504
PARTISAN REVIEW
Freedom, thus, is a hand's reach away. A few strokes of the pen
on the declaration of loyalty will suffice ....
It
is so easy to
exchange your barred window, with its sharp outline of barbed wire,
for freedom. The iron gates of Bialoleka will open before you, and
instead of prisoners' walks you will see the streets of your native city,
patrolled by police and tanks. You will see people being checked,
cars being stopped and their trunks searched; you will see the vigi–
lant eye of the informer fishing out from the crowd people suspected
of "violating the regulations of the state of war." You will hear words
that you had known only from history books: "raid," "Volksliste"
(the declaration of loyalty used by the Nazis during the occupa–
tion)-words torn out from beneath the stately patina of time, words
pulsating with today's ominous rhythm. You will hear about further
arrests, about people being sought, people hiding, about draconian
sentences.
And even if you are capable only of small-minded calculation,
you have your first reason for not signing: it isn't worth it. Here no
one can detain you "for explanations," here you have nothing to
fear.
It
is paradoxical, I know, but if in the morning you are woken
up by someone banging on the door, you are not afraid of uniformed
guests: you know it is only your kindly jailer bringing you your
morning coffee. Here you feel no fear when you see an informer
with restless eyes; here the spy is harmless. Bialoleka is a moral lux–
ury and an oasis of freedom.
Sometimes they will try to scare you. My friend, a worker from
a Warsaw factory, was promised fifteen years of prison . Another was
threatened with a trial for espionage. A third was interrogated in
Russian. Still another was ordered out of his cell and told that he was
going into the heart of Russia (they took him for an X-ray). But all
this is bearable. Indeed, I think it is easier to bear than the morally
and politically complicated situation on the other side of the barbed
wIre.
The Polish Primate condemned the coercion of people
to
sign
declarations of loyalty. The Pope openly called this violation of
human conscience a crime. All condemnation must fall on those who
coerce these declarations out of people, those who employ that cruel
form of debasing human dignity.
A young woman, the wife of a Solidarity activist, was arrested
and taken away from her sick baby-which, she had been told
beforehand, they had decided to place in a children's home. She
