Nation Stops in its Tracks to Tune In : No. 1 on Radio in Poland: Daily Broadcasts of Trial

It was almost 10 p.m., and the guests at a Warsaw dinner party, about half of them Polish journalists, began stealing discreet glances at their watches.

Then someone asked if there was a radio in the house. No, the host replied, it was broken. Almost as if on cue, the guests rose, grabbed their coats and, with profuse apologies, headed for home.

A Warsaw professor, lecturing in a church one evening recently, had the same experience. “Around 9:45, people began getting restless,” he said. “By 10, the hall was empty.”

Much of Poland seems to stop in its tracks these days to tune in to the most extraordinary domestic radio program anyone here remembers hearing in 40 years of Communist rule.

For half an hour each weekday night, starting at 10:30, testimony from the trial of four secret police officers charged with murdering Father Jerzy Popieluszko is broadcast to the nation. Poland listens with the rapt attention that Americans paid a decade ago to the Watergate hearings in the Administration of President Richard M. Nixon.

“There is no other topic of conversation but this trial,” a middle-aged Warsaw intellectual said. “Usually, it’s where did you buy this or that, how much did it cost. But not now.”

The trial in the northern city of Torun, now in its third week, has eclipsed what would otherwise be the topic of the day in Poland--the government’s latest round of proposed price increases.

It is not simply the gravity of the crime that has caught the nation’s interest, or even the high drama of an immensely popular, pro-Solidarity priest martyred in a Soviet Bloc nation for his advocacy of the truth as he saw it.

What has riveted the attention of Poles as much as anything is the revealing window this open trial has provided on the inner workings and the mindset of the secret police, the pervasive and powerful security apparatus that has kept the Communist Party in power for two generations.

All Poland has heard the pitifully slurred stammer of Lt. Waldemar Chmielewski, who is said to have suffered a nervous collapse after his arrest, telling how his superior, Capt. Grzegorz Piotrowski, recruited him with assurances that “high-level” authorities had given them a free hand to act against troublesome priests.

He was not to worry about being caught, the lieutenant said Piotrowski told him after the priest’s battered body was dumped in the Vistula River, because “the criminology department belongs to us,” and all would be covered up.

There was the smooth baritone voice of Capt. Piotrowski himself, accused of organizing the kidnaping and murder. Controlled and haughty, he depicted Popieluszko as a dangerous subversive and spoke with chilling casualness of discussions about throwing priests off moving trains and terrorizing militant clergymen to the “verge of a heart attack” because the nation’s political leaders hesitated to curb them by legal means.

Col. Adam Pietruszka, the most senior of the four officers on trial and deputy head of the discreetly named 4th Department of the security service, which keeps the Roman Catholic Church under surveillance, has come across as a dissembler so inept that at one point a judge asked him when he plans to start telling the truth. According to a Polish legal publication, he has the lowest IQ of the four.

There was no discussion of physical violence, the 47-year-old colonel has insisted, in a rasping, almost plaintive voice with the inflection of a man with a modest education. His orders, Poles have heard, were simply to gather “compromising” materials on priests who criticized the state, to blackmail them into silence and submission.

“For us Poles, you can’t imagine what a revelation this has been,” said a woman who listens regularly. “These people live in a world of their own, above the law. . . . All the evidence the church ever needs that it is persecuted is right here.”

Polish newspapers, which are among the least restricted in Eastern Europe, have pulled nearly abreast of Western papers in their detailed coverage of the trial.

“Look at this,” a prominent establishment journalist remarked in amazement the other day as he unfolded a copy of the party daily Trybuna Ludu with its long columns of trial coverage. “This is the kind of space normally reserved for dull political speeches and pronouncements.”

Censors, some of whom are on duty in the Torun courthouse for Polish journalists covering the trial, have not left the news columns and broadcasts untouched, but their touch is exceptionally light. They have suppressed, though, Col. Pietruszka’s statements implicating his superior, Gen. Zenon Platek, in a cover-up. This is apparently a sign that the state does not take Pietruszka’s statements seriously.

Television news, in its nightly minute or two of film clips from the trial, tries to protect the identities of secret police officers summoned as witnesses while still serving on active duty by showing them from behind and using only their first names and last initials.

Field Day for Western Radio

Many Poles, however, fill in the gaps and learn the officers’ full names by tuning in to a multitude of shortwave broadcasts beamed to Poland by foreign stations, which receive uncensored reports from the 10 Western news organizations allowed into the courtroom.

“First we get French radio in Polish at 6:30, which is not jammed,” a Warsaw listener explained. “Then there is Radio Free Europe, Voice of America, the BBC from London and, of course, our own. By the end of the evening, you can piece the whole day’s story together.”

Despite the openness of the proceeding, one impression that appears to be widely shared by Poles is that this is a “steered” trial which, if it is not following a script handed down by the government, is certainly proceeding within pre-set bounds of disclosure, perhaps to a predetermined verdict.

The partiality of the presiding judge, Artur Kujawa, has contributed to this impression. For example, he has allowed Capt. Piotrowski to deliver a bitter tirade against the church and activist priests like Popieluszko, but he has made no apparent effort to persuade the captain to answer questions asked by lawyers representing the priest’s family, who have the legal status of auxiliary prosecutors.

Judge Kujawa has also read into the record materials attributed by the secret police to the slain priest, which he condemned as “rabid anti-communism,” and grilled his driver--a former commando who escaped from the kidnapers by leaping out of the car at 60 miles an hour--about Popieluszko’s associations with activists of Solidarity, the outlawed independent labor union.

“Who’s on trial here?” has become a cliche question among many Poles, who regard this as a show trial but a fascinating show, nonetheless.

“A lot of ordinary people think that even if these (officers) get the death penalty, it will never be carried out,” a Warsaw lawyer said. “People think they’ll serve a short time in prison--then they’ll be given new names, new faces, maybe go live quiet lives in the Crimea,” the Soviet Union’s sunny Black Sea coastal region.

For intellectuals, the fate of the four is a less interesting question than the reasons why this trial--which exposes the underside of the secret police to such unaccustomed light--is so open. According to legal authorities, the government could have found ample justification in the law to conduct it behind closed doors, as with trials of several security officers in the late 1950s who were charged with torturing political prisoners during the Stalinist era.

Public relations, by a government eager to rebuild its diplomatic and trade ties with the West, is part of the answer. The implicit message to Poles and to the world at large is that Poland is a nation of laws that does not condone police terror. To put this across, officials acknowledge that they want the widest possible coverage of the trial by Western journalists.

More important, in the view of respected Polish observers, is a message aimed at the rank and file of the Interior Ministry, which includes the uniformed police and the security service.

“This trial is meant to form the basis for a process of change in the ministry, to bring it under tighter control,” a well-informed lawyer said.

Because the Polish leader, Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski, depended so heavily on the security apparatus to maintain power during and immediately after the imposition of martial law in 1981, he could not then afford to curb the police authorities’ growing sense of immunity from the law, a journalist said in a recent conversation.

“Gen. Jaruzelski couldn’t risk cutting the branch he was sitting on,” he said.

The first attempt to puncture the ministry’s sense of autonomy and immunity, the journalist continued, was the May, 1984, trial of police officers accused of beating to death a 17-year-old Solidarity activist, Grzegorz Przemyk, a year earlier. Putting police in the dock for what amounted to political murder was unprecedented in itself, but it backfired when the officers were acquitted.

“Believe it or not, the courts in Poland are independent--in the sense that they will not convict if the evidence is insufficient,” the journalist said.

Wrong Message

Although the court could have ordered the state prosecutor to reopen its investigation, it failed to do so, perhaps for political reasons, and thus may have sent the police and security service a message opposite from the one intended: that political violence, if not condoned at the top, could at least be covered up.

According to Polish observers, the public trial of Popieluszko’s killers is meant to erase such ambiguities, and at the same time demonstrate that the government will not tolerate what it regards as anti-communist subversion by clergymen.

The trial is also supposed to give impetus to a nationwide review of Interior Ministry personnel, a review intended to assert stronger discipline from the top. And a newly appointed deputy interior minister, Andrzej Gdula, is expected to rebuild internal party controls in the ministry.

Some doubt that this particular rogue elephant can be tamed for long, given the leadership’s dependence on it.

But a respected journalist, relegated to a minor job for his pro-Solidarity sympathies, describes the decision to hold an open trial as a courageous act by Jaruzelski.

“Whether he will succeed is another question,” the journalist said, adding, “The security apparatus will never forgive him for the humiliation it has suffered.”