Advertisement

Together in a Lifetime of Activism : For Polish Couple, Struggle Came Early

Share
Times Staff Writer

Zbigniew Romaszewski was born in Warsaw in 1940--not a great time to be alive in this city. In 1945, after a year’s detention, he and his mother were released from the Gross-Rosen concentration camp, near what is now the city of Wroclaw. His earliest memories are of apocalypse and mercy.

“I was very young,” he said, “so what I remember is like snapshots only. I remember our house burning in Warsaw, during the uprising, with my toys inside. I remember the awful stench of the latrines at Gross-Rosen. And I remember, when the Americans liberated the camp, the wonderful taste of rice cooked with milk, and bean soup.”

Children of Poland

Zofia Romaszewski, his wife, was born the same year and into the same caldron. She remembers, around the age of 4, being lost on a train. Like all Polish children of that age and in that time, she had memorized the names and addresses of relatives and, with the help of strangers, she found her way to the home of an aunt, who cared for her until the war’s end.

Advertisement

Such beginnings, it would seem, prepared the Romaszewskis for a life of political activism, for their deep involvement with the Solidarity independent trade union movement, for the months of underground hiding followed by months of jail, 35 years later.

Fire, Hunger and Horror

But it is probably better to think of those earlier years of fire, hunger and horror as a backdrop for what was to follow, for it was during the aftermath of World War II and the imposition of Stalin’s communism on Poland that the real seeds of a life in opposition were sown.

“In Poland, starting at age 7 or 8, your political views become definite,” Romaszewski said last week. “You see this system does not fit Poland and you are opposed to it.”

Last week, the Romaszewskis were honored for that credo, which guides them still in an uphill battle to defend hundreds of Polish workers and citizens in a variety of grievances against unfair factory managements, police brutality and government oppression--in short, to right some of the wrongs in a system that does not fit.

The award, to both Romaszewskis, came from Stanford University’s Aurora Foundation, to honor their activities on behalf of human rights in Poland. The award, which carries a grant of $50,000 for each of them, was accepted on their behalf by Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz, considered Poland’s greatest living poet. They say they plan to use the money to continue their human rights activities.

The Romaszewskis’ applications for passports to attend the award ceremonies Thursday, which was the United Nations’ “International Day of Human Rights,” were denied by the authorities, who called their travel plans “dangerous to the interests of the state.”

Advertisement

Seven Arrested

Nevertheless, the event was celebrated here with a Mass in a Warsaw church. And perhaps the most significant expression of the day in this country was the arrest of seven opposition activists who chained themselves to a lamppost and, from the scaffolding of a construction site, unfurled banners calling for the release of political prisoners.

Poland officially claims to have no political prisoners, but Romaszewski, who heads Solidarity’s human rights monitoring committee, is unimpressed with the government disclaimers. His committee’s annual report, issued last week, noted that at least 700 Poles have been fined by misdemeanor courts over the past 12 months, many of them opposition activists who have been repeatedly hauled into police stations around the country and held for 48 hours.

“The fines are increasing,” Romaszewski says. “They are now about 40,000 to 45,000 zlotys ($125 to $140).” The average monthly wage in Poland is about 30,000 zlotys.

Although the government has avoided leveling political charges at activist figures, it has sometimes resorted to criminal statutes to take them out of circulation. One, for example, has been jailed for failure to make alimony payments. At least 10 men have been jailed for refusing military service.

All of this, to activists such as the Romaszewskis, represents the present atmosphere of Poland, a country locked in a seemingly endless economic and political crisis. It is an atmosphere like the winter climate--cold, gray, veiled in bad air.

The Romaszewskis’ apartment, at the top of a dim green stairway in one of Warsaw’s anonymous post-war blocks, seems a shelter from gloom. The furnishings are modest but comfortable. The light is soft and warm. Three walls in the living room are lined with books, political studies side-by-side with scientific journals.

Advertisement

Zbigniew Romaszewski is a physicist, a discipline that seems to have become an afterthought in the turbulence of the last decade. He is slender, sharp-featured, a man who chooses his words with care and concentration.

Zofia Romaszewski seems a complimentary force, soft of expression, lively, quick to laughter. She also studied physics. For many years, both earned income teaching or tutoring.

Young Political Activist

They met not in the classroom, however, but in politics. It was 1956--they were both 16--and Zofia Ploska, the daughter in an old and distinguished family which was deeply involved in the scouting movement, had been collecting money to buy drugs for an airlift to Hungary, where Soviet troops and tanks had invaded to put down a revolution. She met Romaszewski at a youth conference.

At the same time, they both decided they could not join the Union of Socialist Youth. It was to be a lasting alliance. They were married four years later.

Through most of the 1960s, they studied, taught and worked. A daughter was born in 1962. In 1968, Romaszewski went to the Soviet Union to study.

“It was an important time,” he recalled. “The flowering of independent culture in the Soviet Union. It was the time of (writer Alexander) Solzhenitsyn, the first samizdat (underground) publications, the time of the formation of a Soviet opposition.”

He remembers, he said, the sheer wonder and inspiration in the news that seven dissident figures had staged a protest in Moscow’s Red Square.

Advertisement

“This really struck me, that people could be that courageous and that determined.”

After his return to Poland, the Romaszewskis, almost inevitably, were drawn to the circle of intellectuals, meeting first in discussion groups, concerned with reforming the Polish system.

In 1976, when the Committee for the Defense of Workers’ Rights (KOR) was formed, the Romaszewskis were among its central activists. They have remained among Poland’s leading opposition forces ever since.

KOR’s principal focus was on the plight of striking workers, originally at Radom and Ursus. It began by raising money for legal defense and family support and campaigned for an official inquiry into police brutality.

Poverty in Radom

“We used to hitchhike to Radom,” Romaszewski recalled. “It was an awful place. I never thought there was such poverty in Poland. We saw real human misery. And masses of police.”

“The town,” Zofia Romaszewski said, “was drunk, dark and beaten by police. It was terrorized.”

In the last three months of 1976, Romaszewski made 43 trips to Radom. At first, the workers and their families were suspicious of the Warsaw intellectuals in their midst.

Advertisement

“But we had an effect,” Romaszewski said. “We saw we gave these people hope. They met with human kindness, human solidarity. It was very important for them.”

KOR also left behind the beginning of a local organization; it became a precursor to Solidarity. When the independent trade union burst on the scene in 1980, the Romaszewskis were deeply involved in it as well. When martial law was declared Dec. 13, 1981, both of them, by luck, avoided arrest. Romaszewski, a member of Solidarity’s national commission, was on a train from Gdansk. He got off when it stopped on the outskirts of Warsaw. Zofia Romaszewski was at a party. The police came to the apartment while she was at the party and raided the party after she had left for home.

Solidarity, banned by decree, went underground.

And Zofia Romaszewski became famous, in April, 1982, as the voice of Radio Solidarity, whose first eight-minute broadcast was one of the dramatic triumphs of that underground.

Although most subsequent broadcasts were jammed by the government--with blasts of American rock ‘n’ roll--Radio Solidarity broadcasts seemed a tonic for the union’s millions of supporters, who also enjoyed the sight of the authorities’ frantic efforts to locate the radio transmitter, usually set atop some Warsaw apartment building. The broadcasts were all prerecorded on cassette tapes.

Informer’s Tip

The Romaszewskis were arrested later that summer, apparently on an informer’s tip, and tried by a military court. He was sentenced to 4 1/2 years in prison. She was given three years. They were both released, after more than six months, in one of the amnesties declared by the government.

Their work has gone on, the focus of it much as it was in the days of KOR. It is not easy. Their activities are closely watched and, they suspect, their efforts sometimes sabotaged. Recently their car went out of control on the open road. It was destroyed and one of the passengers injured. Romaszewski cannot say for sure, but he suspects the car had been tampered with because he was always careful to keep it maintained and it had only recently been serviced. The trunk of the car, in the months before the accident, had been broken into repeatedly.

Advertisement

Hovering over it all is that chill sense of crisis, so far unrelieved by the Polish government’s efforts--half-hearted, Romaszewski believes--at reform. Real reform, with the present government, is a vain hope, he thinks.

“This regime is based on a group of people who are interested in preserving this system of economic anarchy,” he said. “In the provinces, you have entire corrupted groups that have no wish at all to change the present situation because the present situation guarantees their stability.”

It is, as scholars have noted, the fundamental conflict faced by reform movements in the Communist world.

“These groups constitute the basis of social support for the regime, and therefore the regime has to represent their interests,” Romaszewski said.

The Polish situation, Romaszewski believes, is “very complicated and very bad.” The government fears “economic collapse and the possibility of open revolt.” On the other hand, the society, having grown up with ideas of “social egalitarianism,” is suspicious of change. “All concepts which would lead to the accumulation of capital or the stratification of income would certainly be unpopular and meet with a lot of resistance,” he said. “This transition to purely liberal concepts is a misunderstanding. It won’t work.”

Romaszewski noted that the recent defeat of the government’s referendum on economic reform allows the regime to depict itself as reformist and the society as conservative. The prospect, as he sees it, is further stagnation.

Advertisement

Nonviolent Solution

“It could go on a long time,” he said. “Or it could blow up overnight. The price of blood sausage could go up in the canteens of one of the big steel mills or shipyards, and it could all start. I see increased activity on the part of the people, which is good because it means that possibly a solution can be found without trouble.

“When we started the intervention commission a year ago, it was very hard going. Now we have thousands who are interested.”

In most cases, he noted, the intervention commission, taking up the battles of individuals against the system sometimes in the work place, sometimes in the courts, deals with “small things.”

Zofia Romaszewski interrupted.

“It starts with small things,” she said, “but it also involves big things, like personal freedom. We go from factory canteens to human rights. It’s important. People need freedom very much.”

Advertisement