Kazimierz Brandys – a Polish prose writer and essayist – was later to recall a 1949 party meeting. When an assuredly important discussion was over, somebody behind him said in a beautiful, dignified baritone: "Wake up, wretched of this Earth". Intrigued, Brandys turned around and saw a tall, slim boy with a lush head of hair. Years down the line he will concede that that boy reminded him of Mayakovsky. His intuition did not let him down – the shaggy young man was not only a poet, but also a great hope of the Party, which was just closing the dome of the communist regime over post-war Poland.
Then we are whisked 41 years forward. The same Kazimierz Brandys comes to an already free homeland from Paris, where his emigrant fate took him. He goes to the Dominican church in Freta Street in Warsaw to take part in a mass for the soul of his deceased colleague. Suddenly, from behind he hears exactly the same smooth, sonorous baritone singing "Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world". He turns around. The same person! The same head of hair, albeit a little on the thinner side. "He belonged to people with a need to believe." - Brandys will summarize later, trying to explain how it is possible that one man is able to move from radical Stalinism to equally radical Catholicism.
This fervent neophyte was called Wiktor Woroszylski. He was a poet, novelist, columnist and author of books for children. As he himself repeatedly admitted, John Paul II played a key role in his spiritual conversion. He met him personally for the first time two years before his appointment to the Holy See. It happened in the spiritual heart of Poland on Jasna Góra in Częstochowa, where a two-day gathering of poets and musicians took place. Cardinal Karol Wojtyła, close to literature and theatre as a young man, always liked to be surrounded by artists. Even ideologically they were on different pages.
For Woroszylski, that encounter was the beginning of the road to living faith. However, before he could move into it, he had to undergo a political conversion and cleanse himself from the grip of communism. This lasted a good dozen or so years - from the first shy doubts that started to oppress him during his several years in the USSR until the final break-up sealed by the anti-Semitic campaign launched by the PZPR in 1968.
Woroszylski's metanoia had one turning point, after which nothing was as it was before for him - even if for a few more years he was deluding himself that there was such a thing as ideal socialism, and only the wrong people introduced it. A few days spent by him in the chaos of the Budapest Uprising was that point. The sight of tanks ravaging the Hungarian capital in November 1956 turned out to be an even more effective cure for the Marxism virus than Nikita Kruszczow's famous paper revealing the scale of torture and abuse of the Soviet security forces.
Birth of "spot face"
In fact, Wiktor Woroszylski's ground-breaking journey to the revolted Budapest began at Łódź Kaliska station. In March 1945, together with his parents and siblings, he got off at that station after a week-long ride from his hometown of Grodno, which they left as part of a repatriations. He was just shy of eighteen and considered himself a full-blooded communist. He later recalled how one summer day, still in Belarus, he came across a Red Army soldier on a sandy country road. The soldier gave him a book about the history of the Soviet Union's Communist Party and Mikołaj Ostrowski's novel "How the Steel Was Tempered". It was these positions that were to become the foundation of Viktor's revolutionary zeal.
In Łódź, he took his first steps to the district committee of the communist party, where the young enthusiast was welcomed with open arms. When a party secretary asked him how he imagined his future - his studies, youth work or maybe a career in an emerging security apparatus? - he replied that he wanted use words to to fight for the consolidation of socialism. And that’s exactly what happened. After just a few months, he went around the newly established factories as a reporter. Then he tried his luck in medicine, but quickly abandoned it for Polish philology. Slowly but surely he was becoming a writer. Though perhaps in his case the term "political agitator" would be more appropriate.
The scale of his fanaticism, or even his blind faith in Marxism, was attested to by many people who knew him then. One of the legends circulating about him says that when he got married, he did not let his wife hang chandeliers and curtains, because even such completely basic decorative elements were associated with exaggerated luxury, unworthy of a devoted companion and petty bourgeoisie, which he hated with all his heart. He remembered himself from those times as a principled person who does not make the separation between the dedication of the party and family life. He even wrote about it in one of his poems at the time:
Its not always good to flaunt your flat,
your third skin, the world of trivia
(…)
find it within yourself not to flinch
faced by a pocked sized poster of a party membership card.
The memoirs of Woroszylski often include an incident from 1946, significant both for him and for the spirit of the period. Victor and a group of other "spot faces" - As young intellectuals obsessed with Marxism started to be called later, he went to the Sejm for a meeting of writers and scientists. When he took up the stand, he turned to "foreign" supporters of the government in exile in London. He started yelling accusations of treason at them. At one point when he leaned forward, a button fell off his jacket. Its halves parted and a powerful chambered Nagant, tucked under the speaker's trouser belt, appeared to those gathered.
Maybe it's hard to believe it today, but no one was surprised by such excesses at the time. Weapons were carried by all, perpetuators of people's power, similar to Woroszylski. And him, with or without a gun, attracted by his magnetism even more. He was a leader. He was the one who gave his pen colleagues the approvals of socialist morality. He was, you might say, a kind of apostle. "The euphoria of the devotee is mixed with the passion of the leader - a strategist, setting up soldiers, requiring listening, staring at the target, what is delirious on the horizon." - he wrote about himself after years.
In his devotion to the idea of communism, did he go as far as to participate in the falsification of the 1947 elections, as a result of which the communists officially took power in Poland? There is no evidence of this, although he probably believed that the goal sanctifies the means, and he wrote about the election itself in his memoirs. Interestingly, he used to talk about himself then in the third person, as if he was looking at a stranger.
The coming "thaw"
1956 was a breakthrough year for the entire socialist bloc. The chain of events that flooded Budapest in blood and opened the eyes of "spot face" Woroszylski to the true nature of communism was initiated in Moscow during the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Nikita Khrushchev, its secretary successor of Joseph Stalin, delivered a secret report during the congress entitled "On the cult of the individual and its consequences." The scale of the crimes of the regime and its subordinate services revealed by Khrushchev was overpowering.
The information about the report, despite initial blocking attempts, leaked very quickly to Poland. It made its rounds by word of mouth and illegal copies. At one point it was even possible to purchase it. And it has to be admitted here that the reports about Soviet crimes fell on fertile ground in the People's Republic of Poland, because already a year and a half earlier the Polish section of Radio Free Europe aired a series of programmes "Behind the scenes of the security and party", the content of which consisted of the confessions of Józef Światło, a prominent functionary of the Ministry of Public Security, who fled to the West. One of the effects of this ferment was Poznan's June, i.e. the first mass strike; bloody suppressed by the army and militia, which additionally stirred up social moods.
Wiktor Woroszylski observed the beginnings of this wave, later called the "Thaw", from Moscow, where he was on scholarship for young talented people. After four years of looking closely at the achievements of the homeland of the world proletariat, his youthful faith in Marx and Engels was already very much shaken. He gave it interestingly in his poem "Four Winters".
The first winter froze
Blood, thick in veins.
The second gushed snow:
I feel nothing, see nothing, know nothing.
The third winter: under a white drift
Something moves, thaws.
And now its winter four,
too much for the heart.
And as a matter of fact it proved too much. In October, Woroszylski – deeply disappointed, yet still naively believing it could still be done – was already in Warsaw. In an enthusiastic crowd at the Polytechnic he was waiting for Wiesław Gomułka to arrive. An irony of fate, because exactly eight years earlier, in the same place, during the unification congress of the PPR and the PPS, which in effect formed the PZPR, Gomułka had been identified as a reactionary and traitor to the idea of socialism. Now he saw a saviour in him and hoped he could still be normal. The future was to show how wrong he was, but at that moment he didn't think about it.
And it was then, at the very peak of the autumn fever, that the news of the Hungarian uprising broke out. Another Polish poet, Adam Ważyk, was a witness to the manifestation of solidarity with Poland at the monument to General Józef Bem in Budapest. Immediately afterwards, the statue of Joseph Stalin was dropped from the pedestal, and the police brutally attacked the demonstrators. A snowball effect ensued. And, of course, Wiktor Woroszylski had to be there.
In a devastated city
On October 30, after long efforts to go to Hungary as a reporter, he finally flew to Budapest on a plane with medicines and blood – a gift from Poles to the insurgents. He flew there, of course, full of his typical revolutionary optimism, wondering about the chances of Imre Nagy's government. As early as on November 3, he made rough notes that later made up the "1956 Hungarian Journal": "An interesting synthesis of the achievements of a people's democracy: land in the hands of peasants, socialised factories and banks with multiparty, press freedom and other attributes of liberal democracy."
A day later, in a pale dawn, he was pulled out of his sleep by the deafening rumble of the artillery gunfire cannonade. An unmistakable sign that Soviet tanks with "brotherly help" had entered the city. He ran out of the hotel where he lived with a group of other Polish journalists. He did so just in time to listen to the dramatic message of Hungarian intellectuals to the nations of the world, broadcast on the radio in several languages, ending with a chilling plea: "Help! Help! Help!" All telephone lines were down and only the next day he managed to send a telegram from the Polish embassy to Warsaw.
The general convention of the Polish Writers' Union was supposed to have been taking place. Woroszylski therefore begged his fellow writers to support the Hungarian revolution and protest against the mass genocide taking place before his eyes. At that time, he could not have known that the convention – due to the events in Budapest – had been postponed until the end of November.
During the following days he regularly went out to the city to collect materials for the emerging "hot" reportage. He often had to sneak under the walls of buildings, not wanting to die from stray bullets. During one of these execution expeditions, he accidentally found himself in a hospital hidden deep in the basement and closed since the end of the war, in which - as it turned out - doctors quickly set up an insurgent hospital. This episode was immediately immortalized in the poem.
Then sink even lower. Not to hell:
to an underground lazaret.
Give in and seek the help of doctors,
akin to exhausted moles.
Watch the slowly dripping
serum in glass arteries,
watch wounds, to know: it hurts,
to know and see through the eye of a spectator.
Then leave. And experience everything.
Standing above the city ashes,
to believe once more in heaven, pieced together –
in heaven, pieced together with angels.
However, perhaps the most shocking experience for Woroszylski was his meeting with Tibor Déry, a surrealist poet, but in those tragic days, he was mainly the co-author of the calls to the people of Budapest spread out on the walls. Woroszylski did not see the proud fighter for the cause he expected, but a bitter and broken man who saw absolutely no hope for Hungarian democracy. Déry told him that he was just writing his last appeal, in which he intends to ask for an end to the hopeless armed resistance and to move on to the positions of passive opposition of a moral nature.
- And do the insurgents listen to you? – Woroszylski was supposed to ask, thinking of Hungarian writers.
- We are the only instance they listen to. – Déry replied.
"I feel so bitter" – Woroszylski wrote later. The next day he and four other reporters set off for Poland through Yugoslavia. He arrived on November 11th, completely changed. Although he will continue to be self-deceiving about the ideological assumptions of communism as a social-political doctrine for about a decade or so, he will never again write or say anything in his own characteristic party style. He will never again support any actions of the communist authorities.
Slowly, in small steps, it will begin to approach the anti-communist opposition. He will establish, among others, close cooperation with the Parisian "Culture". - one of the leading centres of Polish thought in exile, thanks to which such important for Polish culture artists as Czesław Miłosz and Witold Gombrowicz could exist. Not to mention the whole crowds of writers in the country - like himself - who were gagged by the communists after 1968.
And the "thaw" is over
The "1956 Hungarian Journal" was initially published in episodes in the national literary press. A little later, it was translated into French – the translator, influenced by this text, left the Communist Party of France. Then it was translated into German and Russian. The author himself, carried by the thaw wave, made triumphant visits to workplaces, universities and discussion clubs. He also worked for the Hungarian cause.
He started with, as usual, a fiery speech at the Polish Writers' Union convention postponed to end of November. Standing on the lectern, openly, from the position of an eyewitness, he opposed the lies about the Hungarian revolution reported in the official Polish press. He also stigmatized the fact that Poland, through the mouth of its ambassador to the UN, supported the Soviet aggression against Budapest. He also applied for the invitation of friendly Hungarian writers to Poland, to which he reacted with ovations. However, this - not to mention the reception of more refugees - could not be accepted by the Gomułka government, which, by the way, was one of the first signs that the October thaw was in fact a fiction.
So, despite the thunderous applause, the conclusion was lost because of a pragmatic majority who already knew that political alliances had priority over idealism. And it just so happened that Gomułka wanted to have the best possible relationship with János Kádár. In a dozen or so years' time another Polish writer – Wojciech Żukrowski, whose novel "Stone Tablets" will cause a diplomatic scandal on the Poland-Hungary line - will spoil it. However, that will happen in the future. At the time Woroszylski was alone with his moral outrage. That's the fate of idealists.
And as if that wasn't enough, in the following years, he will be shocked several times by the shocking information that people guilty of the spirit of God were sitting behind the "Hungarian Daily", because the communist security service suspected them of its actual authorship. Interestingly, one of them tried to convince them despite the fact that he was in prison at the time when the "Journal" was being created. Oh, one of the truly Orwellian curiosities of real socialism.
Postscript
Wiktor Woroszylski passed away almost exactly forty years after his Hungarian journey. Throughout this period, he repeatedly – both privately and publicly – stressed how fundamental to his life were the several days he spent in the bleeding Budapest. The spiritual path he has travelled since then is most clearly evidenced by the memory of Kazimierz Brandys, recalled at the beginning. If he were alive today, would he support the actions of his namesake, at Hungary's helm? Judging by the kind of people he surrounded himself after entering the circles of opposition and how they responded to the current Polish government, one can have doubts about this.
On the other hand, it is hard to speculate what people who have lived in completely different times would think today. One thing is certain – Wiktor Woroszylski remains a very meaningful symbol, giving hope that every there is a way out of every ideology if we drum up a minimum of common sense and criticism within ourselves Sometimes, as it turns out, it helps to empirically experience the effects of what we believed in. And even then – as you can see from Woroszylski's example – it's not a process lined with roses.
Marcin Królik - born in 1979, writer, publicist and blogger. He studied Polish philology at the University of Warsaw. He made his debut in 2013 with the "Drzewo różane" ["Rose Tree"] novel He also writes essays and reports, where he focuses on broadly defined spiritual and civilisational issues.
Sources:
Anna Bikont and Joanna Szczęsna "Lawina i kamienie. Pisarze wobec komunizmu", pub. by Prószyński i S-ka Warsaw 2006
Wiktor Woroszylski "1956 Hungarian Journal", pub. by Więź Warsaw 1990
Notes to foreign readers:
Vladimir Mayakovsky – Russian poet and playwright, initially fascinated by communism, became more and more critical of it towards the end of his life. He died in not suspicious circumstances in 1930.
The antisemitic 1968 campaign is a phenomenon of quite a complicated genesis, to which a separate text should in principle should be devoted, so it is best to look here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968_Polish_political_crisis
PZPR - Polish United Workers' Party, created as a result of a merger with PPS (Polish Socialist Party). Exercised dictatorial rule in Poland until 1989.
Repatriations – mass exodus of Poles from lands taken away from Poland and incorporated into the USSR.
Political agitator (politruk) – a political officer in the Red Army dealing with ideological shaping of soldiers. Writers or journalists, whose work was primarily propaganda, were later referred to in this way.