Family History of Fear Read online

  Baśka stressed that. People were coming home, all sorts of people, and as soon as they had told their stories, they wanted to act, to do something for Poland. “You can’t imagine what it was like then. How could you? Today, people sit around talking about politics. It wasn’t like that in those days. We had to pitch in and do something for the country.”

  My mother felt that way, and so did her father. And her friends, the daughter of the cleaning woman at the Central Committee and the shoemaker’s daughter from Mokotowska Street.

  Everybody knew Halina was Jewish. This is how they remember it today and how they tell the story. How she and her mother, who was a schoolteacher, were stuck in the ghetto during the Occupation and then, after that, went into hiding. But for them, it was exactly the same as knowing that Baśka’s family remained loyal to the AK, the Home Army, or that they fought in the streets during the Warsaw Uprising. Or that so-and-so escaped from Auschwitz. Or had never returned from some other concentration camp. Each of them had a wound to bear. Only the degree of pain varied. They were not interested in adding prejudice to the mix. No scar was considered more important than another. The only real difference between them was the destiny assigned to each by the war. Otherwise, they had different parents and lived in different houses. That’s all. And when they shared it in secret, as little girls do—friends tell each other all sorts of things—when they were told about that, it simply wasn’t mentioned again. Considering the pace at which events were moving, they had more than enough material to discuss. Like joining the ZMP, the Union of Polish Youth, for example.

  One fine day, the principal of the school came into their classroom and said, in a tone that brooked no objections: “Young ladies, you are to join the ZMP.” And so they did, eight out of nine. Almost every one of them sincerely believed in the ideals of socialism. It was hardest for Baśka. She had to hide her relationship with the Marian Society/Sodality of Our Lady. Still, none of them regarded enrolling in that organization as a political gesture. They had agreed to give their wholehearted support to the system that was in place at that time. Now, they felt even more connected by the shared discipline of the organization and by its rituals—for instance, marches and social activities. Besides, they all knew membership in the ZMP was their ticket to the university.

  December 21, 1949, was Joseph Stalin’s seventieth birthday. Stalin, master builder of the first socialist country in the world—according to the wall posters—leader and educator of the workers of the world, of progressive youth the world over, and Poland’s greatest friend. She believed it; she wanted to; just as, when the war was ending and all the children were waiting for their parents to appear, she had believed her teacher’s promise that the Russians would come and that no one, from that day on, would ever hurt them again. The Russians did come, and actually, nothing that bad had happened, for which they all had Comrade Stalin to thank.

  They had been celebrating his birthday since the beginning of the month. The ZMP held one program after another. There were discussions of Stalin’s life and work, and all sorts of contests organized around the common theme of his achievements. The best participants were rewarded with books by Soviet authors glorifying the heroic struggle against the fascist invader and celebrating the establishment of socialism. I am sure my mother got one. I remember seeing a book by Fadeyev on the shelves at home.

  She was one of the first to put together a complete library of her own. She knew how to speak with conviction about the superiority of the current system over the old one, using as an example the availability of cheaply priced books. Created in March of that year, the Committee for the Propagation of the Book brought out volumes of Polish classics for one hundred złotys, the equivalent of three kilos of bread, seven eggs, or a pint of vodka.

  She kept these accounts meticulously and reported them to scholarly journals, full of enthusiasm and pride. Several dozen titles out of the two hundred projected had already been published, each with a print run of at least fifty thousand copies. Before the war, even the most popular works sold a few thousand copies at best. That was a big difference. Soon she realized that she wanted to know more about everything to do with books. The Week of Public Education, Books and Publishers, which was held for the first time that year, 1949, was as significant an event in her eyes as the campaign against illiteracy.

  Sunday mornings, most of Halina’s friends went to church, but she never did. That was as it should be, she thought. It did not surprise her that Catholics and Party members prayed together every week. Regina, who was president of the ZMP in their class and came from the working-class district of Wola, never missed a May Day parade or a Sunday Mass. Political commitment, diligence, and piety did not necessarily have to conflict. For her father they did, but not everyone was as much of a stickler about the basics. And even he made exceptions.

  Sometimes, after breakfast, they went for a Sunday walk together. Or else her father and stepmother would go and Halina would stay home alone. She had never taken Catholicism to heart. She did not feel she was missing anything. She never read or thought about the Bible. She never felt the need. She did not know how to behave at a Mass.

  Before graduation, all the girls in Halina’s class went to confession, two by two, at the Convent of the Sisters of Nazareth. The whole class also took Communion. One after another, they knelt at the altar and received the body of Jesus. All of them, without exception.

  My mother denies it categorically to this day. She swears that she never, ever went to confession. That she never took Communion. It is how she remembers things.

  “Religion” is clearly indicated on her diploma, written in dark ink with a firm hand. Very good. Her classmates remember. We can assume that she took part in all the compulsory religious ceremonies at school. And then she blotted it out.In the graduation photograph, she looks demure, in a navy-blue uniform with a little round white collar, her hands folded on the bench in front of her. An excellent student, satisfactory in Latin and physical education, determined, with a serious expression, next to Miss Ronthaler, the Polish professor and hall monitor. Of the nine graduates, three were admitted to the school of journalism at the University of Warsaw. In the autumn of 1950, high school diplomas in hand, they embarked on a new chapter of their lives. Perhaps the most important one of all.

  * * *

  * The Gray Ranks was a Polish resistance movement—agents sent by the AK, the military arm of the government-in-exile in London. (A.T.)

  BOGDAN II

  MY FATHER, BOGDAN TUSZYŃSKI, A POLISH RADIO SPORT REPORTER AT WORK

  Bogdan still looks back on those first few years in Poland right after the war as a time of tremendous enthusiasm. He remembers how grateful they were to the Soviet army, which had delivered them from the Nazis. No one spoke then, as we do today, of the yoke of communism, but of building a socialist country “on the model of the sister state of workers and peasants.” They took seriously the slogan “Workers of the world, unite.”

  He did not know what that really meant. In other words, he was not aware of anything beneath the surface. In those days, like many others, he was oblivious. None of them felt they were under lock and key, captives of the “Red menace.” They did not use terms like “regime” or “under the yoke.” There was nothing shameful in their political involvement. Only Poland and the future mattered. On every official form, he emphasized his working-class background and his left-wing pedigree. He included his parents’ membership in the PPS, the Polish Socialist Party, although his mother was never an active member, and his father’s ties, after the war, with the PZPR, the Polish United Workers’ Party, although he no longer maintained contact with his father. Bogdan’s political activism started as soon as he entered secondary school, when he joined the ranks of the “Red Scouts,” which gathered working-class youths under the socialist banner. He adopted their ideology as his own. At this time he also joined the ZMP, the Union of Polish Youth, but—as he stated on the official form—it was only at
the university that he came into contact for the first time with “the real work of the youth organization” and “the scientific view of the world.” They elected him secretary of the local group.

  He was involved in sports, he attended the dances, and he wrote his first articles. He started contributing to the popular daily Przegląd Sportowy, a sports paper. He was nineteen years old in 1951 and knew exactly what he wanted. He was skillful, he wrote a great deal, and very quickly. He was so successful that one day a professor pleaded with him to moderate his pace, because the other students could not keep up. “You have all sorts here, people from the countryside, collective farms; it’s a question of fairness.”

  It was his success in sports, no doubt, that brought young Tuszyński to the attention of the director Leonard Buczkowski. He was filming Pierwszy Start (First Start), the edifying story of a country lad who wants to become a glider pilot. A team of intrepid fellows from the association called In the Service of Poland bravely helped him. Bogdan had a part as a telegraph operator. The young actor Stanisław Mikulski appeared in several scenes, and the high-school student Roman Polanski was in one frame. Bogdan’s characteristic gesture of brushing back his hair from his forehead was caught on film.

  He soon fell in love.

  He knew everything about Halina. She herself had told him. It was an important element of their relationship. He immediately felt responsible for her and wanted to be her protector.

  To me they seem very young, slender and radiant, at that time. Always together, in a group. Wearing red ties. If they marched, it was jauntily. If they sang, they gave their all. If they took action, it was with conviction. They were permanently at the height of euphoria—in the trenches, in their social life, in their propaganda work in the countryside, in the gathering of stonka (potato bugs). And in the parades on May 1.

  “Feel sorry you couldn’t be here,” wrote a student to her friend—it could have been my mother to her girlfriend or any one of them. “Something phenomenal. I was in the front row wearing a red tie. There was a red banner raised high in the sky, and my eyes were riveted with admiration on Comrade President Bierut. People streamed past for hours on end, for a whole day. Then the military parade. What power!”

  They would remember the first parades of their student years as idyllic.

  At the universities, everyone was debating the issues of Communist education. Among them were subjects such as “Why we adopt as our own the tenets of communism and morality.” Or else: “On patriotism and internationalism.” “The moral and ideological profile of a member of the ZMP—a young patriot and future leader of the country” was particularly popular.

  Right after the war, the department of journalism at the University of Warsaw provided a diverse environment. On the one hand were young members of the ZMP just out of secondary school, and on the other, noticeably older students in their twenties and even in their thirties, as well as “comrades” of both sexes selected by branches of the Party to continue their studies.

  The young were brimming over with energy; they wanted to construct socialism from the ground up, as they had a profound faith in the new order. They also believed in the profession of journalism and its mission. The newspaper, in the words of Lenin, was “an organizer, a propagator, an agitator.” The newspaper was the “cultural bread.” They were conscious of its power. The press had to mobilize the broadest public opinion for the tasks facing the country in the struggle to achieve peace. “From a banal scribbler serving the bourgeois class,” wrote Bogdan, “the journalist in our system has raised himself to the function of social militant before whom stand glorious goals.” That’s what was drilled into them: they had to be politically vigilant; they had to pay attention to public opinion, stigmatize evil, and react by composing letters, complaints, demands. The militant students were placed under the supervision of the dean of the faculty, first Jerzy Kowalewski, then Aleksander Litwin.

  The transcript of the department listed all the subjects that had to be mastered by the students in the journalism section during their three-year course of studies. My parents studied from 1950 to 1953. It was the political economy of capitalism, with Professor Lipinski, that took up the most time, four hours a week. They devoted two hours to dialectical and historical materialism with Adam Schaff. The students were required to participate in work-study organizations—at a daily paper, at a weekly, on the radio—as well as learning the techniques of printing. In total, more than twenty subjects, among them military training. In the second year was added the history of the All-Union Party (the Bolsheviks), logic, style, and literature.

  The lectures were attended by large numbers of students, and the tutorials were broken down into smaller groups. Teams of readers reported on the short stories by Prus, Sienkiewicz, and Konopnicka, Volkolamsk Highway by Bek, and How the Steel Was Tempered by Ostrovsky. The printed word had to reach the masses and strengthen them in the spirit of socialist realism. The students voiced their contempt for films “made in Hollywood”; they were enthusiastic about art based on the simple life; they debated the moral dilemmas of the welders and foremen.

  When they started their studies in autumn 1950, you could be thrown out of the university for telling a joke. It was necessary only that someone rush to inform the right people: “He told me a joke about the USSR.” Meetings were organized at the faculty level to debate the horrors of wearing narrow trousers or of making the moves of a “cool cat” while dancing. As a general rule, denunciations concerning participation in the Warsaw Uprising or belonging to the AK, the Home Army, were really dangerous. Someone in their group recalled an accusation made against a colleague who was threatened with expulsion from the organization because she took notes during lectures with an American fountain pen. This must have had a deeper meaning.

  The propaganda brochures for internal use warned: “The disruptive aspects of the enemy’s work are hostile manifestations, especially those linked to the question of Katyn* and the defacing of newspapers posted on walls. The enemy also depraves the young through drunkenness and debauchery, into which they even lure members of the ZMP. In some cases the depravity is masked specifically as communist morality: It’s to enjoy life that we have communist morality. Residents of the university dormitories are particularly vulnerable.”

  During his student years my father had no other residence in Warsaw, like the five other members of his group from Rypin: Daniel, Czarek, Edek, Włodek, and Witek. Among them were four couples, Halina and Bogdan included, who formed a circle of friends. My father enjoyed laughter and telling jokes. You could hardly avoid noticing him socially; he had to stand out, no matter at what price. No doubt he was careless in what he said, because he had confidence in people, in the times.

  I have trouble imagining my parents this way: always together, in classes, during recesses, during the evening meetings. Always near one another, at no more than arm’s length, side by side, knees touching, shoulder to shoulder. He was generally in action, always “between”—between a match and meeting someone, a conference, returning home. She was calm and serious. But she also enjoyed laughing, especially in his presence. To the others, they both seemed without a care. For that she was also grateful to him.

  They seem to me so dissimilar, coming from such different homes, heredity, and environments, each carrying baggage of distinct experiences. Following different gods. And yet many things united them, above and beyond their initial feelings. Above all they wanted to live, at last live, walk, and breathe, attain their happiness. Holding their heads high, she and he, with the same privileges, the same promise of a favorable destiny. In Poland, in their country. The daughter of an engineer and the son of a railroad worker, the granddaughter of merchants and the grandson of peasants, coming from different planets, on this same piece of Polish soil.

  How did it happen? How could they brand as an enemy of the people this lad from working-class Łόdź, so that he was stripped of his rights as a member of an organization to which he
was completely devoted? No one can remember. The whole faculty gathered for the meeting. No one can reconstitute the sequence of events of this organized entrapment, or the succession of accusations.

  From that moment something started to change in the life of my father.

  May 1952. Certainly it was May: he remembered the chestnut trees in bloom. One morning he was leaving the student dormitory on Grenadiers Street, his soccer shoes slung over his shoulders. He was on the team representing the university in a game that afternoon, vying for the championship of the top-ranked schools. He was in a hurry. He was coming from the other side of the Vistula by bus and wanted to go over his notes before classes. And see Halina.

  He had hardly entered the university hall when he was called to the office of the ZMP. On the right of the entrance hall, up to the second floor. There were several men in the room. Without any warning, one of them put a revolver to his back. Even though it now seems unbelievable, that is what he remembers: “You son of a bitch, come with us.” Downstairs, near the Geography Institute, a car was waiting. They drove him to Mostowski Palace, headquarters of the Internal Security Services, the political police.

  His friends at the residence had seen him leave for the university, but he did not show up there before noon, nor afterward. Halina became worried. By evening they went searching for him.

  Someone had seen him as he was being intercepted in the entrance hall of the university. Someone else told Halina. She was in a panic. She who had never asked her father for anything now ran to see him. I am not absolutely certain, and she does not remember, but somebody must have intervened. Or else all of this would have taken another turn. It was the only arrest made in a class that numbered more than a hundred students.