We Cannot Be Beaten

TIME’S Eastern European Bureau Chief Richard Hornik spent the first ten days of Poland’s state of emergency in Gdansk and Warsaw, operating as best he could under a communications blackout, tight censorship and restrictions on travel. Last week he flew from Warsaw to Paris, where he wrote this firsthand account of life under General Jaruzelski ‘s martial-law regime. His report:

“They should know that we cannot be beaten,” said a 30-year-old Pole. “It may take three or five years, but we will be back.” That sort of spirit has made it impossible to “beat” the Poles for centuries. But in a way it has also kept the Poles from achieving victory.

What really galls the Poles this time is that they have defeated themselves—temporarily, of course. The nation that secretly derided the people of Czechoslovakia for offering no resistance in 1968 must now admit that it has not lived up to that brave slogan so often heard since August 1980: “It is better to die standing than to live on your knees.”

And whereas it took five Warsaw Pact armies to end the Prague Spring, the Polish August was frozen by the pride of the nation, by the sons and brothers of Solidarity members. The Polish army was the last official institution with any popular trust. That is finished now. Even the cowed population of Warsaw openly shows its hatred. Obscene gestures are made at passing armored columns. The Poles have taken the acronym of the ruling military council WRON, and added an A to produce WRONA, crow in Polish. “Crow” was what Poles called the Gestapo during the Nazi occupation, after the stylized eagle on the Gestapo emblem. Silhouettes of crows are popping up around Warsaw, and swastikas are being drawn on the frosty windows of the capital’s overcrowded buses.

Most of the young conscripts who stand guard at every significant intersection in Warsaw attempt to be pleasant. They seem overjoyed when an occasional passer-by stops to chat as they stand next to their coal-fired braziers warming themselves against the freezing temperatures of one of Poland’s coldest and snowiest Decembers in years. But they are easily angered when people mutter that “all the coal goes to the army.”

Is the army strong enough? The consensus in Warsaw: not for the long haul. In physical terms, the army and the other security forces are stretched to the limit. Said one Western diplomat, “There is not one unit or piece of equipment in reserve.” Most soldiers are on 18-hr, shifts. The army is not being used to suppress strikes or break up demonstrations. A tank may be used to burst through a factory gate or fire a warning shot, but it is the militia (police) who are left to do the dirty work.

Thus far that has been sufficient. Most of Poland is calm. There are trouble spots, but the WRON can wait out or starve out that resistance. Quiet does not mean that the military takeover has succeeded, however, for the security forces have no weapons against the growing passive resistance in the country. As one Western observer said, “You can put a colonel in every shoe factory in the country, but that will not stop the decline in production.”

The food situation is similar. The regime now threatens coercive procurement because sales to the state are so low. The army can confiscate the food hoarded by farmers from this year’s harvest but, as one government official said, “These are still peasants, not farmers.” Next fall there just may not be anything to confiscate. In short, Poland faces a long spell of economic privation, which will cause passive resistance to become active if control is relaxed. There seems to be no way out of the mess.

That raises the question of why the army generals took this route. Church officials believe that Jaruzelski hoped to pull off a blitzkrieg that would sever Solidarity’s head and so stun its rank and file that they would be incapable of resistance. After a week, the theory goes, the military council would gradually ease martial law in exchange for the union’s peaceful cooperation in rebuilding the economy. A tame Solidarity, probably led by Lech Walesa, would be offered a limited but meaningful role in running the country. Party hardliners and apparat would be neutralized, but the party would keep its leading role.

Much of that fits with what has happened. Walesa has been handled gingerly both in detention and in the official media. Detainees who agree to be good in the future have been released. Some have even made public recantations. Meanwhile, the party has almost disappeared. The Polish flag now flies alongside the Red flag over Central Committee headquarters. A Politburo meeting last Tuesday received only one sentence of coverage in the party’s daily newspaper, Trybuna Ludu. But in the end the military miscalculated. Walesa and his colleagues have refused to collaborate. Solidarity’s head was severed, but its limbs have managed some remarkable death spasms.

Still, Jaruzelski is committed now. The regime will go ahead with plans to relax a number of the restrictions of martial law, and will continue

its attempts to find quislings within Solidarity who will help build a new and more docile union. There is no other choice, even though this one may be doomed from the start.

Almost every Pole I talked with in the past week seems to understand this. “I have to drink to sleep,” said one depressed man. “Otherwise I think too much, and they are all bad thoughts.” Others try to involve themselves in the Christmas season, buying trees and decorations and queuing up at the food shops, which suddenly seem better supplied than they usually are, reinforcing everyone’s conviction that the government had been holding back supplies. A small minority of mostly very young people are beginning to launch a resistance movement. “Young people are going to their elders and asking them how they did it during the Nazi occupation,” said one student. “We have a lot to learn, but we will not gowithout a fight.”

An open struggle would inevitably end in bloodshed and Soviet intervention. The Poles’ only real weapon is the one that has seen them through so many times in the past two centuries—waiting the occupiers out while keeping the national spirit alive. The only difference is that this time the occupiers are home-grown—foreign-trained maybe—but homegrown.