Going Back

In the summer of 2006, I made a trip to Poland. We were quite a party: Hanna, my Polish mother-in-law, aged 80; two sisters-in-law, one brother-in-law (Turkish), my nephew and my son. The journey was important for three reasons. This was the first time that Hanna had set foot on Polish soil since she was marched out of Warsaw in 1944. A teenage resistance fighter, she had taken part in the Warsaw Rising, when her brother Marek was shot and killed by a Nazi sniper as he ran across the street to save a friend. Second, I was revisiting a country last seen in 1979, ten years before the fall of Communism, when Marek, my husband, named after that lost brother, had taken me to see the mythical places of courage and heroism which had fed the stories of his childhood. Finally, and most sadly, we were making this journey to mark the first anniversary of his death: taking his ashes to scatter on Polish soil, as he had wished. Some years earlier, through the Red Cross, Hanna had traced a long-lost half-sister and brother, who had believed her killed in the war. When this joyful contact was effected, Marek had said he would take her to Poland to meet them. Now, we were taking him.

Before we set out, I had gone through the shelves in his study, and from the volumes of Polish history, memoirs and fiction I chose as my travelling companion The Polish House: An Intimate History of Poland by Radek Sikorski. Published in 1997, it frames huge pieces of history – the war, the post-war Communist era and the dramatic birth, in 1980, of Solidarity – through the loving reconstruction of a ruined Polish manor: an apt symbol of the rebuilding of a country which for centuries had been invaded, divided, reunited and torn apart once more. The last division was in 1939, when the Nazi-Soviet Pact offered different kinds of terror, east and west. In the flowering of Solidarity, the whole world watched as Church and workers united to bring about the end of decades of Soviet oppression. As a young man, Radek Sikorski played an active part in this drama, subsequently seeking political asylum in Britain, where he began his career as a journalist. Now, in this book, he was doing what we were all doing: going back. ‘Perhaps exiles are particularly prone to long for a home of their own,’ he writes early on, and he describes how, when his parents were finally granted a visa to visit him, they spent a fortnight in a hillside cottage in North Wales. Here, observing well-tended homes and gardens, together they conceived the dream of a country house in Poland: a ruin, something they could just afford and then bring back to life. Eventually, they located one, ‘a ghost estate with a couple of hectares of land near a major city for under a thousand pounds’. In 1989, with the fall of Communism, Sikorski – by now a foreign correspondent – and his father visited it for the first time.

The contours of the old estate were still distinguishable. We passed the smithy, its wooden portico stooped with age. By a clump of barns and cottages – the old farm buildings – children with faces like chimney sweeps waved to us. Then, suddenly overcome with shyness, they stuck their fingers in their mouths and looked away. Past the farm we drove in the shade again, in a long avenue of slim chestnuts . . . It was the old drive leading to the manor itself.

But The Polish House, beguiling as it is in its descriptions of mellowed tiles, birds flying in and out of broken windows, festoons of cobwebs and rotting beams, is much more than the story of how a family restored order and beauty here. The estate they found in Chobielin lies in the countryside outside Bydgoszcz, the city where Sikorski grew up and which, after the shipyards of Gdansk, became the most famous place in the annals of Solidarity.

By my final year at secondary school, I was a hardened anti- Communist. On September 1st, 1980, the [May Day] ceremony marking the beginning of my last academic year at secondary school was as tedious as always: the same Communist slogans on the walls, the same wooden speeches. But in the boys’ lavatory, which we called Hades because it lay in a dungeon in the basement, you could feel a changed mood. There were excited whispers. ‘Who is this man called Walesa?’ boys asked. ‘And why did he need such a huge pen?’ Television pictures had shown him the night before signing the historic Gdansk Agreements with a pen in the shape of a huge cigar . . . Outside school, the very streets had changed. Normally, the mood of a crowd in a Communist country was sullen and hostile. Tired, grey people shuffled from shop window to shop window in the hope of hunting down a piece of meat or a roll of toilet paper . . . But now the crowds were smiling; queues reverberated with chatter . . . It was the same everywhere. My parents told me that work had almost stopped. Everybody was talking politics.

What happened in Bydgoszcz soon afterwards marked a turning-point in the national revolution. Walesa came to speak at the huge city hall rally. In its wake, Solidarity branches were formed in every workplace, as was happening throughout the country. Over the following months, Sikorski and his schoolmates took part in gleeful underground activities: plastering walls with illegally printed posters during the night, spray-painting slogans, founding a news bulletin, The White Eagle. At a time when even to use a typewriter required permission from the secret police, all this was hugely daring and provocative. And faced with nationwide strikes and rallies, in an unstoppable rise of defiance, there were many in the Party who wanted confrontation, and a Soviet invasion. In Bydgoszcz, in the spring of 1981, this almost happened. A meeting between Solidarity and city councillors ended in deadlock; riot police were called; one of the union’s most militant members, Jan Rulewski, was beaten up. Next day, the photographs of his blood-spattered face and missing teeth were flashed to every Solidarity cell in the country, and received as ‘the declaration of war’.  Within a week – during which Sikorski acted as unofficial translator for the hordes of Western TV teams – sirens were sounding all over the city. A national strike had begun: it brought 10 million workers in red-and-white armbands out on to the streets, and Poland came to a halt. This was the largest ever strike in the history of the Soviet bloc. Night after night the television showed pictures of Warsaw Pact tanks patrolling the Polish border. Then, abruptly, it was all over: Walesa (it was learned much later) had bowed to personal pressure from the Pope. Spring’s outburst of political activism dwindled into the daily search for bread and toilet paper. But in May, his matura examinations behind him, Radek Sikorski fled to Britain. And in December, General Jaruzelski declared a state of martial law. It seemed, then, as if the spirit of a free Poland – and, by implication, of all Communist Eastern Europe – had finally been crushed. But within ten years the Berlin Wall was down, and an unimagined new era dawned. Looking back on his early youth, Sikorski reflects:

It was because Communism tried to abolish history that I revered old things. And it was precisely because I had been taught that manor houses were a feudal relic that made me want to live in one . . . It is thanks to the turn of the wheel that I am able to restore Chobielin: I happen to have been born at the right time, a member of the Solidarity generation which saw Poland slip away from Russian domination . . . But the awareness of living in a zone of heightened political risks, all of which might have an immediate bearing on my life, has been with me always . . . I could not help imbibing it from stories told in my childhood at the family table – and especially from stories about the Second World War.

The war is everywhere in Poland. Its atrocities are memorialized wherever you go, from the dark little iron plaques on the walls of Warsaw – Here ten men and women were executed by the Nazis . . . On this spot six . . . Here seven, in the Warsaw Rising – to the preservation of Auschwitz, which our party visited on a boiling afternoon in August, as Marek and I had done together, twenty-six years before. And as Radek Sikorski interweaves a vivid account of the part played by his family in the war with his account of the restoration of a nineteenth-century manor, so I interwove my reading of his book with the daily experience of our family journey. To say that this was layered is an understatement: with every step we were revisiting both the real places in which my parents-in-law had lived, gone to school, fought and almost died; and those same places which for so long had existed only in imagination for their children. Sikorski sat listening to his parents and grandparents in the Communist Poland of the Seventies; Marek and his sisters had done the same in Fifties London. They learned how, in 1946, parents and grandparents had come to England, leaving behind a Poland taken into Communist rule, a place they all refused to recognize or, in such circumstances, ever to visit again. But now, sixty years later, Hanna was finally returning to her birthplace, and her daughters and grandsons were making their first journey there. And as we travelled from one haunting site to another, I was both remembering the summer of 1979, when Marek and I had visited many of these places together, and having the strange experience of walking down streets, through sunlit leafy cemeteries, to memorials, which twenty years ago I had described in my first novel, Spring Will Be Ours, written when our son was still a little boy. Then, I had imagined whole battle scenes in occupied Warsaw; now, my mother-in-law was pointing out the places I’d researched (with her help) and reinvented, where those brave young people had built their barricades. Then, she had lost her brother. Now, she had lost her son. As we travelled through Poland, The Polish House linked her history with Sikorski’s, reminded me of all I had read for my novel, and taught me much I did not know. The book concludes several years after the collapse of Communism, with what, in Sikorski’s youth, would have been an unimaginable invitation. ‘By February 1992, the house was wreathed in scaffolding.’ One day, he was sitting on top of the roof, ‘breathing in the moist air and taking in the view over the river and the carp ponds beyond’, when a phone call came from Warsaw. In a momentous turnaround, the teenage Solidarity activist who had once translated Walesa’s speeches for the Western media was now, still a young man, being invited to join the government as deputy minister for defence. Though this would mean an enormous cut in salary, he took about thirty seconds to make up his mind. What followed, however, was a ministerial career which did not, in the end, last very long. A government already in decline was brought down by revelations of ‘a sickness in the body politic’ with the publication of the names of those who figured in the secret police files as past informers. Sikorski was in Washington when the story broke: he returned to Warsaw to find both the minister of defence and the prime minister already dismissed from office. Within a couple of days, he had cleared his desk. And as he unscrewed his own lamp from the wall,

I noticed something odd about the picture of the white eagle, our state crest, that had hung above my desk. There was something on the reverse. I took the picture down and looked. It was the familiar bearded face of Comrade Lenin. Like a reversible raincoat, the picture could be changed with just a flick of the wrist. I don’t know whether it was made that way as an economy measure, or for a joke as a sign of defiance, but I now think that the picture encapsulates Poland at that time. Three hours later, I was back in the solitude of Chobielin.

And in those new-mown acres, planted with chestnuts and set with beehives, with a well supplying ‘hard, delicious mineral water’ and a vegetable garden yielding ‘tomatoes and cucumbers untouched by chemicals’, Sikorski closes his rich and engaging memoir.

The manor house, just like my life, and the country around it, has made full circle. Whatever happens, there is now something in the world I can point to and say: ‘I did this.’ I have found a patch where I want to see the trees I have planted rise tall, where I want my children to roam, where I can take pleasure in growing old.

Not everyone grows old. We scattered Marek’s ashes in three places suffused with poetry and history. The first was a tramride out of the city, in the Cemetery of the Warsaw Rising Fighters. In 1979 Marek and I had visited this place together, and lit a candle beneath the towering headstone on which, among dozens of others, his uncle’s name is carved. Now, the earth was white with his ashes, and Hanna laid flowers in red and white, the Polish colours – a plastic spray, ‘because they’ll last’. On the anniversary itself we scattered ashes in the waters of the Vistula in Krakow, from the bank overlooked by Wawel, the palace of the Polish kings. And finally, when we had travelled south, and been welcomed with open arms by Hanna’s long-lost family, we all went up into the Beskidy mountains and scattered the last, with wild flowers, in the stream called the Black Vistula, the river’s source, tumbling over rocks, shaded by trees. As the water swept downwards, clouded with white, flowers twisting this way and that, I felt as if the whole of Marek’s family history, which he both revered and found so hard to bear, were concentrated into this moment, everyone standing silent on the bank, poised between then and now.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 17 © Sue Gee 2008