For much of the twentieth century, Poles could only dream of freedom. During the Second World War Hitler had tried to reduce the country to a nation of serf-like ‘helots’. Those not exterminated at Auschwitz would survive as slaves of the Reich. At the same time Stalin sent 1.5 million Poles to his gulags. By 1945 one in five Poles had been eradicated along with 352 hospitals, 5,919 schools, 17 universities, 25 museums, 22 million library books and 50 per cent of the road, rail and sea transport infrastructure. When Poland was ‘liberated’ by the Red Army, it was in ruins, and in chains.
Kryśka herself had rallied against the Soviet occupation on protest marches, in defiance of martial law, by printing banned literature. She had been born in leafy Żoliborz, Warsaw’s joli bord – beautiful embankment – and home to the capital’s intelligentsia. In the riverside neighbourhood of old villas and persistent ideals, she’d grown up with a sense that she was part of a greater community, with responsibilities towards it. She was seventeen when Solidarność, the first free trade union in a Warsaw Pact country, was founded. Aged eighteen she joined its student wing, Niezależne Zrzeszenie Studentów, and helped to print Animal Farm. Across the country hundreds of brave souls like her took huge risks to collect paper, type mimeograph pages, bind and distribute forbidden books and newssheets in secret. Everywhere lurked the danger of discovery, arrest, imprisonment – or worse. They published Orwell, Bulgakov and samizdat political brochures. Truth-telling – as she had told me at our first meeting – could have cost them their lives.
In the end the ‘paper ammunition’ helped to send communism ‘to the mushrooms’.
‘Suddenly we could breathe freely, people could associate freely, fear vanished.’
But after graduation and the fall of the Wall, Kryśka, then aged twenty-six and working as an anaesthetist in a state hospital, couldn’t afford to feed herself and her young daughter. She joined Novo Nordisk, one of the Western pharmaceutical multinationals pushing into the burgeoning Eastern European market, and became its leading product manager.
‘I chose Novo Nordisk because of its focus on education: running conferences, training medical practitioners, sharing knowledge. I used its expertise to help to build a better country, while building a new life for myself.’
As Poland became the most dynamic economy of the former communist states, Novo Nordisk, like other big pharmas, shifted its focus to profit. Kryśka resigned and returned to state medicine, her sense of social responsibility also driving her to build three educational medical websites: ‘Others Like Me’, a moderated platform for patients with chronic diseases; ‘A Week for Your Spine’, a physiotherapy programme for office workers; and ‘Cure the Pain’, which weaned doctors and nurses from prescribing opiates, the only pain medicine that had been available during the communist years.
Yet despite its economic success, Poland did not become a ‘boring’ country. Many Poles felt left behind – envious of wealthier Germans, allured by the solace of old, imagined certainties – and so turned to ethnic nationalism to fill the void in their lives. They wanted history. They wanted glory. Above all they wanted someone to blame for their perceived misfortune.
PiS, the so-called Law and Justice party, came to power by exploiting their anxieties. The party, led by twin brothers, campaigned on a strident anti-immigration platform. It claimed that migrants from the Middle East took Polish jobs, even though almost no Muslim refugees had settled in the country. It asserted that they brought cholera and dysentery into Europe, spreading ‘various parasites and protozoa’. Then it cemented its rule with bribes – an unaffordable ‘Family 500+’ baby bonus scheme and a lowered pension age – and set about remaking the country as an illiberal democracy: taking overt control of the media, promoting civil servants according to their political allegiance, abolishing the state council tasked with fighting racism. To defend its attacks on civil society, the Law and Justice party spun a story that the transition from communist dictatorship had been a sham, and that it alone could protect – and lead – Poland.
At the age of forty-seven, Kryśka returned to political activism, outraged by the government’s deception, as well as its exploitation of a tragic air disaster. In 2010 a Polish air force Tupolev Tu-154 crashed in thick fog killing one of the twin brothers as well as his wife, the chiefs of the army, navy and air force, the head of the National Bank and ninety other senior officials and veterans. The surviving twin became the country’s leader and set about turning his brother into a martyr. On the same day every month (not just the annual anniversary), Jarosław Kaczyński – the surviving brother – stood in front of Warsaw’s Presidential Palace to deliver a speech in honour of the dead, and to whip up fears of ‘foreign interference’.
Obywatele RP – Citizens of the Polish Republic, the group that Kryśka would join – began its peaceful protest by holding aloft white roses during Kaczyński’s divisive monthly rallies. When he set about politicising the judiciary, she and others paraded into the crowd a banner that quoted his dead brother on the need to ‘fiercely guard’ the courts’ independence.
The leadership’s response was swift and brutal. Police ripped down the banner and parliament outlawed demonstrations at regular political events. Within a month hundreds were awaiting trial for flouting the new, unconstitutional law, or for failing to pay its fines.
‘We were called Poles of the worst sort,’ Kryśka explained. ‘We women and men who demonstrated against the governing party were said to have treason in our genes.’ She rolled up her sleeve to show me her upper arms, bruised black and purple after police had dragged her away from four successive protests in as many weeks. Kryśka was only of medium height yet she always stood out in a crowd.
‘Jestem gorszego sortu!’ she told me, assuring me that she was among the ‘worst sort’. ‘It’s a badge of honour for us, you know.’
Thirty years ago Poland had played a leading role in the collapse of the Soviet bloc. Solidarność had set the stage for the broader revolt across Eastern Europe. Its post-communist leaders had embraced market democracy, NATO and the European Union. But did most Poles no longer care about defending the principles and practices of a free society? Was the country making its own backwards journey, returning to an inward and illiberal past defined by family, church and home?
‘No way,’ replied Kryśka, shaking her head.
I feared the real answer was ‘Not yet.’
Last November, Kryśka and thirteen other women joined Warsaw’s annual Independence Day march. Around them on central Plac Defilad gathered thousands of young couples, old patriots, families on holiday… and a core of ultranationalists wearing Iron Cross hoodies and Polish eagle street wear.
As soon as the march began the extremists slid in from the fringes, chanting, ‘Biała Europa!’ White Europe! They insinuated themselves into the crowd, perverting its party-like atmosphere, igniting flares to cast the square into smoky crimson light. ‘Clean Blood! Pure Poland!’ Their green and black flags stained the sea of Polish colours. Aggression was in the air.
‘The police were afraid. We were afraid,’ Kryśka told me. ‘We had appealed to the city to ban the march, knowing that it would be hijacked but they refused, claiming that there was no proof.’
She and her tiny group walked with furled banner near to the front of the 70,000 marchers.