Something else was new. In the square in front of the people’s palace – across the road from TK Maxx and Pizza Hut – an ‘ordinary’ 54-year-old father of two had set himself on fire. On a balmy October afternoon Piotr Szczęsny, a grey-haired chemist from Niepołomice, had distributed leaflets indicting the ruling party for its attacks on the rule of law. He wore an autumn-brown sweater and black woollen scarf. He poured flammable liquid over his body and immolated himself.
‘I call on you all – do not wait any longer!’ his leaflet begged his fellow Poles. ‘This government must be changed as fast as possible before it completely destroys our country, before it completely deprives us of freedom.’
Szczęsny wanted his suicide to ‘shake the consciences of people’ and for ‘the entire PiS nomenclature’ to acknowledge that ‘they have my blood on their hands’. He also wanted them to desist from perpetrating their divisive, inflammatory ‘religion of the Smolensk air crash tragedy’. In response, the government-controlled media shrugged him off as mentally unstable.
On the spot where he’d set himself alight – surrounded by dozens of bunched flowers and votive candles – I stared at the paving stone memorial into which were stamped Szczęsny’s last words, ‘ja, zwykły szary człowiek’.
I, an ordinary grey person.
Above Warsaw the evening breeze drew tiers of cloud across the sky like runs of staggered curtains: hazy sheers, diaphanous lace, heavy velvet drapes. Once or twice the veils parted and clear silver light flooded over the broad avenues and wet paving stones. But for the most part the clouds massed together, banishing the sun behind their mottled screen, letting it cast neither shadow nor clarity, lighting the city but illuminating nothing.
Thirty years ago when I’d first written about Kryśka, I’d changed both her name and her occupation to disguise her identity, so as to protect her. I did not suspect that, thirty years on, I’d consider doing it again, as Poland – ‘boring’ Poland – stepped into the unknown, into an era when nothing was certain, filling me with a sense of awful premonition.
29
Devil’s Domain
In 1940, 22,000 Polish soldiers, surgeons, lawyers, landowners, fathers and sons were executed by Soviet secret state police – shot in the back of the head, their corpses dumped twelve deep in vast mass graves. All had been herded to that evil place beyond the eastern border. All were killed to wipe out the country’s elite.
Seventy years later an aircraft plunged into the fog above the devil’s domain. On board were Poland’s president and ninety-five other senior officials. On the anniversary of the Katyn massacre they were flying to Smolensk, the nearest airport to the haunted forest. Bad weather made the landing risky but an urgent political incentive drove the president.
Three days earlier Vladimir Putin had stood in that forest, with the Polish president’s political rival, Donald Tusk. In a rare demonstration of reconciliation, Putin had admitted that the Soviet crime ‘cannot be justified in any way’. Russian and Pole had shaken hands over the graves. Their gesture promised a new era of cooperation between the two countries. It dominated the national news. Now the Polish president simply had to reach Katyn. He had to be photographed at the graveside. On its final approach, after speaking to his twin brother on the radio telephone, his Tupolev Tu-154 slammed into the ground 200 metres short of the runway, killing all on board.
Within hours of the accident, conspiracy theories seized – or were foisted upon – the Polish imagination. There’d been a bomb on board. The pilots had been lured to disaster. The fog around the airport had been artificially produced. None of the claims could be substantiated, but it mattered not for the tragedy – like that of the 1940 massacre – fed the cult of martyrdom, which was then exploited for political ends.
In 2016 Smolensk set out to legitimise the false narrative. In the Polish-made movie a fictional journalist named Nina refuses to accept the official version of events. Instead she launches her own investigation, interacting with other actors as well as actual persons, ‘proving’ that sinister forces caused the crash. Scripted scenes and documentary footage are intercut for dramatic effect: a mysterious ‘International No. 1’ instructs the presidential Tupolev to descend too low, KGB heavies seize a reporter’s camera at the crash site, salvage workers smash the wreck’s windows to martial music and the victims’ metal coffins are welded shut to hide evidence. Finally, the ghosts of Katyn – dignified and tall in polished Second World War uniforms – greet Poland’s newest martyrs to the afterlife, saluting the assassinated president, shaking hands with his dead wife, weeping together at the grave pit.
‘I feel I need to make this film, even if it is me against everyone else,’ its director Antoni Krauze declared with lashings of hyperbole. ‘I intend to show the truth.’
In truth Krauze was far from being alone. As many as half of all Poles had been taken in by one or other of the conspiracy theories, and thousands of them donated money to finance the film. One pensioner gave three lots of ten złoty (about $3), apologising that it was all she could afford. Crowdfunding, topped up in part by the right-wing Smoleńsk 2010 Foundation, kick-started pre-production.
The rest of the budget was less easy to find. The Polish Film Institute – not yet controlled by the ruling PiS – did not fall for the celluloid yarn. No international distributor wanted to invest in it. The actor Marian Opania – who had been asked to play the part of the president – declared in public that he would not appear in a film ‘based on lies’. As a result the project teetered on the brink of collapse, until an anonymous donor coughed up $1.5 million.
On completion Smolensk was awarded the ‘Honourable Patronage of the President of Poland’ (despite the president’s wife and daughter missing its premiere to take in a new Woody Allen movie). It also picked up a record seven Polish ‘Serpent’ anti-Oscars, including worst film, worst director, worst female role and most embarrassing scene of the year. For all the controversy, one fact above all was undeniably true about Smolensk. It was a real turkey.
There were three of them, and I’d expected only one. Six months earlier he had flown to London to interview me about my books for his weekly arts programme. When I’d rung him to arrange a Warsaw meeting, he didn’t mention his friends. Nor that he was now head of the network.
‘Our duty is to regain Poland,’ he said, pouring a fine Château Gruaud Larose (2ème cru, 2007). He was sandy-haired and pale of eye. I’ll call him Janek.
‘Think of it as a crusade,’ suggested Mateusz. Again, not his real name. His sharp and craggy face brought to mind a prizefighter. He had just been promoted as well, from reporter to deputy controller of a ‘rival’ channel.