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Confessions of a Polish Ambassador
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11491 |
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BOOK WORLD
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10 / 1986 |
2,850 Words |
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Lucy Mazareski
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THE LIBERATION OF ONE
Romuald Spasowski
New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
672 pp., $24.95
In The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn depicted a chilling network of secret police installations, labor camps, prisons, and transit centers honeycombing the whole of the Soviet Union. "This Archipelago," he wrote, "crisscrossed and patterned that other country within which it was located, like a gigantic patchwork, cutting into its cities, hovering over its streets."
Poland's landscape is not peppered with prisons and labor camps. But it is networked with an appendage of that larger Archipelago - a shadowy web of Polish secret police and state militia facilities regulating surveillance, harassment, and occasional violence. Superimposed on the land from without, it is a foreign presence securely tied to its watchful parent. Romuald Spasowski calls it a "state within a state." He should know. He was a Polish deputy foreign minister and twice ambassador to the United States. In December of 1981, in protest against the imposition of martial law in Poland and the forcible dissolution of the Free Trade Union Solidarity, Ambassador Spasowski requested and was granted political asylum in the United States, making him the highest-ranking communist official ever to defect to the West. His tale of disillusionment with communism, his life-long ideal, is a story about the fate of modern Poland itself and its forced submission to the Soviet overlords.
When the Red Army swept across German-occupied Poland in 1944, routing the Nazi forces, it was not greeted by a jubilant people hailing their "liberators." A largely mute, impassive population stared out at the advancing columns - most Poles were already aware that they were merely exchanging one tyranny for another. It was the same Red Army that in September of 1939 had attacked and taken over eastern Poland a few days after Germany had occupied western Poland. In a secret protocol signed by foreign ministers Molotov and Ribbentrop, Hitler and Stalin had divided Poland between them. Many of the Poles who watched the Red Army advance in 1944 were wondering if their families and friends who had vanished in the Soviet-held provinces were living or dead.
Yet, there were some who wanted the Soviets to come. They were mostly Polish communists, among them the young Romuald Spasowski. Romuald's father had been Poland's most prominent pre-war communist writer. An atheist and Russophile after whom a street in Warsaw is named, his influence on his son was decisive; adulation of the ideology of the Soviet Union would be "Romek's "exclusive patrimony.
During the wartime occupation, while other young Poles had been organizing and fighting in the Polish Resistance Home Army, Spasowski had attempted to cross over to the Soviet-held provinces to join the Red Army. His account of that experience is particularly fascinating for its telling glimpses into Poland's lesser known holocaust - the Soviet reign of terror under which in 1939-1940 alone an estimated two million Poles were deported in railroad convoys to Siberia, half of whom perished within the first year. Spasowski was aware of developments there: his own grandmother, uncle, and the latter's entire family were among those carted off to annihilation. Yet, even at such close range,
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