There is Something About Poland…

In the 1970s when Poland was embedded in the greater Soviet empire, there was a women’s lingerie store in central Warsaw named “Bardotka” a tribute to the sexy French movie star, Brigitte Bardot. I remember thinking that in Moscow where I lived at the time, the same enterprise would be called “Women’s Undergarment Store Including Girdles Number 4.”

In 1976, President Gerald Ford’s most embarrassing political moment came in a campaign debate with Jimmy Carter when he said that Poland was not under Kremlin domination. He was widely mocked for ignorance. Well, in a way he was expressing an insight that almost no one in the United States understood (including, perhaps, Ford himself).

Poland was then and is, to a very large extent today, very much itself. What that means is that it is a strikingly homogeneous land of deeply ingrained values (everyone still seems to be addressed as Sir and Madam in common usage) with a vexed thousand year history of occupations and internal turmoil. Yet succeeding generations, especially among the young, display a manner of fashionable irony and a lightness of spirit in distinct contrast to the stolid Germans and Russians that surround them.

In the Soviet era the country’s defining “opposition” was the Catholic Church to which nearly the entire population belonged. In 1979 the first Polish Pope, John Paul 2, visited the country and virtually everyone, it seemed, turned out under sunny June skies to see him. This was the answer to Joseph Stalin’s derisive taunt, “How many divisions has the Pope?” In a few months, Lech Walesa, an electrician from Gdansk started the Solidarity movement which led a decade later to the downfall of the Communist regime.

That was the start of 30 years of Polish democracy and economic development that is now at risk because of a sharp turn to the right by the governing Law and Justice Party. Once again, as has been the case so often in the past, the question is what is next for Poland?

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My impressions of Poland come from a mix of heritage and experience. My parents and brother, Poles and also Jewish, escaped at the start of World War 2 and made their way across Europe and the Middle East to India where I was born in 1943. They arrived in the United States aboard the S.S. Hermitage in 1944 at the age of 40 (my brother was 12) and had a full second life in New York. For all their American success, they retained an inescapable Polish sensibility, not in a political way but as a matter of upper-middle class expectations and speech.

They and their friends were “survivors” of the Holocaust. But for the most part they reveled in their renewed lives rather than dwell on their losses, which in many cases were enormous.

I visited Poland for the first time in 1966 in the summer after my first job in journalism, already an observer by instinct. I returned a number of times as reporter in the 1970s. In 1991 I came as a publisher to see what was happening in the early post-Communist stage. In 2002, a cousin, Joanna Olczak won Poland’s top literary prize for a book titled “In the Garden of Memory” that told the story of my mother’s family over 150 years.

The most recent trip, this May, was what I called a “Family Legacy Visit” to visit with relatives in Krakow and Warsaw whose Jewish roots are, on the whole, much less important to them than their Polish identity. This was also a chance to see the Polish ricochet from three decades of progressive policies to the populism on the rise in so many countries around the world.

Poles are understandably skeptical about judgments rendered by a foreigner, even one that understands, as I do, the Polish language (I never took the trouble to learn to speak properly). My filter is unquestionably American. But I find the Poles so appealing that I want the positives to prevail over the revanchist stance of the current political leadership.

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Krakow and Warsaw this spring look terrific. The infrastructure post-1989 is impressive. The airports, inter-city trains and thoroughfares are well made (especially by the ramshackle standards of JFK and much of Amtrak); the parks are lush and the main city squares are filled with all ages, notably the millennials who are very much part of the global universe of backpacks, cellphones, water bottles, tights, jeans and tattoos. American and European brands are everywhere: Starbucks, Uber and fast food have definitely taken hold. Movies, music, digital news and entertainment are familiar in form even with their Polish accents. Tee-shirts are mostly in English heralding superheroes and girl power. The overall vibe in what was a week with two national holidays and beautiful weather was very relaxed.)

Restaurants and cafes are full. The downtowns squares in Warsaw and Krakow are pedestrian malls. This is a festive panorama without the surface hints of terrorism and tension that are so much a part of post 9/11 American life.

What is stunning coming from New York is that virtually everyone, everywhere is white, aside from Asian tourists and a very few Africans. The social fabric is very different from counterpart cities in Europe and the U.S. where so much of the service sector comes from lands of color. Those jobs in Poland are held by two million Ukrainians. (In Britain, it is, famously, the Polish ex-pats who are carpenters, plumbers and waiters.)

And yet, the pattern of politics now resembles what has been happening in various ways in Hungary, the Czech Republic, Turkey, Russia, China, the Philippines and the United States. The post-1989 era of “liberal” ideals is over. The iconic event was a plane crash in April 2010 in which the Polish president, Lech Kaczynski, and scores of other prominent politicians and public figures were killed. The tragedy has been elevated to 9/11 prominence by Kaczynski’s twin brother, Jaroslaw, now regarded as Poland’s most powerful politician. Conspiracy theories abound managing to link Russian responsibility for the crash and the Polish government of the time. The national shift to the right is directly traceable to the aftermath of that episode. On the eighth anniversary of the “catastrophe,” as it is called, a monument was erected on the same plaza where the first mass with Pope John Paul II was celebrated in 1979.

As one of the states which Hungary’s Viktor Orban has called “illiberal democracies”, the prevailing view is that compared to Hungary and Russia, Poland’s government is less overtly fascistic (it is not an exaggeration to use the term). But the undermining of the judiciary and attacks on the “opposition” media, among other moves are considered ominous.

The echoes of Poland’s last period of political independence between the two world wars are definitely there. The nationalist and right-wing tendencies that were on the rise in the years before the Nazi invasion of 1939 feel familiar to Poles on the center and left.

The Catholic Church of the Soviet era has again reverted to its intrinsic dogmatism in secular matters. The government’s warnings about the specter of waves of immigrants from lands of color when there is none is a reminder of Poland’s views of “the other” who in the past were mostly Jews.

One explanation for the turnabout in public attitudes is the well-founded Polish resentment of the role of foreign powers, bearing in mind the centuries of Poland’s position as a vassal nation to its neighbors and the horrors of German occupation. The European Union which has poured many tens of billions of dollars into Poland is benign by any past standards. But it does require meeting Brussels’ various mandates. Poles have kept their zlotys as currency. They have their own passports and seem across the political spectrum to savor their Polish nationality.

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For much of the population at large, since the end of World War 2, the United State has been seen as the beacon of freedom and particularly in urban areas, a model for compatible taste and culture. The Trump era has caused a mix of bafflement, consternation and some amusement. “Poland’s right wing leadership is bad for Poland,” says Adam Michnik, Poland’s most prominent pundit of the democratic left, “but Trump is bad for the world”. My stories about Stormy Daniels, Michael Cohen, Trump’s hirsute personal doctor (just some of the sagas unfolding during our trip) were funny in their telling but also humiliating to consider for a nation that in so many ways has been Poland’s beau ideal from afar.

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Because of my background, I am especially sensitive to the status of Poland’s Jews. Most of Poland’s three million Jews were killed during the Holocaust. But in the post-Soviet era there has been a resurgence of Jewish interest in the cities. Krakow is only 90 minutes from the Auschwitz-Birkenau camps, which had two million visitors last year. There is a bustling Jewish Community Center which has 700 members and a full schedule of activities. Joining requires at least one Jewish grandparent, a reflection of what is known as Jewish “roots” as the essential factor associated with the faith. A Friday evening Sabbath dinner I attended had some religious rituals (the prayers over challah and wine, for instance). But it seemed to me more about being part of a club or group than an ardent expression of piety.

There are very impressive and moving Jewish sites. The factory of Oskar Schindler, who rescued hundreds of Jews who would have been executed, has been turned into a museum of the Jewish fate in the years of Nazi occupation. The Birkenau rail head is chillingly unchanged from the time when so many hundreds of thousands of people arrived and were sent immediately to the gas chambers, the remnants of which are now stone piles. In Warsaw there is a large new museum about the thousand year history of Poland’s Jews which has all the features of the most modern of historical museums anywhere. The old Jewish cemetery in Warsaw has been cleaned up enough so as not to be as much of a symbol of Jewish demise as it surely is. I left with a piece of crumbled stone off an Osnos family headstone to give to my brother.

People in my family, all descended on my mother’s side from the 19th Century chief rabbi of Vienna, are aware of where they came from but are not (with only one exception) in any way religious. Some have been baptized. Marriages are mixed. They are Jewish by heritage and Polish, as far as I could tell, to their core.

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So what now for Poland? I asked everyone what they thought would happen in the coming period. Adam Michnik and all the most civic minded members of my family and contacts all said they really had no clear idea. The current shift to the right could be a phase, hopefully, or a long-term return to the autocracies and intolerance of Poland’s past. Given this prevailing view, a prediction from a foreign visitor, should not be worth much. Yet, reflecting on Poland’s history of upheavals and ignoble spasms, the prospect of smooth times ahead seems unlikely. That would be terribly sad because Poles and Poland have endured and, since 1989, achieved so much that they have the right to a successful future.