Poles Are Invited to NATO Ball, but No One’s Dancing

The decision Tuesday to invite Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic to join NATO will forever alter the political geography of Eastern Europe, perhaps most remarkably in places such as this historic Baltic seaport, site of the first battle of World War II and a cradle of the anti-Communist rebellion.

Perhaps nowhere in the former East Bloc has a citizenry toiled harder to shed two burdens of 20th century Europe--Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia--and been so disappointed by its patrons in the West. For many toughened but proud Poles, the Madrid announcement comes as vindication of causes once thought lost.

“There is great satisfaction that this day has come,” Lech Walesa, the former Polish president and Solidarity trade union founder, said in his office here. “We are not entering NATO to save ourselves, but to introduce peace to all of Europe.”

Yet for all the striving and longing, the mood here Tuesday was somber, not euphoric; entrance into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was welcomed but not rejoiced over.

After years of reaching, the people of Gdansk--and much of Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary--are uncertain about their catch. Huge numbers of Poles support NATO membership; history, however, looms too ominously for older generations to get caught up in emotions of the moment, and younger Poles already take Western ways for granted.

“My son lives in a different world, with a computer and a television with 36 channels,” said Jerzy Borowczak, 40, who was imprisoned under communism for his political activities and is now head of Solidarity at the bankrupt Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk. “For his generation, what I went through might as well have been the Napoleonic wars.”

Until President Clinton announced that he will visit Warsaw during this week’s trip to Europe, there were no plans in Poland to publicly mark the NATO invitation. The Madrid summit did not even top the evening news on Polish television Tuesday, getting second billing to deadly floods in southern Poland and the Czech Republic.

“I am in favor of NATO admission because it is in fashion to be so, but we Poles have experience with such military pacts before World War II and know how little they can mean,” Borowczak said. “The French still can’t look us in the eye, and the same with the British.”

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Outside the shipyard’s main gate, Aleksandra Olszewska, wearing a striped smock and bright pink lipstick, tended to the hundreds of flowers that adorn a cluster of monuments to the anti-Communist protests of the 1970s and 1980s. She has volunteered ever since her shipyard-worker husband died during martial law in 1982.

Olszewska described herself as a Polish patriot and got misty-eyed when asked about the lives lost on the worn cobblestones propping up her potted pansies, marigolds and cut roses. She shooed away noisy schoolkids who lounged beneath the shady poplar trees, reminding them that the memorial is a cemetery, not a public park.

Olszewska, 70, said people just aren’t excited about NATO; it is something for the politicians.

“For me, NATO is like a huge group of countries fighting for position, and we will be left out in the end anyway,” Olszewska said. “What can it do for us?”

At the city’s other memorial to the dead, veteran Julian Dworakowski traced his steps along the onetime harbor-front garrison. Now 80 and ailing, he recounted the fateful barrage that set off World War II 58 years ago and shaped the European security order for the next two generations.

In the early morning of Sept. 1, 1939, Dworakowski and about 200 Polish soldiers came under attack when the German battleship Schleswig-Holstein fired the first shots of the war at a Polish enclave in what was then known as the Free City of Danzig. Against all odds, the Polish men held off 4,000 German troops for a week before surrendering. The promised French and British counterattack never came.

Dworakowski spent most of the war in German and Soviet prison camps. When it was all over, he took a job at the Lenin Shipyard--later to become the birthplace of Solidarity. A few years ago, he boycotted a reconciliation ceremony with crew members of the Schleswig-Holstein, saying he had no reason to reconcile with men who tried to kill him. His view of Poland’s no-show allies of the time is equally uncharitable.

“In 1939, everyone failed us; they all just cared about themselves,” said Dworakowski, his silver tooth and blue eyes glistening in the afternoon sunshine. “Maybe this time, with NATO, it will be different. Maybe this is our payback.”