Iron Curtain (72 page)

If anything, the childhood experiences of
Karol Modzelewski were even more contradictory and confusing. Modzelewski was born in
Russia, the son of a Russian officer and his Polish communist wife. Three weeks after his birth in 1937, his father was arrested, and he was sent to a Russian orphanage, where he lived for several years. But he was removed from the orphanage after his mother remarried. Karol’s new stepfather was
Zygmunt Modzelewski, a communist who was the Polish ambassador to the USSR in 1945–47, and later Polish minister of foreign affairs. Modzelewski learned of his biological father’s arrest only in 1954—by accident, from a schoolmate—when he was seventeen years old, and only then did he discuss the true story of his father’s life with his mother.

Years later, he reckoned even that conversation was only possible because Stalin was already dead: “Before, no one told such things to children—there was always a threat that the child would let out the secret. It was dangerous for the child but also for the parents.” Modzelewski’s wife had been expelled from kindergarten at the age of three after Stalin’s death because she told her teacher, “My grandfather says Stalin is already burning in hell.” The teacher sent her home, not as punishment but because the danger to the grandfather and to the school was so great.

So carefully did his parents shield Modzelewski from their own growing doubts about the Polish political system that as a child he was terrified by their occasionally critical comments. After the arrest of
General Wacław Komar in 1952, in connection with the show trials of the time, he explained to his stepfather, echoing his schoolteachers, that Komar was a spy: “My stepfather shouted at me … he never cursed me so much as then. I said that he
had been arrested. My stepfather replied, ‘Arrested does not equal guilty.’ It was a banal truth but at that time I felt it like an earthquake. If he was right, it meant that the authorities are arresting innocent citizens. Who could say this? Only an enemy …”

He drew similar conclusions after he once asked about a change to the food rationing system. His stepfather snapped, “It is so that people eat less and work more.” Modzelewski was shocked: “Only the enemy could say something like that … I remember that because it was a tremendous stress at the time, I had to deny it somehow in order to decrease the dissonance … I did not recognize him as the enemy but he was speaking like one. I remember that feeling even today after all those years that have passed.”
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The Modzelewskis were not alone in dealing with difficult information by keeping silent. Krzyztof Pomian, another scion of a communist family, remembered that “it was simply not done to speak about arrests, they were accepted without comment. And since this wasn’t a topic for discussion, it wasn’t a topic for reflection either.” In 1952, he and a Jewish friend sat together and read accounts of the show trials in Prague. The friend asked him what he thought of the Slánský trial and Pomian replied that he didn’t think anything of it: “It’s just another trial.” The friend exploded: “You don’t see that this is an anti-Semitic story?” That was his first conversation with anyone about any of the trials, and it did make him think for the first time too.
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Feelings of divided loyalty haunted some who were even closer to the centers of power.
Jerzy Morawski, a Union of Polish Youth leader at the time, didn’t doubt in retrospect his own youthful enthusiasm for the communist cause, even in the Stalinist 1950s. But even then he knew that party meetings were, to put it bluntly, boring: “It was all stiff, all of that. And there was an enormous amount of intolerance. Everyone was supposed to agree. Everybody was supposed to think identically, act identically … that stiffness destroyed the enthusiasm.”

Later, Morawski became a leading propaganda bureaucrat; more precisely, he was the man who decided which Stalinist slogans would be used in public spaces. But even in this position of high authority, he had mixed feelings about this work: “Something inside me always said that this is not right, it’s aesthetically unappealing … but on the other hand, that’s how we win people over.”
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This may not be an entirely honest recollection—of course, it’s easy in retrospect to say that one was uncomfortable—but the problem of divided feelings was acknowledged by others, even at the time. “People have
become cunning after twelve years of the Nazi regime,” one Leipzig professor told a party acquaintance, “and if they suspect that a certain person has anything to do with state power—and this applies to members of the Party as well—they shut their mouths.”
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Splitting one’s personality into home and school, friends and work, private and public was one way to cope with the requirement to collaborate. Others tried what Iván Vitányi called “a brainwashing made by myself.” This wasn’t quite the same as Oskar Nerlinger’s determined effort to transform himself from an abstract painter into a socialist realist, but something more like self-silencing. After the war, Vitányi had been an enthusiastic activist at one of the People’s Colleges in Budapest, and an avid student of peasant music and folk dancing. But after objecting to the removal of the Nékosz leadership in 1948, he was expelled from his college and given an internal party trial. He was not, in the end, expelled from the party. But the Rajk affair had begun and a sense of menace had crept into the media. Although he was himself a member of the regime, having taken a job at the Ministry of Culture, Vitányi decided, in his own words, “I shall not think and I shall not deal with the country. I don’t know anything, I don’t want to know. I want to do my work.”

From having been a talkative and even argumentative young man, he became silent. And although he agreed years later that one could debate about whether this “self-brainwashing” was a good tactic or not, “I survived.” He behaved as he knew he should in public. He kept his thoughts to himself. He was not arrested. This, at the time, counted as a major professional success.
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Instead of remaining silent, others deliberately chose to forget parts of their biography or to ignore, quite consciously, uncomfortable facts. Those were the tactics deployed by Elfriede
Brüning, the East German journalist and novelist who had belonged to the communist party before the war—she had even met Walter Ulbricht as a child—and had been jailed by the Nazis. By the end of the war she was living quietly in the country home of her husband’s parents, where she joyfully anticipated the arrival of the Russians and celebrated when they finally came.
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After the war’s end, Brüning threw herself enthusiastically into the work of the
cultural life of communist East Berlin. She joined the Kulturbund and went to work for its weekly publication,
Sonntag
, hoping to become a journalist.
In one of her first articles, she described riding into Berlin on a truck full of onions and carrots. Arriving in the city, the truck was besieged by beggars and women holding up children: “One carrot for my child, one carrot!” She handed the article in to her editor, who dismissed it: “Give that to
Tagesspiegel
,” the West Berlin newspaper, he told her. She looked at him blankly: Did he really want her to give it to
Tagesspiegel
? In the East, he explained scornfully, “we are to radiate optimism.” Her article was too negative: it must show the present as it ought to be, not as it was.

Brüning never considered giving her article to
Tagesspiegel
and never considered working for a Western newspaper either. All of Brüning’s friends were staying in the East, and she herself belonged, culturally and intellectually, to the communist movement. And so she convinced herself that “optimism” was important, and that in any case what mattered were communism’s ultimate goals, not the mistakes made along the way. She disliked many things about the new system: “the personality cult of Stalin … the ridiculous banners everywhere … slogans like ‘Every artificially inseminated pig is a blow to the face of Imperialist warmongers.’ ”
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She objected to the ration cards that divided the population into classes and the system of double canteens at workplaces, “one with stew for the workers and one [with better food] for the engineers and heads of departments.” But she persevered: “We were steeped in the wish to help the construction, and to convince people who had believed in Hitler not long ago that we wanted the right thing now.”

In her autobiography, Brüning makes clear that at some level she continued to believe she had done the right thing. She frequently contrasts the achievements of the East with those of the West: “Didn’t we send workers’ children to university? Hadn’t we liberated women from their immaturity, given them access to all professions, and guaranteed them the same rights as men, including the same wage for the same work—a demand that has not been fulfilled in the Western state until today? We were, that was our belief, the better state … we were proud of our alleged independence and thought ourselves to be on the right track.”
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Brüning learned to rationalize her choices, to put things into a larger context, and to take the long view. But she never convinced herself that black was white, or that there was nothing wrong with the system she had chosen. In 1968, following the
Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, she briefly considered emigrating but did not. In time, she grew friendly with
Susanne Leonhard, Wolfgang’s mother, who had spent many years in the Soviet Gulag but eventually
returned to East Berlin. Inspired by Leonhard’s life story, Brüning began to interview others who had spent time in the Gulag. After 1989 she published the collected interviews in a book,
Lästige Zeugen
(
Annoying Witnesses
). The words of her preface could be about herself: “For too long they were forced to remain silent, to conceal … Therefore, it is high time we let these men and women have their say, they who fell victim to the Stalin era and must finally be granted full justice …”
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In a 2006 interview, I spoke with Brüning for several hours about her life. We talked about her career, the early days of the Kulturbund, and her life in East Berlin after the war. Among other things, she told me she had known nothing at the time about mass rapes and theft carried out by the
Red Army in 1945, and nothing about the mass arrests that followed. I didn’t press. But a few days later, she called back. Yes, she had known about some of these things, she said, and she would like to talk about them. We met for a second time.

It was true, Brüning explained, that she had celebrated the liberation. But her pleasure had quickly faded. In the spring of 1945, Soviet soldiers occupied her in-laws’ home and began stealing books and other things to sell on the black market. Her husband approached their commander and asked them to stop. In revenge, one of the soldiers planted a pistol in his suitcase. It was “discovered,” and Brüning’s husband was arrested as a saboteur. Pleading her long membership in the communist party, she managed to obtain his release. But as a result of this incident, her husband turned on communism (and on her) and emigrated to the West. She never remarried.

It was also true, as Brüning had said in our first conversation, that out in the countryside there were no mass rapes. But after the war, she had visited Berlin to find her parents. Not only had she heard a good deal about rape in the city and met many victims, she spent several days hiding from Soviet soldiers who were looking for women in her parents’ neighborhood.

A few months after that, Brüning spent some time in the seaside town of Ahrenshoop, where the Kulturbund wanted to set up a writers’ colony. But in order to have a writers’ colony, the Kulturbund had to get hold of somewhere for the writers to stay. To solve that problem, charges were trumped up against the owners of some of the more attractive seaside villas. Those who were not arrested fled to the West. The cultural bureaucrats moved in.

We did hear about these things, Brüning told me, “but you must understand, I had welcomed the arrival of the Red Army and we wanted to build
socialism—well, even today I sometimes reproach myself—we did not inquire closely enough …” Her voice trailed off—and that was all. She had just wanted me to know that she knew.

The splitting of one’s personality into public and private, home and school, friends and work was not the only solution for those who wanted to live successful lives in a communist regime. Instead of hiding their mixed feelings, a small and unusual group of people displayed them openly. Instead of feeling conflicted, they tried to play dual roles, staying within the system and maintaining some independence at the same time. This kind of ambiguous role could be played, for example, within the official “opposition” parties, the phony political parties that had been created to replace the real ones after their leaders had fled or been arrested, parties that were loyal to the regime in every way that mattered. East Germans who remained active within the rump Christian Democratic Party were allowed to be publicly religious, although they were expected to adhere to the principles of Marxism-Leninism at the same time. Poles who remained within the rump Polish Peasants’ Party were allowed to be advocates on behalf of farmers, as long as their advocacy didn’t come into conflict with official policy.

No one in Eastern Europe ever played this particular game with greater skill than
Bolesław Piasecki, a politician whose extraordinary career took him from the radical right to the radical left within a decade. Assessments of his life range widely. As early as 1956,
Leopold Tyrmand denounced him as a man for whom “all morality in politics is a harmful myth.”
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More recently, one of his biographers called him a “tragic figure.”
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Judgments of Piasecki fall almost everywhere else in between. To some, his is a classic collaborationist story. To others, his life is a tale of survival.

Piasecki’s career began in the turbulent 1930s, when as a very young man he made his name as an activist of a faction of the far-right
Polish National Radical Party. Known by the name of their publication,
Falanga
—a clear allusion to Spanish fascism—the Falangists believed that they were living through a time of moral and economic crisis. Like the communist parties of that same era, they also believed that Polish society was deeply corrupt, and that the weaknesses of democracy and the “nonsense” of democratic liberalism were to blame. But even though they were anti-Semites, and though they
admired authoritarian regimes in general and Italian fascism in particular, the Falangists were Polish nationalists, and thus, with one or two exceptions, they did not collaborate with Hitler.
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