Daniel Bell
CONVERSATIONS IN WARSAW :
Excerpts from a Journal
Last summer, while I was in Berlin for a conference of
the Congress for Cultural Freedom, an opportunity arose to motor to
Warsaw. I had met by chance an old acquaintance, William Grif·
fiths, a scholar at M.I.T., who was going to Warsaw to do further
research on a book he was writing about the Polish "October" of
1956, the events that brought Gomulka back to power and led to
the liberalization of the regime. I had never been to Poland, and
spoke no Polish, but I had an intense desire to see at first hand the
operation of a Communist society, and to find out whether the
liberal reforms of the "revolution" were being maintained. (The
language barrier, though I had feared it would be a problem,
proved illusory: the literary people speak French, and the sociolo–
gists speak English-still another illustration of the "two cultures."
The waiters spoke German!) Through introductions arranged by
various friends, I was able to meet a large number of Polish intel·
lectuals. I think these individuals represented many shades of
opinion, except the Catholic. For reasons that should be clear, I
cannot identify most of the persons I spoke to, and in some cases I
have had to omit considerable detail. For the rest, I have tried to
report fully and accurately what I saw and heard.
We arrived in Warsaw late in the evening, and after dinner
Griffiths and I strolled down the Krakowskie przedmiescie to the
Stare Miasto, the "old city" of Warsaw. It was an extraordinary
revelation. One entered the old city from a large open piazza
dominated by a column. Along one side of the piazza ran a stone
balustrade that looked out over the Vistula, and steps ran down
from the piazza to a road below, which curved into a bridge that
crossed the Vistula. Fronting the other side of the piazza was a large,
