every human existence. You are engaged in the argument of Giordano Bruno with the Inquisitor, of the Decembrist with the tsarist police superintendent, of Walerian Lukasiriski with the tsarist angel of annihilation, of Carl von Ossietzky with the blond Gestapo officer, of Osip Mandelstam with a member of the Bolshevik party dressed in a uniform with the blue piping of the NKVD. You are engaged in the never-ending argument about which Henryk Elzberg [the Polish philosopher] once said that the value of your participation cannot be gauged in terms of your chances of victory but rather by the value of your idea. In other words, you score a victory not when you win power but when you remain faithful to yourself. Your common sense also tells you that by signing the loyalty declaration you are placing a whip in the hands of the policemen. They will wave it around and threaten you in order to force you to sign the next declaration, your agreement to collaborate with them. With this, your loyalty declaration will transform itself into your pact with the devil. This is why you should not give these police inquisitors even the tip of your finger: because they will instantly grab your whole arm. Surely you must know someone whose life has been shattered by one moment of moral inattention or weakness of spirit, someone who has been pursued by phone calls, whose home and office are regularly invaded by the police, who is blackmailed every time he or she goes abroad. Such people pay for one moment of unwisdom with years of degradation and fear. If you don’t want to be afraid, if you want to respect yourself, your inner voice tells you, don't enter into any agreements with the policemen. You harbor no hatred toward the policemen, only pity. You know the high incidence of mental illness among them; you know that every one of them is ashamed in front of his children. You know that the sentence of national oblivion will be passed on them (who can remember any more the executioners and informers of bygone days?), that they can win the fame only of Herostrates—like commissar Kajdan in Stefan Zeromski’s Before the Spring or colonel Rozanski from the Polish Stalinist Security Service. And this is the third reason—the argument of memory. he history of your nation is fixed in your memory. You know that in its history a loyalty declaration signed in jail has always been a disgrace, loyalty to oneself and to the national tradition a virtue. You can remember those who were tortured and jailed for long years but who signed no declarations. And you know that you, too, will not sign them, because you are unable and unwilling to renounce the memory of the others, especially since there are certain people who keep on popping up in your memories; those who lost the battle for dignity in prison. With your mind’s eye you can see Andrzej M., the excellent literary critic, your friend, who while in jail wrote a brilliant essay denouncing p eop le - proof of his moral death; Heniek Sz., an ambitious and intelligent man,who let himself be maneuvered into the role of chief informer on his friends; Zygmunt D., a charming companion and intelligent young man who gave in once and then spent years denouncing his friends. So you remember with dread and terror this human debris, these people who have been battered by the police machine, and you will see that your own future, too, is an open question. The choice is yours, but your memory ceaselessly repeats in your ear: you, too, can be like them. No one is born an informer; you forge yourfate daily, at the price of your life. At this point you still haven’t heard about the loyalty declarations; the infamous interviews, the shameful pronouncements read on the radio. You still don’t know how Marian K. from Nowa Huta, an intelligent and courageous Solidarity activist, was cheated when in his declaration he wanted to render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and unto God the things that are God’s, but ended up giving everything to the police, because he had not imagined that there exist situations when ambiguity turns into explicitness and half-truths become full-fledged lies. You still haven’t heard the interview with Stanislaw Z., a worker and an activist in Nowa Huta, an artful dodger whom people always distrusted and who is now living up to their suspicions by echoing the government’s propaganda. You still haven’t read the declaration made by Marek B., the [Solidarity] National Commission's spokesman, who was a physicist from Gdansk and Lech’s protege, slandering Solidarity's people. Nor the declaration make by Zygmunt L. of Szczecin, Marian J.'s adviser, who dictated to Marian all that drivel about “the Jews who are in power” and about “setting up gallows for the party leaders," and who today is condemning “extremists.” In other words, you still don’t know that this time, as always, people will be lied to, cheated (think of Zdzislaw R. from Poznan, to whom you talked at the unveiling of the Poznan monument), cowed yet again. You don’t know that this time, too, the rats will be the first to run from the sinking ship. But you do know already that all this is nothing new, that you will not feel like explaining to these policemen who are waving your release in front of your nose, in this crowded police station, that it is they who are the slaves and that no release will free them from their slavery. You don't feel like explaining that these people who are crowded into these smoke-filled corridors, and who have only just been torn out of their homes—these worker activists, professors and writers, students and artists, friends and strangers—that they are the very life and substance of liberty and that this is why war has been declared on them. You don’t feel like explaining to the policeman who whacked your face with sadistic delight (he was given permission to do it, at last—he had to spend sixteen months restraining himself) the meaning of Vassili Rozanov’s [the Rusian philosopher] essay, which argues that European culture's most fundamental debate is the antagonism between the man who holds the knout and the man who is being flogged with it. And you don’t feel like explaining to him that your encounter is the latest incarnation of this antagonism. You will not talk to him at all. You will smile ironically, you will choose not to sign anything (not even your warrant), you will express your regrets, and—you will leave the room. They will drive you to Bialoleka in the company of people who are the pride of every Polish home. You will ride together with a famous philosopher and an eminent historian, a theater director and a professor of economics, a Solidarity leader from Ursus and one from Warsaw University, students, and workers. In Bialoleka itself they will not beat you. On the contrary! You are to serve as proof of their liberalism and humanism; for very soon they will be showing you off to the International Red Cross delegation and to Sejm [the Polish parliament] deputies, and even to the primate of Poland. So they will be quite courteous, quite helpful, quite gentle. But every now and then they will make you take a walk between two lines of men in helmets, armed with truncheons and shields, in order to frighten you and to remind you of their power. The only thing that these masquerades will remind you of is that this regime is like the vicious dog that loves to bite even though his teeth have fallen out. Pavel Korchagin’s [a pre-WW11 communist fiction hero] ethos has disappeared; nowadays when someone shouts at a policeman, a flash of fear appears in his pupils. You can detect this fear and uncertainty under his helmet, through his uniform, behind his shield (a Japanese import). And you will realize right away that a policeman’s fear means that there is still hope for you. Hope is important. Perhaps more important than anything else. After all, this is precisely what the battle is being fought over: the policemen want to force out of us a declaration that we are giving up hope. They know that the person who pledges his loyalty to this system of coercion and lies is forsaking hope for a Poland in which lies and coercion will be rejected. These declarations are supposed to make us into lowly and servile people, who will not rise up to fight for freedom and dignity. So by refusing to talk with the policeman, by refusing to collaborate, by rejecting the status of informer, and by choosing to be a political prisoner you are defending hope. Not just hope within yourself and for yourself but also in others and for others. You are casting your declaration of hope out of your prison cell into the world, like a sealed bottle into the ocean. If even one single person finds it, you will have scored a victory. Solidarity leader/writer Adam Michnik was held in prison for two-and-one-half years beginning in December 1981, when some 10,000 people were arrested. He has only recently been released in an amnesty from a second prison term. Excerpted from Letters from Prison and Other Essays, published by University of California Press—$25. Copyright ®198S by The Regents of the University of California. Artist Royal Nebeker lives in Gearhart, Oregon. He has lived anc(.exhibited extensively in Europe. This illustration is based on his poster from a 1981 group show which travelled throughout Poland. His work is in the permanent collection of the National Gallery of Poland in Cracow. HUMAN RELATIONS INSTITUTE MA DEGREE PROGRAM IN COUNSELING PSYCHOLOGY D eg ree S p e c ia liza t ion in DEPTH PSYCHOLOGY INCORPORATING DEPTH TRADITIONS WITH THE PRACTICE OF COUNSELING PSYCHOLOGY The Human Relations Institute's program in counseling psychology strives to reaffiliate psychology with the humanities. In a unique approach to the study of psychotherapy, the program is designed around an interdisciplinary curriculum that includes, in a d d ition to training in individual and family psychotherapy, the study of depth psychological traditions, art and mythology. MONTHLY WEEKEND COURSES In addition to core and adjunct faculty, distinguished lecturers and therapists from the field of Depth Psychology contribute to the pro gram These have included James Hillman. Charles Ponced Linda Leonard, Marion Woodman and Robert Stein NOW ENROLLING FOR 1987-1988 PROGRAM For a catalog: HUMAN RELATIONS INSTITUTE. 5200 Hollister Avenue. Santa Barbara, CA 93111 (805) 967-4557 The Media PROJECT PRESENTS AN EVENiNq o f fREE RANqiNq CONVERSATION ANd visUAls wirh filMMAkER/wRiTER David MilhollANd 8 : 0 0 p.M., M oN thy , MAy 1S ih AT The MEJ IA PROJECT, 7 1 6 S .W . 1 6 ih , PO R IIANJ s l “ ’ doNA liON REQUESIEd ca ll 2 2 5 - 5 5 J 5 FOR INFORMATION Clinton St. Quarterly—Spring, 1987 33
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