conglomerate – it is the flagship, the symbol of Polish socialism. Meanwhile, here and there people are hearing rumours that all is not well aboard ship. Somebody at the PZPR Central Committee comes up with the idea of sending someone there on a special mission. The job is entrusted to Remigiusz Szczęsnowicz, manager of the cultural centre in the Warsaw district of Targówek, who works with ‘difficult’ young people. He is to look around and write a report for the Central Committee. As he recalls years later, at the time there was a story doing the rounds at Nowa Huta about some newborn babies found in lime pits there.
Kapuściński is given a different task: to take a stand against Adam Ważyk’s ‘Poem for Adults’. ‘[W]ithin the Party management they were ready to flip – “What shall we do about Ważyk’s lampoon? Let’s prove it’s all lies!” ’15 recalled the late Wojciech Adamiecki, then a journalist for Sztandar Młodych.
‘Poem for Adults’ is emblematic of the time, a landmark text from which the beginning of the thaw in Poland is often dated. In fact, the Stalinist ice has been melting for over a year when the poem appears on 21 September 1955 in the weekly Nowa Kultura (New Culture). But as a composition reflecting the spirit of the times, this, and no earlier or later literary text, is the one that passes into history. Its author is a poet who in past years has dedicated his entire soul and creative art to the cause of socialism. (‘I destroyed the mythology that I myself had believed in until then,’ he will admit years later.)
The ‘Poem for Adults’ is about Nowa Huta, the construction of which was extolled by the socialist–realist poets. Ważyk does not embellish; he sees the naked truth about socialism in Nowa Huta.
From villages and towns they come by the cartload
to build a steelworks, conjure up a city,
dig a new Eldorado out of the earth,
an army of pioneers, the assembled rabble,
they crowd into shacks, barracks and hotels,
they whistle as they trudge down the muddy streets:
a great migration, dishevelled ambition,
a string round the neck with a cross from Częstochowa,
three storeys of curses, a small down pillow,
a gallon of vodka and a yen for the whores,
a mistrustful soul, torn from near the border,
half aroused and half deranged,
reticent with words, singing folk songs,
suddenly ejected from medieval darkness,
the wandering mass, inhuman Poland,
howling with boredom on the long December nights . . .
The great migration building industry,
unknown to Poland, but known to history,
fed on the emptiness of great big words, living
wild, from day to day and in defiance of the preachers –
in a cloud of carbon monoxide, in a gradual torment,
from it the working class is being smelted.
There’s a lot of debris. But so far it’s a shambles.16
Five years earlier, in his ‘Poem about Nowa Huta’, Kapuściński had praised this showpiece construction project of People’s Poland. He went there with Wiktor Woroszylski in the summer of 1950, where Woroszylski had read his poems to the men building Nowa Huta, and the eighteen-year-old Kapuściński had listened, looked around, and become acquainted with some people. Later he wrote many critical comments about the authorities’ negligence ‘in the cultural sphere’, including that the travelling cinemas did not come to Nowa Huta often enough, that the libraries for workers were inferior, and that there was a lack of quality entertainment.
Now his job is to go there and see that everything is in the best possible order.
Kapuściński and Szczęsnowicz share a rented room in one of Nowa Huta’s small hotels. They expect to have a boring time trudging about the building site and having cliché conversations with the workers. And suddenly they discover an unknown world whose existence they have never imagined.
In his report to the Central Committee, Szczęsnowicz writes that ‘you won’t be able to educate the young people building Nowa Huta with the help of a church and a wretched pub selling vodka’.17 The image that Kapuściński paints in his report, entitled ‘This Is Also the Truth about Nowa Huta’, prompts the editor-in-chief of Sztandar Młodych to say, ‘This will never get through.’
What won’t get through?
The story about the pimping mother, who sits in one room collecting money for services provided by her daughter in the next room. Or the one about the fourteen-year-old girl who has infected eight boys and ‘described her exploits in such a vulgar way that one felt like vomiting’. Or the young married couples who spend their wedding nights in gateways and ditches (‘whoever thought up the brilliant idea that married couples can only stay together in a hotel room until eight p.m.?’).
A worker friend tells Kapuściński that he will never marry, because in these conditions he would be bound to ‘have no respect for his wife’.
[A]t Huta the bureaucracy reaches a degree of barbarity. For example, a woman living in a workers’ hotel is going to give birth. There are six other girls living in the same room. After three months she is supposed to go back to work. She doesn’t: she works at Huta, several kilometres from the hotel, but she has to feed her baby four times a day. Nevertheless, they tell her to bring a certificate proving that she is working. Yes, but she cannot get one. Then along comes the hotel man, takes away her bedding, takes away everything that is not her property, and the woman and her baby are left on the bare floor-boards.18
Kapuściński hears about the fortunes of his friends from a few years earlier who have had enough and refuse to put up with ‘all these obscenities’. One has written complaints and petitions, for which he has been punished by having his accommodation allotment withheld, despite the fact that he has a sick mother and his wife lives out in the countryside because they have no home of their own in the town. Another critic has been sacked from his job. Still another has been stymied by lethal rumours that ‘he is a shirker and troublemaker. Not the worst method either!’ he writes. ‘People can see what’s going on. It is as if some monstrous bureaucratic fungus has sprung up here, which is proliferating and crushing everything, but no one seems at all concerned.’ In his report, Kapuściński reveals that complaints about what is going on at Nowa Huta have reached the ZMP authorities in Warsaw, but no one cares and they have gone unanswered.
Instead of painting the world of Ważyk’s poem in rosy colours, Kapuściński adds even more black to it. He is on the side of the workers, who feel hurt by the poet’s words: ‘rabble’, ‘semi-deranged soul’, ‘inhuman Poland’, ‘a shambles’. ‘To them these expressions,’ writes Kapuściński, ‘are wrongful, untrue and insulting’; they feel as if ‘they are of no use to anyone, as if they are invisible’. ‘But they admit that many of the images in the poem are true, all the more since they all too rarely read the whole truth about themselves.’
Kapuściński ends with a challenge to the Party and the ZMP: ‘At Nowa Huta
