huts full of human hair, bat- tered shoes and suitcases. It was here that Rudolf Hoess gassed his 'best loved prison- ers', the gypsies. They were 'undisciplined' and some fought like wild cats to avoid being driven into the black chambers. Treblinka: sleeping now in quiet woods, where villagers pick mushrooms. It took the guards less than an hour to unload a freight train of families, coax them up the Road to Heaven through the birch trees, strip, shave the women's heads and annhi- late them.

A mile or two from the Russian border, east of Bialystok, I visited the last Jewish cemetery I was to see, at Krynki. It was a bleak, windy mound with a horse tethered to a gravestone. New village houses are encroaching on it. In the vale below it the Orthodox cemetery was strewn with fresh flowers and candles. I would have gone on to the nearby Tatar village of Kruszyniany but it began to snow. Warsaw, when I got back, had turned into a grey wintry city. People were queuing up for warm boots and wearing padded jackets like lumber- jacks. I parked my van under a tree in Zbawiciela Square and went indoors.