The View from the Ground

by Martha Gellhorn

  “I wonder why the fellow did it,” the tall man mused. “Mostly they steal.”

  “Steal what?”

  He laughed. “Anything they can get. Sometimes they come to the verandas of the houses and steal the washing.”

  “But,” I began.

  “What can we do? We have our work. We cannot pass our life fighting against steaiers.”

  “And if the stealers are also killers?”

  “We still have our work.”

  Supposedly there is an armistice between the Arab States and Israel, but from 1950 to July, 1956, the Israeli Government has registered with the United Nations Mixed Armistice Commission a total of 6,261 attacks on Israeli citizens and property by Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. Israeli casualties, for the same period, were 1,127 killed and wounded. Do these figures make any impact on the imagination? In July of this year, for instance, there were only 71 Arab attacks of some sort, only four Israelis killed, and 10 wounded. The 71 “armistice violations” included theft, sabotage, shots fired at farmers in fields, people on roads or in the streets of Jerusalem, kidnapping, a plane shot down, road mines laid, hand grenades thrown, the usual thing: a light month. Last April there were 19 Israelis killed and 59 wounded: a heavy month.

  Since Nasser's Suez grab the Egyptian frontier has been relatively quiet; the main burden of daily harassment has passed to Jordan. In August, that began with Jordanian “marauders” shooting up a bus in the Negev, killing a woman and a few men who were going home from Beersheba. It went on, in the familiar rat-bite way, day after day; little death, little destruction, too numerous, too small, and above all too routine to be reported in the world's press. Finally, Israeli archaeologists were killed while studying a site, and a woman was shot while picking olives in a kibbutz. The Israeli Government (after there has been enough of this deadly small stuff) orders an Army attack in force, usually on a military objective, as has been done just now in Jordan. The Israeli reprisal is always newsworthy. The number of such reprisals, by the Israel Army or by frontier kibbutzniks, from 1950 to July, 1956, was 24. The United Nations Mixed Armistice Commission states that the Arab dead and wounded resulting from these reprisals for that period totaled 252.

  When the Israeli Government orders a reprisal attack it does so in order to slow down the daily Arab attacks along any given frontier. To date this has worked. At the same time, Israel receives the censure of world public opinion and of the United Nations. Israelis do not feel this is just, since the world and the United Nations fail effectively to condemn the perpetual and cumulatively heavier “armistice violations” of the Arabs, but Israelis also feel that justice is a rare if not unobtainable commodity. Ben-Gurion, speaking for his whole people, never stops saying that he will meet the Arab leaders anywhere, any time, to talk peace. It is obvious that the Israelis must crave peace, but peace is not what they have got. They have not got war either, as yet. They have this, and they live with it.

  And somehow they live well; not comfortably, not easily, and not—heaven knows—"graciously,” but well in a way that has something to do with the heart and the spirit. Driving to the airport, I asked the taxi driver his opinion of life in Israel. (No foreigner can resist the Israeli taxi drivers who, among an international breed of talkers and philosophers, are pure champions.) He said, “It is all very bewteefool, very hoppy.”

  Home of the Brave

  THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY, March 1959

  The man was tall, very thin, with a fine emaciated face and two round indented scars in his cheek, bullet wounds or worse. Since everyone in Poland looks ten years older than his age, he may have been thirty-five, perhaps younger. He wore something shabby in the way of sweater, windbreaker, grayish trousers. Poor and ugly clothing is routine; what matters is that the clothes seem sleazy and no protection against the cold. Where there are few material signs of position, people declare themselves by their faces and the tone of their minds. This was a man of breeding and education, and of special courage, and he was one of Cardinal Wyszynski's Catholics.

  He said, “Our young people are so against doctrine that it even works against us. They say that they agree with us in some things, we have an ethical sense, we believe in the individual and his freedom and his soul, but then we have dogma too, and they hate dogma. . . . No one, not the young nor us nor anyone, except some very old people who have understood nothing, wants capital-ism again; that is over. We want the future, though we are not sure of its form. But that future must make room for and allow the dignity of the individual.”

  No label that I knew fitted this man. I told him that he did not sound like any other Catholic I had talked to, outside Poland.

  “We are Catholic humanists. We are only concerned with the freedom of the individual in this or any future society. We often feel closer to liberal Communists than to some totalitarian-minded Catholics—those who believe in a small ruling group, a strong government, and in telling the people, who are considered as a mass, what to do.”

  I had come to see this unusual Catholic to check what I thought I had learned about young people in his country. In something over two weeks in Poland, I had listened at length to forty-eight people, all met by chance and luck; no one selected for me, no one supervised, and I had been guided to this tiny fraction of a fraction by my own special curiosity. I was interested in the young who live by their minds, because I wanted to see what a lifetime of war and Communism had done to their minds. I shall report here only on the intellectual young; the brain workers, not the manual workers.

  Nothing and no one in Poland are as expected; and our yardsticks do not apply, for none of us has had to live as Poles have, through twenty merciless years. We belong in different worlds. Seen from Poland, the West seems very far away, an almost insanely luxurious dream. And Poland feels like a dream too, a heroic nightmare. One's sense of reality is dislocated. One needs a new vocabulary to think with.

  Even flat terms that we imagine we can define, like “Catholic” and “Communist,” have not the tight meanings we give to them. There are Communist-sponsored Catholics, the totalitarian-minded believers that the thin man spoke of, and active Catholic humanists, supporters of the Cardinal. Then there are the younger Catholics who go to church because formerly it was one way to protest against the regime, and the church is linked to patriotism, and “in hard times, religion is the only way to be free in your soul,” and churches are beautiful, and you are there with friends; but they do not obey any of the rules of the church. As for Communists, there is a type described, always laughingly, as a “real, fanatic Communist"—these are hard to find, and I did not manage to see one; there is someone else described as “very Communist” and someone milder called “quite Communist” and there is a “member of the Party,” which does not necessarily mean that he is a true Communist at all. A man might have joined the Party during the war, because the Communist underground resistance was the most efficient against the Nazis; this is a frequent reason and accepted as laudable. Or a man might become a member of the Party after the war, because he had to, to do the work he wanted or to hold his position; not laudable perhaps, but understood. And then there is a massive condition, known as being “communisant.” A graduate student, our equivalent of a man studying for his Ph.D. who consistently fails to write his thesis, explained that “all our young people are communisants. It is not the idea we are against; we see it as more modern than capitalism.”

  “Then you are Party members?” I asked.

  Four of us were packed into a small hired car at the time, driving through the flat smoky Silesian countryside. “No!” they cried out in shocked voices, “no, no!” The party was “administrative,” and they had nothing to do with that sort of thing.

  I told the Catholic with the wounded face about our Silesian outing. In the morning I had hired a soiled hotel car and collected my chums haphazardly in the street. This was in Krakow. My young new friends were free to go anywhere at once; they are always on the move, searching for a
n odd job, a chance meal, a permission from a government bureau, a book, fun, anything. A student has a stipend of four dollars a month; this is calculated on the real value of the zloty, the black market value, not the pepped-up official exchange. If lucky, he gets food parcels from home, and he does whatever jobs he can find or sells anything he may have, to survive. But a successful grown-up man having two jobs—one would not be enough—might earn thirty dollars a month and support a family, and this is considered very good money not by what it can provide, but simply good money to get. Poverty among intellectuals (all I know about) is universal; there are only degrees of worse and worse.

  We were going to an industrial village in Silesia to see a Polish primitive painter whose work I had heard of. Riding in a private car is a treat, and since I was there, with my old-fashioned tendency to eat now and again, I would buy food if we could find it, so it was a real party.

  One boy, aged twenty, was studying singing; another, aged twenty-two, was an accomplished scene designer and painter, a senior student; the third was the art-historian non-Ph.D. aged all of twenty-seven, a Pied Piper figure who leads the young to make fun for themselves. They and their friends run a little cabaret in a derelict cellar. Their stage is four battered kitchen tables in a row, scenery is painted on the wall of the cellar, costumes are tacked together out of borrowed odds and ends. If people have money, they pay to see the cabaret; if not, they see the show anyhow. The cellar had been closed for months; the band of young amateurs was suspect because of making political jokes. (At one time they did a strip tease of a statue of Stalin, not tactful but much appreciated.) They had promised to make no more political jokes. Every night now, helpless with laughter, they rehearsed—in their filthy, freezing cellar—a take-off on the Romantics. Romanticism, with its emphasis on lovesickness, mal du siècle, and personal drama, strikes them as high comedy. The cabaret uses their talents and keeps their private hope alive.

  In the car, Julek, the Pied Piper, began to remove his various coats. He always wears everything he owns, beat-up turtle-neck sweater, suit, overcoat, because he has no room of his own, sleeps wherever he can find a bed, and carries his property on his person. Suddenly loud warbling cries issued from the singer, while the painter shook with laughter. The painter said, ‘This is an interesting boy. He shows me now what is the Russian school of bel canto.” Roaring with laughter at Russians is a mad Polish specialty; and the young I saw, who were all absorbed in the arts, laugh like billy-o. Unless they are telling you, with disgust, of the long period when their working lives were dominated by the theory of Socialist Realism, that Pollyanna version of art which makes everything sentimental and over-life-size, a whooping-up propaganda. Officially, until 1956, they had to be taught that Socialist Realism was real art. On the whole they despised and rejected this teaching by pure instinct.

  Julek and I looked at the awful landscape, a synthesis of industrial ugliness, and Julek observed, “If you cannot pay people to work, you must use terror. There is no other way. We were all made equal in poverty and that was necessary. Our country was destroyed by the war and hopelessly poor. If only the West could help us to get on our feet, then people could be paid to work; but no, Russia would not allow that. It is so awkward, isn't it, our culture goes West and our economics goes East.”

  “Is it only poverty that makes Rysio [the painter] and Pavel [the singer] seem so discouraged for themselves?” I would have settled for that; you feel poverty as if it were a suffocating smell in the air.

  “All the young are in despair, a priori. There is no future for them, and they know it. My life, for instance, is terribly important to me; but I see that it has no importance in the great thing of history. They will shut up our cellar one day, perhaps soon. Official opinion thinks we are reactionary because we make jokes. That is idiotic, but that is official opinion. It will be hard for us because it is easier when you have a little group to laugh together. But we will be stopped, and I understand it. I don't accept it; I understand it.”

  Rysio, in a fury that was close to tears, said, “I am a painter. I do not care whether a private man or a government runs a shop. What difference does it make? I only want to live in peace and paint. But who will ever buy my paintings? Who has money for that? Oh, I would give my paintings, my drawings, all; I have nothing, but everything I have, if only I could go to Italy and look at the beautiful Renaissance pictures.”

  “If you had the money and were free, would you go for good?” I asked.

  “No. No. I could not ever do that.”

  I had asked all the young I saw whether they would leave Poland permanently, if able to, if a living could be earned else- where, and each one said: No.

  And after this, to my surprise, it turned out that they were communisants.

  “It's not the theory, then, that they object to,” I asked the Catholic humanist, “but the practice?”

  “Ah, the practice. It's so much better now, since 1956, you can have no idea.”

  His smile lighted up his drawn, scarred face. Leon, a newly met journalist friend who had brought me here, and I said good- bye and went out into the slimy streets of Krakow. “That's a good, sane man,” Leon said. I could place Leon, a little, because a few days before he had told me that he was “partyless. I don't think I could belong to any party, even if I agreed with it.”

  “The country seems full of good, sane people,” I said. “And Krakow seems a good, sane city.”

  For five hundred years Krakow has been a university town and a center of art, but it was founded in the tenth century, and the ancient castle of the Polish Kings and the cathedral where they are buried rise on a hill above the city and the curving river. Herr Franck, a little man with pink-and-white skin and a pursed rosebud mouth, the monstrous Nazi King of Poland, lived and ruled in that castle and thus insulted the Poles’ passionate love of their history. Narrow streets wind from the castle to the market square, with its arcaded town hall and flower stands and pigeons. The reconstructed statue of Poland's greatest poet stands in this square. The Nazis, determined to destroy the culture of the Poles as well as their bodies, dynamited this monument. All during the Nazi occupation, little bunches of flowers appeared on the dynamited rubble. But for twenty years now the people of Krakow have had no money to paint or refurbish their city, and it is dirty, worn-out, like a very old, very tired beauty.

  Leon is young by my standards but not by Polish standards, as he is thirty. A man of seventy might have learned how to keep Leon's tolerant distance from life, by becoming a spectator. However, if you are a soldier at fifteen, in an underground army, and fight a final losing battle for your country, and are afterwards buffeted around Europe alone for eight years, perhaps you become seventy quickly.

  “You know,” Leon said, “the truth is that most young people are only interested in politics as it affects their freedom.”

  “But politics affects everything,” I said. “Like an incurable disease. It spreads everywhere; it never leaves you alone.”

  “We know we have the best we can get, and we are glad of it and only hope to keep it. This much freedom. And perhaps it will get better; maybe if the Russians grow richer. There would be less terror everywhere. . . . People don't hate the Russians, you know, it isn't that. The Russians exploited us after the war, and they were always forcing us to love them. That was awful, but they've let up. With time, with time, it has to get better. Let's go and drink some vodka.”

  They all drink a lot of vodka and who wouldn't and why not? The young ones exaggerate how much they drink; they haven't the money to drink steadily. In plays and stories they use vodka, drunkenness, as a symbol of bitterness and brutality. Drinking to forget, and becoming beastly as a result. This is touching; they are such unbeastly young.

  We had a merry time in Krakow. We waltzed and tangoed at what is considered locally a depraved night club for low-class people. It was a big, plain, well-lit room with nursery-pink walls, and looked to me like a respectable dance hall for l
ower-middle-class families. The band was a delight. The Poles adore jazz, and it is the worst jazz I have ever heard. Cheap vodka is the diet in this dance hall; most of the women were tarts—hefty, scout-leaderish tarts. All the men, as everywhere else, kissed hands. At the end of each dance, with an elegance which would have been fine at Versailles, hands are kissed; when meeting or leaving a lady, hands are kissed. In the muddy street, under the drizzling sky, you see a woman dressed in baggy clothes and a beret and run-down shoes, and her face weary, pale, unpainted, having her hand kissed by a man who looks as if he had just come from a day's heavy road-building. The way to address waiters is to call softly, “Please, Monsieur.” ("Mister” is not the right translation.) Chambermaids are “Madame.” And even “very” Communists, I am told, cannot bring themselves to say “Comrade,” and they kiss hands too. The manners of the young are glorious, as are their voices; all voices, in fact. By their voices alone, you would say this is a nation of cultivated people. But how did the young learn? These manners, in this desolate mise-en-scène, have nobility and magic.

  We went to the theater; everyone goes to the theater; seats are cheap. Krakow is a town of half a million people and has ten legitimate theaters, an operetta company, and a Philharmonic. The first play I saw there was written by a very young writer; it was modern (the characters dressed in blue jeans, floppy skirts), yet allegorical too. And imagination, in the theater, proves an excellent substitute for money. Here, on a tilted, cleverly lit stage, furnished only with three symbolic bench swings, we were in the miserable crowded Warsaw room of two young men. Vodka played a prominent part in the plot, which was the story of the denial of love, the heartless treatment of a young girl. The playwright was attacking what he feels to be an attitude of his contemporaries; cynicism and self-hate, born of hopelessness, working itself out as vengeance on the innocent.