The View from the Ground

by Martha Gellhorn

  So this boy, who does not dream of a better physical existence, dreams of ballet, and notably of American ballet. He eats even less and saves to buy ballet books that are published in New York. They cost a terrible lot, by his starvation standards; he owns four of them. The Poles do not ask favors, they prefer to offer them; pride is part of their bravery. My young friend knotted himself in apologies before he could bring out his one vital request. “Could you ask Mr. Jerome Robbins if he would have me do a set and costumes? I do not want money; I would be happy to give. I wish only to work for him.” Sadly, I had to point out that life did not function exactly like this in America, and also I did not know Mr. Robbins. Privately, I doubted whether at his age, straight from school, he would have the chance anywhere in America to do the work he does in Krakow.

  No one believes that the State—in its concrete form, the high Communist bureaucracy—is a devoted lover of the arts. The State merely refuses to waste its money on what it considers junk; the Poles won't endure being bored; the result of these two different viewpoints is exciting, good art. I think the Polish public is better trained and more eager than we are and wants more from art than we do; and it is nobly served by its artists. In my opinion, the culture—odious word—in its quality, quantity, and availability, is the most laudable aspect of this regime. The Poles would probably say they have wrested their culture from the State, they have made it because it is in them, and that would be true; but the culture is there, and although the State pays misery wages for it, as for all else, still it pays.

  Culture rests on, stems from education, and education in Poland is a fascinating mystery. There are twice as many universities as before the war. I have no statistics on student population, but the small city of Krakow alone has forty thousand students of university level. Entrance examinations are the same throughout the country and very stiff; no laggards are allowed to remain in classrooms. And beyond all the formal schooling, the sense of a whole people clamoring for and gulping down education is something you feel as a fact, like the weather. I sought enlightenment; when you want a thoughtful point of view you go to the opposition, the Catholic liberal elite. I put my questions to a man of generally recognized fairness and intelligence. “Why isn't Communism sowing dragon's teeth with all this education? If education does nothing else, it teaches people to ask, ‘Why?’ And not only does the State provide so much education, but apparently it permits real education, not the teaching of dogma to parrots. Isn't this a crazy risk? They're not going to get a nation of Communists here, anyway. They're going to get a nation of free, liberal intellectuals.”

  It should be noted that this man is an honorable anti-Communist and bears no relation to the horrible world-wide crew of professional anti-Communists once headed by Hitler, ably abetted by the late Senator McCarthy, now recently joined by Dr. “Verwoerd. Many and very nasty people are anti-Communist because they are natural Fascists who see in Communism a power threat to their own repulsive dreams of power, or use Communism as a handy word for smearing all dissenters. This man is pure in his rejection of Communism, and for my part, I stand with people like him who hate Communism because they believe in humanity, one by one, the only way it comes. Peace and dignity, responsibility and freedom are what we want for ourselves, and so for all other men. The genuine anti-Communists know that the end never justifies the means, in terms of human life. We are accountable for the means; the end is always lost or changed in time: the means of Communism, as of Fascism, are inhuman.

  His answer astonished me: “Of all the bad things anyone can say about Communism, I do not think you can say that they want to keep people stupid so as to control them.” I asked him to repeat this, I found it so startling, both as coming from him and as an unexpected revelation of hope for the world. “The Communists may have believed that a middle intelligentsia, half educated but thinking itself educated, would be better prepared to swallow their ideology whole. But of course, so far, this does not work.”

  There is little or no material advantage, for a Pole, in being educated, yet educated people are the aristocracy of the classless society. There is also no such thing, and never can be any such thing, as a classless society; men, luckily, are not equal. The Poles are equal enough in poverty, but any bright young Pole would rather be an underpaid intellectual than a better-paid worker.

  One rainy afternoon we picked up a young man in a café in Nowa Huta, which is the modern steel town the State has built outside Krakow. This eighteen-year-old was enrolled in the law faculty of Krakow University; his father was a steelworker. He announced that after he had finished law he would like to study philosophy, and after that he would like to become a journalist. I was thinking how cross a normal capitalist father would be, having to pay for all this education, and, besides, quite unnecessary education, as we journalists would be the first to testify. How much does it cost? I wondered. Tuition is fourteen dollars a year. Adding up, generously, we figured that with books, carfare, lunches, some clothes, some spending money, he cost his father sixty dollars a year, which is a lot, a very good month's wage in Poland.

  The young man—delightful soft voice, opera face, the usual manners of all classes in this “classless society,” which is to say, perfect courtesy in speech, hand-kissing, innate politeness—seemed unworried by his father's financial problems. He loves sports, jazz, movies: the international freemasonry of youth. He reads classical drama for pleasure. He wanted to know whether America was as beautiful as he had heard. Then he wanted to know whether people lived very nervous lives there; he had also heard this. (Few Americans would deny that life is needlessly nervous in God's Own Country; but few of us could take what Polish nerves do, and have to.) Change this boy's clothes, teach him English, and he would be one of the better-bred, more intellectually alert freshmen at Princeton.

  Someone said, “Do you want to see a peasants’ university?” and indeed I did, so off we went, I and three Poles who had never heard of such an institution, although they lived twenty miles from it. We arrived at an old shabby country manor and found that this house sheltered sixty students who come for seven months, farm boys and girls who have already finished their high schools. Throughout Poland there are ten such peasants’ universities, based, we were told, on the Danish model. The couple who ran this school reminded me of the best type of Quakers; in fifteen years they have graduated 2200 students. They have many more applications than they can accept: young men, back home in their villages, send their fiancées to this school, wishing their future wives to have the same advantages they had; alumni bring their children for visits; the local peasants pour in on Sunday afternoons for coffee and cake and discussion with the undergraduates.

  The school has no other aim than to set the mind free. It wants to make whole people. It believes, evidently, that truth is beauty, beauty truth, and in a modest way it tries to show students something of the wide world of the mind. After which, the students return to their small poor villages and share this new knowledge, this vision; and they are gladly welcomed by their own kind, as bringers of light. It seems too happily good to be real, but it is real.

  For seven months, these boys and girls study dancing, painting, singing, acting; they take courses in geography and history. But above all, they are encouraged to read. Sometimes a student will read fifty books during his stay, sometimes seven; no pressure is exerted. The library is a good one. The students organize almost nightly book evenings, at which one of them reviews what he has read. The schedule of these literary gatherings was tacked on the principal's wall: Balzac, Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Conrad, Hemingway are the foreign authors I remember. One night a student had reviewed a life of Lenin; there was no other indication of politics.

  We were treated to a heavenly show of old Polish folk dancing and singing, in costume. When we left, a small group of students were preparing a play for that night; they had dramatized Goethe's Sorrows of Werther and were about to stage it, with a homemade set, a spotlight, and whatever costumes
they had invented and sewed. No one had told them to do this or helped them; the teachers arrive at the evening entertainment as visitors. There it is. I cannot explain it or fit it into any preconceived notions; I only know it exists. My three Polish chums were as amazed and impressed as I was.

  A gentle bourgeois housewife teaches English in a Krakow public school, to earn some extra money. She has twelve students, aged eleven to thirteen, and for two hours twice a week they slug away at the job with rapt attention. Within three months they can take simple English dictation without making mistakes. She says it is wonderful to teach them, they are so clever, so eager to learn. What she reports seems to me a sort of miracle; try thinking of it in reverse, our children learning Polish.

  The professor from the medical school at Krakow is, as they always politely say in Poland, “over sixty.” He is a pre-war professor, and professors were and are very great people in Europe, and he was accustomed to quite an elegant standard of life. His university will celebrate its six hundredth anniversary in 1964; it is Ivy League in Poland, a famous center of learning. He doesn't so much talk as explode with energy; he shouted joyfully that, in his work, it is a thousand times better than before the war. There are now ten medical faculties instead of five, no trouble with politics for the last five years, all the money you want for research, every scientific publication from all over the world, colleagues coming from the West to visit; he himself does not want money, he has time only for work; what is bad is that the young assistants are not paid enough, very bad; and they lack foreign exchange to buy equipment in the West; but there are more students with more chances, and young doctors can go to the country, where they are needed, and make a good living. “We get on with the work,” he roared—marvelous man.

  I thought it fine Polish-funny that if you wanted a miner's point of view in Katowice you searched out your man in a night club. In a vast, ill-lit, dingy hall (standard for popular night clubs), the younger mining set was doing frantic rock-'n'-roll and did not look suitable for serious conversation. We found a very correct, nice, pudgy middle-aged man who turned out to be in the engineering section of the mine. He reads technical material in English, German, and Russian, but he is not a university graduate; he is a plain worker.

  Perhaps the final comment on education in Poland was made by an old peasant woman who lived in a meadow by a brook, in a log and plaster cottage painted pale blue, with a thatched roof. I loved the looks of this place and the inside of her house, with its big yellow tile stove for heating and cooking, its oil lamps. I thought this was the nearest I'd ever get to nineteenth-century peasants in Russian literature. She was as jolly as a grig; everything was right, her kerchief, her heavy boots, her large wool skirts, her lined face, her small gay blue eyes, her voice like a cackling giggling croak. We brought vodka with us, as a help to knocking on doors and asking personal questions of strangers, and this worked like a charm—not that any private person would refuse to let you in and to answer anything you asked. She wanted mainly and disconnectedly to talk of her sister, who had been in Auschwitz and was always ill, sick with the concentration-camp sickness—terrible changes in the body induced by starvation, which end, by some metabolic twist, as disabling obesity; her sister could not take a job where she had to stay in one room. This old woman's life can never have been anything but stony hardship, and it is the same now; she would not think it worth while to complain. But suddenly she said, “I can only scratch my name like a hen. Now the children go to school.”

  I love and admire the Poles, and for their sake I wish I could report that life is better in Poland, more room to breathe, more hope, and more money. In 1958, there seemed little enough of those commodities, and now it is worse.

  “Everyone is sick of politics,” said Antoni. “All they care about is making money.”

  “And do they?”

  “Oh, no, of course not. There is always less money. And prices go up and wages stay the same, or else, plop, they go down. And many people have no jobs. But there is no unemployment relief, because in a Communist State there can be no unemployment. And the labor exchanges do not find people work. It is a joke, no?”

  “Since I'm not Polish, the answer is No.”

  “Many people are becoming Communists now, just for the sake of a job. That seems to me a big mistake. I think Communists should at least be sincere, don't you agree?”

  A year and a half ago, we talked a great deal about the past war, about Russia, about fear of another war, even occasionally about the Polish government. This time, topic number one was economics, which is the nagging desperate preoccupation of the Poles. When they say they are interested in making money, they mean they are interested in staying alive.

  People exist who can write intelligently about Marxist economics. To the ignorant outside observer, Marxist economics in Poland seem like a mad doctrinaire system, unrelated to human life or human nature, which is designed to keep people miserably poor. The State, the overall paymaster, does not pay a living wage. And meantime, it hounds the pitiful relicts of private enterprise that have somehow survived. (A miller by a stream: since the last of the Polish Kings, over two hundred years ago, his family has owned and operated an ancient wooden water wheel and ground grain for the neighbors. He is hardly a threat to any economic system. A wiser state—we will skip the idea of a kinder state—would even consider this man and his mill wheel as art objects to be preserved. He is being chivvied out of existence by taxes; one small man lost in the countryside, one man with a handsome mourning face who sees the end of his line.)

  Communist economics in Poland apparently work like Prohibition in America. Prohibition made the United States a nation of illegal drinkers; Communist economics force the Poles to be finaglers, cheats, little or big crooks. If a charwoman is paid ten dollars a month for full-time work, she must obviously have several jobs or starve. So she checks in at two or more jobs, works a little, and badly, at each, and lives. If a janitor who shovels coal into boilers all night in the ravaging Polish climate earns sixteen dollars a month, he must obviously steal some of the coal to sell it on the black market, or starve. If you are higher up in the scale of employment, you can rob more from the State, and be caught and go to jail: a visit to the law courts any day will confirm this. “The most honest woman you could ever know,” I heard, “she is in prison for embezzling. She did it for everyone else where she worked, too; she had to help them.” “We are all honest here,” said the peasant woman who rents rooms in her house for vacationing city people; she could not make a living off the farm. “But in the next village, someone robbed the co-op.” “Oh, well,” said the driver of our hired car, “they were only stealing from the State, not from real people.”

  Terror changes its face; for the past few years, there have been no political trials. In fact, what use is political rebellion of any kind? The Poles know their catastrophic geography and their ruthless neighbor. Now the State concentrates on money and snoops after any signs of well-being, for legally there should be none. Lawyers, organized into cooperatives, have private practices, with a fixed scale of fees; but they must not earn more than sixty dollars a month. A peasant remarked, “If you wear a pair of good trousers, they follow you to see where you got the money.” A year later, a man is ominously questioned as to how he managed to buy a car for his work. The ever-present, ever-menacing State, which taps telephones, opens mail, searches rooms, follows people, seems turned into a suspicious cash register with an X-ray eye. Those who have nothing must go on having nothing.

  I don't pretend to understand what purpose or excuse there can be for such economics; I only know the atmosphere—anxiety, disgust, hopelessness—and the visible results. Dirt and neglect: oh, the bad food and scruffy rooms, the broken plumbing, the filthy, slow, overloaded trains, the antique planes with the heating out of order, freeze or boil, the shoddy goods at the absurd prices; and why not, why not? I also think that the pitiful drunkenness of the poor—half the ragged cotton-clad farmers in
a squalid village pub dead drunk at two o'clock on a Monday afternoon, shabby men reeling dangerously in the dark streets—is due to this antihuman economics. If you cannot earn enough for a decent life and can no longer hope, you can at least get drunk. The State's solution is to raise the price of vodka, not wages.

  When, by some miracle of good sense, a living wage is paid, the effect is of light flooding into darkness. One day we were following the usual custom of knocking on strangers’ doors and were thus let into a flat in Nowa Huta. It was a clean one-room dwelling for a young man, his wife, and baby (plus kitchen and bath; rent $1.72 a month). The young man was a mason; starting here as an unskilled worker at the age of fifteen, he had been employed for ten years in building these vast complexes of gray cement sardine tins and was now earning fifty-six dollars a month. That is more than a judge earns in Poland. He had medals for good workmanship, of which he was shyly proud. He reads six or seven newspapers a day and saves them. He loves the movies (favorites: Hitchcock's Rear Window, Francis, the “talking mule,” and anything with Eartha Kitt). He had two books out from the lending library: Feuerbach's Essence of Religion and The Count of Monte Cristo. Once a month he goes to the theater—there is an especially fine one at Nowa Huta; to the movies three or four times a week; he watches and plays soccer. He is a contented man and a hard, competent worker. The State should arrive, in pilgrimage, and study this man and try to learn from him the basic truths about human needs, human hopes, human nature.