POLAND: The House on Szucha Avenue

POLAND The House on Szucha Avenue

The old national anthem, now played along with the Internationale, still proclaimed: “Poland is not yet lost.” But many a Pole was beginning to wonder. Arrests of the Government’s political opponents were rapidly increasing in number from week to week. The Catholic hierarchy and clergy, completely abandoning its technically impartial position, openly urged Poles to vote against the Communist-dominated Government. The Government thundered back: “The Vatican is a friend of the Germans!” Anti-Semitic terrorists circulated stories that the Government had allowed Jews to torture and kill 160 non-Jewish Poles imprisoned in the city of Radom. The extreme rightist underground paper Honor & Fatherland proclaimed that, unless the U.S. and Britain eventually severed relations with the Government, Poland’s only hope was a future war between the great powers.

The Neighbors. Nowhere in divided Poland was the pattern of these scenes clearer than in a six-story limestone apartment building at No. 16 Aleja Szucha (Warsaw’s Pennsylvania Avenue), where two prominent Poles reside in two modest flats. One was little-known Jakub Berman, Under Secretary of State without Portfolio (but with plenty of jobs), one of the most powerful members of Poland’s Communist ruling clique. The other was lantern-jawed, indomitable Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, leader of the anti-Communist Polish Peasant Party who, of all Polish public figures today, enjoys perhaps the highest popularity and the lowest life-expectancy. The two neighbors, though they shared the same Tommy-gun-toting doormen, the same postman and the same erratic central heating, were not on speaking terms. They were engaged in an implacable battle leading up to a grave finale: Poland’s long-delayed national elections, now scheduled for Jan. 19.

Berman is a career Communist who was trained in Moscow and, typically, chose Russia for his wartime exile. Mikolajczyk chose Britain.

Berman has sentimental Charles Boyer eyes, is also known for his Quiz-Kid memory, his eloquence and his highly unsentimental political skill. The current renaissance of Poland’s traditionally virulent anti-Semitism increases his unpopularity (Berman is a Jew), but his power is enormous. No document moves in. or out of the Premier’s office without his O.K., and foreign diplomats, when stymied elsewhere, go to him for decisive action. A foreign visitor once called him: “A Harry Hopkins without a Roosevelt.” The comparison applies to Berman’s behind-the-scenes role, not to his objectives.

The Difference. Last week, Berman and his fellow Communists, who knew that Mikolajczyk would win any fair election, were efficiently making sure that the Jan. 19 election would not be fair. Not a single member of Miko’s Peasant Party was named to any of the 52 district committees which will supervise the voting. The Peasant Party’s newspaper, Gazeta Ludowa, was crippled by constant arrests among its staff members (among the first to go was its chief crime reporter).

To close any breaches in the anti-Mikolajczyk front, Communist and Socialist leaders last week slipped away to a secret meeting place and formalized an already existing working agreement for a full fighting alliance against “all symptoms of reaction.”

First result: Socialists who did not like the merger were arrested by the Government’s Security Police. Premier Edward Osubka-Morawski, a Socialist who obviously gets along with the Communists, was not one of these. He grimly underlined the connection between electoral victory and control of the police in a memorable statement: “No Polish Government has ever been defeated in an election. The record won’t be broken.”

Unbowed, Mikolajczyk continued his campaign as best he could. He fully endorsed the Government’s economic program, including nationalization and land reform. Said one of his lieutenants: “The main difference is—we believe in civil liberties.”

The Threat. The U.S. last week sent a probably futile note to Warsaw protesting the Government’s violation of the Yalta provision for a “free and unfettered” vote. The one concrete result of continued Western watchfulness, as evidenced by the U.S. note, was Mikolajczyk’s personal safety—so far. But foreign correspondents in Warsaw feared that, after a Communist election victory, things might take a grimmer turn between the neighbors of No. 16 Szucha Avenue. Few people would be surprised if there should be a sudden vacancy. As everywhere else, apartments are scarce in Warsaw and Mikolajczyk crowds the city, anyhow.