86
PARTISAN REVIEW
People showed their real faces, regardless of the party cards they had
in their pockets. We have often written about reaction, but for a long
time we were unable to give it its real name. In the same Polytechnic
School, where Saturday night nearly thirty thousand young people of
Warsaw sang, at the end of a meeting lasting many hours, the
Inter–
national
and the Polish anthem, Boleslaw Piasecki
2
several years ago
addressed his storm-troopers inciting them to anti-Jewish pogroms. We
have heard that voice again. On the eve of the most important events
that have taken place
in
the last years, the voice threatened the pa–
triotic Left with the proclamation of martial law if the national discus–
sion were to be transformed into action. But the Warsaw working class
imposed a martial law of its own. It was enough to go out into the streets
on that Friday night to know who was master in Warsaw. Working-class
Warsaw was on the alert, and its voice was heard at the plenary
meeting of the Central Committee.
Jan Kott
2 Ex-fascist and anti-Semite, captured by the Russians ; was persuaded to
work for them; returned to Poland after the war; became head of the Com–
munist-front Catholic Progressive group "Pax".
FRENCH INTELLECTUALS SAY NO
"The events of the past weeks have raised burning questions
of conscience for Communists that neither the Party's Central Committee
nor the Party organ have helped to resolve. An incredible poverty of
information, a veil of silence, and more or less deliberate ambiguities
have upset Communists' minds, leaving them helpless, open to all the
insinuations of the enemy...."
The individuals who signed this protest, with the request that a
special congress of the Party be called, are anything but obscure. One
of the signers is Pablo Picasso, whose fame as "the master of the dove"
has reached the remotest Manchurian village; another is the psychologist
Henri Wallon, professor at the College de France. True enough, the
latter has already thought better of his stand-and he will not be the
only one. No sooner had the "Manifesto of the Ten" been denounced
by the Party as a conspiracy of an organized fraction, than he publicly
apologized and assured Maurice Thorez of his unswerving loyalty.
One of the Party's leading juridical authorities, Professor Leon
