Poles Handle Fallout With Old Remedies: Black Humor, Vodka

WARSAW — With nowhere else to hide, Poles are taking refuge from the radioactive fallout that has dusted their country more severely than most in the sturdiest of Polish remedies, black humor and a touch of vodka.

“I don’t think anyone I know is completely sober,” said a youthful office worker in Warsaw at one point last week. “If you can’t drink the tap water, what else is there?”

The authorities have not, in fact, advised against drinking tap water, but some Western embassies have. And in a nation that thrives on rumors, and tends to put more faith in some foreign governments than its own, that’s good enough.

While the government is handing out millions of protective doses of jod-- iodine--to children, one inventive Pole has devised a version for grown-ups, called jodynowka : Four drops of iodine, just enough to impart a gagging metallic taste, to half a liter of vodka.

Radiation humorists have noted that the Soviet Union has thus finally achieved its long-sought goal of a nuclear-free zone in Europe--as free as the wind.

And what was the most popular political slogan in Communist Eastern Europe in the wake of recent May Day celebrations? “Long live our radiant friendship with the Soviet Union.”

Among the radiation riddles circulating in Warsaw is one that asks, “What flies and glows in the dark?” Chicken Kiev, of course.

Paper’s Contribution

Perhaps inadvertently, Friday’s edition of the Warsaw newspaper Zycie Warszawy made a small contribution to radiation humor with a brief item from Moscow on its front page that some Poles pointed out with malicious glee.

The item announced final preparations for the 39th annual “Race for Peace,” an international bicycle run scheduled to begin Tuesday in Kiev, just 60 miles south of the reactor at Chernobyl.

The Soviet team’s “elimination heat,” the notice blandly reported, took place on April 26. That was the day the reactor is believed to have gone up in smoke.

But the one item that many seem to find the funniest is also the most obscure: “What’s the most poisonous dose of radiation?”

One rem.

Rem, as it happens, is not only a unit of radiation exposure but the pseudonym of Poland’s most vitriolic press commentator, the government’s widely disliked chief spokesman Jerzy Urban, who signs his articles “Jan Rem.”