by Laurie Lee
That morning there was a great stir in the hotel hall. The interpreter-guides, in their mackintoshes and bathing caps, rushed flush-faced here and there. Poets were being rounded up in their separate language groups – half-dozen of Latin-Americans; half-dozen of East Germans; a brace of Balkans, assorted Nordics, and me. Wonderingly we stood in the dark hall, facing the thick double curtains which separated us from the light and cold of the street. And as one waited for the last late bards to be brought from their beds we asked ourselves which of the two great mysteries would first be revealed to us – Mickiewicz or Warsaw city? It proved to be the latter – the poet for the moment was being kept in cold storage.
A fleet of grey official motor-cars drove us fast through the wide and greasy streets. We were bound for a lecture to be given by city architects. They showed us three great solemn maps: Warsaw as it was in 1939 – a mixed-up mosaic of yellow lozenges; Warsaw in 1945 – total destruction; then Warsaw as it was and would be – the mosaic tidied up in red and sliced through by broad north-south, east-west, boulevards; all, that is, except for one original muddle still remaining towards the north. The woman lecturer, in flowery French, referred to this part last. ‘As modern architects, you understand, we wish to build only what is new, contemporary, or supra-contemporary. But we have also found it necessary to make a gesture to nostalgia and the sentiment of the middle-aged by rebuilding exactly part of the Old Town.’ And the smile she gave us asked forgiveness.
Later, I drove round the thawing, rain-swept city with my two guides. Moody as ever, they sat in a torpor now, making no comment unless I asked a question. And yet that journey, with the obvious reflections that rose out of it, was my most moving experience in Poland. We drove in weaving circles for about three hours: up the great boulevards, snaking through the new Old Town, crossing the sombre acres of flattened ghetto, and past the vulgar, soaring, Russian-built Palace of Culture and Science. We drove through parks, round factories, past the Party Office; looked at the government paper-mill – as large as Olympia – and visited various monuments. But only slowly did I tune-in through my Western-protected senses to what I was seeing. Naked, prim, unfinished, and dateless in aspect, this city, spreading from horizon to horizon and already the home of a million people, was yet one of the youngest cities in the world. Every building one saw, no matter what the style, was new, and every person in the street – clerk, cab-driver, fat wife, or pretty student – each had a tale to tell so steeped in the experience of horror that to us it is still unimaginable.
There are only two other cities in the world that know what Warsaw knows. The destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, by a triumph of super-gadgetry, lasted only some thirty seconds. Warsaw’s fate was more old-fashioned, requiring six years of enemy occupation finally to do the trick. But it was just as complete in the end. Villas, tenements, churches, schools, theatres, palaces, libraries, shops; the baroque, the medieval, the formal, the friendly, the charming, and the poor; by bomb and shell, flame-thrower and dynamite; successively, surely, and not always in the heat of battle, all had been wiped away, and the people shot or removed.
All this is known but all this, in Warsaw today, must be remembered. As must also those late months of 1945 when the people of Warsaw, released from their prison camps, drifted back to reoccupy their city. They looked for Warsaw and they found nothing. Nothing but a drifting wilderness of bricks, smelling rankly of the dead. Perhaps here and there, on the edge, a thin and starving house, like a gob of flesh on a burnt-out skeleton. Otherwise nothing. Nothing that was human or memorable or that could be identified as a city. No roofs or glass, no cloth or fires, no tables, altars, books, or bread, no women, children, horses, or fowls. There were no survivors of this destroyed city. The refugees came back to nothing.
They scratched among the jagged waste of brick and found the streets. They scratched again and found the cellars of the dead. And there, for a while, they set up house.
One of the first things they did, as though to re-establish their identity and the identity of Warsaw, was to reconstruct, in exact detail, the squares and winding lanes of the Old Town. Much of this reconstruction has already been completed and it is a miracle of love and patience – working from old photographs and drawings, several hundred houses have been rebuilt exactly as they stood before the dynamiters blew them to the ground. It is strange to walk through those streets today. The ghosts of the wartime dead, returning now, could find their way intimately among these houses. They glitter again in the frosty sunlight in all the paint and gilding of their seventeenth-century splendour, exact from Flemish roof and gable, down painted walls of grapes, boar-hunts, minstrels, and dancing peasants, to the arched and studded doorways of ancient wood, topped by their wrought-iron lamps. It is an architectural resurrection wrapped in a rare emotional haze – as though we had exactly rebuilt the city of London after the Great Fire, taverns, brothels, and all. It lacks only one thing, some breath of its original human life to animate those faultless walls. For though many of the buildings are lived in, by families of grace and favour, they are cold as museums yet.
The Old Town is a nostalgic pocket, and is only a small part of modern Warsaw. But in much of the rest of the rebuilding an eye has been kept on the past. Successions of broad and formally fronted streets have been re-created, some in a curious Georgian style, others exactly as Canaletto painted them. There is also a certain amount in the noncommittal, poker-faced, concrete-and-glass, Great West Road tradition. But on the whole it is nostalgia rather than expediency that has gone into the rebuilding of this city, and Warsaw today, standing upon its ashes – a rolled-out raft of brick and bones which it would have taken too long to remove – cannot be viewed without emotion.
My tour ended on the banks of the Vistula. We sat in the motor-car and gazed across the slow and rain-starred river – not much wider than the Thames at Battersea – and saw the low bank where the Red Army sat quietly through the three-month hell of the Warsaw Insurrection, watching the last of the city die. According to all the known patterns of Hollywood films, Russian films, and the Songs of the Partisans, the Red Army, when it saw the people of Warsaw rise and take arms against their oppressors, should have blazed their way across the river and rescued them. But they didn’t. The Warsavians, heartened by the sight of the Russians so near, rose up and fought the Germans with anything they could lay their hands on. The Germans machine-gunned them. The people took to the sewers, were starved out, and machine-gunned again. Meanwhile the remains of their city, street by street, was dynamited. And the Red Army sat and watched across the river.
‘What happened?’ I asked my guides.
The girl said nothing. The voice of the young man, normally so casual and witty, came to me in a clipped and solemn trance.
‘The Warsaw Rising was premature,’ he said. ‘The leaders were traitors. They gave the signal to rise without consulting the Red Army generals. They gave the signal only because they wished for political leadership after the war. The Polish people despise them as opportunists and careerists. In any case, the Red Army was helpless – their lines of communication were too far extended.’
‘Why was no help flown in?’
‘Ah, that was the trouble. The rising was split up – a ring of Poles, a ring of Germans, then Poles, then Germans, and so on. Supplies would have fallen into the arms of the Hitlerites.’ He smiled at me softly. ‘No can do, you understand?’
By that evening most of the world-wide guests had been gathered in, and when we sat down to eat we filled a banqueting hall. We observed each other closely, as though it was the first night out on a liner. There were poets here of every kind, white-maned Russians, turbanned Pakistanis, bright-bloused Bulgarians, slit-eyed Yugoslavs, prim Dutch, clerkly Swedes, knotty Norwegians; Spaniards speaking French, Hindus speaking German, Americans speaking English and Chinese speaking everything.
At my table I had been joined by two professors from prominent United States universities. They had just arri
ved on separate aircraft and were delighted, almost hysterical, at meeting each other. Sonya, the interpreter, sat demurely between them and they talked across her. Her dazed blue eyes clicked rhythmically between them as though watching a tennis match.
‘Did you get photographed at the airport?’ one asked the other. ‘Boy, I did! Carnations, too. Ha ha! And you’ll be speaking on the radio too, you know. Oh, yes. The works. But meantime,’ voices were lowered, ‘let me tell you about the beds. Let me warn you. The mattresses, for instance …’
After a few days the poets began to stray from their language groups and to mix a little. Our kindly interpreters were like nannies, and it was difficult to slip their clinging hands, but we managed it at last. My first break for freedom took me into the Old Town, in search of a tavern. There weren’t any. I had a beer at the counter of a State grocer’s shop, but it was as thick and sweet as treacle, and cost seven shillings (official rate of exchange). Finally, in a wine-shop in a side-street, I succeeded in persuading an old lady, by a series of dramatic gestures, to slip me a bottle of vodka in exchange for a small tin of Nescafé. She was pleased by the exchange, and the arrangement preserved itself throughout my stay.
In the course of these excursions I ran into the broad bulk of the Czech poet Nezval and we walked together in the snow, though we had no common language. I also met an Egyptian senator-judge, who was also a CBE and a verse-dramatist (and when I told Sonya, later, all the things he was, she was plainly shocked). I walked and talked with a neat Chinese of the same name as myself, and I exchanged quotations with a Hindu. But my favourites were the Latin-Americans, who never lost their personal sense of celebration. Returning, battered, from a four-hour lecture, they would say to me, ‘Come, poet, let’s go upstairs and have a concert.’ There, round a bottle-laden table, they would fight the cold with Andalusian cries. Neruda, the Chilean, would exclaim ‘Pan Tadeusz!’ in helpless amazement, then reverse his jacket for added comfort. The Cuban, Guillén, would sing some Indian songs. Rafael Alberti would fill our notebooks with drawings of fighters in suits of light, and his precocious but beautiful fourteen-year-old daughter, Aitana, would slip me poems in English, complaining: ‘I know too much … I can talk only with angels’.
I spent much time with this cynical, warm-blooded group, but Sonya, in the end, disapproved of it. ‘Wouldn’t you like to meet some Polish writers?’ she asked severely. I said I would, and wrote out a list of names. She tucked them into her bag and said she would arrange for a meeting immediately. But not one of them ever turned up.
But Mickiewicz? What can I say about Mickiewicz? When I went to Warsaw I knew nothing about him – at least, nothing about the poet. For a week Mickiewicz was the password of our existence. Our rooms were full of his references. The image of his thin face and flowing hair was plastered about the city. We went to long lectures about him. We attended the official opening of his museum (where a German scholar lost a boot and fell flat on his face before the newsreel cameras). The museum was full of heroic sculptures, paintings, death masks, and first editions in Russian. In the theatre we witnessed his static, five-hour play, Forefather’s Eve. Finally, in the glittering, iced-cake Assembly Hall of the Palace of Culture, accompanied by all the leaders of the State, we listened to twelve international authorities, in seven languages, deliver addresses in the dead man’s honour. He was a patriot, the soul of Poland, a revolutionary socialist, a major statesman, a partisan for freedom, an exile, and a martyr. But I don’t remember hearing what kind of poet he was, and I never succeeded in finding out.
Yet sitting there, spot-lit on the brocaded seats of honour, in the great hall, with the official mighty, and surrounded by several thousand breathless citizens, young and old, I could not help feeling stirred and amazed, as the hours went by, that such reverence and such a national pause should be devoted to the memory of a poet, no matter how dead or good he was. I began to compare this august ceremony with those major literary occasions we sometimes enjoy in Britain – the Foyle’s Luncheon, the PEN Club Dinner, the Annual General Meeting of the Royal Society of Literature, and the furtive annual opening, by a speechless mayor, of the Shakespeare Memorial Festival. Here in Warsaw’s Palace of Culture, large and holy as a cathedral, I looked about me, took a deep breath, and inflated myself. The Secretary of the Party, the Prime Minister, all the country’s great, sat dumb and enslaved, gazing up at the fifty-foot portrait of the poet and at the bright-pated literary figures who sat like gods on the high platform. We had been fetched from the world’s ends for this moment, all expenses paid; we had been lodged in pomp, cossetted, flattered, and treated with awe. We were the possessors of powerful secrets, each one a kin to Mickiewicz’s immortality. Surely, I thought, here, if nowhere else, the pen has inherited the earth.
It was not till the lights were turned down, and the newsreel cameras had departed, and the week-long celebrations were ending that I began to discover a reason for all this. I may be wrong, but it seemed simple enough. Was it not that Poland, whose identity has always been threatened with evaporation by hot blasts of power either from Germany or from Russia, was seeking a major figure, a national myth; and one, moreover, who, though in every sense a Pole, had for much of his life been nourished and sheltered by that part of the Western world to which their emotions naturally turn? The shadow of Russia had always been close and heavy. Someone must be found who was innocently free from this. So Mickiewicz, exile and mystical patriot, romantic poet, long-time dead, Moscow-persecuted and Paris-protected, was their natural choice. And to the founding of this man as State-god, forefather Adam, we from around the world had been bidden as witnesses. It might have been worse, I suppose. It might have been a general.
On my last day, with the celebrations slowing down, a free-for-all had been arranged at the University during which the visiting poets were invited to read from their works.
The assembly hall was packed with students of both sexes, their faces shining with welcome and youthful grease. Amid thunderous clapping a dozen of us filed towards the platform while girls ran forward and showered us with winter flowers. We sat on the platform grinning amongst these blooms, while a sea of blue eyes sparkled expectantly below us. I had never, in the name of poetry, seen so many listeners gathered together before, and again that drunken feeling welled within me.
Then, one by one, in our several languages, we read a poem each. And almost all made the same mistake. Assuming that every word would be intimately understood, most poets read in that scared, inhibited voice which seems part and package of the modern style. I was lucky because I came last on the list, and it soon occurred to me that what the students really wanted, in default of sense, was passion and noise. (This was proved by the success of the Cuban, Guillén, who read a poem in a dialect so springing and rhythmical that you could have danced to it.)
Then – worse still – a tweedy, dapper, Dutch poet got up and announced a poem in English – which I thought was my province. ‘This poem is about Poland,’ he said, ‘and in it I have developed the charming idea of referring to Poland as a woman’. Low-voiced and deferential, he then read a poem of straightforward, though scarcely top-grade, pornography – ‘your lips, your eyes, your hips, your thighs’ – ending as an afterthought, ‘Poland shall never die!’ I was outraged. Who did he think he was fooling?
As I followed this man I thought, we must do better than that. My poem, sense or no, was really going to sound like something. I gripped the lectern with both hands and bawled my head off. I made more noise than all the rest of the poets put together and ended up shaking all over. I don’t suppose I was ever so moved in my life.
It was noon, and time to leave for England, and I was ready to go. On this day, and on two others in the week, a sleeping-car ran straight from Warsaw to Paris. My ticket was bought and I looked forward to a comfortable journey. Then, on my return from the University, I was met by long faces in the hotel. ‘We have bad news for you,’ they said. ‘You cannot leave from Warsaw. The sl
eeping-wagon is broken.’
The winter blizzards were really beginning to blow that day. ‘There must be some train out of Warsaw,’ I said. ‘I’ll take anything.’ ‘You will?’ They opened their eyes in astonishment and went away to confer. Presently the Celebration Officials approached me, jaunty and jovial. ‘Ah, Mr Lee,’ they said. ‘We hear you are going to Paris the sporting way. Ha ha!’ And they shook hands with generous relief.
The journey proved to be more sporting than even they had imagined – fifty hours, five changes, three frontiers, and no porters. To make matters worse, I was loaded with a three-day hamper in a loose cardboard box and a half-hundredweight of Polish books tied up with string. The hamper contained a goose, a pound of ham, six pickled gherkins, butter, cheese, three bottles of pop, and two dozen big red apples. Across the face of Europe, scrambling in and out of trains, in snow and rain, in mist and darkness, I fought a losing battle with these things. At every station the hamper burst and apples and gherkins went bouncing away beneath the cider-pressing feet of Poles and Czechs and Germans. Then, as the wolves of exhaustion began to catch up on me, I selected and abandoned, one by one, the thick black books my Polish hosts had given me. A five-volume collection of the poems of ‘X’ (in Polish) was donated anonymously to the station-master at Prague. Ten volumes of literary criticism went through a lavatory window near Petrovice. The collected reflections of the Slavophil ‘Y’ I dropped into some passing goods-wagons just outside Nuremberg. As for the collected works of Adam Mickiewicz: fifteen volumes, in brown, gold-embossed leather; I stuck to them through thick and thin. It seemed the least I could do.
There is a little more that I would add. Among the unsorted odds and ends that still remain with me I remember the thin, plain maid in the hotel, who asked me to send her as many copies of Vogue as I could lay my hands on. The Rumanian poet who had a brainstorm and left the hotel, screaming. The pale, sick face of the English ex-patriot, late of the British Council, who is now a Polish subject, successful and despised. The cabaret that made us laugh so with its attacks on queues, transport, and the Palace of Culture. The Polish poet who is just bringing out, with official backing, a two-volume, de luxe translation of the works of Lord Byron.
