The crow and the eagle

This article, which was smuggled out of rcnand last month, was written by a Polish university lecturer who is a member both of Solidarity and of KOR, the opposition Workers' Defence Committee. He escaped arren on the night of the coup last December because he happened to be away home at the time. He is still free and 11Img in Poland.

The devil took power in Poland at night, „ the most appropriate time for him, and .gesen well in advance, too. Solidarity's en- t.. ,Ire National Committee was in session in 1/41, dnsk; there were only a few workers on uhtY in the regional council buildings. Out- side, the the frosty, snow-covered streets were riliotY; the television programmes were liW11.1g to a close and yawning couples ere making their way to bed. It started with the telephones being cut offf. The stopping of telexes and telegrams °ll owed immediately. Then the roads were E °sed, railway stations blocked off, and, after that it was the turn of the air and sea 1,3°rts. Within a matter of hours the still divided society was besieged. It was ,,ilv1,,cled up internally, and hermetically seal- "' from the outside. That is how the blitzkrieg on the Polish began. The people who were down 'Internment' received the first visits as early as midnight; others were picked up at *h. Some were treated politely and were 'en time to take warm underwear (the even was minus 10°C). Others were bsed rutally, their hands tied behind their tiackab while they were still half-asleep and tbne.ornprehending, standing by their beds in eh' pyjamas. They tried to take an internationally 'howed Warsaw sociologist by stealth, but L refused to open his front door — so they broke it down. He's still inside today. They (eated a famous geneticist, a member. of Polish Academy of the Sciences, polite- YhibY giving him ten minutes to pack his t lags; but they raised hell at a younger col- eague's flat where they terrorised the neighbours and gave him a helping of tear- tgas after he'd been handcuffed. Some were ih.°!,d, that they were being taken to the del And others were told nothing at And some were told they were being 'in- eeri!ed'• Thus was Polish vocabulary had by this new word which, hitherto, 44, been used exclusively about the soldiers w officers of an army at war when they were seeking shelter in a neutral country. It So what does being 'interned' mean now? stitleans being put in prison without a court riterlee simply because one is active in public life, or because one is an a ekhowledged authority, or because people

value one's judgment, or because one show- ed courage at a testing time. Being `intern- ed' means being put at the mercy of ad- ministrative decisions without a chance to appeal for as long as is necessary. It means having the right to get one short visit per month from a member of one's family, to receive two food parcels (3 kg each), and to write an unlimited number of letters which will be censored and can be confiscated.

It is now known how many 'internees', more or less, there were supposed to have been: according to confidential and unof- ficial leaks, it was 27,000. But, so the leaks claim, the authorities met with only partial success. So how many of them (of us) are there? Conservative estimates oscillate bet- ween 12,000 and 18,000, of whom about a thousand have come from Warsaw alone. The authorities, however, keep talking about a maximum total of 5,000, of whom some have been freed already.

If you were well-known before, the pro- blem is not so great: your absence is con- spicuous and the eyes of the world are following your fate. But you cannot say that about a couple of thousand (or maybe three, or five, or ten thousand) local Rural Solidarity activists who were picked up dur- ing the night by uniformed drunks and taken away to the accompaniament of their terrified wives' plaintive laments. And you cannot say it about the single young workers in small factory towns, intelligent and courageous men whose only crime was that they took part in the heroic strikes, that they won the respect of their fellow workers, and that they were the chairmen of the factory committees. Yet it is they who form the broad mass of internees, it is they who make up the lion's share of de- tainees. Some of them have already been sentenced to four, five or six years by courts-martial, and that is how their names have come to light at all.

It was slightly different for couples with children. If both parents had to be interned, their children were, quite simply, taken away from them. There is the astounding story of a young woman, a graduate of philosophy. She had already come to the militia's attention earlier when, as a student in Lodz (some 60 miles from Warsaw), she had been moderately active in the indepen- dent students' movement. After graduation she had come to Warsaw and married a mathematician. He worked as a research of- ficer with Solidarity while she looked after the baby which is now six months old. They were both picked up in the night.

`Good God, what about the child?' `What about it? We'll just pack it off to the orphanage!' Quite desperate, she spent a few days in Bialoleka, then she was transferred to the women's prison in Olszynka Grochowska where, to her amazement, she discovered that her mother was also being held. (Why? And why had they brought her there all the way from Lodz?) It was some time after that that she heard that a colonel was inspecting the prison. She saw this as her last chance and, for all her gentility and refinement, she started to behave quite appallingly in her cell, clattering her mess-tin against the steel door the while. Eventually, she was brought before the colonel. She started to say: 'You took me and my husband away, I had to leave a tiny baby behind, you must let me go.' There was no reaction. Tye got to get out, I ... I give you six hours.' What do you mean — six hours? What are you going to do after that?' You just wait and see; I'll get a pretty kettle of fish ready for you!'

The colonel, afraid that she was threatening to commit suicide, tried to calm her down. 'But you must live, you've got a small child,' he said. But she just turn- ed round and went back to her cell. He came round in an army vehicle at three in the morning and took her straight home. But that wasn't the end of it. She thanked him, he saluted and left. When she got upstairs to her flat she found a group of Security Service functionaries waiting for her. She went quite cold. 'But that's im- possible,' she said, 'I've just been released. The colonel's just brought me round himself ... "Ah, yes, that will be the army. But we've got our own special instructions.' So they took her to the station and grilled her for a few hours. 'Write!' Write what?' `Write everything!' What do you mean everything?' At length they relented and gave her a bit of paper to sign saying that she would observe the Constitution of the Polish People's Republic and not over- throw socialism in Poland. She shrugged and signed. She was reunited with her child, who was alive and well, a few hours later. Now she is glad to be free, spends her time in queues and making up parcels for her mother and her husband.

He, meanwhile, along with a few hun- dred others, is still in Bialoleka. The name of this prison, some 12 miles away from the city centre, is on everyone's lips. It is where all the Warsaw prisoners were taken on the morning of 13 December. The warders were quite astounded and bewildered by the in- flux; according to numerous accounts, they were similarly perplexed elsewhere. The cells were cold, with windows missing, while outside the frost was bitter. The win- dow panes were replaced after one of the very first internees, Professor Klemens Szaniawski, had been released. He told Archbishop Glemp about the state of things there, and the Primate protested to the authorities that conditions were inhumane in the extreme. His protest proved effective.

There are various internment centres and various conditions in them, though one can assume that, generally speaking, they are not too dissimilar. But there are exceptions — kinds of 'first circle'. One of these is Jaworze, a military training centre in Western Pomerania with a small, lakeside holiday resort for officers attached. It was there that the cream of the Polish in- telligentsia was ferried by helicopter. Among them were well-known writers (Ki- jowski, Woroszylski, General Secretary of Polish PEN Bartoszewski, and editor-in- chief of the weekly Solidarity Mazowiecki), professors Kunicki-Goldfinger, Holzer, Boguslawski and Wyrzykowski, members of KOR Halina Mikolajska and Anka Kowalska, the Keciks (what happened to their children?), the journalist Piotr Wierz- bicki, the historian Jerzy Jedlicki, the young nuclear physicist and independent publisher Grzegorz Boguta, and the young poet Jacek Bierezin. They were all put in this mini-Hilton hotel, with its good heating, its comparatively good food, and with soldiers serving the meals. They take short walks along the snow-covered road and round the guards with their machine guns ready to fire. Some have already been freed and taken back to Warsaw by helicopter; their places have been taken by others.

That is the showcase. The official list of internment centres has been made public, and there are supposed to be 49 of them. That means there are at least 49. By and large they are civic goals in the middle, or on the outskirts, of medium and large towns. And what has happened to the prisoners who were there before? Where have they been transferred to and in what conditions are they being kept? Maybe some of them, the criminal element, have been incorporated into ZOMO (the militia reserves): 'You can beat people up, you can kill them; in return you'll get a conditional reprieve...'

The prison in Leczyca, where the Lodz Solidarity activists, among others, are being kept, is known about, as is Strzebielinek, a large prison outside Wejherowo near Gdansk, where the local Baltic coast ac- tivists and many members of the National Committee (some of whom have been transferred from Bialoleka) are detained. The camp in Uherce, in the forests of the south-east, contains the region's peasant activists, the same people who organised the peasant protests aimed at getting Rural Solidarity officially registered a year ago. As the days go by new names come to light, new centres are revealed, families — fre- quently quite terrified — are contacted, and attempts are made to send in parcels con- taining food and warm clothes.

More and more names are coming to light. There are those who were not picked up during that memorable first night; they did not go back home for some time. Then they thought the danger had passed — and now they are inside. There are those who were not down to be detained during the first phase, but after a few days they were summoned for questioning. Some were locked up only after the second or third in- terrogation.

Active resistance, in the form of occupa- tion strikes, has come to an end. The last redoubt was the strike in the darkness when over a thousand miners sat it out in the tun- nels of the Ziemowit colliery. Before that there had been a spate of fierce strikes. obeying the generally known instructions issued by Solidarity's National Committee, but they were successfully stifled. Even to- day nobody knows how many fatal casu- alties there were, not even approximately and they will not know for a long time yet. There were seven men shot in the Wujek mine in Silesia on 16 December. That is, there were seven victims about whom the authorities expressed their deep regret. This means that people succeeded in wresting those seven bodies from the mortuary while the rest of the corpses (who knows how many?) were disposed of clandestinely straight away. So rumour has it. And there are often repeated rumours that ZOMO functionaries ran amok and finished off the wounded miners as they were being taken to hospital, and stories of the 'pacification' of the hospital itself and of beatings inflicted on doctors and nurses. These stories cannot

There are restrictions on movenleal constant road-checks and, in some parts the country, a complete ban on the use .1 private cars. Not to mention the censorshlr of private correspondence, the sir°i searches, and the frequent checking of idea tity papers. In this situation, the circulanene of news becomes very hard indeed. More often than not it deals with purely 10 events and registers incomplete data: the is no collective pool of information. But there is collective resistance' Justifications of the state of war have been rejected totally, and the people are sinking into an intense and ferocious silence. In One factory, for example, everyone turned 01 .r1 the morning and then they all sat in silence,' with their arms demonstratively foldeu. • When any of the managers or militiamen ° combat jackets came down to the shaP floor, the entire workforce stood uP Ia! silence and put their hands up. Then they all sat down again. What can be seen Oae clearly is the efficient running of comInn11„1. ty services (which have all been militarisel and of the retail outlets dealing directly gil! the public. There are fewer power cuts in the housing estates which means that there is no great demand for electricity from 111 dustry; central heating is working well, t°°' here is a huge campaign of dismissal;„it

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is hard to judge just how widespread it is' but it is being waged with particular SCVellt7 in the so-called central institutions — th ministries, the state and economic manage,• ment administrations — and the tna', d media, which have been totally parkse, anyway. People are having their cons ciences and backbones crushed. Either You sign a pledge of loyalty to the militaryauthorities, or tomorrow you are out 10°`',' ing for a new job. Either you resign fr°1114 membership of Solidarity, or you g` transferred to a job where it takes you to:ed hours to get to work and where you get Pal, 1 half your present wages. 'Why should resign from Solidarity? I mean, the 1101°11 has only been suspended; it hasn't been made illegal...'. 1.ri `Okay, guys kay, The curfew has been lifted only twice since its introduction: that was °r1 s hyeorueZe fired; oe Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve,,. Everyone wants to get home before eleven o'clock. Throughout the night, the streets. are quite empty except for the occasional army patrol or jeep. If you go out at night' you can be fined and detained at the stns s tion. There is a Warsaw joke which 'naked the real point. It is a quarter to eleven ane two militiamen are watching the street. !" last bus pulls up at the bus-stop. There is 9, man running to catch the bus — he is out °I breath. Without so much as a word, one the militiamen aims and fires. The 1118f. drops — dead. The other militiaman saY; `What did you do that for? There's st", another 15 minutes to go.' all right' says the first militiaman, 'I know the inaae. He's a neighbour of mine. He'd never /10 got home anyway.' The acronym of the Military Council for National Defence, the group of men trYing to rule Poland, is WRON. If you add an `aj, you get the word WRONA, the Polish for crow — a stupid and nasty bird. Which gives rise to a mass of sayings, one of Which is making the rounds in the whole country — a crow can never conquer an exile (the national emblem of Poland is a white eagle). Meanwhile, the flood of resignations iroin the Party is unstemmed; its extent most he devastating. It is widely known that all the journalists working on the weekly Akultura (with the exception of the editor-n.1- °110) have returned their Party cards. The same is true of university teachers and of actors{e.g.Lomnicki, Dmochowski). ;here is a story about a coffin left outside ,arlY headquarters in Katowice. The ter- nfied fearing that a bomb had been left inside, called in the army's engineers who opened the coffin and found a Pile of party membership cards returned by the last workers still left in the Party. But the People who have stayed on in the Party

are the hardest and most rabid element. They are dangerous, they are bent on revenge and many of them are armed. They must be very frightened people — and they have plenty to be frightened of.

Everyone listens to the foreign radio sta- tions: the country's press is almost univer- sally boycotted, and television is watched only by masochists who like the sight of an- nouncers in uniform. People spend their evenings tuning in to the best unjammed frequencies in their attempt to catch the BBC, Radio Free Europe and Voice of America broadcasts: it has become a na- tional sport again, just as it used to be in the Stalinist era. The news that came through in the last few days has shocked everyone: Jaruzelski is threatening to deport people. And there is a joke about that too. Walesa is being interrogated by one of the colonels. `Well now, tovarisch Walesa, tell us: where would you rather we sent you — East, or West?"West, of course', says Walesa. Whereupon the colonel turns to the secretary and says: 'Write it down — West Siberia.'