PROFESSOR ANDRZEJ NOWAK HAD JUST wrapped up a conference on the work of Solzhenitsyn, in December 1981, when martial law was declared. Overnight, Poland changed. A photograph captured a tank stationed outside a cinema. The film being advertised? Apocalypse Now.
Communism was established in Poland, soon after the end of the Second World War, with tremendous savagery. War heroes liable to resist the dictatorial state — such as Witold Pilecki, who had volunteered to enter Auschwitz to gather information — were imprisoned, tortured, and executed. A thriving cultural scene was strangled in its cot. President Bolesław Bierut was a shameless bootlicker of Joseph Stalin.
The regime softened in the middle of the 1950s under Władysław Gomułka, until a stagnant economy and political unrest inspired an anti-Semitic purge and the shooting of striking workers in Gdynia and Gdańsk. Edward Gierek, replacing Gomułka, sought economic progress with massive borrowing. It led to problems down the road when the debts had to be paid, but it — was ubiquitous. “If you didn’t steal from the state,” Wildstein told me, explaining the attitude of the time, “you stole from your family.”
