What Every American Should Know About Europe

by Melissa Rossi

  Run by Father Tadeusz Rydzyk, Radio Maryja claims to reach 3 million listeners, many of them the rural poor. The Catholic station has triggered uproars for comments portraying Jews as extorting the government in trying to get back lands lost during WWII; the station also referred to survivors’ compensation as part of “Holocaust, Inc.” Radio Maryja defended accused pedophile Father Henryk Jankowski, who’d shrugged off the sexual accusations as a “Judeo-Communist plot.” The station, which regularly interviews the highest-ranking Law and Justice Party members, was recently rapped by the Vatican, which asked that Radio Maryja stop attacking Jews. The broadcast incidents speak to a far wider problem of anti-Semitism in Poland, where several political parties take a blatantly anti-Jew view, and where neo-Nazis are believed to number some 20,000.

  Poland does have some able leaders—Western European media support the higher-brow, probusiness candidates from Civic Platform—but skilled politicians in Poland seem to be outnumbered by venom-spewing clowns. And one of the more popular is Self Defense’s Andrzej Lepper, currently vice speaker of Parliament.

  Farmer’s friend Andrzej Lepper. Watch out for flying spuds!

  POLAND’S MOST FAMOUS CAMERA HOG

  In a country marked by a shortage of strong leaders, Andrzej Lepper stands out. Then again, given his love of stunts, the square-jawed parliamentarian with slicked-back hair would stand out anywhere: the fancy-suited pig farmer is a bona fide ham. Forming Self Defense (Samoobrona) in 1993, Lepper first grabbed headlines for overturning rail wagons filled with imported wheat and organizing roadblocks of trucks hauling imported grain that competed with grain sold by Polish farmers; 20,000 and more began showing up for protests that often turned bloody. The former boxer sometimes plays Robin Hood, raiding corporate pork farms and making off with sausages to distribute to the poor, although sometimes he more closely resembles the Godfather—his minions at least once beat a civil servant, who had come to foreclose a farm, to an unrecognizable pulp. He’s stormed the Ministry of Agriculture howling over trade policy; he’s pushed hecklers into manure; and he’s ordered mobs to toss eggs, potatoes, and even firecrackers at politicians supporting the sale of Polish industry and land—including visiting dignitaries from the EU. That his party could show up as Poland’s most popular in 2004 (and third-most popular in the 2005 election) was a surprise to most Polish politicians, and a sign of how out of touch the establishment was with the nonurban masses. Lepper was laughed off as a loudmouthed nuisance when he ran for president in 2000—although, with over 1.3 percent of the vote, he fared better than former president Lech Walesa. But by 2001, Lepper and his Self Defense Party had secured enough votes to take fifty-three seats in the 460–seat Sejm, the lower chamber of Parliament. Then the fun really started, as parliamentary speakers were shoved from the podium by Self Defense ministers and Lepper’s tirades began; if his microphone was shut off while he was blasting the government, he simply picked up a bullhorn and continued. Politicians from Brussels to Warsaw see Lepper as dangerous, but between his tirades that mix nationalism and the price of bacon, Lepper does make some valid points: he emphasizes the plight of small farmers who can’t fight subsidized agribusiness, and gives voice to the rural poor, many of whom still plow with horses and harvest by hand, and whose small farms are expected to fold.

  The reality is that Poland, historically divided by neighbors, is still split—economically, politically, and morally. Those divisions, combined with a defensive attitude born of years of being shoved around, often make the country that has so much potential a real headache on the international stage, instead of a country that is really getting ahead.

  One final disappointment revolves around Poland’s worship of the United States. It’s not simply that the U.S. is dragging her feet on making good her promises on foreign investment, or that while Western Europeans are welcomed, Poles visiting the U.S. must buy visas and be fingerprinted—recent requirements that Poles see as a slap in the face. In her bid to forge a closer friendship and guarantee security from Uncle Sam, Poland sometimes appears to sell herself out. There is a bitter irony in reports that Poland—the country that loudly lamented the cruel treatment of civilians and political prisoners by Soviets and Nazis—was running torture camps and rendition centers of suspected terrorists, alongside the CIA.

  History Review

  If Poland acts defensive, it’s understandable. Much of her recent history can be summed up in two words: Poor Poland. For the two centuries leading up to 1989, when she booted out the Communist regime, Polska stood out as the textbook victim of geography. Physically trapped between Russia and Germany, Poland was yanked continuously into the violent, horrifying exploits of her powerful neighbors. The surprise is that Poland ended up as the neighborhood weakling; for centuries, she was one of the most powerful kingdoms in Europe.

  Filled with universities and splendid palaces, and headed by a religiously tolerant monarchy, historical Poland granted previously unknown rights to her subjects, including the right to a parliament that elected the king. After Poland coupled with Lithuania through royal marriage in 1386, the joint kingdom spread across Eastern Europe from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Europe’s largest kingdom at the time, she was one of the Continent’s mightiest powers for a few hundred years.

  Source of power: The Federation of Poland and Lithuania, as the joint kingdom was later known, became wealthy from agriculture during the Middle Ages. Rich in grain, the Federation found a ready market in Europe’s booming population. For centuries, Poland remained Europe’s main bread basket.

  A literate land where education was valued, the kingdom became a publishing hotbed in the 1400s, but the 1500s were even more enlightened. During this “golden age” (influenced by Florentines and Venetians, with whom Polish royals were often cavorting and marrying), architects and mapmakers, poets and painters, scientists and philosophers filled the land that was also the home of Copernicus, whose heliocentric writings would spin the world in a whole new direction.

  NEARLY FORGOTTEN COPERNICUS (1473–1543)

  It was a scandalous, heretical idea at the time, so highly controversial that Renaissance astronomer/mathematician/teacher/doctor/lawyer/governor Nicolaj Kopernik, a devout Catholic, first broached his concept of a heliocentric universe in a small handwritten book (Commentariolus) given only to trusted friends. In fact, Copernicus’s full-blown ideas, captured in On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres might never have seen the ink of the printing presses had not a copy of Commentariolus found its way into the hands of a German mathematician known as Rheticus. The German become so obsessed with Copernicus’s idea that he traveled to Poland, moved in, and hounded the old man to let him take the scribblings of the second, more developed book to the printer, an act finally accomplished in 1543; it’s said Copernicus died hours after seeing the book. Copernicus was actually a lawyer by training, and he did not have a deluxe observatory, often studying celestial movements through specially placed holes in the walls of his house. Although he kick-started the Scientific Revolution, Copernicus was not the first to postulate that the sun, not Earth, was the center of our system; he was, however, the first to widely popularize that notion, and the one who definitely shoved aside Ptolemy’s theory of a twisting geocentric universe. His book offered valuable theories, but no evidence. German astronomer Kepler later proved that Copernicus was right.

  Poland’s renaissance dried up by the late 1700s, after the country lost half her population to assorted wars, famine, and plagues. Seizing upon Poland’s weaknesses, Russia, Prussia, Austria (and Sweden for a time) all began annexing Polish lands starting in 1772—a geographical gnawing called “The First Partition.” Poles rebelled frequently, and after a particularly heated revolt, Poland’s three occupiers ganged up and split all remaining Polish lands between themselves. What was once Poland was literally erased from the map in 1795, a devastating event known by Poles as “The Third Partition.”

  Violent uprisings, attempts on the czar’s life,
and assorted furtive acts by Poland’s many secret societies didn’t cease, nor did harsh reprisals. Nevertheless, Poland remained essentially “disappeared” until the First World War, a period even more traumatic for Poles. The three countries that had yanked apart Poland lined up on two different sides: Poles were forced to fight for countries they didn’t support; worse, they often had to fight fellow Poles in battles that killed 1.5 million Polish troops and civilians.

  From World War I, however, Poles finally regained independence. When dashing military marshal Jozef Pilsudski took Warsaw in November 1918, he declared Poland an independent, sovereign country; the world powers officially agreed the next year.

  FATHER OF POLAND JOZEF PILSUDSKI (MARSHAL, 1918–1935)

  After he was tossed into a Siberian prison as a young man for an assassination attempt on Russian czar Alexander III, Socialist Pilsudski went on to publish his own newspaper, Robotnik (The Worker). Obsessed with the idea of Poland as an independent country, he became a guerrilla fighter and bandit, robbing banks and trains to fund a private militia to fight Russia, which he saw as the Poles’ greatest threat. Fighting in the First World War, he hailed all of Poland free and sovereign in 1918. The only problem was deciding where exactly Poland was anymore; Pilsudski tried to annex land from almost all of the neighbors. He finally settled for part of Russia and part of Germany—and most of Lithuania, where he had been born. Lithuanians don’t like him at all.

  Known for his handlebar mustache, brilliant military maneuvers, and hot temper, Pilsudski took over as head of state in 1918, leading Poland into half a dozen wars in the next two years. Four years later, he left to oversee the Polish armed forces—and Poland quickly blew through ten governments. Pilsudski returned in 1926, heading a military coup that killed hundreds and entrenched him as dictator.

  “I shit on all of you,” Pilsudski bellowed in 1926, when he burst into Parliament, which he called “The House of Whores.” “The time has come to treat you like children, because you behave like children.”4

  Despite his bullish nature, Pilsudski is revered as the father of Polish independence, and to his credit he somewhat organized the ramshackle republic. Given her German/Austrian/Russian past, Poland was by then a highly messy state of assorted ethnicities who used half a dozen currencies and as many languages; the country was so mismatched that even trains couldn’t travel easily, since different gauges of rail ran through different parts of the country.5 When Pilsudski died in 1935, Poland disintegrated again, leaving her ripe for attacks by historical foes Russia and Germany.

  During the late 1930s, the Soviets and Nazis schemed together on how to snatch Poland and the Baltic countries. (See “Dirty Words: Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact,” page 320.)

  Poland had barely celebrated her twentieth anniversary of independence when her freedom did another vanishing act. The Nazis took western Poland in September 1939; the Soviets took eastern Poland two weeks later. For the next five and a half years, Poland suffered the war’s longest continuous fighting, and trains rumbled through the countryside carrying millions of civilian prisoners to concentration camps. Nearly the entire Jewish Polish population of 2 million died in the camps, alongside 1.5 million gypsies, gays, Communists, and dissidents.

  Due to her history of religious tolerance, more Jews lived in Poland than anywhere else in Europe—which is one reason Hitler pounced on the country and set up the most notorious concentration camps here, including Auschwitz, Birkenau, and Treblinka.

  THE WARSAW GHETTO UPRISING: APRIL 19–MAY 16, 19436

  In October 1940, the Nazis forced Warsaw’s 500,000 Jewish residents from their homes and shoved them into a ghetto located near a train station. Nearly 300,000 were hauled off to concentration camps over the next two years, and another 100,000 ghetto-dwellers starved to death or died from disease. In January 1943, when another 5,000 Jews were sent off on trains, a young band of Jews attacked the Nazis, a move that halted deportations for several months. When Nazis returned to continue deportations on April 19, 1943, several hundred young Jews fought back with homemade explosives. The resisters were overwhelmed within a few weeks, when the Germans torched every building and gassed the tunnels. Only a few hundred of the remaining 60,000 Jews in the ghetto escaped.

  Germans demolished cities going in—nearly a quarter of Warsaw lay in ruin within two weeks—and they devastated them going out, leaving Warsaw a pile of bloodred rocks. But Russians weren’t any kinder. During their occupation, the Soviets hauled off 1.5 million Poles to Siberia and systematically used Polish troops and officers as frontline human shields to absorb Nazi bullets. The Soviets even set up the Poles in the final Allied battle to reclaim Warsaw from the Nazis. Insisting that they would represent the Allies, the Russians didn’t join in the battle; instead they watched from the other side of the Vistula River as the Nazis ravaged the outnumbered Poles. It was a deliberate move—Stalin had calculated that he would be ridding himself of many future Polish dissidents.

  By the end of the war, 6 million Poles—over one-sixth of the population—were dead.

  Relief didn’t arrive when WWII ended. The Soviet Union, the Allies-approved supervisor during reconstruction, yanked Poland into her sphere of influence, putting in puppets as leaders and running the place from afar. Poland remained a Soviet satellite for four depressing, air-polluted decades, during which tens of thousands of intellectuals, writers, and dissidents were shipped off to Siberian gulags, locked up, or killed.

  CLANDESTINE COMMUNICATION

  Across the Soviet Union and her satellite states, underground political movements relied on small printing presses that cranked out thousands of pamphlets, broadsheets, and small books—some political essays and calls for reform, some works of poetry or fiction. The Samizdat self-publishing movement was particularly strong in Poland. So evolved was the subversive communication network in Poland—historically a haven for secret societies—that underground writings circulated via a clandestine postal system that operated with its own stamps.7

  The Polish rebelled throughout the Communist era, most notably in 1956. The protest—the first major uprising in any Soviet-controlled country, except for East Germany in 1953—started during a food shortage. Workers in Poznan’s locomotive factory wanted more than a 20 percent wage hike; they wanted bread. On June 28, 1956, their riot, during which protesters stormed the city jail, turned into a countrywide uprising involving some 100,000; it was ultimately quashed by the Polish army, which killed up to 100 workers. The riots had one positive consequence: reform-oriented Socialist Wladyslaw Gomulka was brought back to power. Gomulka pushed out Stalinists, cut the powers of secret police, gave more freedom to the press, dropped demands for collectivizing farms, tolerated Catholicism, and kept Moscow at more of a distance—for a time.

  Gomulka later grew hard-line. When Czechoslovakians threw off the totalitarian yoke during 1968’s Prague Spring (See “Former Czechoslovakia,” page 348), Gomulka supported a Soviet crackdown and let Moscow borrow Polish troops to accomplish it. When Polish students demonstrated in protest, Gomulka rounded up their leaders, throwing hundreds in jail. Two years later, when dockworkers protested at Gdansk (foreshadowing the rise of Solidarity in 1980), Gomulka again tried to smother dissent with force; that time, thirty-five died in the showdown. Gomulka was pushed out of power as a result.

  Poland’s most memorable role as a satellite was triggering the fall of Soviet Communism—and the Catholic Church certainly helped. When Karol Wojtyla, the Bishop of Krakow, donned the papal robes in 1978 and took the name Pope John Paul II, he triggered a renewed call for independence that echoed across Poland and spurred dissent across Soviet bloc countries. The most powerful move out of Poland, however, came from the dock and shipyard workers in Gdansk, a defiant group who’d staged its first major protest in 1970. When they rose up again in a 1980 protest, a spike was driven into Moscow’s heart—one that would finally make it stop beating.

  HUNGRY FOR CHANGE

  The soaring cost of fo
od started it. In July 1980, when the government responded to food shortages by increasing the price of meat, the country collapsed in strikes. Most destabilizing was the strike in the Lenin shipyard in Gdansk, where workers had organized an illegal union, Solidarnosc (Solidarity). The union chose feisty electrician Lech Walesa as its leader; even though he had been fired from his job, Walesa scaled the fence to join that summer’s protests. Backed by workers from twenty other factories, Walesa negotiated an agreement with the Polish Communists. Fearing further rebellion, the Communists signed a twenty-one point agreement that August, giving workers the right to unionize and strike. Solidarity soon rose as a symbol for more rights to all, and before long a quarter of Poles in all professions rallied behind the banner of Solidarity, which transformed from trade union to political movement. Walesa instantly became a celebrity, but by the end of 1981, Walesa and other leaders were imprisoned and the country was cloaked in martial law. Curfews remained in effect for eighteen months—those long nights at home triggered a huge baby boom—but they were lifted in July 1983 under international pressure. Walesa, who won the Nobel Peace Prize that year, and hundreds of others were released. As the world looked on—and the Communist regime was continually condemned by Pope John Paul II and U.S. president Ronald Reagan, among others—Polish Communists were forced to open the country up little by little. Other factors, too, were at work: the brutal Soviet-Afghanistan war (1979–1989) was wearing down both the Soviet army and Soviet coffers. By the time Mikhail Gorbachev, who’d stepped in as premier in 1985, began promoting his ideas for opening up and restructuring the Soviet Union, strong independence movements were already well under way in Poland—and in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, and Romania. In January 1990, the Polish Communist Party was dissolved (it was later reformed as the more open Democratic Left Alliance), and in May 1990, Solidarity candidates dominated the country’s first free elections in four decades. Lech Walesa was sworn in as president that December.