A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [152]
Barbara Gora, another longtime Communist, did not mourn the regime's passing, either. She had never married and had always been absorbed in her work. She had found a position compiling a weekly newsletter on foreign agriculture. The three-page publication was intended to be a serious journal for professionals who wanted to keep up with interesting ideas around the world. She tried to make it her contribution to improving Polish agronomy. But it was difficult to fit all the information into only three pages, and she worked under a man who desperately wanted to embellish his standing in the party by having his own articles published. His studies were usually arcane and irrelevant and sometimes ridiculous. She particularly remembered his pointless study of Swedish bears. When they were that silly, she would simply take the article home with her and never mention it. But she was often obliged to run his pieces. Dissatisfied, she left when the first opportunity to retire came up in 1987. “We all waited for the changes. We were so disappointed with our lives. This was not socialism. It was state capitalism. There was a privileged class, the owners of Poland.”
But the new Polish state would also have its disappointments. Konstanty Gebert understood that in spite of its coalition of Jews, Catholics, unionists, and intellectuals, Solidarity had always had an anti-Semitic element, especially within the Warsaw chapter of the trade union. During the 1990 presidential campaign, a poll indicated that 30 percent of Poles believed “Jews have too much influence in Poland.” Among those who said they intended to vote for Walesa, 50 percent agreed with that statement.
In the local elections that year several small parties expressed anti-Semitism. A small conservative Catholic party with the backing of Polish Primate Jozef Cardinal Glemp produced a poster that showed a happy worker tossing out a barrel-load of people bearing the sinister rapacious faces that have become the standard anti-Semitic stereotype for Jews. The caption said, “Enough of socialism, comrades.”
In the 1990 presidential race, Mazowiecki, having been the first post-Communist leader, appeared to be mounting a major challenge to Walesa's candidacy. Although Mazowiecki was a devout Catholic, his campaign was dogged by persistent rumors that he was secretly a Jew. No public figure ever uttered this, but it appears to have been widely believed. Konstanty Gebert, who by that time had become a well-known journalist, would question people on why they believed this. One person explained to him, “He is sad, and he prays too much,” while another told him, “Well, he did get to be prime minister, didn't he?”
While Walesa had always been outspoken in condemning anti-Semitism, he did nothing to deflate the anti-Semitic tone of the campaign, no doubt since it had turned against his principal opponent. He started playing with Polish anti-Semitism, vaguely alluding to hidden Jewish activities and asserting that he was “a hundred percent Pole” and that he had documents going back “for generations untold” proving his Polishness.
In a speech to a Solidarity group Walesa referred to rumors that “a new clique is at the trough again.” He went on to say that he had heard they were Jews. A group angrily walked out of that meeting and established its own party, the Civic Movement for Democratic Action. Walesa complained that he could not attack the new movement without being accused