I objected that I didn’t know Polish.
The secretariat staff told me I could go in three months’ time, and in three months one could learn even Turkish.
This I doubted. But one thing I did not doubt was that they had looked for someone interested in going to Poland but hadn’t found anyone. Had it been a trip to France or Italy. .
I couldn’t just get up and leave work for three months.
But they’d already asked at the publisher’s office and obtained approval.
I said I’d have to consult with my family. But just in case (not to waste any time), I immediately purchased a Polish textbook.
I knew little about Polish history and even less about Polish culture. I’d read something by Henryk Sienkiewicz, but his works didn’t make any special impression. Adam Mickiewicz’s novels Pan Tadeusz and Forefathers’ Eve didn’t speak to me. Of contemporary Polish literature I loved two of my peers, Sławomir Mrożek and Jakob Hlasek. I liked Mrożek’s wittiness and biting satire and Hlasek’s stories for their special rawness or even crudeness. I’d read something by Bruno Schulz — another interesting author who, like Kafka, had been concealed from us in school, someone with whom I had in common my spinning of dreamlike worlds. I liked Ashes and Diamonds by Jerzy Andrzejewski and admired some wonderful Polish films: for example, Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s Night Train and Mother Joan of the Angels and Andrzej Wajda’s Sewer and Innocent Sorcerers.
I knew a little more about Polish politics. I’d followed the developments of the bloody Poznań protests with the naive hope that the new chair of the party, Władysław Gomułka (his comrades had nearly sent him to the gallows a few years earlier), would be able to combine socialism with freedom. Shortly after he was elected, he announced that the current system oppressed and wronged the character and the conscience of the people. In this system, human honor has been spat upon. . whereas now the silent, enslaved minds were beginning to wake from the stupor caused by the poison smoke of lies, falsehoods, and sanctimoniousness. We have finished with this system or we are finishing with it once and for all. Such a public condemnation of our regime was unthinkable.
But the most important thing for me was that at the moment I did not have a topic to write about. Perhaps I would stumble across it on the journey.
I decided to accept the invitation. I convinced my friend Mirek Klomínek to go with me to draw some accompanying pictures, and I would try to get him the same invitation I had.
In the end he didn’t get it, but the Polish Writers’ Union was willing to pay a month’s accommodation for the two of us. Fortunately, my food allowance was sufficient for both of us to travel by train or bus and dine in cheap canteens.
Before the departure I devoted my spare time to learning Polish. I took a subscription to the Polish newspaper Politika, which published socioscientific essays that would never be allowed in Czechoslovakia, and from the Polish Cultural Center I acquired some original stories by Sławomir Mrożek. I discovered that Polish was not that difficult for someone who knew Czech, Slovak, and Russian; had heard a bit of Bulgarian; and had moreover studied Old Church Slavonic. Also, Polish seemed, at least at first glance, to resemble old Czech most of all. When we finally departed, I was certain I would be able to manage any necessary conversation.
Klomínek and I traveled across Poland, from the south to the north and back again. We stayed in Warsaw, Rzeszów, Gdańsk, Gdynia, and even Łódź.
I soon learned that Poland was afflicted with an even worse scarcity of goods than we were, but at the same time there was a small but enterprising private trade that offered a selection of materials that were in short supply, especially fashionable (and almost certainly smuggled) goods. This was already a sign of a more unfettered society. More important, however, at least to me, was the greater freedom of the press and the availability of foreign books. I spent a half day in the frightful Palace of Culture, where foreign books were stored in the basement. There were hundreds of books in German, English, and of course Russian and sociological and political studies that were patently non-Marxist, which was the main thing. Such bookstores did not exist in Czechoslovakia. I knew that here I would spend all my remaining money. The only thing I hesitated over was what language to buy them in. Finally I chose, probably sensibly, English.
Klomínek and I returned to Prague, where I stayed for a brief visit, but then I went back to Poland — this time alone. I had decided to visit Auschwitz, but I did not dare write about this place where so many of my loved ones and millions of others I hadn’t known had been murdered.
In this desolate wasteland teeming with the remnants of its previous horrors, I was oppressed by an awareness of something I had already begun to forget: Everything I had heard and read had actually occurred. I saw the gas chambers and thought again of the thousands of people who had been brought here to be slaughtered.
In Kraków, I wrote a long letter to Helena, not about what I’d seen but to tell her I loved her. I also bought a bundle of postcards with all kinds of animals on them: a hippopotamus, a lion, a parrot, a crocodile, even a cuckoo clock. Every evening I wrote a short fairy tale on one of the postcards and sent it to Michal. It was probably the first correspondence he ever received in his life.
I attended the theater as well. I remember a play by Tadeusz Różewicz called Our Small Stabilization. It came highly recommended, but I was disappointed because it so blatantly hovered between Ionesco and Beckett.
I visited a few painters, theater people, and writers of my generation. All of them lived in small apartments suffused with tobacco smoke (destroyed by the war, Poland had an even worse housing situation than we did).
We held opinions that were similar on politics, less so on literature. Compared with them, I was a conservative. I believed that literature had a mission and thus a responsibility. I also didn’t feel the need to get drunk and disdain the world and human narrow-mindedness. It seemed to me that here — certainly owing in part to the greater political freedom — artists were reveling in fashionable trends that their colleagues professed in countries wearied by freedom.
I managed to cajole a short interview out of Mrożek in Warsaw; I didn’t get to meet Hlasek, who had fled to Israel, where he continued to drink himself to death.
I don’t like it when people make generalizations about nations or ethnicities, claiming that Germans are disciplined, Czechs have a sense of humor, the English are tight-laced, the Russians are drunkards, Jews are businessmen, and Gypsies are thieves. I did not attempt any such generalizations about the Poles even though I noticed that most of them went to church, and I ran into monks and nuns everywhere I went. The Poles also like to talk about their glorious past. Their heroism of both recent and ancient times is shrouded in an almost mystical reverence, as if they are trying to convince themselves that being a Pole is a calling. And it was precisely these topics that were argued about passionately in the newspapers and in private. In a slender booklet I wrote about my trip, in which I combined reportage, conversations, feuilletons, and essays, I quoted an advertising billboard that somewhat suggested this:
THE SCRIPTURES EXIST IN 830 LANGUAGES