ZBIGNIEW HERBERT
563
true that Bereza
l
was an awful thing. Poverty in the countryside was
terrible , too....
JT:
We do remember all that.
ZH:
We do. But it was also a country of people, who worked for it,
although they did not agree with its government. It was a country of
writers and scholars who had no equals in the postwar era. Polish
high schools were not bad, and the universities were excellent-and
not only those from before World War I, like Lvov or Kracow. The
new universities in Poznan, Warsaw, Vilno had magnificent profes–
sors to whom we owe our life. Well, before the war there was Fa–
langa. But one has to see both the dark and the bright sides . There
was anti-Semitism - no one denies that. On the other hand remem–
ber the Kielce provocation in the "People's Poland," after the war.
The most repulsive pogrom ever seen on this soil happened shortly
after the referendum .
JT:
The 6th of July, 1946.
It
was about two weeks after the referen–
dum .
ZH:
Yes . It was meant to turn the attention of the world away from
the referendum. They slaughtered innocent people using the mob.
It
was all manipulated. There is proof of that, but the old boys did not
pay any attention to these facts. There was the radiant future; there
was literature . And now, to the ulterior motives. They were stimu–
lated. The plan was to separate the intellectual elite from the mis–
erable life of the so-called "people." First they started to build a
greenhouse in Krakow, then in Lodz, and finally in Warsaw-in the
very center. At the beginning of the fifties I saw the "winter cam–
paign of grain purchase ." The stores were empty. Why? "Because
dark peasants are stockpiling their crops." Groups of "workers" trav–
elled to the villages to confiscate and destroy the property of kulaks.
A kulak was someone who had about twenty acres. These were the
farms that produced for the market! The society was antagonized.
And in the midst of this terrible murder of the nation, a kind of flea
circus was established with its headquarters on Krakowskie Przed–
miescie. The followers of the "Polish Avant-garde" attacked the fol–
lowers of the "Wiadomosci Literackie" group. Books written in those
days are mostly paper with print on it. No one with a sense of humor
could possibly read them, but they made the school reading lists.
JT:
Like
Ashes and Diamonds .
1.
An "isolation camp" for political prisoners established in 1934. Persons sent there
were mostly communists and members of Ukrainian and Byelorussian opposition .
