Read an Excerpt
There Is No Freedom Without Bread!
1989 and the Civil War That Brought Down Communism
By Constantine Pleshakov Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright © 2009 Constantine Pleshakov
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-4229-4
CHAPTER 1
War Brings License: 1942–48
The year was 1981, and if the world had ever cared about Poland, it was then. Three men had claimed the scene, and the protagonists of the emerging revolution had choices to make.
They couldn't have been more different: Karol Wojtyla was the son of a Habsburg officer raised in a rented apartment ("The extant furniture, china, cutlery, and decorations suggest solidity, piety, and a simple, but hardly impoverished, standard of living"); Wojciech Jaruzelski came from the gentry and grew up on an estate ("a deeply religious and patriotic upbringing"); Lech Walesa was a carpenter's son born in a hamlet in the heart of a marshland ("Our neighbors had avoided it, deeming it too dreadful to live on"). The officer's son was fluent in several languages, and an acknowledged poet, academic, and playwright. The nobleman did what his ancestors had — he had joined the army. The working-class man was an electrician. Given their very different backgrounds, it would have seemed totally impossible for the three to ever meet, let alone interact, but their paths did cross and the collision would shatter what Marx dreamed up, Lenin planned, and Stalin executed.
Those looking for a providential plan wouldn't fail to notice that, strangely enough, the three had been exposed to similar misfortunes. They all lost fathers to World War II, though the age gap between them, the sons, was tremendous — a quarter of a century. It is not unusual for a carpenter's son to do manual labor — like father, like son — but, surprisingly, his privileged brethren were forced into that as well, the middle-class boy working at a quarry, the nobleman in coal mines. At an age more appropriate for courtship and partying, each of the three saw multiple violent deaths, massacres that spared them only by chance. They were all children of war.
In the era before missiles, the war reached people first as a nighttime glare on the horizon; the light was a no-nonsense messenger, the reflection of fires in the war zone. The glare was disturbingly soundless and lasted for a night or two or three, depending on the force of the resistance the army was putting up in the area in question, and then the people started hearing the cannonade. In a few hours, the first wave of refugees hit the town. By that time, they had lost most of the bags they had carried with them, and many had lost family. Now the people in town had to decide — to flee or to stay.
If they chose to stay, they discovered shortly that the enemy, when he arrived, had a human form. He needed food and lodging, and everything else his nature might have demanded. In an instant, everyday life ground to a halt: banks, hospitals, and schools were shut down, money was more or less useless, the town thrown back to a time before abstractions — and its people had better have something valuable to barter for food. The enemy put up street signs in his language — Nach this and Nach that — but he used the local alphabet on the cardboard placards attached to the necks of executed resistance fighters.
The streets were empty, the people very quiet. Noise was the privilege of the occupying force. But in that silence, opportunities were born.
In 1942, one of the young men negotiating the silence was the future pope, Karol Wojtyla.
War has circles, like hell. This is how a witness described the Wehr-macht's arrival in a French town: "They [the German soldiers] smiled from afar at the young girls and the young girls walked by, proud and scornful ... So the Germans looked down at the crowd of kids around their knees: all the village children were there, fascinated by the uniforms, the horses, the high boots. However loudly their mothers called them, they wouldn't listen. They furtively touched the heavy material of the soldiers' jackets with their dirty fingers. The Germans beckoned to them and filled their hands with sweets and coins." In Poland, the arrival looked very different: "Of the houses, all that remained were brick chimneys and a few walls amid the smoldering ruins and glowing embers. The stench of fire and death was in the air ... People still walked among the ruins, searching dazedly. They picked their way through, looking, perhaps, for what remained of their belongings and their kin."
In September 1939, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union dismembered Poland. About one million Poles on the Soviet side of the border lost their property and shortly thereafter their freedom, deported to Central Asia and Siberia, where they were forced to work in mines and construction sites. Hitler did the same with his share of Poland. In the western part of the country, designated by Hitler as the area to be claimed by German settlers, half a million Poles were stripped of their land and evacuated. All in all, about three million Poles were sent to the Reich to work on farms and factories. Hitler's viceroy in Poland, Hans Frank, a man with "cold, fishlike" eyes who made Wojtyla's city, Kraków, his base, banned schools and Chopin concerts; he ordered libraries destroyed, monuments taken down. "The Pole has no rights whatsoever," Frank announced. Poles would work for the Reich and "in the end they will die out. There will never again be a Poland." His colleague in Prague had seven Czechs executed and proudly posted notices announcing the accomplishment. Frank smiled. "If I wanted to order notices posted every time seven Poles were shot, there wouldn't be enough forest in Poland to make the paper."
Like many others, Wojtyla fled Kraków in September 1939 and then, frightened by the chaos on the highways, turned back. Like every Polish male over the age of fourteen, he was now obliged to work for the Reich — and the philology major did, first at a quarry and then at a power plant. Like many, he lost family when the wartime malnutrition and distress killed his father, the last surviving Wojtyla other than himself. But unlike many other young men, he was not interested in materialistic interpretations of the catastrophe that had befallen Poland, like the Luftwaffe superiority in the air, the Blitzkrieg of the German panzer corps, the Red Army backstabbing Poland, Britain and France not rushing military help to their Polish ally. He argued metaphysically: at the age of twenty-two, single, poor, and orphaned, he felt like Job — a fine man scorched by God for no obvious reason.
Poland was often called the most Catholic country in Europe. An American traveler visiting shortly before the war admired peasants walking to church barefoot wearing "their very best" and carrying "bouquets of flowers mixed with sprays of wheat." The main Polish shrine was the church at Jasna Góra Monastery in Czestochowa, where, in "a chapel on the N.E. side, above the altar, hangs the celebrated and wonder-working picture known as the 'Black Madonna' (Regina Regni Poloniae). This consists of a painting of the Virgin and Child on cypress-wood, much darkened by age and adorned with costly jewels." The dry description comes from a Baedeker the visitor was likely using, and it doesn't even remotely hint at what she saw in the actual location. "Inside the church," she wrote,
when the large bronze gates leading to the altar were thrown open, there was a regular stampede. People shoved wildly, raising their hands in the air to grab the doors by which to pull themselves in, or to keep their arms from being broken in the jam. People grabbed each other to get near the altar rail. One looked into faces that bore signs of tragedy, and tears were rolling down many cheeks ... The Church means much to the people of Poland where extreme poverty exists. Church days are almost their only days of fete, their only hours of freedom. The fine architecture of church building, the richness of the ecclesiastical treasures and of the Mass — these are about the only things of beauty that enter into the lives of most of these communicants.
The visitor's analysis sounded unwittingly Marxist. But the irony was that the wealthy in Poland were equally devoted. When in 1920 Józef Pilsudski defeated the invading Red Army on the Vistula River in a classic maneuver, sending his best forces into the gap between two Red Army groups, many Poles attributed the victory to God's intervention, dubbing it the "Miracle on the Vistula." The losers proposed a different explanation for the strategic blunder: not God but tired troops (incidentally, one of them was Joseph Stalin) and supply shortages.
In Kraków, the portal of Wawel Castle bore the inscription Si Deus Nobiscum Quis Contra Nos — If God Is With Us Who Can Be Against Us? This "if" suggested the possibility of abandonment by God. With Hans Frank in the Wawel, the Poles were forced to address a dilemma: Accept? Rebel? Approximately four hundred thousand Poles took up armed resistance. Millions did not.
Despite what his apologists would have to say forty years later, the only act of defiance Karol Wojtyla allowed himself was to perform in the clandestine Rhapsodic Theater, a company performing patriotic dramas for a select audience — basically, preaching to the converted, and in a whisper, too. The young man wrote a play called Job, the stern title somewhat compromised by a baroque subtitle:
A Drama from the Old Testament
The Action Took Place in the Old Testament
Before Christ's Coming
The Action Takes Place in Our Days
In Job's Time
For Poland and the World
The Action Takes Place in the Time of Expectation,
Of Imploring Judgment,
In the Time of Longing
For Christ's Testament,
Worked Out
In Poland's and the World's Suffering.
The play followed the Book of Job closely: there was a reason behind the trial, as, unknown to Job, God had made a bet with Satan about Job's "integrity," and all the deaths and loss of property were one huge test of Job's faith that Job almost failed, because, finally overwhelmed, he loudly questioned God's wisdom: "I cry to you, O God, but you don't answer me. I stand before you, and you don't bother to look." God's response to the rebel's objection was very compelling: "Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? ... Have you ever commanded the morning to appear and caused the dawn to rise in the east? ... Do you know where the gates of death are located? ... Have you visited the treasuries of the snow? Have you seen where the hail is made and stored? ... Can you hold back the movements of the stars? Are you able to restrain the Pleiades or Orion? ... Can you shout to the clouds and make it rain? Can you make lightning appear and cause it to strike as you direct it?"
On hearing the frightfully specific list of things he couldn't do, Job repented and howled: "I take back everything I said, and I sit in dust and ashes to show my repentance." Satisfied by the humbled man's cooperation, God "blessed Job in the second half of his life even more than in the beginning," giving him "fourteen thousand sheep, six thousand camels, one thousand teams of oxen, and one thousand female donkeys," and also seven sons and three daughters, and let him live until the age of 140 "to see four generations of his children and grandchildren."
The Book of Job addressed the issue of theodicy head-on, and the answer it gave to the question of why bad things happen to good people — there is always a cosmic reason for everything, and an individual, if he wants to keep his integrity, has to accept that — is a cornerstone of all three Abrahamic religions. But unquestioning devotion like that demanded a lot of strength, particularly from a young intellectual struggling in an occupied country. Also, Abrahamic theodicy suggested that a human might eventually get an answer to the why-is-this-happening-to-me question. Wojtyla was determined to go all the way through the trial and do everything humanly possible to get an answer. At work, he prayed on his knees, "unafraid of ridicule and seemingly able to tune out the racket around him to concentrate on his conversation with God." He joined a group called the Living Rosary run by Jan Tyranowski, a tailor by occupation, which had about sixty young males, ages fourteen and up. They were secretive like early Christians, and like an apostle, their leader lacked any formal training. Tyranowski put Wojtyla in charge of a team of fifteen. The immersion in spiritual work — reading, meditating, tutoring during a foreign occupation — was what later generations of Eastern European dissidents would call "inner emigration," retreating inward and washing one's hands of the state and its evils.
Wojtyla was Tyranowski's favorite, and the tailor introduced the young man to a hallowed treasure: the writings of St. John of the Cross, a poet-saint best known for wrestling with the Dark Night of the Soul, a three-o'clock-in-the-morning type of angst that should not be fought but rather embraced, as the surrender leads the sufferer into sweeter depths, where Jesus shines.
How well I know the spring that brims and flows,
Although by night.
This eternal spring is hidden deep,
How well I know the course its waters keep,
Although by night.
Its source I do not know because it has none
And yet from this, I know, all sources come,
Although by night.
In the fall of 1942, the portal to the depths had a location: Franciszkanska 3, in Kraków, where Archbishop Adam Stefan Sapieha ran an underground seminary.
Sapieha, the father figure of Wojtyla's life, was a "short man of iron will." Arrogant, curt, and unforgiving — in one word, princely — he presided over the Polish church during the war after its official shepherd, August Cardinal Hlond, followed the government into exile. When Hans Frank invited himself to dinner, the archbishop served him beet jam, acorn bread, and ersatz coffee, declaring that that's what the rest of the nation was having. After an uprising began in Warsaw on August 1, 1944, and the Nazis retaliated massively, Sapieha ordered all the seminarians into his residence. They would stay there until the Red Army marched into Kraków five months later. An eyewitness wrote:
The Red Army soldiers seemed strange, haunted, their faces endlessly weary. They moved lethargically, a gray mass that little resembled an army, their earflaps flapping, their eyes voids, their gray overcoats almost down to their ankles. They wore quilted jackets and trousers, and clumsy, misshapen felt boots. Some of them carried rifles with protruding bayonets; others carried submachine guns with cartridge drums, a piece of rope where the strap should have been.
The Poles smiled at the Soviet soldiers, but they did not respond. Seeing how weary they were, Poles handed them food. They ate without stopping or even slowing their pace. Trucks followed pulling long-barreled antitank guns. "On to Berlin" signs were scrawled in Russian on their sides.
The number of vulgarities written about the origins of communism in Eastern Europe is insulting to the dignity of the nations in question. It is not fair to assume that Marxism reached Eastern Europe dressed in a Red Army trench coat. It arrived earlier and looked different, and to understand that we must look to Franz Kafka.
"As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams," "The Metamorphosis" famously begins, "he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect." Samsa, Kafka's grotesque double, is a "commercial traveler" by occupation, so alienated from everyone and everything that his horrid metamorphosis seems to be the culmination of a journey, not the beginning of a new one. Looking at his "armor-plated" back, "domelike brown belly divided into stiff arched segments," and "numerous legs" — a centipede, in the opinion of Vladimir Nabokov — Gregor asks himself a question: "What has happened to me?" But he instantly switches to the breadwinner's concerns: he has to catch a seven o'clock train, having already missed his regular one, as he had inexplicably slept through the "ear-splitting noise" of the alarm clock, "properly set for four o'clock." "Oh God, he thought, what an exhausting job I've picked on! ... The chief himself would be sure to come with the sick-insurance doctor, would reproach his parents with their son's laziness, and would cut all excuses short by referring to the insurance doctor, who of course regarded all mankind as perfectly healthy malingerers."
Though Kafka personally had no interest in Marxism, "The Metamorphosis" echoes The Communist Manifesto: "The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations ... It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of Philistine sentimentalism in the icy water of egotistical calculation." In principle, Gregor's metamorphosis should've evoked exactly that — religious fervor ("Is that the Devil messing with our boy, Mother?"), chivalrous enthusiasm ("Don't you worry, son, we will find a cure no matter what!"), and sentimentalism ("Scratch his back, there, between the plates. The poor darling seems to like that"). Yet "In the course of that very first day," the story informs us, "Gregor's father explained the family's financial position and prospects to both his mother and his sister." Obviously, with Gregor unable to go to work anymore, they didn't look good.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from There Is No Freedom Without Bread! by Constantine Pleshakov. Copyright © 2009 Constantine Pleshakov. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
