3 Nations Face Evils of Red Past

High school students at a museum exhibit on Stalinist-era political executions clustered around Julian Gluchowski, peppering him with questions about his years in jail.

“My bones weren’t broken or my fingernails pulled out, but very often I heard screams at night of other people being tortured,” said the 64-year-old Gluchowski, imprisoned in his late teens for anti-Communist agitation. The students hung on every word.

Nearly a decade after the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, Poland is now digging and poking into the darkest corners of its totalitarian era, seeking a kind of emotional closure. New laws, trials, exhibits and public debate are part of a long-delayed effort to open up the past and determine who--if anyone--should still be punished.

In Wroclaw alone, about 55 people were executed for political “crimes” during the post-World War II Stalinist era, while executions nationwide ran into the thousands. In the early 1980s, during martial law and its aftermath, more than 100 Poles died as a result of state repression.

Many of the issues now facing Poland--including how to handle the massive files collected by secret police, who spied on citizens during four decades of Communist dictatorship--also trouble the Czech Republic and Hungary. These countries also saw thousands of political executions and the use of torture to extract confessions, especially in the early 1950s.

Yet all three countries--generally seen as the most successful former Soviet Bloc states--took peaceful paths in their escape from communism. All are due to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization next month and are on the fast track for membership in the European Union. Putting the Communist past firmly behind them is important to consolidate democracy and deepen trust with their new Western partners, including the United States.

But as secrets about past behavior come into the open, they can destroy political careers, friendships and even marriages. Those who look into their own police files run the risk of finding that a close friend or spouse informed on them.

Precisely because the collapse of communism in this region was achieved peacefully, these countries have never undergone radical “de-communization” like the “de-Nazification” that followed World War II in West Germany.

“The fact that Germany has become a democratic country and has overcome its Nazi past, I think is the result of a very firm and decisive de-Nazification,” said Sen. Zbigniew Romaszewski, chairman of the Polish Senate’s Human Rights and Rule of Law Committee. Something similar would benefit former Soviet Bloc countries, he added, but “despite the monstrous crimes committed by communism, until today the world has not resolved this issue.”

Hot Issue in Poland

Now, however, the attempt in Poland to clean up dirt from the past is a hotter issue than at any time since the nation shed communism.

* In December, the Polish Parliament overrode a presidential veto to pass a law opening secret police files to those who were spied upon. The new law marks progress in “closing the door behind Communist Poland,” declared Jacek Rybicki, a legislator whose political roots are in the Solidarity union movement that brought down the old regime. Laws opening secret police files took effect in 1997 in the Czech Republic and Hungary.

* Poles are now grappling with the key question of what to do about former President Wojciech Jaruzelski, 75. Should he remain in comfortable retirement or face punishment for his actions during the Communist era, as demanded by an increasingly vocal group of legislators?

* A “vetting” law was recently enacted requiring politicians, judges, prosecutors and lawyers--an estimated 20,000 people--to file statements declaring whether they ever cooperated with the Communist secret police. There is no punishment--aside from the potential wrath of voters, colleagues, friends and clients--for admitting collaboration. But if denials are proved false in a court hearing, those who lied are banned from such posts for 10 years.

* Another new Polish law opens the door to firing judges shown to have cravenly followed Communist Party dictates in passing sentences, rather than judging cases on their merits.

Polish Foreign Minister Bronislaw Geremek, speaking with foreign correspondents the day the law on secret police files won approval, expressed support for both it and the vetting law--and stressed that Poland will be a good NATO partner. “The West knows it can trust Poland,” he said.

NATO officials have expressed confidence in the new members due to join soon. On a visit to Warsaw in December, Frederic Krug, head of the NATO security office, said Poland will be able to fulfill its duties in regard to the protection of NATO secrets.

Dark Humor in Communism

While issues from the past are typically treated with deadly seriousness, sometimes there is a lighter touch. Hungary, for example, moved many of the most monumental “socialist art” statues from Budapest into a museum-park outside the capital. The museum shop sells T-shirts mocking communism, cassette tapes of old-time favorite propaganda songs and a brochure that describes the park as a “cemetery” for the statues.

In Warsaw, a recent exhibit of photos banned by Communist censors created a stir with such gems as a dog walking past a line of uniformed police standing at attention. While the photo is funny and irreverent, the fact that it was deemed dangerous shows the insecurity and foolish fears of the censors.

Before its 1993 breakup into the Czech Republic and Slovakia, Czechoslovakia banned former secret police collaborators and high Communist officials from public office. But the party itself was not outlawed.

Hungary passed a similar but weaker law in 1994 that directed any officeholders who had been secret police informers to resign. It lacked teeth, however, and was virtually ignored.

Poland’s Solidarity union, which led the fight against communism, abandoned any thoughts of political retribution when it struck the 1989 “round-table” deal that brought the peaceful transition to democracy.

“I was working on the political committee for the round table, and no one raised the issue,” said Jerzy J. Wiatr, a 67-year-old former Communist who now teaches political sociology at Warsaw University. “The logic of a political agreement would rule out the possibility of revenge.”

Poland’s right-wing governments of the early 1990s concentrated on economic reforms. They were followed by a left-leaning government dominated by former Communists. The right has been back in power since late 1997 and is finally moving more aggressively on issues of the past.

Yet trying to grasp the thorny problems can prove as painful as ignoring them. Information buried or allegedly buried in secret police files, for example, is political dynamite that can explode in unforeseen directions.

Late last year, Czech President Vaclav Havel and former Vienna Mayor Helmut Zilk endured an embarrassing uproar when Zilk, 71, was accused of having cooperated with Czechoslovakia’s Communist-era secret police when he was a journalist in the 1960s. The charge, allegedly backed by secret files, led former dissident Havel to cancel plans to grant Zilk a state honor, the Order of the White Lion, in October. The incident ended with the Czech president apologizing to Zilk in December after a commission determined that secret agents had filed reports on conversations with Zilk, but that he never knowingly helped them.

“There are many cases of files being falsified,” said former Polish Deputy Interior Minister Jan Widacki, who served in a right-leaning government. “A former Communist interior minister gave an interview in which he mentioned how files were fabricated, destroyed, etc.”

There also are concerns about possible invasion of privacy if files aren’t tightly locked away.

“If a microphone is in the bedroom, if the mail is opened, it’s obvious that, in the intimate sphere of life, data is being gathered as well,” said Eva Standeisky, a scholar at the Documentation and Academic Research Institute for the History of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, a think tank in Budapest that is helping reassess the country’s history under communism.

Tolerance for Informers

Peter Bokros, 42, a former dissident artist who visited the archives in Budapest to examine his 200-page file, said he had learned that the secret police had turned at least one member of his old pro-democracy group into an informer, but he hadn’t yet figured out who it was.

“For sure I will have a bad feeling if I find out that some of my friends were agents,” Bokros said. But he expressed a tolerance that seems especially widespread among Hungarians.

“I do not have the right now to think that he was guilty,” Bokros explained. “I am sure he was forced to be an agent. He was blackmailed by a sexual problem, or forced through his wife or children to be an agent. There were thousands of ways to coerce a person. For example, they tell a person, ‘We will do something bad to your child.’ ”

In November, Hungary held three trials of soldiers accused of killing 22 protesters during the Soviet-led crackdown on the country’s 1956 pro-democracy revolt. But in keeping with the now-dominant Hungarian mood of forgive and forget, the Supreme Court ruled that the charges should be dropped. The justification was that the Hungarian statute of limitations for murder had already expired and that, since the crushing of the revolt was not a “war,” the shootings could not be considered war crimes, which have no time limit for punishment.

The Hungarian media gave minimal coverage to the trials, and public reaction was subdued. Some individuals, however, expressed anger at the decision.

“They should have been punished because they were shooting peaceful demonstrators,” said retired nurse Ferenc Szabo, 77. “I was working in surgery, and a lot of Hungarian young people were brought after being shot. There were so many wounded we didn’t have enough beds. We had to put them in the corridors. . . . What I saw in 1956 I cannot forget--when the mothers came in looking for their sons, and they were dead.”

Striving for Stronger Democracy

Backers of Poland’s new disclosure laws hope that rather than stirring up fresh trouble, they will give the country a healthier democracy. Bringing personal histories out in the open diminishes the threat that they could be used for blackmail or political intrigue, they argue.

The laws will not, however, eliminate all former Communists from political life. In both Hungary and Poland, onetime Communist parties that now consider themselves social democratic were voted back into office in the early 1990s. Although they have now lost power, in both countries they form the main parliamentary opposition.

Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski, a former Communist, consistently ranks as the country’s most popular politician, drawing about 70% approval in recent public opinion polls. Analysts say, however, that this is due to his personable nature and skills as a politician.

Meanwhile, Polish authorities are slowly pursuing trials against individuals responsible for some of the most flagrant abuses under communism. The Main Commission on Investigating Crimes Against the Polish Nation has gathered evidence and requested prosecutions of about 200 people for politically motivated Communist-era crimes, said chief investigator Adam W. Kieruj. The 21 people convicted so far were for the most part charged with “using torture and inhuman methods during investigations,” he said.

Polish authorities are also seeking the extradition from Britain of a Stalinist-era military prosecutor, Helena Wolinska, 80, who is now a British citizen. Her signature was on the arrest warrant for a Polish World War II hero, Gen. August Fieldorf, executed by the Communists in 1953. Wolinska has denied any responsibility for his trial and execution.

Pressures also are growing to make former President Jaruzelski stand trial for his role in a 1970 crackdown on striking workers in Gdansk and other cities, during which 44 people died. Charges against Jaruzelski in those killings, committed while he was defense minister, were first filed in 1995. Jaruzelski claims innocence and has stalled the proceedings by citing ill health. He continues to live in his comfortable Warsaw home, drawing a general’s pension and enjoying perks of a former president.

Sen. Romaszewski and other Jaruzelski critics contend that he also should face judgment for his 1981 declaration of martial law and the violent suppression of protests, including the slaying of nine coal miners in Katowice.

“There should be a verdict of the Tribunal of State, and he should bear responsibility for it,” Romaszewski said. “If Jaruzelski is not responsible for martial law and the killing of miners . . . then the question arises: Is any government responsible for anything it does?”

Ela Kasprzycka of The Times’ Warsaw Bureau contributed to this report.