Wojciech Zukrowski - Stone Tablets

Her bag with a yellowed newspaper, the tightly twisted little paper horn in which peanuts rattled — she had held them in her hand. He sat unable to breathe. A cry rose in his throat; he wanted to turn his head away, to beat it against the car. He missed that golden hand, the eyes beaming like the sky after the first snow, looking trustfully at him from under waves of coppery hair. Margit is gone. Gone. And I am alone.

I am alone.

A dull pain grew and settled at the bottom of his sickened heart. It wandered through his pulse, then tightened around him. He parted his lips and gasped for air. He closed his eyes; he saw the dry grass bending in the warm breeze, the red stony hills, the sun filling the vastness of space, lashing it with brooms of flame.

April 14, 1916: Wojciech Zukrowski is born in Krakow. At the time, Poland is partitioned between Russia, Prussia, and Austria.

1918: World War I ends, and Poland gains independence for the first time since it was first partitioned in 1795.

September 1939: World War II begins with Germany’s attack on Poland. Zukrowski serves in the Polish horse artillery and is wounded in his right leg.

1940: With political and economic ties to Germany, Hungary joins the Axis and fights as an ally of Germany. Hungarian troops participate in the invasion of Russia; some fight in Ukraine, like the fictional Istvan Terey in Stone Tablets . Hungarian leader Miklós Horthy seeks to negotiate a peace with the Allies, but Germany coerces Hungary to remain in the war by kidnapping Horthy’s son and imprisoning Horthy himself.

February 1945: As World War II draws to a close, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin meet at Yalta in Crimea to plan for postwar Europe. Again Poland loses its independence as the Yalta Agreement places it, together with Hungary and other East European countries, in the Soviet Union’s “sphere of influence.” On May 8, Germany surrenders, ending the war in Europe. On August 14, Japan surrenders, ending World War II.

August 1947: India, under the leadership of Gandhi and Nehru, gains independence from British rule. Nehru becomes India’s first prime minister. Independence leads to the creation of Pakistan as an independent state and to revisions to business and currency regulations which will affect characters in Stone Tablets .

March 1953: Stalin dies. Throughout the Eastern bloc, political prisoners are released, and citizens in Russia’s client states hope for new political freedoms.

May 1955: Moscow formally establishes the Warsaw Pact, a mutual defense agreement between Russia’s client states, including Poland and Hungary.

1956: As a result of the end of Stalinist rule, Hungarians are emboldened to demand internal reforms and more autonomy from Moscow. On October 22, university students announce demands for free elections, freedom of expression, and the withdrawal of all Soviet troops from Hungary. A statue of Lenin is toppled in Budapest as clashes occur between Russian troops and Hungarian dissidents. The Hungarian government tries to negotiate a withdrawal of the Soviets from the country. On November 1, Hungarian leader Imre Nagy announces that Hungary has withdrawn from the Warsaw Pact and calls on the West for support, but on November 4, Russian launches full-scale attacks that inflict severe damage on Budapest.

In late October a crisis develops in the Mideast as Israel, Great Britain, and France move to seize the Suez Canal, which President Gamal Abdel Nasser had earlier nationalized. Stalin’s successor, Nikita Krushchev, supports Nasser, taking the role of defender of Arabs. The Suez Crisis threatens to bring about a military confrontation between Russia and the West, muting the response of the United States and other Western powers to the situation in Hungary, where Russia succeeds in crushing the uprising.

Zukrowski begins a three-year assignment with the Polish diplomatic corps in India. By this time Communists, including those in nearby China, are eyeing India, with its impoverished masses, as a potential field for the extension of their influence.

1965: Zukrowski, already a well-known author and screenwriter, completes Stone Tablets. The Polish censors refuse to allow the book to be published until a confidant of First Party Secretary Władysław Gomułka, Poland’s head of state, persuades Gomułka to override their decision.

1966: Stone Tablets is published. The book is extremely popular in Poland, but its criticisms of Stalinist abuses and its sympathy with the Hungarian Revolution cause such a furor in the Warsaw Pact that a new print run is held up. Andrzej Wajda, even then well known in Poland, is refused permission to make a film of the book. Polish authorities try to placate angry Hungarian officials by promising not to allow it to be translated into foreign languages.

1970: Stone Tablets is translated into Czech by Helena Teigova, but its distribution is forbidden by the government. Printed copies are stored in a warehouse, but workers smuggle so many out to readers that when the ban is lifted, few or no copies remain.

1984: A film of Stone Tablets , with the characters changed from Hungarians to Poles, premieres in Poland.

April 1989: Under pressure from the Solidarity movement, which includes some 10 million of 38 million Poles, the communist government of Poland agrees to allow multiparty elections. Two months later, Solidarity wins 99 percent of the available seats, and its leader, Lech Walesa, is elected president, effectively ending communist rule in Poland. In October, Hungary introduces a multiparty system. Hungary opens its border with Austria, which leads to the opening of the Berlin Wall on November 9. The demolition of that wall by ecstatic East and West Germans signals the end of communist domination in East Europe.

1996: Zukrowski wins the Władysław Reymont prize for lifetime literary achievement.

1997: Stone Tablets is published in a Russian translation.

August 26, 2000: Zukrowski dies in Warsaw.

2005: Zukrowski’s daughter Katarzyna, an economist and professor at Warsaw School of Economics, authorizes an English translation of Stone Tablets .

Wojciech Zukrowski was born in Krakow, Poland in 1916, in the middle of World War I. He was studying Polish language and literature at Jagiellonian University at the outbreak of War II. Zukrowski then served in the horse artillery and within a short time he was wounded. After Hitler’s forces occupied Poland, he joined the Polish resistance as a specialist in sabotage.

From late 1939 until 1945, Zukrowski worked in the Solvay limestone quarry with his friend Karol Wojtyla, who would become Pope John Paul II. The quarry was a haven for Polish intellectuals because it was not closely watched by the Germans. Acting on a shared passion for “cultural resistance” to the detested Nazi occupation, Zukrowski and Wojtyla helped form an underground acting group, the Rhapsodic Theater — an enterprise that could have brought severe punishment if they had been discovered. The two corresponded until Zukrowski’s death in 2000.

Zukrowski married Maria Woltersdorf in 1945 and had a daughter, Katarzyna. He first gained recognition for From the Land of Silence , a book about life in an occupied country, and Kidnapping in Tiutiurlistan , an animal fable critical of war, which became an enduringly popular children’s book. In 1953 he became a war correspondent in Vietnam and China and traveled in Laos and Cambodia. The death of Stalin that year eventually led to the “thaw,” a relaxation of political discipline that revived hopes for increased autonomy within member nations of the Warsaw Pact. In 1956, as Poles watched the deepening rebellion against the communist regime in Hungary, Zukrowski embarked on a three-year tour as cultural attaché with the Polish diplomatic mission in India.