Civility in Uncivil Times

Front matter

POLISH STUDIES - TRANSDISCIPLINARY PERSPECTIVES 32

Anna Machcewicz

Civility in Uncivil Times

Introduction

On 2 March 1949, Kazimierz Moczarski, one of the thousands of Poland’s political prisoners, was moved into a new cell in a prison in Warsaw’s Mokotéw district. He found himself face to face with SS General Jiirgen Stroop. During the war Moczarski had served in the anti-German underground, the Home Army.

Stroop had been responsible for the bloody liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto in April-May 1943. For Moczarski, facing a criminal and an enemy with whose system he had engaged in a life-or-death struggle for six years, this was a situation straight out of Shakespeare. They would spend nine months together, and every day Moczarski listened to Stroop talk. The fact that each man had reasons to believe that he would not come out of prison alive made Stroop extremely candid.

However, things turned out differently. Or, rather, justice was served.

Stroop was hanged in Warsaw in 1951. The Polish media did not cover his trial or his execution very extensively. Moczarski was sentenced to death, pardoned and released after Poland emerged from Stalinism in 1956, and later rehabilitated.

Moczarski would never forget his time with Stroop. He understood that the prison discussions taught him something important. Stroop’s was not only a crime story but, more importantly, an account of the evolution of a criminal. Moczarski told it dispassionately, with detachment and, despite the ostensibly casual form of reportage he chose, he gave us a profound vivisection of a killer. His book Conversations with an Executioner appeared more than twenty years after he was released.

The whole world watched Adolf Eichmann’s trial in 1961. Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem appeared in 1963. Unlike Moczarski, Arendt did not meet the executioner she wrote about, but only observed his trial. Still, this eminent philosopher gave us an astute portrait of the dutiful Nazi. Her reflections on “ordinary” men’s readiness to commit crimes, the law’s shortcomings and the limited opportunities to settle scores for crimes have entered the canons of learning and of literature.

Poland was cut off from the world by the Iron Curtain, and so Moczarski did not have an opportunity to read Arendts book. It is all the more astounding to juxtapose the books, as the two portraits intertwine to confirm her thesis about the “banality of evil.”

Neither Eichmann nor Stroop questioned the Nazi system of order and obeisance to power, and both repeated with conviction clichés about the “humiliation brought on by the Versailles Treaty,” about the Weimar Republic as a stale puddle, about the imperative to put an end to parliamentary democracy, about restoring Germany's greatness and acquiring living space for the Germans. Until the very end, they both believed that Germany had lost the war because the Nazis had not acted decisively enough. Indeed, both obediently executed orders, suspending their personal moral judgement. They were perfect cogs in the bureaucratic machine of a totalitarian state.

However, there was something in Moczarski’s narrative that Arendts story did not have. This Polish political prisoner’s time of sharing a prison cell with a Nazi general symbolised the history of the part of Europe that was subjected to Communist rule in the wake of the Second World War. Moczarski landed at the very centre of his country’s and his nations history.

After five years of working for the Polish Underground State, where he risked his life and sacrificed his personal affairs, as soon as the war was over, Moczarski was locked up as the new regime's political enemy. He would spend nearly eleven years in a prison that held both Poles and Nazis, which was run by Poles serving the Stalinist regime. "Then, prison offered the privilege of a straightforward and simple and clearly defined situation (basically, only a ‘no’ or a 'yes'). Such an existence favours stubbornly adhering to principles instead of giving in to the circumstances of the need to manoeuvre, which can so easily transform into scheming,” Moczarski writes in his conclusion to Conversations with an Executioner. It is important to listen to what a political prisoner of many years has to say.

Kazimierz Moczarski did not come from nowhere. He was an heir to a timehonoured tradition held up in his homeland and by his family, and very much a child of his time. Still, everyone chooses his traditions.

Born in Warsaw in 1907, he was eleven when the Great War ended, making it possible for many nation-states to form in East-Central Europe. The Polish Republic was reborn after 123 years of partitions by its three imperial neighbours. Moczarskis was the first generation to start its adult life in it.

He was born in a teachers home, which was driven by a tradition of engagement in pro-independence activity, and he became active in public life already as a university student. He joined the Youth Legion, which adhered closely to Józef Piłsudski, for many Poles a legendary leader who was instrumental in Poland's rebirth in 1918. However, Piłsudskis people gradually turned to authoritarian ways. Moczarski left the Youth Legion in mid-1934 and travelled in France, where he came close to the left and observed the growing Fascist and National Socialist threats. Searching for his own ideology after returning to Poland, he finally opted for the Democratic Club movement of the liberal-democratic and secular intelligentsia, which attracted a range of people, from the anti-Fascist left all the way to Communist sympathisers. However, as a promoter of compromise and discussions in which ideas clashed, Moczarski fundamentally opposed all radicalism. While he was sensitive to social injustice, he was also wholly resistant to the era’s revolutionary enthusiasts who wanted to change the world. He respected the law and the social contract. He viewed the world critically and fought for principles rooted not in utopian ideals but in Positivist work that would change public ethics. His ideological choices were rooted in the latenineteenth-century ethical tradition of radical intelligentsia. This thinking, very characteristic of a large part of the pre-war Polish intelligentsia, lay in the best traditions of civic engagement.

In September 1939, Poland became the first target of Nazi aggression. Under the German occupation, Moczarski became active in several organisations: as an analyst of the vibrant politics of the underground in the Office of Information and Propaganda (Biuro Informacji i Propagandy, BIP); as a member of the underground Democratic Party (Stronnictwo Demokratyczne, SD); and as a representative of the Polish Underground State in the Directorate of Underground Resistance (Kierownictwie Walki Podziemnej, KWP), where he pursued collaborators, informers, and blackmailers of Jews, the szmalcowniks. KWP was especially important to him, as he helped to protect the persecuted citizens of his country within the confines of Polish law.

In the last months of the German occupation, Moczarski rose fortuitously from a relatively low level in the military hierarchy to head the Office of Information and Propaganda of the Home Army’s Main Command. He continued in that position after the Red Army invaded the Polish lands without bringing Poland freedom.

At the Yalta Conference of February 1945, the Allies agreed to sponsor democratic elections in Poland. Moczarski, like most of his compatriots, looked forward to working legally to rebuild his country and engage in his passion of politics. However, in violation of all international agreements, secret police jails filled with people loyal to Poland who supported non-Communist parties, but also former Home Army fighters. Loyal to his superiors and feeling responsible for those serving under him, Moczarski remained underground until the summer of 1945. He believed that staying on any longer would not bring the long-awaited freedom to his homeland. This lay at the source of the enormous dilemma he faced and the reason behind his attempt to seek an opening for the Communists and the underground to talk. However, the former had no interest in such talks, nor in a compromise.

Paradoxically, it was Moczarski who spent eleven years in prison, one of the longest terms served in Communist Poland. Tortured during the investigations to give false testimony against his underground comrades, he did not crack; consequently, he was made to share a cell with a Nazi war criminal. He survived to denounce the Stalinist system in his rehabilitation trial, on behalf of himself and others. He had the strength and the skills to write about his encounter with Stroop to give evidence about a dark era.

After leaving prison, Moczarski was marginalised, like others whose mouths and career paths had been closed. However, he considered even this nonsovereign Polish state his, and he did not want to go into internal exile. He found a place for himself that fit in with his socially conscious temperament.

Moczarski spent the last years of his life working rigorously on the life and career of General Jiirgen Stroop, whom he had got to know so well. After writing several hundred pages of notes right after leaving prison, for years he continued to add to his knowledge and weighed the best form to tell the story. The text of his future book, Conversations with an Executioner, appeared in instalments in the low-circulation monthly Odra in 1972-74. He did not live to see it come out as a book, because the authorities resisted publishing this provocative work, which begged the question of how it could have happened that its author was locked in a prison cell with a war criminal. Conversations with an Executioner, delayed by the censorship office, appeared two years after Moczarski’s death, almost simultaneously in Poland and West Germany (as Gespräche mit dem Henker: Das Leben des SS-Generals Jürgen Stroop. Aufgezeichnet im Mokotow-Gefdngnis zu Warschau [Conversations with an executioner: The life of SS General Jiirgen Stroop. Recorded in Warsaw s Mokotów prison]).

The book became well-known both in Poland and abroad in translations into more than a dozen languages, including English, and most recently Italian, Greek and Russian.

It might seem that Kazimierz Moczarski’s life story tells us about a world that is long gone. It might seem that the Second World War should have cured people once and for all of inflicting any form of persecution based on nationality, ethnicity, religion or beliefs. And yet racism, xenophobia and a fascination with violence are doing quite well, even if they have different foundations from those on which German Fascism was constructed in the 1920s. However, the thoughts and actions of those who adhere to such beliefs have not changed: they believe that they can impose their ideas by force and trample others’ dignity with impunity. The stories of Stroop and Eichmann tell us about the banality of evil, the weakness that worships violence and the vanity that so easily transforms humans into beasts. However, is there such a thing as the banality of good?

Moczarski gives us some optimism. He was not the heroic type. There was no grandiloquence in him. “T dont like platitudes and big words because I always suspect that they are covering up a scam, he wrote to his friend Marta Rajchman. A slight man, he had his eccentricities and his flaws. During the war, he did not take up arms. His heroism lay in his sense of duty, but he did not spend much time talking about it. He had firm convictions. He sided with an open and tolerant world against nationalism, hypocrisy and dogmatism. He took part in actions that, he believed, would give people the freedom to think, act and create. So much and so little.

This biography of Kazimierz Moczarski is based on written materials and discussions with people who knew him. In his daughter’s home archive, I found his notes, his wealth of correspondence with his wife, Zofia, nearly twenty years’ worth of letters to friends after his release from prison, and photographs, the most moving of which were taken in his first months of freedom, the summer of 1956.

Documents kept in drawers helped to give Zofia Moczarska an important place in this book.

An especially important set of letters are those written by Zofia and Kazimierz in their eleven years apart. They give unique testimony to what two people who were extremely close lived through, felt and thought. Their marriage bore the fierce scar of a totalitarian state’s harsh deeds. They were not unique, and we must remember the personal price paid by all the victims of Stalinist oppression.

The archive of the Institute of National Remembrance (Instytut Pamieci Narodowej, IPN) holds extensive documentation about Moczarski collected by the Polish People’s Republic's Ministry of Public Security (Ministerstwo Bezpieczenstwa Publicznego), later the Security Service (Stuzba Bezpieczenstwa, SB). It includes protocols of interrogations, trial documents, but also reports submitted secretly by a person Moczarski trusted, which reveal his unmasking and arrest in 1945. After his release from prison in 1956, Moczarski, like most former Home Army people, continued to attract secret police attention. He was observed until his death. After he died, as his legend began to grow, his wife was harassed by the Security Service, which tried to discredit his name.

Learning about a persons life is a long journey. On my journey, I met many individuals whom I would like to thank for their time and help. The following people told me their stories: Zbigniew Baucz, Leon Janowicz, Professor Jacek Kochanowicz, Professor Marcin Kula, Zbigniew Lenka, Irena Rakowska-Bartel, Malgorzata Szejnert, Teresa Szydłowska, Janina Szczuka, Andrzej Wajda. Professor Władysław Bartoszewski answered my questions by letter.

I received valuable advice and help from several Polish historians: Professor Andrzej Friszke, Dr Janusz Marszalec, Dr hab. Andrzej Kunert, Professor Grzegorz Mazur and Professor Tomasz Szarota. I wish to thank Dr Marek Ney- Krwawicz for alerting me to some important documents.

My work was made possible by Elzbieta Moczarska, who gave me access to her documents, so I thank her profusely. I want to thank my husband, Pawel, this books first assiduous reader, for his unwavering support.

Chapter One: A Dream of Poland

His was the first generation to grow up in the newly sovereign Poland. Kazimierz Moczarski was eleven in 1918, when it regained its independence after 123 years of being dismembered by its three neighbours, Russia, Prussia and Austria- Hungary. What could he remember from those early days? Had he watched his father disarm Germans in their hometown of Lipno, a small Kuyavian town in the north in November 1918? If he had, images of this kind usually stay with a person for life. What would he have overheard at home? He certainly understood his family’s pro-independence tradition, which included forebears serving in Napoleon's army and fighting in the nineteenth-century anti-Russian uprisings. Born in Warsaw on 21 July 1907 as his parents’ third child, he was given the first and middle names, Kazimierz Damazy, after his grandfather, a combatant in the January 1863 uprising.

It is easy to see in our mind’s eye little Kazimierz, Kazik or Kazio, listening to his father’s stories of exile to Siberia as punishment for belonging to a pro-independence club in secondary school. There were also family stories about organising school strikes, Scout troops and underground education under Russian rule. It was then that his father, Jan, met Michalina Skarbek- Wodzinowska, who would become his wife. Would all this talk have been enough to infect Kazimierz with “the Poland virus?” Indeed, Jan and Michalinas four children passed their patriotism test with flying colours. When the Second World War broke out, the three of them dove into underground activism.

Theirs was a teachers family. Jan, a graduate of the University of Warsaw s Natural Sciences Department, championed the Polish Socialist Party (Polska Partia Socjalistyczna, PPS) and ardently admired the charismatic Marshal Józef Piłsudski, one of the fathers of Polish sovereignty. Jan served as headmaster of several secondary schools in various towns. In Lipno, people remembered him with respect. A plaque on the schools wall survives to this day. Throughout her career, Michalina taught Polish literature in the schools her husband headed.!

The Jan Kreczmar Secondary School in Warsaw, from which Kazimierz Moczarski graduated, was known for its teachers’ leftist leanings. The many Jewish boys were treated kindly, and it must have been there that Kazimierz learned tolerance, a value he would always adhere to. Just as he was becoming an adult, in May 1926 he observed Józef Pilsudski’s military coup. By aiming

1 Andrzej K. Kunert, Oskarżony Kazimierz Moczarski (Warsaw, 2006), 10-16.

to purify Polish politics, the new Sanacja (cleansing) regime undermined the young democracy.

The Moczarskis saw to it that their children were well educated for a life in independent Poland: their oldest son and daughter studied medicine, while the youngest, a boy who would be shot to death by a Gestapo functionary, held great promise as a painter. Kazimierz chose to study law at the University of Warsaw, and also enrolled in its School of Journalism. Beginning in the late 1920s students were increasingly coming under the sway of the radical-right Camp for a Greater Poland (Obóz Wielkiej Polski, OWP), which instigated anti-Jewish violence and instituted ghetto benches in universities. In 1930, other students created the Youth Legion (Legion Młodych) as an antidote to these radical nationalists and adopted a pro-state and non-nationalist ideology. Moczarski made his first political choice then. “The Youth Legion attracted young people who were perturbed by the [Camp for a Greater Poland’s] terror. Young people who were enchanted with Marshal Pilsudski flocked to it, but as they could remember the states rebirth, the state idea was also attractive to them, Tadeusz Kochanowicz, Moczarskis university friend, described the Legion.’

Kochanowicz continued,

Moczarski was brimming with energy. A short time after its launch, the Legion made its first public appearance at a university. There was a rally, I can't remember on what occasion, but in any event an uncontroversial one. It was held in the entrance hall of Warsaw Polytechnic, and was fully under the control of the [Camp for a Greater Poland]. Our group of thirty or forty stood off to the side, under the wall. Without warning, we unfurled a banner reading Youth Legion’ and sang [the pro-Piłsudski] “We are the first brigade’? The [Camp for a Greater Poland] responded at lightning speed, in ten minutes managed to push us out of the building and inflicted some light bruises. Over time, skirmishes like these took place more and more often and became more and more rough. It became customary in anticipation of large skirmishes to spend the organisation’s money on dozens of bamboo canes. I saw the canes right after one such skirmish, their bottoms had turned into bunches of drooping bamboo stems, some looked like overused carpet beaters. It made me think how resilient human skulls can be. Members of the Legion who suffered wounds that required dressing would later strut around its office showing off their bandaged heads and shoulders.

The injured included Moczarski, one of the people who stood up for their convictions.

2 Tadeusz Kochanowicz, unpublished memoir in author's collection, 38.

Kazimierz Moczarski, 1920s, Warsaw. Photogr. Archive of Elzbieta Moczarska / FOTONOVA.

As the Great Depression descended on Poland and the rest of Europe, mass unemployment and destitution spread. It was not only the Communists, but also Socialists, members of the People’s Party, Christian Democrats and Nationalists who offered predictions that the crisis would mean the beginning of the end of capitalism. Both the left and the right came up with radical programmes of social and economic reforms. The generation that had grown up in the sovereign state, especially sensitive to the effects of the crisis, was speaking up on social and political issues in an increasingly loud voice.

The economic crisis sharpened Moczarski's already keen social sensitivity. In 1932, the so-called Żyrardów Affair agitated Poland, revealing not only corruption but also the nasty working conditions in the town’s factories, operated by a

French textile conglomerate. The Youth Legion joined a campaign opposing the influx of foreign capital and defending workers’ rights. In the autumn of 1932, it demanded waiving university fees for poor students and introducing tuition for the rich. However, these demands did not make it a leftist organisation. The Youth Legion’s ideology was not cohesive, as its membership included conservatives and Socialists, and even Communist sympathisers. Its leader was Zbigniew Zapasiewicz, a politician closely affiliated with the Polish Socialist Party.

“During a stay in Paris, Zapasiewicz became involved with the Jeunesse Laïque et Républicaine; recounted Kochanowicz. “As he worked to strengthen the Legion’s left wing, he was advised by Halina Krahelska and Wincenty Rzymowski.”’ The sociologist and writer Krahelska and the prominent journalist and Freemason Rzymowski exemplified the socially engaged leftist intelligentsia. It was most likely under their influence that a left wing of the Legion gelled in the 1930s. Another wing identified fully with the Sanacja, which governed Poland after the May 1926 coup and became increasingly authoritarian and nationalistic. “Moczarski and I were on the left wing of this organisation led by Zbigniew Zapasiewicz. It was he who arranged a Foreign Ministry grant for Moczarski to study at the Institut des Hautes Etudes Internationales” remembered Kochanowicz.*

Moczarski arrived in Paris, at the time Europes unchallenged capital, in December 1932. What a time! In January 1933, Hitler would become Germany’s chancellor, and fear of a war was growing. In France, the Socialists and Communists were becoming increasingly popular, and leftist opinion leaders included Frédéric Joliot-Curie, Marie’s son-in-law. Every new arrival from Poland hoped to be invited to the Joliot-Curie salon. “I was not honoured by an invitation, rue de Médicis, I think. However, my closest friends frequented Mrs Irenes and her husband Fródćrics home. I could be seen around the Quartier Latin with these friends, Moczarski writes years later to his lawyer Władysław Winawer. Moczarski also discusses the attempts to form a Romantic, somewhat utopian commune of Polish students by the Paris cell of the Youth Legion to be modelled on the idealistic retreat of the Désert de Bièvres that Georges Duhamel had written about. Its members would contribute their earnings to a kitty to run their household communally. This time marked the beginning of Moczarski’s

3 Kochanowicz, unpublished memoir in authors collection, 39.

4 Kochanowicz, unpublished memoir in authors collection, 39.

5 Letter to Władysław Winawer, December 1954, Elżbieta Moczarskas archive, National Library, Warsaw.

friendship with Marta Rajchman, daughter of the famous bacteriologist who in 1946 would become one of the founders of UNICEF, Ludwik Rajchman. Marta was known for her radical-left beliefs; as a student in Zurich she had been nicknamed “Bolshevik”

Probably thanks to being “seen around the Quartier Latin” Moczarski returned to Poland with a “red” reputation. At least this is what was whispered in the hallways of the Ministry of Social Welfare, where he became a legal counsel after a months-long job search. Tadeusz Kochanowicz, who was already working there, helped him get the position. Moczarski specialised in labour law and, beginning in 1936, went to Geneva as a member of the Polish government delegation for the annual International Labour Organisation conferences.

Kazimierz found office life neither boring nor monotonous. Irena Rakowska- Bartel was the deputy minister's head secretary. They met shortly after Moczarski started there. At the age of 90, she could still vividly remember their first meeting:

On my way back from the minister’s office, I heard my office mate Tadeusz Paczkowski say on the phone: “We have a new girl, her legs just keep on going, do you want to meet her?’ A split second later, two young men, Kazimierz Moczarski and Tadeusz Kochanowicz, rushed down from the floor above. We became fast friends. Later, Lula Hołówkówna, daughter of [the politician] Tadeusz Hołówko, who had been murdered by the Ukrainians [in 1931], joined our pack. We were young. We would spend entire afternoons together. When it was time to leave the ministry, which was in Długa Street in the so-called Windy Palace, we would walk down Bielańska, cross Theatre Square, and head to a Jewish restaurant for a bite. We would then all run home to change and meet again to go to the cinema or theatre. We would sometimes wrap the night up in a dance hall. We would then take showers and. . . back to work.*

For all the flamboyance of her account, Moczarski was certainly no lightweight. His friends saw him as modest, focused and at times even stiff. He treated life very seriously. “He often kept his distance as we hooted and joked around, observing us closely,’ added Rakowska-Bartel.

The Ministry of Social Welfare, as remembered by Zbigniew Baucz who started his first job as a lawyer there in 1937, was run in a modern way, thematically, not very bureaucratically. I was very young and came from the provinces to boot—indeed by comparison to Warsaw, Lublin remained provincial—and was quite overwhelmed as I landed abruptly amid the ministry’s intellectual cadre. The kind of people who worked there were open, not in the least bigoted, and they all expressed their political views freely.’

6 Authors interview with Irena Rakowska-Bartel, April 2007. 7 Author's interview with Zbigniew Baucz, December 2006.

Baucz had read law at the Catholic University of Lublin.

But what was going on at the University of Warsaw, in Krakowskie Przedmiescie Avenue, the assaults against Jews, the National Radical Camp (Obóz Narodowo-Radykalny, ONR) hit squads, all this came as a shock to me. There were no such tensions in Lublin. My university was Catholic, and nothing of this kind took place there. There were many Jews working in our ministry, and this never caused any problems. We were simply disgusted by the goings-on in the streets of Warsaw, and Moczarski was especially outspoken.

By now, Moczarski had become deeply involved in politics. Right after returning from France in 1934, he and a group of friends followed Zapasiewicz out of the Youth Legion. They started an independent journal, Pion, whose opinion pieces were so extremely critical of the government that Sanacja’s pre-emptive censorship confiscated several issues, so that after a few months the group had to abandon this publishing project. Moczarski, trying to find a place for himself, became involved in the union activities of the administrative intelligentsia and joined the Association of Government Employees (Stowarzyszenie Urzędników Państwowych, SUP), whose leaders had leftist, even Communist, sympathies. He became editor of the association’s journal, but also became involved in other projects. According to Tadeusz Kochanowicz, “Together we looked for people with views similar to ours and organised neverending political discussions. They would take place in private homes, often at Moczarski’s in Hoża Street! They were informal, a tad conspiratorial. They covered everything, world politics and, more critically, Sanacja-era Poland and the political changes they deemed necessary. Because they adopted Maurycy Mochnacki, a commentator and pro-independence political activist of the first half of the nineteenth century, as their patron, they called their meetings “maurycowki.” Indeed, one of Moczarski’s wartime noms de guerre would be "Maurycy. The left-leaning intelligentsia met there; they tended not to shut themselves off inside dogmas but were open and inquisitive.

“What did we have in common? What was it that brought most of us together for long stretches of time?” Moczarski would discuss the meetings of the Maurycy Mochnacki Club years later in the journal Tygodnik Demokratyczny.

This will not be a superficial answer: we were not fixed in any ideological way or methods of action it entailed. We believed in Cyprian Kamil Norwid’s idea of the unity of content (attitude) and form (method). Our ideological standpoint was ... rationalist, materialistic, humanistic and progressive thought with roots both in our nation’s democratic

8 Kochanowicz, unpublished memoir in authors collection, 39.

traditions and in the teachings of Marx, Engels and their successors. We also shared methods of action, which consisted of respecting the political and organisational principles we shared. We certainly believed in promoting progress not through terror, diktat or leadership but through good work, the culture of political deeds, structured debate, persuasion, free expression of views and opinions, tolerance—all this within the bounds of reason, moderation, without excessive, unnecessary stress on the brain, the tongue and time. The thirty-year-olds of the M. M. Club had another platform in common, the years of daily engagement in the white-collar trade unions. This kept us down to earth, stopped us from floating in cheap idealisation or demagoguery. It illustrated the visible problems of poverty, underdevelopment, exploitation, class struggle, the mechanism of capitalist management .... We spent long months at the M.M. Club talking about the need for a political party which would, at least to some degree, serve as the legal equivalent of the worker movement. And we worked on it. We held hundreds of discussions, conferences, consultations, disputes, even quarrels.’

They met with people from all sorts of leftist groups: the Union of Polish Democratic Youth (Związek Polskiej Młodzieży Demokratycznej, ZPMD), young peasant party activists and even activists of the Communist Union of Polish Youth (Komunistyczny Związek Młodzieży Polskiej, KZMP). They were fascinated by Henryk Dembiński, a charismatic figure in the Communistleaning academic circles in Vilna. The Warsaw authorities refused to register their informal group as an association. Following Marshal Piłsudski's death in May 1935, the discussions among Warsaw politically aware leftist intelligentsia were taking place in a new political atmosphere. The Polish parliament elected by the new 1935 electoral law no longer reflected real political or social cleavages, as all political groups critical of the government found themselves outside the Sejm. The Sanacja’s ideology was clearly morphing into authoritarianism. The newly centralised Camp of National Unity (Obóz Zjednoczenia Narodowego, OZN) adopted some of the National Democrats’ catchphrases. Policies curbing the cultural rights of the Ukrainian minority were making headway. The Camp of National Unity spoke out in favour of waging an economic war against the Jews and promoted their emigration to Palestine.

Piłsudskis old guard, people who had fought for Polands independence and many of whom retained their left-liberal beliefs, did not thrive in this atmosphere. In October 1937, the first Democratic Club was founded in Warsaw by senators of Sanacja's left wing, Regina Fleszarowa and Mieczysław Michałowicz, the historian Marceli Handelsman, architect Jerzy Makowiecki and writer Halina Krahelska. The group included the diplomat Tytus Filipowicz, a pre-1914