Hitch-22: A Memoir

  Interviewing one of the former leaders of the Portuguese fascist system, Dr. Franco Nogueira, in his office at the amazingly titled Banco Spiritu Santu e Comercial (Bank of the Holy Spirit and Commerce, its grotesque moniker partly explained by a family name), I had been informed by him that it was relatively easy to keep Portugal and its people contained and under control because the country was peculiar in Europe in only having one land frontier. Poland’s problem is the exact opposite. It is condemned by geography to live between Germany and Russia, and has been repeatedly invaded, occupied, and partitioned. Not an entirely blameless country—its forces took part in the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia after the British sell-out in Munich—in 1939 it was attacked and overrun by both Hitler and Stalin acting in concert. Its borders were redrawn again after 1945—I was late in life to discover that those frontier territories had been the home of my mother’s ancestors—and in 1976 the eventual results of the Hitler-Stalin rapacity could be seen in a dingy Russian-backed Communist bureaucracy sitting atop a sullen and strongly Catholic people who perhaps only agreed with their rulers in distrusting Federal Germany. (An old national chestnut asks the question: If the Russians and Germans both attack again, who do you shoot first? Answer: “The Germans. Business Before Pleasure.” You can also deduce something about a Pole who answers this question the other way around.)

  My business, however, was not with the Communists or the nationalists but with the democrats and the internationalists. At the time, these seemed to be about ten or twenty in number, barely enough to constitute a minyan had they been Jewish, which a few of them—however secular and non-Zionist—actually were. The one I most wished to meet was Jacek Kurón, author of the Trotskyist manifesto against the regime that I had so eagerly hawked around Oxford. He was still going, and strongly at that, in a tiny apartment much invigilated by the “U.B.” or Polish secret police. Out of this cell of an apartment and other cells like it was to come a replicating system—the Workers Defense Committee/Komitet Obrony Robotnikow or KOR—which would eventually multiply and divide and evolve (perhaps paradoxically) into something more basic and simple: the elementary word—and movement—Solidarnosc or “Solidarity.”

  Rabbi Tarfon says somewhere that the task can never be quite completed, yet one has no right to give it up. Of the comrades I met that bleak winter, many of them veterans of the extemely nasty Polish prison system, none really expected to make more than a small dent in the regime. Yet to an outsider like myself, there did seem to be a faint nimbus of optimism, visible on the very edge of a dark and cold star. It was, to put it another way, quite astonishing to see how much, and to what an extent, the party-state depended on lies. Small lies and big lies. Petty lies hardly worth telling, that would shame a nose-picking, whining, guilty child, and huge lies that would cause a hardened blackmailer and perjurer to blush a bit.

  To give an example of the paltry sort: the Chilean Communist leader Luis Corvalán had recently been “swapped,” in a piece of overt Cold War horsetrading, for the Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky. No evident disgrace in that, perhaps, but the Polish Communist press insisted only on reporting the release of Corvalán, and only as the outcome of a campaign of international proletarian solidarity. In a time of BBC and other broadcasts, and with many Poles having family overseas, the chances of such a falsification being believed were exactly nil. Yet such crass falsification was the everyday currency of the Polish media.

  On the macro scale, it was still officially “true” that the mass graves of Katyn, across the Belarus border, in which the corpses of tens of thousands of Polish officers had been hastily interred in the 1940s, were the responsibility of the Nazis. But there simply wasn’t a single person in the whole of Poland who credited this disgusting untruth. Not even those paid to spread it believed it.*

  My American Trotskyist girlfriend and I had been told by friends that the thing to take to Warsaw was blue jeans, which had totemic value on the black market. We accordingly packed several old, patched, worn-out pairs. We scrounged a bed from my old Oxford comrade Christopher Bobinski, who was then just beginning his stellar career as a reporter from his homeland. As an interpreter he provided us with the lovely Barbara Kopec, who held down a daytime job in the “Palace of Culture” that dominated the main square of the city. It had been built as a personal gift from Joseph Stalin to the people of Poland, and in its form and shape expressed all the good taste and goodwill that such benevolence might have implied. It wasn’t much fun working inside the building, as Barbara remarked, but at least it meant she didn’t have to look at the damn thing.

  When we went to meet Jacek Kurón in his tiny cluttered apartment, this tough and stocky fellow punctured one of my illusions right away, by saying that he no longer had any illusions about Trotskyism. The real terrain of struggle was for democratic liberties and the rule of law. And, even as we spoke, we were continually reminded of the distance to be traveled toward this goal. At regular intervals, Kurón’s phone would ring and he would be subjected to “spontaneous” abuse. In an effort to spook him, a death threat had been anonymously delivered, with a countdown of a hundred days. It stood at sixty-five to go on the day of our visit. And the besetting sin of Polish public life, anti-Semitism, was in evidence as well. He showed and read me a violently Jew-hating letter, sent to him by registered mail. The sender had then delivered another letter, this time by hand, confessing that the first missive had been dictated to him in a police station! This showed a real sickness in the Communist system, not just because of the use of bigotry as a provocation, but because anti-Semitism had historically always been used by the Polish right wing against the Reds. It took real calcified cynicism to employ such a weapon of reaction against dissent. (It would have been even nastier if Jacek Kurón had actually been Jewish, but the fact is that he wasn’t: Polish and other Jew-baiters have been known to operate without possessing the raw material of any actual Jews to “work” with.)

  In their pedantic way, the postwar Communists had tried to rebuild Warsaw as an exact replica of its prewar self. Some of this was soulless and dull, but there was heavy snow that Christmas, and I found the icy city rather hypnotizing. We went to the nearby township of Kazimierc, once a center of Jewish life before the nearly “clean” sweep that had been made of Polish Jewry. We attended a midnight Mass in Vilanow, where the congregation was so densely packed that it spilled out of doors, with worshippers kneeling in the drifts. I could not understand much of the sermon, but it didn’t seem to be delivered in the emetic, emollient tones of the Second Vatican Council. Polish Catholicism, often a historic ally of extremist politics, also had its collaborationist side with a semi-official group known as Pax Christi sitting in the rubber-stamp parliament. But that Christmas Cardinal Wyszynski gave a rather decent and spirited sermon, making quite strong statements about the repression of strikers. Everybody got to hear about it, but the official press didn’t report a single line of the homily, thus underlining yet again the self-defeating character of lying and censorship. “Self-sabotaging” might be a better term: one of the strikes in the port city of Stettin had been provoked when the shipyard workers read in the Communist Party paper that they had all “volunteered” to work longer hours in the interests of production. One of the leaders of that strike, a man named Edmund Baluka, later told me that he had been sent as a soldier into Czechoslovakia during the Warsaw Pact aggression of August 1968. He had been told, and had believed, that he was going to repel a West German invasion of Prague. Discovering a complete absence of Germans in the country—except for East German soldiers who were also taking part in the Russian-sponsored occupation—had destroyed his entire faith in anything the Party ever said. (Baluka, too, was for some time to associate himself with Trotskyism.)

  Our young friends in the KOR invited us for a Christmas Eve feast in a cold but cheery apartment. There was a great deal to eat and drink, but I suddenly noticed with an inner qualm that everything—every loaf and sausage and cheese and bottle—
was the last third or quarter of itself. It was clear that in the interests of hospitality, all the odds and ends and saved-up leftovers were being deployed. I was glad to be able to produce the parcel of blue jeans. And I don’t remember a gift ever going over so well. “Are you sure you can spare all of these?” we were asked, as if we were parting with a fortune. “On the black market, this can raise a huge amount for the committee.” There was also the eagerly discussed hope that KOR could start an underground publishing house, to print among other things the works of George Orwell. (This did later happen, with a samizdat imprint called NOWA.) Even so, and keen as I was on the latter idea especially, I urged them to keep back at least something of our gift for themselves. They remained self-denyingly serious, though I think it was decided that Barbara should have a pair of her very own, if only to show off a bit of style in the Stalinist wedding cake that was her office building. In later years, as the strikes burgeoned and spread and the Polish working class outlived both the Polish Communist Party and—as in Portugal—the attempt of that party to stay in power by using the army, I liked to imagine those blue jeans as having acted as one of the pebbles that began the historical avalanche.

  My ability to carry my liquor was very useful on that trip, as it has been on several other voyages. The hearteningly jovial and inspiring evening ended with a drinking-bout challenge to me from a young comrade named Witold. Two lines of shot glasses were arranged down each side of the dining table, and filled to the brim with different flavors of Polish vodka, including my own then-favorite Zubrovka, tinted a pale-ish green by the buffalo grass that grows in the east of the country. Last man to the finish-line was a sissy. I do not actually remember whether I beat Witold or whether it was a dead heat, but I remember a rush of pride at his fraternal embrace, and also his exclaiming: “Christophe, tu es un vrai Polonais!” It was a title of honor.

  This trip was also to yield me another of those life-altering aperçus. It came from Adam Michnik, one of the founders of the KOR and later one of the chief intellectuals of Solidarnosc and later still—and to this day—a leading figure in the academic and publishing life of his country. When I met him, he was already a veteran of numerous victimizations and imprisonments. His troubles had begun in 1966, when he was expelled from the university for organizing a seminar for Professor Leszek Kolakowski. Having a Jewish father but not a Jewish mother he could easily have “passed” but preferred to describe himself as a Pole of Jewish descent. He was then definitely of the secular Left, and had been impressed by the way that, in Franco Spain, “civil society” had been able to build up parallel institutions that could gradually and organically replace the deliquescent absolutist state. This was very much the model that many of Poland’s oppositionists were to follow. I mentioned to him at our first meeting that Jacek Kurón thought the next wave of protests wouldn’t be very “socialistic,” because the word had been so much discredited by Communist rule. Michnik wasn’t so sure. “After all, ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ are words that have been discredited by governments as well, but we do not abandon them for that reason. The real struggle for us is for the citizen to cease to be the property of the state.” I knew as I wrote it down and underlined it that that last sentence was a pregnant one, that its implications for all political positions were enormous and that in order to stay true to the principle—once again, the principle of consistent anti-totalitarianism—one might have to expose oneself to steadily mounting contradictions.

  I was to see Adam Michnik on and off through the long transformation of Poland and watch him emerge as an honored historian and politician as well as the editor of perhaps the country’s most respected newspaper, Gazeta Wyborzka, which had begun life as an illegal strike-sheet. One of the juiciest pleasures of life is to be able to salute and embrace, as elected leaders and honored representatives, people whom you first met when they were on the run or in exile or (like Adam) in and out of jail. I was to have this experience again, and I hope to have it many more times in the future: it sometimes allows me to feel that life is full of point.

  Argentina: Death and Disappearance (and an Infinite Library)

  At a lunchtime reception for the diplomatic corps in Washington, given the day before the inauguration of Barack Obama as president, I was approached by a good-looking man who extended his hand. “We once met many years ago,” he said. “And you knew and befriended my father.” My mind emptied, as so often happens on such occasions. I had to inform him that he had the advantage of me. “My name is Hector Timerman. I am the ambassador of Argentina.”

  In my above album of things that seem to make life pointful and worthwhile, and that even occasionally suggest, in Dr. King’s phrase as often cited by President Obama, that there could be a long arc in the moral universe that slowly, eventually bends toward justice, this would constitute an exceptional entry. It was also something more than a nudge to my memory. There was a time when the name of Jacobo Timerman, the kidnapped and tortured editor of the newspaper La Opinion in Buenos Aires, was a talismanic one. The mere mention of it was enough to elicit moans of obscene pleasure from every fascist south of the Rio Grande: finally in Argentina there was a strict “New Order” that would stamp hard upon the international Communist-Jewish collusion. A little later, the mention of Timerman’s case was enough to derail the nomination of Ronald Reagan’s first nominee as undersecretary for human rights; a man who didn’t seem to have grasped the point that neo-Nazism was a problem for American values. And Timerman’s memoir, Prisoner without a Name, Cell without a Number, was the book above all that clothed in living, hurting flesh the necessarily abstract idea of the desaparecido: the disappeared one or, to invest it with the more sinister and grisly past participle with which it came into the world, the one who has been “disappeared.” In the nuances of that past participle, many, many people vanished into a void that is still unimaginable. It became one of the keywords, along with escuadrone de la muerte or “death squads,” of another arc, this time of radical evil, that spanned a whole subcontinent. Do you know why General Jorge Rafael Videla of Argentina was eventually sentenced? Well, do you? Because he sold the children of the tortured rape victims who were held in his private prison. I could italicize every second word in that last sentence without making it any more heart-stopping. And this subhuman character was boasted of, as a personal friend and genial host, even after he had been removed from the office he had defiled, by none other than Henry Kissinger. So there was an almost hygienic effect in meeting, in a new Washington, as an envoy of an elected government, the son of the brave man who had both survived and exposed the Videla tyranny.

  I had four ambitions when I disembarked in the extravagantly lovely city of Buenos Aires in December of 1977. The first was to see if I could discover what had happened to Jacobo Timerman. The second was to interview the president, who was then General Videla. The third was to see the pampas, and the fourth was to meet my literary hero Jorge Luis Borges. I failed—though not completely—with the first. And I succeeded with the other three, though not in quite the ways I had anticipated.

  Clichés, as the late William Safire was fond of saying, should be avoided like the plague, yet one stale journalistic standby—the “pall of fear” hanging over the city—seemed to be warranted. People spoke to foreigners with an averted gaze, and everybody seemed to know somebody who had just vanished. The rumors of what had happened to them were fantastic and bizarre though, as it turned out, they were only an understatement of the real thing. Before going to see General Videla in Perón’s old pink presidential palace at the Casa Rosada, I went to deliver some letters from Amnesty International to a local human rights group, and also to check in with Los Madres: the black-draped mothers who paraded, every week, with pictures of their missing loved ones in the Plaza Mayo. (“Todo mi familia!” as one elderly lady kept telling me imploringly, as she flourished their photographs. “Todo mi familia!”) From these and from other relatives and friends I got a line of questioning to put to the
general. I would be told by him, they forewarned me, that people “disappeared” all the time, either because of traffic accidents and family quarrels or, in the dire civil-war circumstances of Argentina, because of the wish to drop out of a gang and the need to avoid one’s former associates. But this was a cover story. Most of those who disappeared were openly taken away in the unmarked Ford Falcon cars of the Buenos Aires military police. I should inquire of the general what precisely had happened to Claudia Inez Grumberg, a paraplegic who was unable to move on her own but who had last been seen in the hands of his ever-vigilant armed forces.

  Escorted into Videla’s presence, I justified my politeness and formality by telling myself that I wasn’t there to make points but to elicit facts. I possess a picture of the encounter that still makes me want to spew: there stands the killer and torturer and rape-profiteer, as if to illustrate some seminar on the banality of evil. Bony-thin and mediocre in appearance, with a scrubby moustache, he looks for all the world like a cretin impersonating a toothbrush. I am gripping his hand in a much too unctuous manner and smiling as if genuinely delighted at the introduction. Aching to expunge this humiliation, I waited while he went almost pedantically through the predicted script, waving away the rumored but doubtless regrettable dematerializations that were said to be afflicting his fellow Argentines. And then I asked him about Senorita Grumberg. He replied that if what I had said was true, then I should remember that “terrorism is not just killing with a bomb, but activating ideas. Maybe that’s why she’s detained.” I expressed astonishment at this reply and, evidently thinking that I hadn’t understood him the first time, Videla enlarged on the theme. “We consider it a great crime to work against the Western and Christian style of life: it is not just the bomber but the ideologist who is the danger.” Behind him, I could see one or two of his brighter staff officers looking at me with stark hostility as they realized that the general—El Presidente—had made a mistake by speaking so candidly. (I was later to find that I was being followed around the city, which caused me many a fearful moment.) In response to a follow-up question, Videla crassly denied—“rotondamente”: “roundly” denied—holding Jacobo Timerman “as either a journalist or a Jew.” While we were having this surreal exchange, here is what Timerman was being told by his taunting tormentors: