COLUMN ONE : A Tree Grows in Bialowieza : Poland has managed to preserve Europe’s last truly primeval forest. It now stands as a rare victory in the pollution-scarred East.

The most striking feature of the forest, on first glimpse, is not the living trees but the dead ones.

They lie where they have fallen, grown thickly over with lichen and moss, liverwort and fern, and sink slowly back into the earth. It is an arboreal version of an elephant’s graveyard, suggesting the passage of massive living things. It is a place where a respectful hush seems appropriate.

But this is not a dying forest or an ecological disaster, so common in much of Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe, where 40 years of Communist heavy industry and its noxious fumes have stunted and maimed millions of acres of forested land.

Instead, Bialowieza (pronounced bee-ALL-of-YEZ-huh), with its striking view of fallen trees--among hundreds of thousands of living ones--represents an ecological success story.

It is even more rare than tales of environmental restoration, for Bialowieza has never had to undergo restoration. It is today what it has always been. It is the last truly primeval forest left in Europe--uncut, untended and perfectly natural. According to those who watch over its fortunes and those who come to study its characteristics, Bialowieza looks today the way it looked 2,000 years ago.

Which is, in a word, awesome. Here are oak trees, in their wild and natural settings, 500 years old, 140 feet tall, majestic and magnificent lords of the forest. There are pines and spruce trees, half that age, towering 160 feet; lindens to dwarf the coddled specimens lining the boulevards of Berlin and other European capitals; ash trees that would supply the Los Angeles Dodgers with bats into the next century; even a few towering elms, survivors, in their isolation, of the Dutch elm disease that has ravaged those trees across Europe and North America.

Once the private hunting grounds of Polish kings, Russian princes and Lithuanian dukes, Bialowieza has been protected against encroachment by farmers and woodcutters, ancient and modern, by virtue of royal writ and happy accident.

The Polish government, since 1921, has recognized the treasure the forest represents and has guarded it closely. In 1977, it was recognized by UNESCO as a “biosphere preserve” and in 1979 was included as the only natural site on the United Nations’ World Heritage list.

Bialowieza National Park is 11,867 acres, or 18 1/2 square miles. The park itself lies at the center of a larger forest, covering 482 square miles and straddling the border of Poland and the Soviet Republic of Belarus, formerly known as Byelorussia. (Before the end of World War II, it was all Polish; now the Soviets claim sightly more than half, or 259 square miles. During the 19th-Century partition of Poland, the Russians had it all.)

The national park that forms the core of the forest in Poland is, in the parlance of the park officials, “strictly controlled,” meaning that it is not controlled at all but rather strictly protected.

“We don’t introduce trees, and we don’t intervene,” said Czeslaw Okolow, the park’s curator, who has worked here for 31 years. “In nature, each element has its function, and in the park, the idea is to allow that process to go on unimpeded.”

It means that when a tree falls here, it falls because of the forces of nature--sometimes wind, winter ice storms, spring lightning, sometimes disease or old age. But never because of the ax or the chain saw. Only when a tree crashes across one of the old grid roads in the forest (spaced at one- verst intervals, the old Russian measurement representing about two-thirds of a mile) do the foresters cut the fallen timber and use horses to drag it clear of the trail. No motor vehicles are allowed in the park.

Okolow says park officials are even undecided about what they should do in the event of a forest fire. Luckily, there has never been one in the park itself, although a small one occurred several years ago in the surrounding forest.

“It would be a difficult decision,” Okolow said. “To some extent, fire is a natural force, and there would be an argument, if one occurred, about whether it should be allowed to run its natural course.”

In 1960, Okolow said, a “long and hot” debate went on among the forest’s managers over the fate of an oak tree, believed to be about 600 years old, and obviously diseased, which had become known to visitors as the “King Jagiello Oak,” after one of Poland’s most famous monarchs.

“It was known that Jagiello did hunt in Bialowieza at least twice,” Okolow said, “in 1409 and 1426, and the legend grew up that he had camped underneath this particular oak tree. Of course, no one really knows if he did or not, but that was the attractive legend, and people accepted it.”

The argument was over whether to send in the tree surgeons to intervene and prolong the oak’s life or let nature take its course. Eventually, the latter argument prevailed. The tree fell 14 years later, 126 feet of ancient oak crashing to the ground.

“We organized a press conference,” Okolow remembers, “and officially said goodby to it.”

It is still on the forest guides’ route through the park. Even after having lain on its side on the forest floor for 17 years, covered thickly now with lichen and moss, it remains an impressive sight.

Located on Poland’s eastern border, Bialowieza is well off the beaten track for tourists, and its relative isolation has helped ensure its preservation.

A few German bird-watching groups make organized treks to the forest in the spring, and busloads of Polish students arrive for outings each week during the school year, mainly to visit the park’s museum, fidget through lectures and romp through the hallways of the nearby hotel in the evenings. But the children barely venture beyond the forest edge, and the bird watchers leave no noticeable impression on the place.

Inside the park, a deep stillness prevails in autumn, a quiet in which the falling of leaves is audible. Taking up a vigil on a fallen log and sitting for a time, a visitor can often hear the approach of forest pigs, sows foraging with groups of their young. Roe deer and small herds of elk pass by, catch the human scent and bolt away through the forest.

Canny, elusive ravens soar overhead, croaking hoarsely to their mates, vanish for a time, circle back for a second look, then disappear for good. On a lucky afternoon, a visitor might catch a passing glimpse of a lesser spotted eagle (or its cousin, the great spotted eagle), its big wings flashing for a second before it disappears between the trees.

There are at least five species of eagles resident in the park, and half a dozen species of owls, including the eagle owl, the great grays and snowy owls. The peregrine falcon is here, along with about 20 other raptor, or hawk, species. The park is also home to 53 mammals, including lynx, wolf, beaver, marten, moose and the European forest bison.

The bison were brought back to the forest in 1929, a decade after the last free-living bison were shot by poachers. A successful breeding program allowed them to be reintroduced here, and a herd estimated at 275 now roams freely in the park and the surrounding forest.

All this has proven to be a naturalist’s bonanza, and nearly 6,500 scientific papers have been produced on the flora and fauna of Bialowieza, about 1,300 of them centered on research in the national park. Since the first permanent research station was established in 1932, three others have set up operation in the neighboring village of Bialowieza. Scholars at the Mammal Research Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences have adopted methods of tracking used by naturalists in Africa, placing radio collars on lynx and marten to trace their movements.

That is about as intrusive a study as Okolow and the Scientific Council will allow. There can be no permanent installations in the forest, and no study is allowed that will disrupt its natural patterns.

Camps in the park are not permitted. When a scientist recently asked to be allowed to record the night sounds of the forest, he was permitted to take only his sleeping bag and his tape recorder. And, indeed, the night sounds of the forest, mainly the screeching of the owls, can be strange and riveting, a sharp contrast to the daytime stillness.

But Bialowieza, Okolow says, is not immune to the surrounding environmental problems. Air pollution from distant industrial sites, pollution of rivers, the clear-cutting of nearby forests, the possible effect of a rising water table resulting from the damming of the Narewka River on the park’s southern edge--all are real or potential threats.

Okolow’s solution: “The park needs to be bigger.”

Enlarging it, he said, would ensure that a full variety of ecosystems, typical of a whole forest complex, would be included within the park’s protection. For example, as impressive as the park is to a visitor, it includes only 450 of the 1,050 species of vascular plants known in the full forest range. Moreover, some birds and animals--among them moose, wolf, lynx, spotted eagles, cranes and eagle owls--require large territories and cannot exist entirely within the present park boundaries.

Seven years ago, the park’s Scientific Council came up with a plan to quadruple the park’s size and double the area under strict protection. But the plan has not been adopted by the government, which has higher claims on its list of environmental concerns, including the massive damage from air pollution in the heavily industrialized southern areas of the country. Large Polish cities, including Warsaw, dump their sewage, untreated, directly into the country’s rivers.

Bialowieza may not see its borders expanded any time soon. Next to places such as Katowice, Krakow or Lodz, it is a veritable Eden, however small. That may be as perfect as it gets.