`GALES IN THE MOUNTAINS FLATS'
Zygmunt Zamoyski reports
on the revolution and inflation in Polish life
Poznan THE cost of writing to England has risen by ten times in the six months that I have been here and my tram season ticket is now clearly six times what I first paid. Not all prices have risen equally, however. The coffee and cake — just one slice — that I had at Wroclaw railway station cost me more than the train ticket from there to here, a distance of over 100 miles.
I tipped the waiter in Wroclaw by giving him an impromptu English lesson. I was surprised how good his English was. Even among my best students here I hear such English as, 'How long time it would take to fix that exhausting pipe in your car?' — this from Wlodek, an engineer, who learnt his first English from Iraqis while laying a pipeline in Iraq during their war with Iran. More topical was the comment of Ewa, a research worker with a teenage son: 'For such a long time we had to read the false informations and love the people who didn't deserve on it. It's true revolution in our country and the all socialist block and I think we are living in very interesting time.'
One of the most evident signs of 'true revolution' here is the orgy of street renaming that has occurred. Streets, parks and flats that commemorated the gods of the communist pantheon are fast being renamed. Red Army Street now has its pre-war name of St Martins; Independence Street, a new name, has replaced Stalin- grad; and Marchlewski, one of the early Polish communists, has been superseded by a different Pole, Queen Jadwiga, whose marriage to a Lithuanian prince in 1386 made the Lithuanians decide to adopt Christianity. 'Russia Flats' becoming 'Gales in the Mountains Flats' was a bit puzzling. I later learnt that this new name is the Polish rendering of 'Wuthering Heights'. But such changes are cheap and easy to make. How well Poland will 'I'm terribly sorry, Senor, but today is National No Smoking Day.' succeed in emerging from its 50 years of suffering will depend on the help it receives from its friends in the West. This long- abused country looked to them in vain in 1939 and again in 1945. Perhaps this third time it will be luckier.
I received a postcard from an elderly cousin in Warsaw a few days ago. The recent history of Poland is written into her life. Her family home at Niechanowo, a few miles from here, is now a state farm centre complete with a bar; her husband was murdered by the Germans and her only brother by the Russians. On his memorial in the churchyard opposite the house a few weathered letters spell out his name and the year of his death. 1940. Eight freshly carved letters can also be seen on the stone: 'w Katyniu' (at Katyn). Only now, after 45 years of enforced silence, can his place of burial be named. The 4,500 Poles shot in Katyn Wood were less than a third of the total number murdered by the Russians at that time, but its name is used here to cover the whole ghastly series, since it is the only killing ground as yet certainly known here. We had a Katyn exhibition in Poznan recently. There were photographs of a young man coming out of church after his Wedding; another beside a family Christ- mas tree; another going over a jump at a horse show; another proudly standing with his parents after receiving a university degree; and then these same men in the grave pit, a compressed mass of misshapen corpses. In November 1940 seven-year-old Alina Moroz sent a letter from Zakopane to her father at his Russian camp address. In beautiful copperplate she proudly announced her progress into Class Two and added: 'I've written several letters but have received no reply.' The envelope had been stamped, 'Retour — Inconnu' in January 1941, presumably because it had been sent by registered mail. How strange that something as civilised as the registered post was operating between Germany and Russia at a time when both people's governments had relapsed into such utter barbarism. At that exhibition one was also reminded of Poland's powerful western neighbour. Letters sent from those doomed prisoners in Russia to their homes in this historic Polish town had to be addressed, 'Posen, Deutschland'.
After Poland's neighbours had shared the country out between them and wiped it off the political map of Europe, Poznan was also German occupied. In the 1870s, on the western edge of the city, they built 'Fort Seven'. Its high earth banks, brick walls and network of underground cham- bers made it an ideal spot for the SS and Gestapo when the Germans returned here in 1939. Some 10,000 people were mur- dered there. Part of the fort is now a museum and one can see one of the murder sites where a mass of bullet holes has disfigured the Prussians' fine brickwork. This was later avoided by using an earth bank as a backdrop and, in the interest of hygiene, an open drain was built along the bottom of it. I was surprised to see a guillotine in the museum as well, but this had been used for killing people in the middle of the town and had only been taken to the Fort after the war.
My cousin's postcard is also a reminder of more recent events. It is the type of blank card sold by post offices with the stamp already printed on. This one had been specially prepared for 1990, however, and beneath an uncrowned Polish eagle, it announced: '45 years of the Polish People's Republic'. The Mazowiecki government has now restored the traditional crown to the Polish eagle and removed the cynically imposed word: 'People's'. The 25 zloty stamp printed on the card shows a suitably Stalinist scene: an impressively large machine extracting coal from an open-cast mine. This image of state power is some- what diminished by the fact that my cousin had to affix four more stamps to meet the current 250 zloty rate for postcards.
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