Against the Flow

by Tom Fort

  Returning eight years after her death, I went to see the director of the Teleki Library, Mihály Spielman, who had known her quite well. He filled in some of the facts and dates I was missing. He told me that she had regarded it as her sacred duty to keep an eye on the library. ‘It was her family’s legacy to this town,’ he said. ‘She was an example to us all.’ I learned from him that both Sáromberke/Dumbrǎvioara and Gernyeszeg/Gorneşti had been legally restored to surviving Telekis. There were plans, he understood, to restore them, perhaps create a museum. But he wondered who would pay. It would cost several fortunes to refurbish them, and the Telekis were no longer rich. How could they be, when everything had been taken from them? And, besides, why would they want to live in such places now?

  Both looked very much as I remembered, just scruffier, and both were being used for the same purposes as before. But the Klobusicky manor house at Guraszáda, which I also revisited, now looked beyond hope of repair or redemption. The massive outer walls of the courtyard were ravaged by decay, the ochre plasterwork crumbling, holes gaping in the tiled roofs. The courtyard itself was a sea of weeds. One of the chestnuts was dead, the others had fallen victim to disease. The storks had gone, their nest blown away. The fan-shaped steps leading up to the front door had subsided and buckled. The verandah roof had fallen in at intervals, exposing laths like smashed ribs. Several windows were broken, although the green and purple fanlight over the door leading to the loggia was still intact.

  When I arrived a man was in the act of padlocking the door. He let me in. It was obvious that the place had not been inhabited or regularly used for years, quite possibly since I was last here. The parquet floors rolled in waves, the walls sagged with moisture, the sky was visible through the roof. Outside, the wilderness was closing in fast, swallowing walls and outbuildings. The branches of an acacia rested comfortably across the main roof. Shrubs and brambles reached for the windows. The bamboo grove had almost engulfed the loggia where Leigh Fermor and István sat through the summer nights, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes, breaking off every now and then from their eager conversation to watch the Perseids glitter in the dark sky.

  Guruszáda, 2008

  I sat at the top of the steps overlooking the courtyard for a while, feeling an ache of regret. For so long, 200 years or so, this house had been the beating heart of the village. It had seen such life, heard such laughter, stood for a kind of permanence and security for so many, a kind of guarantee that, here at least, the order of things went on as before. Now the heart had stopped beating. How could it have been allowed to die? How could it have become so useless, so unwanted?

  The only signs of life left were the cooing pigeons; the martins which still made their nests beneath the disintegrating eaves; the butterflies twitching through the sun-warmed air; the bees feasting on the flowers of the acacia. And the trees, the great trees, that had guided me here before. It would take more than the passing of an era to bring them down. They rose high above the scene of desolation all around, looking out across the valley of the lazy, twisting Mureş, to the sweep of woods beyond.

  Chapter 22

  Poles apart

  AT HALF-PAST NINE on a Sunday morning the congregation of the Catholic Church in Lesko was emerging in a strong, steady stream. It took a good while for them all to disperse into the streets of the town, which stands on a hill above the River San in the southeast corner of Poland. As the last of them strolled off, the bells were summoning the next intake for ten o’clock mass – the third of the day, with three more to follow.

  By ten-thirty, when I returned from visiting Lesko’s synagogue and Jewish cemetery, the church was full and the worshippers had spilled into the open space outside, where all the benches were taken and there was standing room only. The voice of the invisible priest came loudly and insistently from speakers fixed to the wall. The crowd was quiet and attentive, even the children, and the responses came in confident unison. It was an impressive spectacle. The Jews of Lesko are no more, but the Catholics are there in force.

  To an outsider, the continuing grip of the Catholic Church on Polish society, 20 years after the overthrow of Communism, is one of the wonders of modern Poland. I asked the manager of the hotel where I was staying a couple of miles upriver why so many people went to church. ‘They are hypocrites,’ she said scornfully. ‘They think it is not important how they behave during the week because they make confession on Sunday.’

  Jurek Kowalski, 1990

  My friend Jurek Kowalski had a more charitable, perhaps more perceptive, explanation. He, his wife Wiesia, and their daughter Ania, are all regular church-goers. Jurek told me he had the usual problems with matters of faith and the after-life. But his commitment to the Church as an earthly power for good was unshakeable. Polish society, he said, had a desperate need for a powerful, binding influence to counter the forces pulling it apart. Mainly for historical reasons – war, conquest, subjugation, genocide, loss of sovereignty and territory, migrations and emigrations – Poles had little sense of community or shared identity. Polish politics had become extravagantly divisive, parties feeding off the promotion of envy and suspicion, and on the fingering of hate figures: Russians, Germans, gypsies, the EU, homosexuals, and so on.

  The Polish mentality, according to Jurek, was to assume that everyone was cheating. Faith in institutions or in ideals of probity and service was almost non-existent. People relied on their families and their cronies and if they thought they could get away with cheating they would. Free market economics and the widening chasm between the fortunate few and the excluded many had further eaten away at the idea of nationhood. Only the Church, Jurek believed, could bridge these divisions, treat the wounds, speak with a single Polish voice.

  He talked a lot about the history of his country. One recurring theme was that it was impossible for someone from England to understand the lasting psychological and spiritual effect of the almost unbroken sequence of conquest and tyranny that constituted Poland’s past. In particular, I could not be expected to grasp the nature of the scars left by the enforced migrations of its people. It seemed that there was hardly a family in Poland that did not look back on some trauma of slaughter, dispossession or uprooting.

  Jurek’s own family was no exception. One strand on his mother’s side had originated from near Kielce, in what was known as the Kingdom, the eastern portion of historic Poland annexed by the Russians as a result of partition in the eighteenth century. Rule from Moscow was periodically challenged in gallant, hopeless uprisings, the last of which – in 1863 – was crushed in the customary brutal fashion. In the aftermath, thousands of Poles were dispatched to die in labour camps in Siberia, and thousands more emigrated. Many others sought refuge in Galicia, the southern sector under Habsburg control, among them Jurek’s forbears on his mother’s side, who settled near Jasło, not far north of the Carpathian mountains.

  His paternal ancestors were themselves Galician but migrated east, to the borderland near the River Bug, from where they were forcibly removed into Russia during the First World War, to the Volga, where they were interned. Jurek’s grandfather and grandmother met as schoolchildren during this period of exile. After the war they returned to what was once more sovereign Polish territory, as a result of the establishment of the expanded Second Polish Republic (also including Lithuania and the western part of Ukraine). The family speciality was farm management, and Jurek’s grandfather was in charge of estates close to the Bug. He also owned his own farm south of the town of Hrubieszów.

  The respite did not last long. Under the terms of the Ribbentrop–Molotov pact of 1939, the Russians again took control of eastern Poland – including the territories of eastern Galicia and Volhynia – and set about obliterating the Polish influence there. At least one million Poles, mainly middle-class professionals and their families, were deported or murdered. Two years later Germany invaded Russia, and Soviet savagery was exchanged for the more refined, but equally horrible, Nazi model. All the time, awaitin
g their opportunity, was a pack of Ukrainian nationalist groups who considered Volhynia and eastern Galicia to be theirs and were resolved to rid them of foreign interlopers.

  The German occupiers were content to leave much of the dirty work to sympathetic Ukrainian militias. In Volhynia 200,000 Jews died; and early in 1943 the so-called Ukrainian Insurgent Army, the UPA, embarked on a carefully planned genocide against Polish villages. Deploying tactics learned from their Nazi instructors, they attacked settlements, murdered the inhabitants, looted anything of value, then burned the houses. The slaughter spread south from Volhynia into eastern Galicia. Scores of villages were destroyed and thousands of Poles were killed, often after torture, often with gruesome cruelty. The massacres continued even after the Red Army swept back on its way to Berlin. The Russians had no more qualms than the Germans about getting rid of Poles, and had their own particular reasons for liquidating the remnants of the educated bourgeoisie.

  In all it is believed that at least 60,000, and possibly as many as 100,000, Polish people were murdered by Ukrainian nationalists. Jurek’s grandfather and his family survived on their farm for three years, finally fleeing west to Lublin, where they stayed. Jurek’s father, Andrzej, went to university there, but after some kind of trouble with the Communist security police, he completed his law studies in Kraków. Eventually he became a lawyer in the town of Krosno, in south-east Poland, Jurek Kowalski’s home town.

  Krosno’s most celebrated son is Ignacy Łukasiewicz, who not only sank what Krosno firmly believes was the world’s first oil well (in 1854, a few miles south of the town), but also invented the oil lamp. Several hundred specimens of this useful household item can be admired in the municipal museum. Also on display in the museum – more as a matter of record than pride – is a photograph of another local notable: Władysław Gomułka, one of the founders of Polish Communism and a long-serving Party leader. The photograph is not flattering – it makes Gomułka look like a bespectacled, hairless reptile in a suit – and there is no statue or commemorative tablet to him to be found anywhere. For those with long memories, however, there is a discreet memorial of a kind: a building on the main square, now a doctors’ surgery and pharmacy, previously the police headquarters where enemies of the state were quietly disposed of.

  Krosno’s fortunes have waxed and waned over the centuries. The fine old houses on the main square mostly date from the sixteenth century, when the town flourished on the proceeds of the Hungarian wine trade. The oil boom initiated by Łukasiewicz fostered an era of prosperity that lasted until the convulsions of 1939. When I was there in summer 2008 it was clearly thriving, the old town spankingly restored, the rest of it humming with commercial activity. But when I first came, in May 1990, it was very different: shabby and uncared for, full of drunks and down-and-outs, fearful of what the future might hold.

  Jurek Kowalski was then in his late 20s. He had a plump-cheeked, boyish face that made him look younger than he was; and a quiet, careful way of talking that made him seem old and wise beyond his years. He was a highly serious fellow, but the seriousness was shot through with a very Polish sense of the absurdities and contradictions inherent in every situation, which would show itself in smiles and quiet laughter. He worked immensely long hours for very little money as a doctor in Krosno’s hospital, where he saw plenty of the desperation rife at all levels of Polish society. His recreation, which he also took very seriously, was fishing. A passionate, highly skilled angler, he had captained the winning Polish team at the world fly-fishing championships in Finland in 1989, and had previously competed in England.

  He was waiting for me in his flat in a cluster of forbidding grey-and-mustard-coloured blocks rising from a scar of wasteland on the edge of town. ‘It is typical of this country,’ Jurek said severely when I commented on the unlovely display of puddles, mud heaps, piles of aggregate, rolls of rusty wire and lumps of metal outside. ‘Polish people are very untidy.’ We drove east from Krosno to Sanok, a half-dead provincial town known for its bus factories. ‘They are the worst buses in Poland,’ Jurek told me. ‘Maybe the worst buses in the world.’ They bore the name Autosan, although more often than not this was invisible underneath their crust of filth and carbon. You saw them everywhere, wheezing along the road with their rear ends enveloped in smoke or broken down at the side, the passengers standing around in attitudes of weary resignation.

  At Sanok we crossed the broad and stately San, the river Jurek had fished all his fishing life. Ahead was the Bieszczady, the region of forested hills and dark valleys that fills Poland’s far south-eastern corner. On the higher Bieszczady hills the trees give way around the summits to meadows of thick, waist-high grass, so that from a distance they suggest the tonsured heads of monks. The beech forests are full of animals, including lynx, wolves, bears and European bison (exterminated in the wild in the 1920s and subsequently reintroduced using animals bred in zoos). Not many humans, though.

  The Bieszczady extends to the border with Ukraine. A rifle-bullet’s range inside the border is a settlement called Smolnik. Visitors come to see the ancient, beautiful wooden church that stands in a grove of ash, lime and acacia trees on top of a low hill. Bees nest at the top of the flattened square tower, and the man who sells drawings of the church and other knick-knacks outside the door will show alleged claw marks along the side, left, he says, by a hungry bear that tried to get to the honey.

  The church looks down on meadows where, in summer, the grass is cut in oval patterns. Woods rise steeply beyond the meadows. The landscape is very pretty, very empty. There is nothing here to suggest that a mere 70 years ago it was full of people and flourishing communities. There were watermills and brickworks, leather workshops, a dairy, a network of farms and businesses. There were even oil wells a couple of miles north, outside the town of Lutowiska, where more than half the population was Jewish.

  In 1942 most of the Jews of Lutowiska were murdered by the Gestapo, and the rest were dispatched to the extermination camp at Bełżec. That episode was a prelude to a period of guerrilla conflict that consumed the region until the end of the war and beyond. As the Russians came from one direction and the Germans retreated in another, Ukrainian UPA separatists pursued a vicious, hopeless campaign for the independence they had been promised by Hitler.

  Damned beyond redemption in Polish and Russian eyes for their collaboration with the Nazis, the UPA fought on from their bases in the Bieszczady mountains even after the rest of shattered Europe was at peace. In 1947 a UPA unit ambushed and killed the Polish war hero General Karol Świerczewski. The Polish army responded with a massive incursion which crushed the insurrection for good.

  A dark chapter followed. The people of the Bieszczady were mainly Boyks and Lemks, ethnically linked with the Ukrainians but – as a result of their isolation in their remote enclave below the Carpathians – culturally distinct. This distinction was lost on the Polish and Russian military commanders and their political masters. They saw this pastoral peasant society of farmers, shepherds, wood-carvers and loggers as a bunch of collaborators and traitors that must be expunged. Under the terms of Operation Vistula the entire population of the Bieszczady was cleared out: 150,000 Lemks were removed to the Soviet Union; 80,000 Boyks were ‘resettled’ in Poland, many of them in Silesia, the coal-rich region in the west handed over by Germany in the redrawing of borders agreed at Yalta.

  Initially the Bieszczady – now almost empty – was incorporated into the Soviet Ukraine. A few years later Moscow decided to hand it back to Poland in exchange for a much more useful strip of coal deposits close to the border to the north. Subsequently the abandoned villages of the Bieszczady, mainly of wooden buildings, were razed. But even the most fervent members of the Polish Central Committee retained a certain superstitious reluctance about attacking consecrated ground, and the churches – both Orthodox and Uniate – were allowed to stand, and were handed over to the care of the Roman Catholic Church.

  So the church at Smolnik still guards its hill,
and the bees still nest in the tower and graze on the acacia flowers. The construction is strong, and there is no obvious reason why these mighty interlocking beams, black with resin, should not be standing in another 200 years. Its principal function these days is as a visitor attraction for the swelling numbers of tourists coming to the Bieszczady, although a service is held once in a while in honour of its dedicatee, St Hubert, the patron saint of hunters.

  The communities that built the church and sustained it have gone almost as if they had never been. The ground they stood on has been reclaimed by woods and meadows. The departed way of life has left few obvious traces. But there is one, visible in early summer. Here and there, against the green of the forest, splashes of white and cream show, where the orchards of apple, pear, cherry and plum trees planted long ago still blossom.

  The church at Smolnik was looked after by a family of foresters, the Bartniks, who lived across the valley. Jurek had known them since he was a boy; he and his father stayed with them when they came from Krosno to fish the San. Their house, built of wood and painted green, stood in a clearing. Pigs foraged in a pen at the back, next to a plot bursting with fruit and vegetables. Hens and geese patrolled the yard at the front.

  ‘These are simple people,’ Jurek said as he unlatched the gate. ‘They have a simple life but a good one, I think. They have enough to eat, they don’t drink too much, they go to church, they work hard. I think they are happy … more happy than most people in Poland.’

  We were welcomed by the senior member of the family, Julian Bartnik, and his wife Maria. She gave us coffee, then a splendid lunch of fresh tomato soup followed by grilled pork with boiled potatoes and spinach. The table where we ate stood on legs made of antlers. The chandelier above the table and the candelabra on the walls were fashioned of the same material. The chairs were covered in deer hide, the floor with boar and wolf skins. From the window the forest rolled away, the viridian of the conifers mixed with the light spring green of the beeches.