William Brodrick - The Day of the Lie

‘Well, what do you think?’

Anselm made a start. He hadn’t heard Sebastian enter. The lawyer pulled over a chair and straddled the seat, his chin lodged on his folded arms as if he were looking into that eye testing machine at the opticians. He worked too hard, that was Anselm’s verdict. The whites were yellowed and bloodshot.

‘Something isn’t quite right.” said Anselm.

‘In what way?’

‘I’m not sure.’ He made a sigh of self-deprecation. ‘Can’t read a damn thing without brooding on it for months. At Larkwood we tend to chew words slowly. swallow them even more slowly and then wait for this sudden kick of understanding, right here — ’ he pointed at his stomach — ‘it’s a bit annoying, really I read stuff ten years ago and I’ve still got indigestion. The only cure’s watching and waiting.’

‘Well, you’ve got till nine-thirty tomorrow morning.’ Sebastian reached into his inside jacket pocket and took out a scrap of paper. He held it up to Anselm so he could read the address scrawled across the middle. ‘You have an appointment with Marek Frenzel.’

Locating the former secret policeman had been no more difficult than tracing Irina Orlosky According to the tax people, Brack’s assistant, now aged sixty-two, had left the SB to join the peace of mind industry and was now a branch manager in central Warsaw He’d shown a flare for insurance. He was still looking after the People: house and contents; the whole caboodle.

‘Does he know what we want?’ asked Anselm, taking the paper. ‘I told his secretary that an old policy had finally matured.’

So the stage was set. If Anselm’s hunch was correct, he’d shortly buy back the missing contents of the Polana file. And that would confirm if Edward Kolba had gone the distance. But in truth Anselm’s curiosity, lambent with expectation, lay just as much elsewhere: on the sidelines.’ far from the fire.

IPN/RM/13129/2010

EDITED TRANSCRIPT OF A STATEMENT MADE BY ROZA MOJESKA

33.41

If it wasn’t for Bernard, I might never have gone back to the Shoemaker. When he was a child, I told him the story of the dragon and I like to think that his first steps towards resistance came from hearing that tale of intellect against brute force. Later, without prompting, he began to ask the ‘wrong’ sorts of question, like, ‘Why do we have a special relationship with the Soviet Union?’. Edward used to pull his hair out, begging him to stick to algebra. Clean problems that could be solved cleanly He just wanted his boy to do well at school.

36.22

At university Bernard started talking about all kinds of freedom… freedom to read books banned by the censor; freedom to watch any film he wanted; to say what he liked; to meet whom he liked; freedom from the restraint that kept everyone in line, an ideological line drawn more for Moscow’s approval than theirs; freedom to pick his own leaders; freedom of information; freedom protected by the law Freedom, pure and simple. Edward would shake his head, stabbing one finger upwards, warning Bernard that they might be bugged, while Aniela would dust the flour from her hands, round on him and shout back, ‘What are you on about? You’re getting a free education!’

38.54

Bernard belonged to that group of intellectuals whose strong belief in socialism — its vision of fairness and equality — had turned restive. Their problem was that, in practice, it wasn’t working properly. They demanded reform not revolution — a reform that had been promised year on year by the Party leadership. All they wanted was for the apparatchiks to stand back so that he and his educated pals could lift the bonnet on the government’s engine. With a bit of major tinkering they were sure they could fix those grinding noises that everyone was complaining about. But eventually he lost his faith. One of his professors was expelled from the Party for condemning the lack of political, social and economic development. That was when he — and many others — realised that without a revolution of ideas there was little hope for change. He wrote a letter saying so to both the rector and the Party leadership — actions for which he could have been kicked out of the university Happily he only received a disciplinary warning. Bernard got his degree later that year and I still remember Edward when the results came out. He sat with his mouth open, tears of joy pouring on to his thick moustache. There was a scholar in the family.

41.52

They got Bernard after he’d started post-graduate studies. One domino hit another: in 1968 the censor banned Forefather’s Eve after the audience had a field day jeering the czarist agent as if he were a latter-day soviet stooge. The students took to the streets in protest so the rector shut down a string of Departments. Thousands of young people — Bernard, among them — had their schooling cut short. They all got ‘wolf tickets’, blacklisting them when it came to finding a job. Edward’s face set into a mask. This was one affair he couldn’t resolve by wangling. He had to watch his boy scratch around for bit work.

42.58

Bernard didn’t only lose his future; he lost a childhood friend, Mateusz Robak. They’d gone in different directions, Bernard to books on philosophy and Mateusz to an electrician’s manual. When the demonstration had erupted Bernard the Student had wanted Mateusz the Worker by his side. But Mateusz had laughed him down: ‘I’m not risking my job so you can watch a play written two hundred years ago.’ They never spoke again, not until 1982. By then Mateusz was in charge of my security.

53.21

I lost a friend, too. Magda Samovitz. We’d met in Saint Justyn’s, where she’d been hidden during the war. The German secret police had taken her away with Mr Lasky in 1944 but she’d survived Treblinka and come back. Well, the government now blamed the student unrest on Zionists, and Magda lost her job simply because she was Jewish. I couldn’t believe that those who’d survived and returned, like her, would one day leave again with the little they could carry in their bags. Thousands lost their jobs and left the country. Magda went to England.

54.39

Bernard became heavily involved in unofficial union activity which was how he met his wife, Helena. A close friend of theirs was shot dead in 1970 at Gdynia, one of a crowd chanting ‘We want bread! We want truth!’ at the machine guns. They carried his body on planks behind a banner saying ‘The Blood of Children’. Others were killed in the Radom riots of 1976 when food prices doubled. Demonstrators unfurled the white eagle and set the Party building on fire. I listened to the news, still not feeling the stab of a needle. According to the presenter, ‘drunken hooligans and hysterical women led the crowds’.

1h. 02

Bernard always said that Solidarity grew from that banner and those martyrs, because afterwards the students and workers came together. But I would add something else, a remark I heard on the bus last week: no Church, no Solidarity, no revolution. And it’s true. Behind this coalition of minds and hands was the presence of those strong arches, arches that had refused to bend or break despite the weight of Soviet Occupation. Even if there were men of God who’d become men of Brack, that changes nothing, and it never can: the story has been told; the arches didn’t sway I, and millions like me, stood beneath them.

Anyway the students and workers, united to this spirit of resistance.’ overwhelmed the Party. Our special friends had to swallow it. Solidarity became official.

What followed, however, was chaos. Strike after strike. I ended up brushing my teeth with imported Bulgarian toothpaste. Frankly though.’ I was more interested in Helena’s pregnancy. I watched her slowly grow large. I didn’t quite notice the hunger marches or the trucks jamming the central roundabout or the rumours that the Russians were mobilising. I just saw Helena’s radiant face. Aniela watched her, scared there’d be a knock on the door; that they might come back in their leather jackets and jeans.