Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw (100 page)

31.7.[1954]. The evening was rather gloomy. We remembered the Rising. The Primate asked me to hum the ‘Warsaw Melody’ because he couldn’t recall the words. Together with the Chaplain we then sang the ‘March of [Mokotov]’. The Primate grew very sad, thinking again of the Rising. I, too, had many painful memories from that time.

1 August. In the morning, the Primate prayed for the fallen of the Rising. Perhaps he is in a black mood not merely because of the Rising, but because of his approaching birthday and the anniversary of his ordination . . .
⁸⁵

When the Primate was finally freed, Sister Maria-Leonia asked him to release her from her vows.

In retrospect, however, one can see that the Stalinists were forging the rod that would break their own backs. The head of anger was gathering in the ruling Party as well as in the nation as a whole. By a
curious act of symmetry they had placed under house-arrest, but not eliminated, both the leading Polish Communist, Comrade Gomulka, and the most respected national leader, Cardinal Stefan W. Unwittingly they had prepared the ground for the grand solution of 1956, when Stalinism collapsed. Both the Comrade and the Cardinal re-emerged to forge the historic compromise that kept the People’s Republic intact for the next thirty-four years.

1956
WAS A MAJOR WATERSHED
for Eastern Europe. It was the year of Khrushchev’s ‘Secret Speech’, which confirmed ‘the Thaw’; and it was also the year of the Hungarian Rising, which was suppressed by Soviet tanks and which set strict limits on the relaxation of the Communist dictatorships. Poland escaped Hungary’s fate by a whisker. The Party leadership, which had chosen Comrade ‘Vyeslav’ as their General Secretary without prior Soviet approval, mobilized the army in readiness to resist Soviet intervention; and Khrushchev, no doubt with the Warsaw Rising in mind, backed off. Comrade Gomulka, who was neither a liberal nor a democrat, nonetheless embarked on his ‘Polish Road to Socialism’ with a significant degree of popular support. By making concessions to the Church, the private farmers, and the cultural elite, he put an end to the nightmare of Stalinism, and gave the Communist regime a new breath of life that was not finally extinguished for more than thirty years.

The Constitution of the People’s Republic had been passed by the Legislative Assembly on 22 July 1952. It was carefully timed to remind everyone of the Lublin Committee and of the Soviet takeover of 1944. It had little practical significance, since the state was subjected, according to Leninist principles of ‘Democratic Centralism’, to the overriding dictatorship of the Communist Party. Indeed, such were the political certainties of the Stalinist era, that the Constitution of 1952 completely omitted the two most important rules of the system, namely the unbreakable ‘alliance’ with the Soviet Union and the ‘leading role’ of the Party. When, on Brezhnev’s insistence, amendments to the Constitution were introduced in 1975–76 to embody these rules in law, open dissent was expressed.

From 1956 onwards, however, the ideological, social, and economic capital of the regime was steadily declining. Of course, the decline did not follow a simple path; and thanks to the Soviet alliance and to the Party’s grip on the instruments of coercion, it seemed for a long time that the regime could never be effectively challenged. Yet in retrospect, one can see very closely that the foundations of Communist power were inexorably eroding. Under the leadership of the Cardinal-Primate, and later of his
understudy, the Archbishop of Cracow, who in 1978 was elected Pope, the authority of the Church rose as that of the discredited politicians fell. Despite the pressures of intense industrialization, the workers in whose interests the People’s Republic was supposed to be organized grew ever more disaffected. In 1980–81 they founded the Solidarity Movement, which was temporarily suppressed by a military coup but which eventually supplanted the regime. Meanwhile, the balance of power within the intellectual and cultural elite tipped. Whereas in the 1950s no dissident intellectuals had been free to operate, a clear majority of educated people, whether openly or in secret, sympathized with the opposition by the 1980s. Soviet communism and its various clones and imitations formed one of the few major political systems in modern European history which died on its feet from natural, internal causes.

Throughout those decades, attitudes to the Warsaw Rising formed an accurate barometer for the declining health of People’s Poland and the increasing vigour of the opposition. After all, the Rising had been the key event whereby the post-war Soviet-backed and Communist-run establishment had come to power. One can identify three main periods. In the late 1950s and 60s, though the criminal tendencies of the Rising’s instigators continued to define the official scenario, it became acceptable to praise the heroism both of the common people and of the insurgents. In the 1970s and 80s, though it was still only permissible to publish critical accounts of the Rising, it was increasingly possible to describe ‘the London camp’ and its followers including the Home Army, and to engage in reasoned discussion. In the 1990s, as during the brief Solidarity interlude of 1980–81, all sides of the argument could be put with equal force; and many ‘blank spots’ in the existing factual information were filled. Each of the decennial anniversaries – 1964, 1974, 1984, and 1994 – acted as the spur for publications, conferences, reunions, and memorials.

The Roman Catholic Primate of Poland was one of the two central figures of the 1956 settlement. He possessed the popular authority which the ruling Party lacked; and by reaching a public understanding with Comrade Gomulka, he ensured that the People’s Republic enjoyed a generation of relative stability. In essence, the settlement between Church and state adopted a strategy of mutual restraint. The Party would stop undermining the liberties of the Church so long as the Church did not call the legitimacy of the Party-State into question. The Party Secretary agreed to the deal because, as a Marxist, he believed that the hold of the Church on an industrializing and modernizing society was bound to wane. The
Primate agreed, confident in the belief that a Church free from political interference could actually strengthen its hold. He was proved right. For twenty-five years, he carefully nourished the religious and cultural life of the nation, teaching them that the battle of minds was more effective than battles on the streets. He quickly became the supreme moral authority in the country, attracting a degree of affection and admiration to which no party leader could ever aspire. So long as he lived, he wielded unparalleled influence. His was the archetypal positivist line – not to fight with sticks and stones, but to preserve and strengthen the essential spirit and sinews of the nation.

For the Primate’s biographers, there is no small problem in reconciling this triumphant positivist strategy of his later years with the fact that in 1944 he had served as a Home Army chaplain (Father ‘Stefan’) tending to the spiritual needs of the Kampinos Group. Suffice it to say that the problem revolves around means and methods, not around goals. A man of profound faith like the Primate took the same uncompromising intellectual and moral stance towards communism that he had earlier taken against fascism. He was not going to compromise on fundamentals. On the other hand, he was not the militant sort of priest who packed a pistol under his soutane. He became involved with the Home Army more by chance than by design. As the parish priest of Laski, a village in a beautiful woodland setting on the northern perimeter of Warsaw, he had taken charge of a religious community which had developed a particularly open-minded and non-judgemental brand of Catholicism. But his parish happened to lie in a district where clashes between the Home Army and the Germans were a daily occurrence. His duty was neither to condemn nor to praise the actions of the insurgents, but to care for their spiritual needs. He undertook it without hesitation. Whether he approved of the armed struggle is open to question. But he could not have failed to witness its terrible consequences. What is certain is that after the war he decided that the overwhelming force of totalitarianism had to be contested by different means. He lived to see the Solidarity movement, and one can say without fear of contradiction that Solidarity’s brand of non-violent opposition was close to his own convictions. Indeed, Solidarity, which owed much to memories of the Rising, but which was destined to humble communism without a shot being fired, was very much the product of his inspiring and unyielding leadership.

The first signs of ‘the Thaw’ were already visible in Poland before the crisis of October 1956 erupted. The policy of forcible collectivization had been abandoned in 1953–54. The much-feared Ministry of Public Security was dismantled in 1955 and replaced by a Ministry of the Interior that took the reorganized security services under its wing. Mokotov Jail was closed, and turned into the headquarters of Polish Radio. Comrade Gomulka, the leader of the ‘national Communists’, was already starting to influence the party line before Bierut’s last journey to Moscow. Most importantly, the great majority of political prisoners were released. As often as not, they were formally exculpated of the false charges brought by Stalinist courts and rehabilitated with full civil rights.

‘Rehabilitation’, however, fell far short of restitution. It usually consisted of a piece of paper which stated that the judgement had been invalid, and that, in consequence, the sentence imposed was now terminated. There was nothing approaching an apology; compensation was rarely paid to the victims; and the guilty judges and procurators were not usually put on trial.

In some sensitive cases the process of judicial review lasted for years. In the case of Nile, the review began with a hearing on 28 February 1957, when the chief witness withdrew all his evidence. The Supreme Court then overruled both of Nile’s sentences, and asked the Provincial Court to reconsider the case as a whole. On 4 July 1958, the prosecutor abandoned the case ‘due to the absence of evidence of the defendant’s guilt’.
¹
This step was equivalent to instating a verdict of ‘not proven’. At a further hearing in July 1960, Nile’s widow, exceptionally, was granted the sum of 50,400
zloties
by the Ministry of Justice for the ‘improper judgement’. The money was used to erect a symbolic gravestone in Warsaw’s military cemetery.

None of the officials who had caused Nile’s death was severely punished. The judge continued to practise. The military prosecutor who laid the false charges, transferred to the reserve, continued to lecture thereafter at the Law Department of Warsaw University. In 1968, among people persecuted by the Communist regime, she emigrated to the United Kingdom, where she obtained British nationality.
²

In the period after 1956, therefore, a great burden was partly lifted. Former Home Army people were still viewed with suspicion by the Communist authorities, and were obliged to exercise discretion about their past. But they were no longer actively persecuted and many were able to
find a niche where they could lead a relatively normal existence for the first time in nearly twenty years.

Contrary to widespread impressions, the number of ex-insurgents who joined the Communist Establishment, especially after 1956, was not insignificant. A few, either through blackmail, opportunism or desperation may have joined during the Stalinist years. But the influx grew when the Stalinist nightmare passed and the People’s Republic was thought to be safely in place for the foreseeable future. One such recruit was Casimir K., sometime soldier of the AK Vigry Battalion, and an ambitious post-war journalist. He found common cause with the Communists through his atheist views; and he earned the label of a ‘janissary of socialism’. He never denied his Home Army connections, publishing a history of his battalion in 1971. After editing several newspapers he came into prominence in the 1970s as a Minister of State and director of the Office of Religious Denominations. This body was the Communists’ watchdog on the Roman Catholic Church; and its director’s function was to shadow, and if possible to diminish the influence of, the Primate. He was seriously worried in 1974 when the Archbishop of Cracow declared that ‘Catholics do not want to be treated as second-class citizens’. He put on a brave face. ‘Just as I am obliged to smile in my duties as a state minister,’ he confessed, ‘so will I as a Communist fight religion and the Church . . . If we cannot annihilate the Church, we should at least prevent it from doing damage.’ But he did not fail, as ex-insurgent to ex-insurgent, to mark the Primate’s seventy-fifth birthday with a gift of flowers. His position became untenable in October 1978 when one of his two key charges was elected Pope. According to a later report, the news was so unbelievable that he rang Moscow, not Rome, for confirmation. The reply was positive.
³

Col. Radoslav made his peace with the Communists by a different route. Nile’s deputy in K-Div., and a very prominent commander in the Rising, he escaped a Communist death cell by signing an agreement with his captors. He then made a career as chairman of a housing cooperative. But his real service to the regime lay in the field of veterans’ affairs, where, in contrast to most of his comrades, he did not shun the so-called Association of Fighters for Freedom and Democracy (ZBoWiD) and rose to its top echelon. The Association was one of the Communists’ vehicles for appropriating the memory of the Second World War to themselves; and it had nothing in common with Freedom and Democracy as once
understood by the Home Army (or the rest of the world). His reward was a host of medals; and promotion to the rank of major general.
⁴

History and its manipulation were always prime concerns of Communist Governments – after all, so-called ‘historical materialism’ was the cornerstone of their philosophy. Yet in the world of Marxist-Leninism, Marxist precepts invariably took second place to the iron rules of Leninism, which insisted that absolute priority be given to the interests of the ruling Party. In this regard, no amount of sophistry could conceal the events of 1944. It was not in the Party’s interests that children should learn how the people of Warsaw had stayed loyal to the ‘bourgeois Government’ in London, nor how the great fraternal army of the Soviet Union had mysteriously ceased its advance. So despite the relaxations of 1956, many aspects about the Rising continued to be taboo. In nearly forty years of its researches the Communist-run Academy of Sciences (PAN) could never agree on the content of the volume covering the war years in its official
History of Poland
.
⁵
Party historians who were licensed to write about the war had a strange habit of running out of ink when they reached 1943.
⁶