1968 - Mark Kurlansky [43]
Ironically, in the happy barracks foreign press was not suppressed. A Pole could go to a library and read Le Monde or the British Guardian. But these papers were accessible only to the few who could read French or English, including many students. Otherwise Poles had to wait for the broadcast on Radio Free Europe.
Students, tourists, even businessmen when traveling abroad would stop off at Radio Free Europe in Vienna and give information. But many refused to work with Radio Free Europe, for this cold war generation had grown up with the capitalists as the enemy, rehearsing for defense in the event of an American nuclear attack in scarce and overcrowded schools, a shortage blamed on the high cost of the fallout shelters each school had to contain.
Leading dissident Jacek Kuroń said, “I knew that Radio Free Europe was done by the CIA. I didn’t know for sure, but I thought so. But it was the only means I had. I would have preferred to use a more neutral media but there was no other.” But despite his negative feelings about them, the Radio Free Europe staff admired and trusted him. Nowak said of Kuroń, “He is one of the most noble human beings I have met in my life.”
An alternative to Radio Free Europe was Kultura, a Polish-language newspaper written by a group of Poles who lived together in Paris. Kultura could get five thousand copies into circulation in Poland, which was often too few, too slowly.
Kuroń said, “My greatest concern was getting information to the Polish people. Who was beaten, who was arrested. I was a central information point and had to distribute the information.” He gestured toward a white phone in his small, dark Warsaw apartment. “Through this phone I used to telephone Radio Free Europe several times a day to give them information because it was broadcast back to Poland immediately. One time I was telling them about seven people in prison, and two political police walked into the apartment and told me to come with them. ‘Who is it you are arresting?’ I asked.
“ ‘We are arresting you, Jacek Kuroń.’ ”
Kuroń was holding the phone with Radio Free Europe still on the line, and the arrest was recorded and broadcast instantly.
Radio Free Europe broadcasted in Poland from 5:00 A.M. to midnight, seven days a week. Broadcasts were by native-speaking Poles. There was music, sports, and news every hour on the hour. The station claimed strict objectivity without editorializing, though few believed this. Few cared. The station was listened to with the expectation that it was a Western point of view. But it was full of information on Poland that came from inside Poland.
The Polish government jammed the station, but this served as a guide. If a Pole turned on the station and heard that familiar engine roar in the background, it meant this was important programming. The words could still be deciphered. “Jamming was our ally,” said Jan Nowak. “It made people curious about what they were hiding.”
One day in 1964, an average-size, blond, fairly typical-looking young Pole stopped by Radio Free Europe in Vienna on his way back to Poland from Paris. He was only eighteen years old, a young disciple of two older, well-known dissidents: Kuroń and Karol Modzelewski. The young man talked with enthusiasm about a vision of a socialism that was both democratic and humane. Four years later, in 1968, Alexander Dubek would call this “communism with a human face.”
Nowak recalled the young man, whose name was Adam Michnik: “He was boyish in appearance but had astounding intellectual maturity for his years.” Michnik was born in 1946, a post-Holocaust Jew from Lwov, which is now in the Ukraine but at the time of his birth was still in Poland. Before the war, when such a world still existed, his father’s family were impoverished, traditional shtetl Jews. His mother came from an assimilated Cracow family. Both parents were communists,