The Technician - Wlodzimierz Kofman

Wlodzimierz Kofman - Graduate Student, Warsaw

On March 8, 1968, I defended my master’s thesis.

On the 9th, my friends came to celebrate.

On the 11th, I went to Kazimierz to relax, and on the 18th, my parents called and told me to come back immediately to Warsaw because the Security Police had come to my house and summoned me for a witness interview.

I sat in the bar at the Journalists’ Association, deciding what to do.  “Well, too bad, I’d better listen to my parents, they know better.”  Wrong.  I went to Warsaw, to the Mostowski Palace,[1] and I didn’t come out until August.  It turned out that my parents were naïve.

Wlodek Kofman's March 1968 mugshots taken by the Security Police.

My parents were Communists.  My father was in the Young Communist League before the war.

I was asked to name the people who had come to celebrate my master’s thesis.  I told them that I wouldn’t, because it’s not right for a host to do that.  So they took me downstairs to a cell.

It was March 19; Gomulka was making his speech.  I could hear the shouts from the Congress Hall on the radio through an open window. 

I graduated from the electronics division of the Warsaw Polytechnic and I took evening courses in mathematics from the University.  I wanted to be a scientist, to do interesting things in science. 

They moved me [to the prison] on Rakowiecka Street.  The investigation went on, though it wasn’t clear what they were investigating.  The interrogations lasted for hours.

They claimed that the so-called “Commandos” had attended my diploma celebration - which wouldn’t be unusual because they were in my group of friends.  And they alleged that I hadn’t organized a party, but an illegal meeting of organizers of the March Events, in which I also participated.  It wasn’t true.  I was getting ready to defend my thesis, I didn’t have time for politics.  In general I wasn’t too interested in politics.

The Security Policy didn’t insult me, didn’t beat me - I didn’t go through any brutal scenes.  Sometimes they would make sarcastic remarks: “Ah, aren’t you smart, aren’t you educated?”  They had a real anti-intellectual complex. In the prison on Rakowiecka there were many students, many of my friends.

Friends from Litewska Street? Piekna, Koszykowa, the Aleja Roz?

No, I lived next to there - on the Aleja Przyjaciol.

Friends from the Club for Seekers of Contradictions?[2]

That was an old story, from my high school days.  I went to Gottwald, same as Irena Grudzinska and Jan Litynski. 

The problem wasn’t so much that they locked me up …. I don’t know how to express it, but…

But...?

They never said it outright, but I felt it during the course of my interrogations.  For them, the Security Police - I don’t have any doubt about it - for them I was a Jew.  Simply a Jew.  But it wasn’t true.  I was a Pole of Jewish ancestry.  Like many of my friends from Gottwald.  There is a difference between being a Jew and a Pole of Jewish ancestry, right?  Do you see the difference?

At that point, during the interrogations on Rakowiecka, I realized that to them I will always be a Jew.  Never a Pole.  I decided to emigrate.

So you let the Security Police determine your nationality?

It wasn’t just about the Security Police.  You know - there was all the March propaganda, terrible newspaper articles, magazines, radio, television. 

In prison, I decided to emigrate. 

I didn’t know about my ancestry for a long time. Today I think that I knew and I didn’t know.  Only once, in 1957, at a scouting meeting, did someone tell me I was a filthy Jew.  It turned into a physical fight, my friend and I ran off and hopped on a street car.  At home I asked my parents, what’s this about, who am I?  And they were surprised - “you didn’t know”?

It was one incident, for many years I had forgotten it. 

The importance of who my grandparents were, who my parents were, who I was really only became important after March.

Of course, I felt somewhat different, but that was because of my family’s history.  I didn’t have a family - they had died.  All we had were so-called “adopted aunts” who survived because they fled to Russia.  Like my parents and my older brother.  Janek was born in 1941 in Pinsk.  My mother’s family died in Pinsk.  My father’s family died in Warsaw, in the Ghetto.  The only one to survive was my mother’s sister, who moved to Canada after the war.  And only because - ironically - the Russians deported her, a seventeen year-old girl, to Tashkent for “Zionism.”  At home we did not talk about the war.

I got out of prison after five months and I informed my parents that I was emigrating.  My father said: you do what you want.  My mother said: you’re right.  My brother said that he was staying.

My father was a Pole of Jewish ancestry.  My mother came from a bourgeois Jewish family from Pinsk.  She graduated from a Polish preparatory school, and she also knew German and Yiddish well.  My father didn’t.

A lot of bad things happened while I was imprisoned on Rakowiecka. 

They threw my father out of his job - that was still in March - right after my arrest.  To this day, I still don’t know whether he was thrown out because I was arrested, or whether I was arrested to give them a reason to throw him out.  Probably the latter.  My father was the Vice-Chairman of the Committee on Work and Wages.

After my mother died - because my father died first - I found the transcript from the Party meeting at the Committee on Work and Wages in which he was ejected from the Party.  Incredible!  It’s a testament to a terrifying era.  My father was thrown out for raising a bad son, obviously, as well as duplicity, revisionism, and betrayal of the Party.  My father never showed that transcript to anyone.  Years later, reading the statements of his colleagues, I was surprised by the low level of their argumentation, bordering on idiocy, and the primitive language that they used. 

My mother was thrown out of the party, and my brother lost his job a few weeks after my father.  My mother was an editor at a union publishing house.  The official reason given was badly raising her son and “failure to take a position with respect to the March Events and her son’s actions.”   And my brother was fired because he was a Jew.  He graduated from the history department at Warsaw University, and two years later he started to work as an editor at the National Technical Publishers.

I went to the Polytechnic to talk about what would happen with me. Before March, I had been promised an assistant position in the electronics department.  I was the best student in my year.  But now, there was no position for me, not for many years probably.  I asked about a practicum.  After I graduated I was supposed to have done a practicum and the Polytechnic had a list of factories with positions on offer.  They told me they would not give me one, I had to find my own.

I met with my professor, my advisor for my master’s thesis.  A colleague came up to him, they started to talk about something, and my professor is suddenly saying “we, they.”  “They” were the Jews; “we” meant good Poles.

It made me sad - my professor, always so helpful to me, had fallen for the government propaganda forced on us by the authorities.  And maybe he didn’t fall for it, maybe it was already within him somewhere, and suddenly, under favorable circumstances - like with many Poles - it came pouring out.  After all, Poles accepted that bureaucratic propaganda.  They accepted it and they supported it.  Don’t say they didn’t, because they did.

I submitted my emigration papers. 

My friend Adam Kreczmar, a poet, son of the actors Jan and Justyna Kreczmar, suggested to me: “I know the Cultural Attache at the French embassy, I’ll talk to him.”  He put us in touch, and we met in October.   The attache said: “Once you’re in Vienna, contact the French embassy.  I’ll try to arrange a three-year doctoral stipend for you.” 

A year earlier I had been in France for a practicum.  The Polytechnic sent me there.  Not only because I was a good student, but because I knew French.  There weren’t many students who knew French.  I spent six weeks in France, visiting various universities.  I also made it to Grenoble - a university city, nice location in the mountains, very pleasant.  I liked it.  I never imagined that I would end up living there.  Of course, I never imagined I would leave Poland.  I never wanted to leave.  I could do it for a short time, on a scholarship or for a seminar, but never permanently.

I started looking for work.  I was turned down by a few places. Then I went to the ZARAT television transmitter factory.  I told the technical director right away that I had just been released from prison.  He said “It doesn’t matter to me.”  He hired me.

I got my permit to emigrate.  In my travel documents, which specified that I was not a Polish citizen, it listed a date the document was created, but no effective date.  At the French Embassy I was informed that they had thrown us out with documents that had no legal validity.  I was provided with a window of time to leave - I think it was about six weeks.  Suddenly it hit me and my parents that I was leaving.  I started making preparations.  I needed to quickly translate some documents: my diploma, my birth certificate, a certificate from work. 

I submitted my resignation.  I had worked at ZARAT for nine months.  The factory still exists.  Up until that time, no one knew me - except for the people who worked with me in the project office - no one paid attention to me, but when I got my emigration papers, suddenly word went out all over the factory that here’s a Jew who’s emigrating to Israel.  I wasn’t emigrating to Israel, but that wasn’t important.  The workers started coming to see the freak - my coworkers form the office had to chase them away.  On my last day of work, I said goodbye to my friends and I went to the head of the department.  And he said…

Oh, God - what did he say?

There are certain words that you never forget …

Something bad?

No, no - he said: “I hope someday you’ll be able to come back.  I hope you [plural] come back.”

To this day it moves me.

Was he the only one?

The only one. 

I felt that I was expelled.

I know, of course I know, that ’68 was carried out by the Security Police.  That’s all true.  And by the PZPR - that’s also true.

But…

The PZPR was your father’s party.

It wasn’t his party anymore.  It was - I don’t know, maybe I’m using too strong of a term - but it was a sort of fascist machine.

But that machine developed under the leadership of former Communist Party of Poland[3] leaders… 

Yes, in a sense.  For my father, it was a tragedy.  He wasn’t concerned about himself personally, that he was fired from his job.  He had different periods in his life.  He spent nine years in prison for Communist activity; when the war broke out, he fled to Pinsk, where he met my mother while she was handing out soup to the poor.  In 1941, after the outbreak of another war,[4] they sent him to do to labor on the other side of the Urals.  He worked on building roads and then on railroads - first as a woodcutter, then as a bookkeeper.  My mother at that time was with Janek near Leningrad, she worked in a nursery and sent money to my father.  Toward the end of 1944, Aleksandr Zawadzki[5] summoned him to Moscow. 

The hardest thing for him was that suddenly, in Poland, his son was losing his right to be a Pole, and forced to emigrate as a Jew.

Did you talk about that?

Later.  But very little.  When he came to Grenoble to visit me and meet his grandchildren.  Of course, I wasn’t allowed into Poland.  I tried hard for nineteen years.  He visited us with my mother a couple of times.  He didn’t say much.  He was never a big talker.  The one thing he said was that when they were dreaming of Poland - back in Moscow, my father was in the Union of Polish Patriots - they were sure that they were going to build the new, communist Poland differently. 

Better than the Soviets?

Yes.  It’s hard to believe, I know - and slowly, very slowly, it started to dawn on him that what they were building was not good.  It wasn’t about the Soviets.  It was about the system; that it was a dictatorship.  And every dictatorship is bad.  I don’t know when he figured it out, but I think it was a long time ago.  In our house there was no pressure to join the Party, no agitation.  Quite the contrary - my father encouraged us to think critically, it was important to him that my brother and I would be free people, open to to other viewpoints.

Before I emigrated I went with my brother and sister-in-law to visit her family in Kochlowic, in Silesia - it’s a town near Katowice.  We stopped in Czestochowa.  It was my first time there.  We went to Jasna Gora, and to Krakow.  We rode all over the south of Poland.  I was saying farewell to Poland. 

I emigrated with two suitcases, and I had a few books.  I didn’t know where I was emigrating to.  I had a Swedish visa, a Canadian one, and the promise of a stipend in France.  At the station there were my parents, some close friends, my “adopted aunts.” a pretty good number of friends.  I felt like there was about to be a change of worlds.  That Communism was behind me, and before me was the world - but what kind of world?

My brother sat with me on the train.  He took me as far as Katowice. I don’t remember what we talked about.  Then we said goodbye. 

[1]      Location of the Security Police headquarters.

[2]      The “Club for Seekers of Contradictions” or Klub Poszukiwaczy Sprzecznosci was an informal discussion group of high school students in Warsaw in the early 1960s, including future “commandos” such as Adam Michnik.

[3]      Prior to World War II, there were separate Socialist (PPS - Polska Partia Socjalistyczna) and Communist (KPP - Komunistyczna Partia Polski) parties in Poland.  In the post-war consolidation of Soviet power, the parties were consolidated into the Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza (PZPR, or Polish Unified Workers’ Party).  Under the Soviets, the former Communist (KPP) leadership was favored over the pre-war Socialists.

[4]      Referring to the outbreak of war between the formerly allied Soviet Union and Germany following the surprise German invasion of the Soviet Union in violation of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.

[5]      Former Communist Party of Poland leader in exile in the Soviet Union beginning in 1931.  After the war he returned to Poland and served, among other positions, as President from 1952-56.