Nyugati Magyarság, 1982 (1. évfolyam, 2-9. szám)
1982-02-01 / 2. szám
1982. február Nyugati Magyarság - Hungarians of the West 9. oldal THE HERO OF MILLIONS Lech Walesa, who is easily distinguished by his moustache, has become a hero to millions of Poles and the whole free world, and a thorn in the side of the embattled Communist regime. Only 16 months ago Mr. Walesa, a 38 year old out-of-work electrician, climbed over the gates of Gdansk's shipyards and formed the strike committee that was to be the spark that began a social revolution. “Mr. Lech”, as he is known in Solidarity, took part in the crucial 1970 strikes which brought down the Communist leader Wieslaw Gomulka. Ten years later in Gdansk he was again to challenge the Communist regime and ultimately cause the fall of Edward Gierek, the party leader who replaced Gomulka, and a host of other major and minor Polish Party officials. From the start, Mr. Walesa warned the authorities that Solidarity was not going to be pushed around. He used his personality and powers of persuasion to build up the Solidarity membership to its present figure of over 10 million. For most of the time he has put himself forward as a man of reason and common sense, simply concerned with the reform of the present system in Poland — not its destruction. All that Solidarity was trying to do was to bring about free elections, worker’s self-management and access to the media, reforms that were supposed to have been guaranteed by the Helsinki agreement. Now. many Solidarity leaders and over 50,000 Poles have been imprisoned in prison camps because of their fight for Freedom, Justice and food. In the meantime, the chief of the Polish regime Gen. Jaruzelski, together with the Russian news media, is trying desperately to discredit this struggle with lies and innuendo and to cover up their dismal failure to give the people of Eastern Europe these basic human rights. May Mr. Walesa keep the Polish people’s struggle alive, and may Canada help to support their struggle. Long live Mr. Walesa! Long live Canada! Kremlin will eventually demand Polish ‘loyalty’ By Charles Fenyvesi WASHINGTON — There are two ways to unmake a revolution in Eastern Europe. Poland’s Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski may try to follow in the footsteps of János Kádár, Hungary’s pragmatic tactician, or he may turn out to be another Gustav Husak, Czechoslovakia's doctrinaire neo-Stalinist The precedents Solidarity’s Lech Walesa is facing are more complex than Jaruzelski’s. Twenty months after Hungary’s 1956 revolution, its leader, Imre Nagy, was hanged. Up to the last moment, the authorities offered to spare his life if he so much as admitted having made “mistakes" — such as his last act as prime minister of calling on the nation to resist the Soviet invaders. To this day, Party Secretary Kádár refuses requests from Nagy’s family to visit the grave; the location is a state secret Nevertheless, under Kádár’s rule, Hungary has become the most liberal of the Soviet bloc states. In 1968 in Czechoslovakia, Party Secretary Alexander Dubcek saved his life by calling off resistance to the invaders — an act of moderation he is now said to regret Since then, he has been living under police surveillance in a small provincial town; he is not permitted to talk to people outside his family. Under his successor, Husak, the regime has not relaxed its grip. Both Nagy and Dubcek were life-long Communists thrust into revolutions not of their making. They were both cautious reformers-fromwithin, bewildered when called upon by the party and the people to mediate passions far more powerful than their instincts for moderation. Nagy, a Marxist theoretician, was swept along by the masses; Dubcek, an apparatchik, thought he could control the storm. Both men saw no solution for the party but to identify with popular demands for democratization. Both believed that their historic missions were to save the party’s pre-eminence in the post-revolutionary democratic society. Nagy chose martyrdom. He refused to disown his revolutionary role as a patriot and to revert to his intellectual commitments as a Moscow-trained Communist Dubcek chose survival — perhaps in the hope that the party or the nation would one day soon call him back to power. Walesa, however, is an authentic revolutionary. As a patriot, a Roman Catholic and a worker, he grew up detesting a system that was imposed from above and frtm abroad. He was never a Communist He believed he would be able to soar above the chasm between the popular demand for democracy and the party’s insistence on a monopoly of power. It didn’t seem to trouble him that his act defied the law of gravity-, he had his own way to compute his odds for success. Thus far, the only successful defiance of Soviet rule over the people’s democracies has occurred in Yugoslavia. That was one strange and unpredictable schism, with Josif Broz Tito, once Stalin’s hit man, forced into rebellion by Stalin’s brutal insistence on complete Soviet control, and by Tito’s own comrades-in-arms pressing him to assert a measure of independence But Tito’s successors are unknown technicians and, as Soviet officials confide after a few glasses of vodka, the struggle for Yugoslavia is by no means over. Walesa’s silence thus far has been eloquent Should he come out in favor of Jaruzelski or admit “mistakes”, Poles and other East Europeans will write him off as another victim of mind-bending techniques developed for Stalin’s show trials. Jaruzelski’s next moment of truth may come when his soldiers will be unable — or unwilling — to fight passive resistance, and the Soviets might insist on helping him out He may be forced to follow Husak’s example and keep Walesa and his friends indefinitely under arrest or incommunicado — or expel them from Poland. But with an economic catastrophe hanging over his head, he may not be as free as Husak was in reimposing party discipline. On the other hand, Jaruzelski may not have Kádár’s skill in relaxing terror ever so gradually, and in putting forth an eventually plausible argument that he is a patriot who saved the country from an even worse fate, rather than a traitor, pure and simple. Is it possible to follow Tito’s example and be a Communist and a patriot at the same time? Or must one be a traitor to one cause and a hero to another? Is martyrdom — with its echoes of the Middle Ages and antiquity — the only honorable resolution of the two conflicting loyalties? One of the comforts of modem Western civilization is not having to live in such a melodrama, avoiding the burden of being a hero or a traitor. (Fenyvesi, a staff writer for The Washington Post Magazine, emigrated from Hungary in 1956) To Poland By Sándor Csoóri Poland, Christ-statue struck by lightning, around your blackening wounds circles the July sunlight, your bones constantly kissed by flies. I suffer for you as if I too were lying bludgeoned in some stinking shed gazing at a single carnation mirrored in watery soup. I might be your Hungarian refugee, little Prince Rákóczi, unsaddled, a student leaning on your church walls, or a soldier just arHved home, bringing with him the scent of the woods, his loved ones dead, buried naked, while above him the swalltws and dazed insects and the smoke-bonnets of ruined cities swirl through the sky — but what am I to you, pale country of deep faith? Nobody, just a friend, your nettling Hungarian haunting your princely streets with the cranberrytaste of noon in his mouth, and who, in his grief, seeks a lover among your daughters because, under the spell of the music of your leaves and light, he wants to touch, to embrace you, and to endure for hours at the greengrocer's the stench of stale beets, to bear the rable, queuing up for the wildest hope. Sándor Csoóri, of Budapest, author of several collections of poetry, is also a scriptwriter and journalist This poem was translated from the Hungarian by William Jay Smith. — The New York Times.
