Freedom Climbers (Legends and Lore)

by Bernadette McDonald

  Andrzej, more than the others, understood the significance of what he was trying. He knew the history of Polish Himalayan climbing, which had begun badly back in 1936 when the Mountaineering Club’s Himalayan Committee was first created. They had initially wanted to climb K2, but when denied a permit, they shifted their focus in 1939 to Nanda Devi East, an unclimbed 7434-metre peak in India’s Garhwal region. Despite dire warnings from their porters that the Goddess of Destruction would repay them if they set foot on the sacred summit, the team did just that. Within fifteen years, all of the summit climbers were dead.

  After World War II broke out in 1939, climbing in the Himalaya more or less came to a halt. But the interruption lasted much longer for Poland than for other countries, thanks to the Soviet regime’s stranglehold grip. Mountains were a sign of freedom—a concept the Soviets feared above all. While the Poles languished under Soviet rule, climbers from around the world summited all 14 of the 8000metre peaks. The French started it with Annapurna in 1950, and the Chinese finished the job on Shishapangma in 1964.

  The first Polish expedition to Afghanistan didn’t take place until 1960. This event set off an avalanche of expeditions to the Hindu Kush, during which the future cadres of the Himalaya were trained. Andrzej felt that Poland was now ready to claim some new territory in the mountaineering world. A winter climb of Noshaq would be the beginning of that journey.

  On December 29, 1972, Andrzej’s team assembled at the Warsaw railway station with their three tons of equipment. Although the trip was his idea, Andrzej began the journey to Moscow with a heavy heart, worried that the objective was too ambitious. On the one hand, venturing into the high mountains in winter seemed like a logical extension of summer pursuits, just like they did in the Alps or the Tatras. But it had never been done. This was a step into the unknown.

  During the train journey, Andrzej suffered with visions of heavy snowfall, lethal avalanches and frozen feet. As they chugged along through Kazakhstan’s bleak landscape, he stared out at the endless frozen fields hidden beneath a blanket of snow. The temperature dipped to –30° Celsius. The climbers had a brief reprieve when they welcomed in the New Year with Georgian champagne, somewhere near the city of Orenburg on the Ural River.

  When they arrived at Noshaq, they were relieved to see very little snow. But it was cold—frighteningly cold. Temperatures hovered around –25° Celsius during the day, and 10 degrees lower at night. The hours of daylight were brutally short. As the winter storms cycled through, the climbers suffered in the cold; they eventually retreated to base camp to tend their cracked and frozen lips—and to pray the mountaineer’s prayer.

  Bless, oh Lord, our mountain endeavours.

  In the blizzard, in the rain, in the avalanche.

  We see your power everywhere.

  Counting the sleepless hours in the bivouac,

  May we survive another night.

  The hanging shadow of the rock temples,

  Soon a ray of sunlight will shine upon us.

  May we happily make it through the day.

  From the mountaintop may we touch the stars.

  Near the middle of February, Andrzej and his partner, the famously tough Tadek Piotrowski, were high enough on the mountain to consider a summit attempt. But temperatures had dropped even lower and were accompanied by a punishing wind. Then, during the night of February 12, Andrzej woke with a start. The tent had stopped flapping and was eerily quiet. He stepped outside. The mountain was windless and calm. He stood perfectly still, savouring the silence and staring in wonder at the black sky, studded with a million stars. This was their chance.

  After hours of thawing out their boots and heating water for tea, they squeezed out the door of their tent at 11 a.m. They still had 800 metres to go. As the day wore on, they stopped on a snowy plateau to make some tea. Andrzej almost fainted when he glanced down and saw a dessicated black hand protruding from the snow. It was that of a Bulgarian climber, one of five who had become lost during the previous summer’s Noshaq expedition. The sight of the hand rattled them, shaking their resolve. Then the sun dropped behind the ridge and the temperature plunged.

  Not long after, the moon rose, bathing the mountain in a pale, ethereal glow. They decided to continue. The summit appeared just ahead, and they radioed down to base camp that it would only be a few minutes more. When they reached the top, however, their spirits plummeted, for they saw that the main summit was still more than a kilometre away. It was now well after 9 p.m. and the wind was picking up. Just before midnight they finally arrived at the summit, faces numbed by the freezing wind. At 4:30 a.m., after 17 hours of continuous movement, they arrived back at their tent. Now it was time to survey the damage. Tadek’s two big toes were frozen like cubes of ice. He rubbed them madly and stuffed them inside his sleeping bag, next to his frozen socks. Andrzej seemed to have emerged unscathed.

  Despite the physical toll, they had succeeded—the first in the world to climb a mountain over 7000 metres—in winter. What would be next? Andrzej was a young and powerful climber. He was ambitious. He embraced risk and celebrated the freedom to do so. He understood the value of that freedom as one of the most important things in his life. “The wind on my cheeks, and the cold when it was winter, and the warmth in the summer, the friction of granite against my fingers.... They bring me so much joy.”8 After Noshaq his mind raced with the possibilities. Why not an 8000er now?

  While Andrzej was tasting success on Noshaq and beginning the long process of rewriting Poland’s place in mountaineering history, Wanda returned home to yet another family tragedy. Her father was found dead, murdered in his home, dismembered and buried in his garden. The murderers were his tenants, presumably motivated by a bit of cash. In a stupor, Maria, Wanda, and Michael accompanied the police to identify his mutilated body. As she stared at the carnage, Wanda raged, kicking at the useless clumps of dirt. She swore and threatened revenge at this senseless act of cruelty, then she stormed out of the garden, slamming the squeaky gate behind her.

  Faced with this brutal murder and still haunted by her older brother’s violent death, Wanda became anxious and paranoid. Strangers frightened her and she began to feel that something terrible might happen to her. She knew her fears were pathological and irrational, so she tried to overcome them, placing herself in situations where she was alone, at night, in the forest, completely responsible for her own safety. Despite her efforts, she couldn’t control her fears. She would stuff her head inside her sleeping bag to block out the horrifying sounds of rustling leaves, which, to her, sounded more like ominous footsteps coming closer and closer.

  In addition to the deaths of her father and brother, several of Wanda’s early climbing partners had already been killed in the mountains. Perhaps it was an overexposure to premature and sudden loss of life that prompted her, and other climbers, to ignore their own mortality rather than succumb to the trauma. As the deaths multiplied, those who survived began to feel immortal. But in her more realistic moments, Wanda admitted that even though she could never escape her addiction to climbing, “It may be the path to death.” Wanda had begun to embrace a dangerous philosophy. She not only rejected the societal values that disgusted her but she also accepted that her commitment to climbing might come at the price of self-sacrifice. This attitude seemed to permeate the Polish climbing community as they pushed themselves harder and longer at increasingly difficult and dangerous routes. The harder they pushed, the better they became. Their success in the mountains grew. As did the casualty rate.

  Fresh from her victory on Noshaq, Wanda travelled to the Alps in September of 1973. Voytek and Jurek were there that year, too, turning heads with their first ascent of the Polish route on the North Face of the Petit Dru near Chamonix, France. Wanda was in Switzerland, with her eye on the notorious North Face of the Eiger. She took two strong women climbers from Poland with her because, as her confidence grew, so did her preference for female climbing partners. She cited two reasons. One was that she had more op
portunity to lead (both physically and figuratively) with women partners. “I don’t feel I own a route unless I’ve had to conquer my fears and take my own risks,” she said.9 Wanda knew of many good female Polish climbers at the time, but most of them climbed with male partners. Her experiences with mixed-gender climbing had provided her with only a limited amount of leading and decision making, both of which she craved. With women climbers, she could be the boss.

  Her second justification had more to do with competition. Wanda had grown up playing competitive sports, and she thought it was unfair to be ranked against other male climbers: she would always appear weaker. She was a competitor by nature, and she wanted an equal field. She set out to build a group of competent, self-sufficient Himalayan female climbers with whom she could climb, and against whom she would be compared.

  When Wanda, together with Danuta Wach and Stefania Egierszdorff, climbed the difficult and dangerous North Pillar of the Eiger, they returned to Poland as celebrities. Journalists were drawn to Wanda’s eminently quotable style: “You don’t appreciate the full flavour of life until you risk losing it.” News of her adventures in the free world excited other Polish climbers, giving them hope and determination to taste freedom for themselves.

  Wanda was thrilled. But when the cameras stopped flashing and the reporters moved on to other stories, reality set in again. There was never enough money or time to relax or train between expeditions. For Wanda, it was straight back to work.

  Then there was her marriage. It was now blindingly clear that, although climbing had initially drawn her and her husband together, it was now tearing them apart as Wanda became increasingly focused on her annual expeditions abroad. She later admitted that her decision to go on that first expedition to the Pamirs so soon after marrying Wojtek probably sealed the fate of their marriage. She and Wojtek divorced after only three years together.

  Some people criticized her for her lack of commitment to married life, but her approach was hardly different than that of her male counterparts, all of whom were away from home for months at a time. She seemed to approach climbing—and life in general—“like a man.” She was independent, with clear and obvious ambitions, and she counted on her spouse’s support. For this, she was judged quite harshly. Perhaps because she had been forced into a patriarchal role in her family after the deaths of both her older brother and her father, an attitude of dominance and responsibility felt natural to her.

  Although Wanda enjoyed what some describe as a meteoric rise in her climbing career, there were a few setbacks. At least, perceived setbacks. The importance of being included on official Polish expeditions cannot be overstated, so it’s not surprising that Wanda felt insulted and ignored when Andrzej failed to invite her on his 1974 winter Lhotse expedition. Her accomplishments were the best among Polish female climbers at the time: hard routes in the Tatras, both winter and summer; the Eiger; Trollryggen; and two 7000-metre peaks. She later heard rumours that she had been excluded not because of her lack of experience but because of her excessive ambition and drive. The assumption was that she would have wanted the summit too badly, perhaps threatening the success of some male members of the team. Another woman was asked to go to Lhotse instead, although in a supporting role.

  The team did not reach the summit. Andrzej later called the failure “the biggest disappointment of my life because we got so close to the top [8250 metres].”10 But despite his personal frustration, Andrzej understood the power of the media. He managed to spin the Lhotse story as a great success, the first time anyone had climbed above 8000 metres in winter.

  In the 1970s, Poland’s mountain clubs were still almost exclusively male. A rising star in that world, Leszek Cichy, explained the situation as he remembered it thirty years later. “To tell the truth...women in the mountains was something new,” he said. “The men sort of treated it as...an attempt at taking part in things that, until now, were things only done by men, such as trips to the poles, conquering space, climbing unconquered peaks So maybe we were a bit...um...selfish?” Disliking this state of affairs, Wanda decided to take things into her own hands.

  The year 1975 was declared International Women’s Year, so Wanda decided to organize a women’s expedition to the highest unclimbed peak in the world—Pakistan’s Gasherbrum III. A number of Polish climbers were convinced that she wanted not only to climb the peak but also to prove that a woman could lead an expedition to one of the highest mountains in the world. With the official support and endorsement of Pakistani President Bhutto’s wife, Nusrat, Wanda was under enormous pressure to succeed.

  Located in the spectacular Karakoram Range, the mountain sits amidst a group of six Gasherbrums, all above 7000 metres and two of them reaching the magical 8000-metre mark. The complex plan had Wanda leading a group of 10 elite women climbers on Gasherbrum III, while the prominent Warsaw climber Janusz Onyszkiewicz led seven men up Gasherbrum II.

  The concept proved confusing right from the start. Alison, Janusz’s wife, was under the impression that the men were there as “an emergency support team” to deal with any problems that might arise between the local Muslims and the women’s team. Janusz later admitted that their fears about the Muslims were amusingly unfounded. “They didn’t regard our ladies as women, but as white men of the female gender.”

  Among the women invited by Wanda, two had already established themselves as a strong climbing team within Poland: Anna Czerwińska and Krystyna Palmowska. They had met Wanda a couple of years earlier while climbing at a Warsaw training crag, and had been impressed by Wanda’s conviction that the future of Polish women’s alpinism demanded a broad range of experience. In order to get the full support of the alpine association, female climbers needed more than just a few important Tatras climbs under their belts, she told them. They needed an international reputation as well.

  The men and women planned to share a number of camps along the way, sharing the work as they went. It was an ingenious strategy, and it worked, although not immediately. Some on the team doubted Wanda’s ability to lead such a large expedition, and Wanda was a little naïve about how a group of motivated, ambitious and strong-willed women would respond to her sometimes bullheaded approach. When she ordered them to carry double loads to save porter fees, they just ignored her.

  Despite her high expectations of others, she was at least as tough on herself. Leszek, 23 at the time, recalled having breakfast with Wanda at one of the higher camps on the mountain when she suddenly felt ill, possibly due to altitude. She ran out of the tent and vomited, came back in, cleaned herself up and declared, “Okay, it’s time to go up.” Not a hint of self-pity was allowed, and certainly not a rest day. Wanda hadn’t scrimped and saved, organized and strategized and travelled halfway across the world to go on vacation. She was completely focused on one thing—the top. It didn’t matter to her how terrible the task was. You had to do it. Gasherbrum III had become her idée fixe.

  But she wasn’t always tough. After a particularly hard day of trail-breaking in the deep snow, one of the climbers saw her collapse into a puddle of tears when her camera malfunctioned. Another time she exploded in frustrated anger when her tent poles wouldn’t cooperate. She was full of contradictions: strong yet weak, stoic but emotional, hot and cold.

  Her success on the mountain did not come easily, particularly with human relationships. Everything started to unravel when climbers began choosing partners, not always to Wanda’s liking. Another complication arose when Saeed, the expedition’s liaison officer, fell in love with the soft-spoken, blond and beautiful Krystyna, and convinced her to take him with her to the top of the mountain. Alison was particularly frustrated and surprised by what she saw as Wanda’s dogmatic attitude, and her husband, Janusz, had serious issues with Wanda’s strategy on the mountain, which he saw as flawed. Krystyna defended her, insisting that Wanda was more pragmatic than dogmatic, adjusting her strategies as needed in order to succeed.

  Their disagreements were laid bare in a documentary film
about the expedition called Boiling Point. In a particularly tense scene, the cameras rolled as the two leaders, Janusz and Wanda, argued about the timing of their summit attempts. Janusz stated that they should have tried for the summit three weeks earlier. Wanda defended her decision, saying, “I don’t see that the participants are so exhausted,” adding that she felt just fine. He retorted, “I wasn’t talking about you since you’re indestructible. I just wanted to say that the plan of attack is damned risky.” He continued his barrage of criticism: “I’m not the leader, because you are, unfortunately, and that’s why there are only seven people [left to climb] after seven weeks. In order to be the leader you have to reach a certain level of intelligence and honesty and you haven’t reached either.”

  “End of discussion,” Wanda said, looking down.

  Late that night she left her tent for a solitary stroll. She needed to clear her mind. The mountains were illuminated by a rising moon, and the continuous murmuring of a nearby stream calmed her jangled nerves. She gazed about for almost an hour before returning to her tent to write in her journal. “This is my place. More than any other. I belong in these mountains There are not enough words to communicate this world. Words are unimportant. Silence is best.”

  Wanda felt she needed to be strong, so she ignored the obvious tensions in the group. She made the conscious decision to be hard-nosed; if people didn’t like her, it didn’t matter. She assessed the expedition dynamics as a microcosm of Polish society: people cried for democracy, but they needed the opposite—tough, directive leadership.