Iron Curtain (73 page)

Piasecki himself was imprisoned by the
Gestapo in 1939. Upon his release, he joined the resistance and eventually the Home Army. In the summer of 1944, just as the Warsaw Uprising broke out, he and his partisan unit were captured by the Red Army in the forests to the east of the city. By November, he was imprisoned in the Soviet occupation force’s headquarters, probably in the notorious cellars of
Lublin castle. What happened next is a matter of no little controversy.

Most of the sources agree that Piasecki held nothing back. He gave the Soviet officers leading his interrogation an accurate account of his career in the resistance. He also gave away the names, and possibly locations, of many of his Home Army colleagues, though by that time much of that information was already known. He hinted heavily at his own importance. He told his Soviet interrogators that he had been in charge of the “clandestine operations” of the Home Army, and had already been named leader of a new, secret section of the underground. This was an exaggeration. But the tactic paid off.

Piasecki’s guards halted his interrogation. They removed him from ordinary military supervision and took him directly to Ivan Serov, the Soviet general who had organized the “cleansing” and pacification of eastern Poland in 1939, and who had been brought back to carry out the same task in the rest of Poland in 1944. Serov had already organized the arrests of General Wilk and General Okulicki, and was trying to find out as much as he could about the Home Army. To Piasecki’s immense surprise, Serov was not much interested in Piasecki’s Falangist past: like most Soviet officials, he considered anyone who was not a communist to be “far right” by definition, and distinctions between social democrats and radical right-wingers did not concern him. He was far more interested in Piasecki’s wartime underground activity, in his alleged “clandestine” connections, in his political views, and in his declared contempt for the London government in exile.
⁴²

By his own account, Piasecki was pleased to discover that he had much in common with the Soviet general. He admired men of power, he was delighted to talk philosophy, and he had some positive things to say about the new regime. He told Serov that he approved of the communist-dominated provisional government and admired the land reform. He enthusiastically
endorsed the expulsion of the Germans and the acquisition of the Western territories. He lauded the “idea of a bloodless social revolution and the transfer of power to workers and peasants.” But he also told Serov that the new communist government was going to have difficulties attracting the loyalty of Poles, with their deep anti-Russian prejudices and their paranoia about occupation. Which, of course, was true.

He offered to help. “I am deeply convinced,” he told Serov in a memo, “that through my influence I can mobilize the reluctant strata of society for active cooperation.” He promised, in other words, to persuade the patriotic, nationalist elements of the underground to support the new regime. Pia-secki’s memo was eventually forwarded to
Colonel Roman Romkowski, the secret policeman in charge of counterintelligence, as well as to Władysław Gomułka, then the communist party boss.
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In the decades afterward, this enigmatic conversation—an exchange between a famously cruel NKVD general and a famously charismatic
Polish nationalist—attained an almost legendary status in Warsaw. No one knew at the time exactly what had transpired, but everyone had a theory. In 1952, Czesław Miłosz wrote a fictional version of the encounter in
Zdobycie Władzy
(
The Seizure of Power
), a novel he published after emigrating to the West. Of course, Miłosz’s account is imaginary. But as one of Piasecki’s biographers points out, Miłosz was in Warsaw in 1945, he would have heard accounts of this famous meeting, and he had himself been tempted into cooperation with the new regime. His account thus has a ring of authenticity, particularly when Kamienski, the Piasecki figure, warns the Soviet general that “you are hated here” and tells him to expect resistance:

Eventually, the general in the novel comes to the point: Kamienski/Pia-secki would be set free, even allowed to publish a newspaper, on the condition
that he “recognize the status quo, and help us reduce the number of victims.” Kamienski/Piasecki deliberates, and then agrees. The general, satisfied, leans back and states that he is not surprised:

Whether or not he used those exact words, archival evidence makes clear that Serov really was impressed by Piasecki and apparently hoped to jumpstart his
political career by naming him mayor of Warsaw. (When reminded of Piasecki years later, Serov is said to have asked, “And so—did he become mayor of Warsaw?”)
⁴⁵
But Serov left soon afterward for Berlin, along with most of the rest of the Red Army leadership. He never returned to Poland.

That left Piasecki in an odd position. He had clearly obtained a blessing of some kind from the Soviet Union. But Polish communists, who understood the significance of his Falangist past quite well, were more suspicious of him and his motives and did not at first promote his political career; nor did they make him mayor of Warsaw. Still, in November 1945 they allowed him to publish the first edition of communist Poland’s first “official” Catholic newspaper,
Dziś i Jutro
(
Today and Tomorrow
).

From the start, the paper offered harsh criticisms of the then-legal Polish Peasants’ Party and of its leader, Stanisław Mikołajczyk, and it urged Poles to support the communists in their “Three Times Yes” referendum. After that referendum had failed to provide a ringing endorsement for the new regime, Piasecki wrote to Gomułka. The current system, he argued, “should be enriched by the political representation of Catholics.”
⁴⁶
He also published an interview with Bierut, in which the communist leader declared grandly that “Polish Catholics have no more and no fewer rights than other citizens”—a comment that implied they might even have a right to their own party. Eventually, this came to pass and in 1952 Piasecki founded Pax, a loyal, legal, pro-communist Catholic “opposition” party, the only one that would ever be allowed to exist in communist Poland or indeed anywhere else in communist Europe.

Both Pax and Piasecki existed in a strange, undefined, and ambiguous political space. On the one hand, Piasecki expressed his loyalty to the regime
enthusiastically and often. “Our main goal,” he wrote at one point, “is the reconstruction of a Catholic doctrine with respect to the ongoing conflict between Marxism and capitalism.” At the same time, Piasecki was one of the few people in public life who never quite cut himself off from the traditions of the wartime underground and was never forced to denounce his Home Army comrades. Those in his circle, many of whom had had extensive Home Army careers, never had to renounce their pasts either, and they were never arrested.

All of this was extremely unusual in public life at the time, and it created, in the words of
Janusz Zabłocki, one of his former colleagues, “an enclave of freedom” around Piasecki, as well as an aura of mystery. Nobody quite knew why the leader of Pax was exempt from the rules—at one point he even managed to expel a police informer from his inner circle—but everyone saw that he was. Most assumed that “there must have been an agreement at the highest political levels” which allowed Piasecki such leeway—presumably an agreement with Soviet officials—and many hoped that his position would grow even stronger. Zabłocki joined the staff of
Dziś i Jutro
under the influence of this belief. So did
Tadeusz Mazowiecki, the Catholic intellectual who would become Poland’s first noncommunist prime minister in 1989. Both men reckoned that Pax would sooner or later play an important role in governing the country.
⁴⁷
Piasecki himself hoped the same.

Throughout his career, Piasecki’s ambiguous status made everyone uneasy. Perhaps because he did have a separate relationship with Soviet officials, the Polish communists never trusted him. Although he continued to play their game (at one point he offered to send Pax observers to North Korea to promote “peace”), the government left him out of the creation of the union of “patriotic” priests and did not ask him to help negotiate the church–state accord. At the same time, his public Catholicism did not endear him to the church as much as he might have hoped. Cardinal Wyszyński loathed Piasecki, and at one point forbade clergy to subscribe to his publications, which eventually came to include
Słowo Powszechny
(
Universal Word
), a daily newspaper, as well as
Dziś i Jutro
. Wyszyński was particularly infuriated by Piasecki’s management of
Caritas, the Catholic charity—Pax took it over after the real organizers were removed—especially when unscrupulous Pax priests were caught selling donated penicillin on the black market.
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The rivalry between the two men may well have been encouraged by the communist party, of course, which had no interest in seeing Pax and the church
create a united front. In later years the party allowed rival “official” church groups to proliferate precisely in order to create competition among them.
⁴⁹

In the end, Piasecki failed in what he apparently set out to do. He never did persuade “reactionary forces” to join the new system. Nor did he persuade the communist party to make Pax an equal partner. He guessed, correctly, that someday the party would hand over power to an opposition grouping of its choice, which is indeed what happened in 1989. But he appeared on the scene too early to take advantage of such a situation himself, and he paid a very high price for trying. In 1957, his teenage son, Bohdan, was kidnapped and murdered, probably by a faction within the Polish secret police, in circumstances that remain murky to this day.

Piasecki did open what seemed, at the time, to be a window of freedom for a few people, and he did ensure that an avowedly Catholic discourse remained part of public life. The books and newspapers published by Pax provided some Catholic education for a generation of readers. More importantly, from Piasecki’s point of view, he survived. At a time when other ex–Home Army officers were dead or in prison, he and his colleagues had their own party, their own newspapers, a stable position within the system. And they had influence in all kinds of places. In 1955, Mazowiecki, Zabłocki, and several others rebelled against his leadership. But after they quit their jobs at
Dzi
ś
i Jutro
or Pax, all of them found it difficult to get new jobs elsewhere: every potential employer was warned off by the secret police, and no one wanted them around. All learned a lesson: a fight with Piasecki was dangerously close to a fight with the regime.
⁵⁰

Odd though it may sound, newspapers and magazines also provided a way out for reluctant collaborators. Of course, those who wrote about politics had few options in this era. They had to accept the telephone calls from the party brass, listen to instructions, and write as they were told. But others had more leeway.
Leopold Unger, a correspondent for
Życie Warszawy
(
Warsaw Life
) in the early 1950s, remembered that even then it was possible to write freely and critically about all kinds of things. The potholes in the streets, for example, or the lack of public buses: “It just wasn’t possible to criticize the system itself.”
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Newspapers were not all about politics, even then, and there were other kinds of publications as well.
Alexander Jackowski, after trying and failing to find his way in Poland’s Foreign Affairs Ministry in the late 1940s, began
editing a folk-art journal in 1952 “by accident,” as he recalled. He kept that job for forty-six years. During that period, he became a renowned expert in the subject of folk art, which he genuinely came to know and love. He didn’t challenge the system in that job, but he did not need to spend any time defending it.
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At some level, the regimes themselves understood the need for apolitical outlets, both for the reading public and for journalists. That’s the best explanation for the East German regime’s decision to begin publishing
Wochenpost
(
The Weekly Post
) in the autumn of 1953. Although the first issue appeared after Stalin’s death, plans for the newspaper had been laid a year earlier. Originally, the idea was Soviet: a senior Red Army general stationed in Berlin felt the East German press was not succeeding in reaching the entire population, especially women. The general approached
Rudi Wetzel, a journalist then out of favor with the regime, and asked him for some ideas. Wetzel made a proposal that seemed to come to nothing.

But behind the scenes a discussion had been sparked. Official reports bewailed the “colorlessness and uniformity of material about life in the republic,” as well as the absence of articles on “gardening, medicine, housework.”
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The East German leadership, ever conscious of how boring its propaganda could be, finally approached Wetzel and proposed that he start a magazine. Their suggestions were identical to those Wetzel himself had made to the Soviet general. And thus
Wochenpost
was born.

From the start, the newspaper tried to be different. Wetzel went out of his way to find journalists who were ambivalent about the regime, at one point even describing the first editorial board as a “journalistic penal colony, full of ex-convicts.” Their articles, at least by comparison to the political tracts found in
Neues Deutschland
, seemed remarkably fresh and entertaining. The first issue, published in time for Christmas, contained gardening hints, light features, and a “womens’ page.” The cover showed a child blowing out a candle and the words “To all who are of goodwill.” Later issues would feature travel writing, long pieces of reportage, even articles for children. But the
Wochenpost
never tried to become an opposition newspaper, in any sense of the term, and this may have been part of its appeal. As the journalist
Klaus Polkehn has argued,
Wochenpost
was “no more opportunistic than its readers.”
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The newspaper didn’t push the limits, and neither did they.