Evoking Polish Memory

Front matter

WARSAW STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY HISTORY 3

Anna Witeska-Mtynarczyk

Evoking Polish Memory

Preface

The place where memory and history meet is always imbued with ambiguity. Multiple understandings and images of the past co-exist and compete for space and legitimacy. Collectively, they generate images and accounts that are both layered and blurred. Sometimes, like two separate but contiguous registers which both account for and contest time past, memories and histories may be formed, reformed and transmitted from standpoints so different that it is hard to recognize in them the same reality, or the same epoch or even incident. Eastern Central Europe is a prime example of such a palimpsest of memory, where the traces are so entangled and so hazy that it is difficult to follow a single thread from beginning to end. And within Eastern Central Europe, Poland - positioned between the historical giants of Russia and Prussia/Germany - has one of the most tangled geo-political narratives.

The Germans ended their occupation of Poland in 1945, fleeing west as the Soviet army marched forward from the east. A kind of civil war, between the Polish Home Army (AK), the Red Army and various left and right wing groups of Polish and Ukrainian partisans, continued until 1947, when the Polish People’s Republic was established. But in some regions, including the place about which Anna Witeska-Mlynarczyk is writing, the unofficial war carried on for several more years, and is still today etched deeply into local memory. These are contested memories, which divide families, friends and neighbours. During the communist years, many stories were ostensibly hidden and silenced, but festered below the surface, feeding feelings of sorrow, rage and resentment. Others were brought into the public domain, manipulated, re-told and reshaped through the courts and public transcripts, re-lived through periods of imprisonment and exile. Meanwhile, the socialist state was creating its own security systems, and the secret police took on the task of surveillance and regulation. Almost half a century later, when socialism collapsed throughout the eastern bloc, we witnessed the same processes, but from a reversed perspective. It is striking that even when ideologies and the structures which support them change dramatically, the same practices continue under different names.

This book is about memory in transition. The transition is, most obviously, one located in political time — the transition period after the fall of communism in 1989. But Anna Witeska-Mlynarczyk is going far beyond the obvious in this monograph, and as we read on we find that the transition is also an older one, from war-torn Poland to the socialist state, and that it is perhaps most importantly a personal one, as heroes become villains with regime changes, villains are rediscovered, and discover themselves, as heroes, and former victims very quickly

12 Preface by Frances Pine become victors. The material she presents draws on popular history, archives, court materials and personal testimony. It probes the memories, often very moving and often problematic, and the recalled histories, of a range of old men who were, in their youth and middle age, variously nationalist fighters, prisoners and deportees, and members of the security forces of the socialist state. Each has a powerful narrative, imbued with a strong sense of self-righteousness. At the time of Witeska-Mtynarczyk’s research, the ones who had been the ‘victims’ of socialism were well placed to become the ‘heroes’ of the postsocialist state; the ones who had been the security guards of socialism, on the other hand, after years of serving the regime in power, suddenly found themselves excluded from spaces of legitimate authority, and portrayed as criminals and villains. To encompass and interpret such accounts, the lineal notion of transition has to expand and broaden to include personal transitions, often unexpected, as well as sudden shifts and about-turns in memory and history.

Reading this book, I was struck by a memory of a conversation I had with a young man in the former GDR, about 10 years after the Wende, the fall of the wall. He has been in his late teens in 1989, and was doing his military service. Posted on the east-west border, as a border guard, he described to me his confusion when he was suddenly told that the border was now open and that the West German soldiers who had been his enemies all his life were now his allies and friends. As AlexeiYurchak says, “everything was forever, until it was no more” (Yurchak 2005). Socialism had seemed absolute, permanent and, indeed, forever to most citizens of socialist states. For those who either through belief or opportunism, or just resignation, cast their lot with the socialist state, it appeared to be unassailable; for those others who publically or, more commonly, secretly, challenged it, it was a massively oppressive structure which gave little indication of immanent demise. For members of both camps, because it seemed ‘forever’, it was a socio-political world which had to be lived in, compromised with and negotiated on a daily basis.

Most ordinary people were ambivalent about politics and saw clearly the ambiguities inherent in the combination of a socialist ideology and life practices that bore little resemblance to the ideal. These ambiguities and ambivalences have been the subject of a lot of very good anthropological research and reflections. But there is a more complex side to them, which until this work has not really been addressed. This concerns the shifting identities of the heroes and the villains, and the victims — who were they, which was which and at what points in history, and how are we to understand them?

I first met Anna Witeska-Mlynarczyk when she was an MA student at CEU, and a colleague sent me a copy of her dissertation, which touched on questions close to my own work. This piece of work showed unusual promise; it was

Preface by Frances Pine 13 based on interview material with one woman, in her late middle age, who was remembering and commenting on the death of her child. It was a challenging project, and one carried out with a gentleness that was nonetheless uncompromising. It struck me then as a very brave undertaking. Over the years I came to know Anna well; she was an invaluable research assistant and colleague on a research project I carried out in Poland. Later I watched the progress of her own doctoral research with great interest. It is a great pleasure to read this book, the culmination of an apprenticeship journey which began with the MA project on death, grief and memory, and to see that the early promise which I and my colleagues recognized has been realized.

The book is a remarkable achievement. One of the most difficult tasks facing an ethnographer is that of establishing rapport with interlocutors with whom it is difficult to sympathise or empathise. Based on hours of interviews, Anna Witeska-Mlynarczyk brings to life the memories of these old men, their very troubled and conflicted pasts, and their own interior worlds, in which they reflect on and justify their past acts. This is delicate and subtle interviewing, allowing the subjects to speak and to wander freely through their memory archives, but pushing and probing the murkier areas; Witeska-Mtynarczyk is not afraid to ask the most difficult questions. The result is a rare look into worlds which many would consider unsavoury, that sheds light on issues of power, violence and persecution by no means restricted to the Eastern European socialist period. In fact, as we should know from old and recent history, these issues are geographically and politically almost ubiquitous. More than anything, this material and analysis speaks to Hannah Arendt’s reflection on the banality of evil (Arendt 1963). We need research like this, and books like this one, if we are ever going to be able to answer the question, so often asked after critical and traumatic events of the last decades, of “How could they have done this? How could this have happened?”.

References:

Arendt, H. 1963. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report of the Banality of Evil. New York: Penguin.

Yurchak, A. 2005. Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Frances Pine August 2013

Contents

Acknowledgements Preface

Notes on Transcription Introduction

Chapter One Hidden Dialogicality: personal memory, expert knowledge, historical policy, and pedagogy of patriotism

Conclusion

209 235 241

Notes on Transcription

“CAPITALS (thought)

silence, pause

| Speech that overlaps with that | | of another speaker, a simulta- | "neous speech, for instance

| A: It was really dangerous (to | | work there) | | B: (You should have) seen us | _at that ‘job’.

| italics

| es n interrupted utterance, for

| instance

| A: Did you- | B: I thought that he- | | A: I asked whether you did... |

Introduction

This book is about landscapes of memory, as they have been collectively realized in a historical time of one Polish town - Marianowice' - by some of its inhabitants. Marianowice’s landscape and the memories held by the people who live in it convey a sense of altered and ruptured history subject to numerous reconstructions. Conflicting commemorative inscriptions pile up on the buildings in which people’s thoughts manage to make sense of the seemingly contradictory. The historical period I focus on encompasses WWII, its aftermath, the communist era, and the transition from communism to democracy, suggesting an association with Howard Hodgkin’s paintings in which layers are painted over layers, never fully erased, always unveiling seemingly forgotten details of past social situations. The subject of this manuscript concerns the recent collective efforts to conventionalize and disambiguate the complex communist past undertaken in Poland, particularly during the years of my fieldwork, from 2006 to 2008. The complexity of the collective appropriation of historical process is visible in many corners of the town, in the ways in which people move within it or in narratives passed on in the locality. In line with Siobhan Kattago’s (2013) view of memory and representation of the past in contemporary Europe, my ethnographic case shows Poland as a space where a plurality of memories and narratives about the recent past start to branch out. The painting of new layers in the landscape and in the people’s minds is a political process comprising collectively enacted efforts by variously aligned social actors differently positioned vis-a-vis the centres of power and holding to divergent narratives about the past. This work takes as its subject matter political processes in which new collectively-built frameworks became objectified and legitimized through institutionalized state channels, eventually proving consequential for the psychologies of two different groups of people, as well as bringing visible change to the landscapes in which they live. The described policies are not characterized by stability as, like society at large, the political elites in Poland are divided on the question of what to do with the legacy of communism.

1 Marianowice is an invented name given to real places — a Polish town of approximately 400.000 inhabitants and the surrounding areas. I chose to anonymize the area and the people. The historical sources used in the book are also anonymized so as not to reveal the identities. I explain the reasoning behind this decision later on in the introduction.

The years of the communist regime in Poland were abundant in violent transgressions of varying intensity, directed particularly at those who politically opposed the pro-Soviet establishment. The structure of the security police” was created in order to immobilize those who imagined that the state in which they lived should have been different and who stood up for this belief. The methods used by the security forces involved harsh repressions, both physical and psychological. During the Stalinist period, the security forces used brutal methods of elimination, imprisonment, torture and psychological repression. From the 1960s onwards, the invigilation of Polish society became more discreet; yet, with every social upheaval, the communist party tightened its control and often used violence against crowds and individuals. Eventually, in the winter of 1981, the newly-imposed martial law turned the social life of the country into a military-controlled project that lasted nearly 20 months. The changes in the global political order, the emergence of Solidarity, and the gradual dissolution of the Soviet bloc paved the way for the processes of political reconstruction. In 1989, the communist party leaders, the Solidarity activists and members of the Catholic Church sat around a table to agree on a new direction for the nation. It was the first step towards a social and political transition’.

This research, conducted nearly two decades after the collapse of a violent regime, was designed to explore the current perspectives of two groups: those who performed acts of resistance during communism, and who are now involved in the moral modes of defining the past, present and their own position in the framework of national history; and those who worked in the communist apparatus of repression, and who have been undergoing symbolic processes of exclusion in post-communist Poland‘. I wanted to examine the ways in which the individuals portrayed in this book came to interpret the recent past. One can appreciate that these subjects and their involvement in the collectively realized actions are oriented to achieving coherence in their life-worlds, unavoidably nest-

2 For the state of historical research and interesting references to works devoted to the communist apparatus of repression in Poland see F. Musiat (2006).

3 For a more detailed account of the history of the People’s Republic of Poland (Polska Republika Ludowa, PRL), see for example D. Stola, M. Zaremba (eds) “PRL — trwanie i zmiana” (2003); interesting and thorough analyses of the social and political aspects of the transition from communism towards democracy in Poland can be found, for example, in: P. Spiewak “Pamięć po komunizmie” (2005), J. Staniszkis “Post-communism: the emerging enigma” (1999) or “Postkomunizm: proba opisu” (2001).

4 Among my informants there were people who worked for the Internal Security Corps (Korpus Bezpieczenstwa Wewnetrznego, KBW), the Security Service of the Ministry of Internal Affairs (Urząd Bezpieczeństwa, UB changed in 1956 into Służba Bezpieczenstwa, SB) and a state police institution (Milicja Obywatelska, MO).

ed in the local landscape configuration that relies on the shifting power structures, semiotic and material resources, and individual psychologies. When designing the research, I believed that working with both groups, defined by the actions of the current state as heroes/victims® and perpetrators, would allow the emergence of a more complete account of the symbolic and moral transition of a nation composed of various individual dramas. People who stood unevenly on different sides of the barricade in the past have been subjected to the moral practices of affirmation and denial in today’s polity. I view their fates as necessarily entangled and complementary, even if conflicting. If, while analyzing the acknowledged lives, one simultaneously looks into the denied ones, the picture gains more depth. One is able to see a background and a foreground at the same time, a perspective that is so easily abandoned, especially when the framing has a moral overtone. In this manuscript, I look at the consequences of the changing projects, authored by the Polish elites, of settling accounts with the past, which oscillated between extremes, and argue that the lack of clear and consequential historical policy led to the unpacking of troublesome individual memories while never fully incorporating them into the symbolic sphere. Such a situation brings no solid resolution, and it may distort the process of building a stable narrative about the self, one’s past, and its relevance for the wider community.

Setting and methods

The first part of the book speaks about the heroes/victims. I use this term to denote those who were involved in anti-communist activity, and who were repressed for such engagements during the undemocratic regime; they have since experienced official recognition in post-communist Poland as victims of communism and have at the same time been publicly acknowledged as national heroes. Suffering and heroism is a well-grounded topos in Polish culture. Those who experienced repression during communism are publicly acknowledged as victims and are seen as people whose dignity and integrity was violated in the political context. At the same time, since they resisted and suffered in the name of the nation, their deeds are considered heroic and they are represented as indomitable heroes. A large number of people in Marianowice fall into this category. Thousands are members of various associations of victims, veterans, combatants and former Solidarity activists. In order to ground my work, I chose to work closely with one particular association — the Association of the Former Prisoners of the Communist Period in Marianowice. The first five chapters should be read as a consequence of my engagement in the workings of this asso-

5 I explain why I use name hero/victim later on in the chapter.

ciation. I visited the associational office on a weekly basis. I participated in the rituals and commemorative events with them. I read the files collected by the state security authorities concerning certain subgroups and persons in the association. Eventually, I undertook some more in-depth work with eighteen individuals. These were mostly men repressed during the Stalinist period. For my methodology, I relied on participant observation, recordings of naturally occurring conversations, recordings of commemorative events, written assignments, interviews, historical records and other official documents made available to me in the course of interaction with my informants and used as contextual material for understanding their stories.

The second part of this study is concerned with the former officers employed in the communist apparatus of repression®. I managed to work extensively with a generation of functionaries who worked in the state security authorities in the 1960s. I also reached a few individuals who worked for the regime at its outset. I used a snowball technique to gain access to this category of informants. I conducted in-depth interviews with eight officers of the Ministry of Interior Affairs. The most far-reaching material I gathered concerns an officer accused of committing a communist crime, and who underwent a trial during my fieldwork. I used the trial situation to gain a dual victim-perpetrator perspective on this particular case. I interviewed a couple of witnesses on both sides, and I also worked closely with the defendant and with the main prosecution witness. I attended most of the hearings. The trial allowed me to gain access to the group of heroes/victims who belonged to Solidarity, and who were repressed in the 1980s. Apart from the trial, my work with the former security officers focused on eliciting their life narratives and probing, through conversation, various topics connected to the past and to the present.

This work attempts to give a sense of the ways in which these two differently positioned groups of people belonging to the same nation/state - the former anti-communist activists repressed for their political involvements and the former officers of the state security authorities - try collectively and internally to negotiate a sense of justice and keep a coherent image of the communist past in the circumstances of the revival of memory politics and attempts to account for

6 I use here various names when talking about the communist apparatus of repression, i.e. forces used under the Polish communist state for fighting the widely understood opposition and for pacifying society (Musiat 2006:7). Historians disagree about how to name such an apparatus. Some argue that “security apparatus” is a proper name, while some prefer “apparatus of repression” or “apparatus of terror” (see Musiat 2006:8). Refraining from evaluation, I will use names such as the state security forces or authorities, the apparatus of repression, the secret police, the security apparatus or security officers interchangeably.

past crimes in contemporary Poland. Above all, the dual construction was meant to allow space for the illustration of divergent perspectives and affective reactions to socially conditioned situatedness vis-a-vis one’s past. The position of each of these groups is different. One used to be on the recognized and privileged side of the state pantheon but, with the transition, moved into the sphere of excluded subjects; the other used to be repressed but is now gaining a momentum of recognition and affirmation’.

I conducted the research mainly among men. While, among the heroes/victims, I met and interviewed women informants, among the former security officers I worked exclusively with male informants. This book should hence be read as an ethnography of particular experiences of manhood nested in nationalist and communist ideologies and realized in the milieu of specific social groups and their complex histories. Recent scholarship has explored the idea that memory is gendered, meaning that there are differences between the ways in which women and men remember the past (Leydesdorff, Passerini and Thomson 2009:1). The socio-linguistic approach, for instance, reveals differences at the level of speech, i.e. it tracks the differences in usage of grammatical constructions in personal narratives, arguing that women and men construct the stories about the same past differently (Ely and McCabe 2009). These differences are believed to be caused by differences in the life experiences of men and women, taking on different social roles and functioning in divergent social contexts and settings, e.g. the tendencies of men to dominate public life and of women to focus on family and household (Leydesdorff, Passerini and Thomson 2009:1). My informants, especially the members of the Association, belong to generations in which male and female spheres remain well defined and separated. I noticed this during visits to the heroes/victims’ homes, where I was greeted by their wives who served us with tea and cookies but never sat together with us while I was recording. In the case of the former security officers, the wives would be ‘protected’ from any knowledge about their professional duties. This was exemplified by Janek who, during my fieldwork, underwent a trial, having been accused

T As will become apparent later, the picture is a bit more complex. The communist state and its functionaries were not unambiguously condemned and excluded in the post-communist condition. This is a large group of people and a lot of dividing lines cut through it. E.g., the ex-functionaries of the security apparatus feel betrayed by the communist leaders. On the other hand, the recognition for the heroes/victims feels bittersweet because of the economic prosperity of the nomenklatura in today’s Poland, especially when compared to the economic hardship experienced by many of the heroes/victims. Hence, despite occupying their own pantheon, the heroes/victims do not particularly feel like winners.

of a communist crime, and did not share this experience with his wife. ‘I simply do not talk to her about it’ - he told me.

I often asked myself what I might have discovered had I approached this project from an alternative viewpoint - that of women. Time did not allow me to explore both viewpoints sufficiently. The logic of ethnographic research implies constant decision-making about what to follow and what to ignore (Sanjek 2003:299). My choice was to follow men, rather than women, because this is what fitted my research timeframe and the way in which the interactions with my informants unfolded. While an ethnography of female, middle-ranking officers, for example, would have made for a fascinating journey, I did not reach a single woman via the snowball effect technique I used. Within the Association of the heroes/victims, women were present, yet their world was self-contained and lived backstage, compared to the front of the stage occupied by the men. The embodiment of gender was nonetheless visible in the usage of associational space where women often clustered around a tiny pantry serving tea or coffee, preparing food for an occasion, talking mainly to each other, and never really taking part in loud male exchanges on recent politics or history. They hardly ever wore uniforms or carried standards during official rituals, although they were always there to help with a glass of water. They wrote poems from their past experience rather than autobiographical narratives, they ran the associational newsletter, and they were usually more modest than the men about their deeds and accomplishments.

Thinking about gender and memory, Sherna Berger Gluck warns researchers against collecting gendered stories ‘naively on a sense of gender solidarity’ (cited after Leydesdorff: IX). Gender is no longer treated as a hegemonic category; it is seen as flexible and changeable. ‘Masculinity and femininity take different forms in different cultural settings’ (Leydesdorff, Passerini and Thomson 2009:1), and within each gender there is great variety, allowing the display of gendered identities (Leydesdorff, Passerini and Thomson 2009:2). This ethnography describes two groups of men whose different positions enable each of them to remember the past and experience their manhood while evoking that past in the present. In the context of memory politics, their gendered identities gained another dimension in which they were performed and produced. The masculinity of these men became partially defined in a public sphere and exposed vis-a-vis particular audiences (e.g. in an official commemorative ritual or in a court). Catherine Kohler Riessman notes how ‘respondents narrativize particular experiences in their lives, often where there has been a breach between ideal and real, self and society’ (1993:3). The men with whom I worked in this project, who have taken up new social positions as a result of the political transition, were preoccupied in their narratives with piecing together the ideal, the real, and the self-demanded or socially-imposed. A hero/victim publicly depicted as a brave and honourable soldier with no stains or shadows has to find ways of incorporating more ambiguous experiences of being a man who “did not manage to be adamant at all times’ (see chapter five). Walking with standards and receiving medals and military promotions, he has to work out a selective narrative that favours those memories that prove he was a man, a role he performs in a public square. The second-generation security officers, on the other hand, try in their narratives to rescue the sense of masculinity that had been fed by the ‘bureaucracy of terror’ in the past. For them, being a man meant having flair, being cunning, being able to stomach brutality, being professional, and being powerful. They take a defensive stand, realizing that these attitudes are now socially condemned. As will become apparent from the narratives, the political transition irritated the gendered aspect of the identities of both groups of men.

The manuscript attempts to pin down the notion of memory on various levels of social reality - from legal aspects of the memory project to embodied experience of remembering. It views memory as a multidimensional figure the depth of which is given by social configurations of power, collective objectifying practices, diversity of historically established cultural vehicles, and individual life histories backed up by fantasies, fears and desires. The main aim of this research was to understand ways in which people negotiate and incorporate a hero/victim and a perpetrator identity into their self-schemata and how this influences their psychologies. The plural form of the noun ‘landscape’ in the title of the introduction is intended to signal the plurality of embodied interactive practices of memory, and their conflicting characters.

Since the book is part of a historical series, I wish to devote some space to explaining the philosophy of anthropological research and the reasons for anonymizing the sources and the people. A historian may feel troubled by the question of how to verify the arguments and knowledge presented in this text if the sources are not given. It is hoped that the commentary on the nature of anthropological work and a specific case, in particular the explanation of its ethical dimension, will facilitate the evaluation of this work and help the reader to approach it with openness.

For anthropologists, it is the fieldwork experience that makes the research ‘anthropological’ (Amit 2000: 1). Unlike methods used in other disciplines, going into the field is understood as a social experience and a ‘total experience’ (Amit 2000: 1). Its shape depends on the ‘conceptual, professional, financial and relational opportunities and resources accessible to the ethnographer’ who engages his/her intellectual, physical, emotional, political and intuitive capital to learn about cultural worlds of particular people (Amit 2000: 6, 1). As such, the fieldwork experience is characterized by instability. Anthropological research is called a ‘messy qualitative experience’ because of its dynamism and unpredictability. This kind of research implies a constant shifting of position between people, social situations, identities and perspectives. In fact, the circumstances often define the choices and method rather than vice versa (Amit 2000: 11). A wide range of methodological techniques can be integrated in ethnographic research (e.g. use of empathy, casual conversations, interviews, life histories, recording of collective expressions of local cultures such as myths, songs or rituals etc.). The choice depends on the appropriateness of a particular technique for the studied topic, the practical possibility of applying it in the field, and the theoretical views of the researcher (Salzman 2002:549). Michael Carrithers points out that fieldwork ‘may take as many forms as there are anthropologists, projects and circumstances’ (2002: 350).

Ethnographic research is about the ways in which ‘a series of unplanned encounters’ make the ethnographer understand the people he/she is studying (Bradburd 1998: XVI). The ethnographer’s paramount aim is ‘to listen, and to move as quickly as possible into natural settings of social life, the places people would be, doing what they would be doing, if the ethnographer was not there’ (Sanjek 2000: 299). This approach grants openness and flexibility to what ends up as a very individualistic and interactive research process. Its strength lies in the ethnographer’s ability to ‘respond and adapt to social circumstances as these arise, to be open to a wide variety of different types of relationships and interactions’ (Amit 2000: 10). The main qualification ascribed to a good ethnographer is his/her capacity to imaginatively enter into other people’s lives (Carrithers 2002: 351). As Peter Metcalf puts it, ‘it remains the case that anthropologists get out and around the world in ways that other scholars do not’ (2005: 183). As a consequence, many contemporary anthropologists ‘prefer to avoid claims of practicing science’ (Metcalf 2005: 183). In a humanistic vision of conducting anthropology, which I share, the goal is emphatically to grasp the studied people’s way of thinking, to create a qualitative account that reflects both the researcher and those studied, while the ethnography itself remains one of many possible interpretations (Salzman 2002:552).