Prologue.
In 1989 the left wing of Solidarity accomplished a deal with the government of Poland resulting in a transformation from communism to a form of evolving democracy. In contrast to East Germany or to the Czech Republik there was no process of decommunization and there was no effort to bring anybody to trial for political crimes committed during 1944-1989. More or less the same people were allowed to run for political offices and use their connections to make easy deals enriching themselves.
Part of Solidarity felt betrayed and the backlash started in May 1992 with the publication of the so-called Macierewicz List claiming that about 65 members of parliament and the government were actually secret collaborators/informers of the secret police. On the top of the list was then-president and the legend of solidarity, Lech Walesa. Walesa orchestrated the collapse of government supporting a form of decommunization called lustracja in Polish.
Ever since there is a fight going on over the issue of decommunization and it plays bigger and bigger role in the political life of Poland. Frustrated by the lack of any progress on that front, a journalist B.Wildstein, who had access to dossiers compiled by the secret police, published in 2005 a list of over 160 thousand people he suspected to be either a TW (secret collaborator) or OZI (source of personal information) of that police. Notice the change of scale: from around 65 on Macierewicz List to 160,000 on Wildstein List. Lots of mathematicians (including myself) are on that list. The law in Poland up to last year stated that anybody applying for a position above certain level must have made a statement about his/her involvement with secret police prior to 1989. In 2006 that law was amended and lustracja was extended to thousands of people including all university professors. Subsequently, that law was overturned by Polish Supreme Court, two of which members were suspected of being secret police informers and most of its members were put on court by the post-communist governments in years 1992-2005 (with the exception of 1997-01 when a national-catholic conservative government was in place).
Needless to say, the emotions about lustracja in Poland are very high. In my conversations with friends and acquaintances in Poland I see fear and hesitance in discussing what really happened. As a US citizen I am in good position to describe my story (if I were still in Poland I would be quiet Ð the politics there is so strange if not crazy). Also, I want my family in the US to understand my life prior to emigration in 1982.
The point of this story is definitely not to claim I ended up on Wildstein List by mistake. Anybody who traveled to the West under communism had to deal with the secret police. Some of us were lucky to smile politely and assure the agents of our patriotism/devotion, some were less fortunate. Looking back I was one of the lucky ones but only by a hair.
Beware this story is quite incomprehensible to Americans with cursory knowledge of Poland. Parts of it are incomprehensible even to me. I hope to understand more of it in the future but I am not optimistic.
Perhaps it will be helpful if I state that I am for limited decommunization in Poland (read my final comments at the end). I would definitely not want the president of any university to be known for squealing on his/her colleagues during communism. I am not in favor of ordinary people (including regular faculty) having to make any statements (but they are responsible if someone was hurt by their activities in the past and should be held accountable). In my view the Left in Poland is to be blamed for blocking lustracja totally and the Right is foolish enough to blow it out of proportion.
Thanks to John Conway and Henryk Michalewski for useful comments that helped me polish the story.
My familyÕs first contact with Secret Police in Poland took place in the city of Rzeszow in 1954. It was one year after my father took a job as an engineer in a factory called WSK (Production of Transport Vehicles officially, a tank factory in reality). He was called in to get news of a promotion. After learning that the new duties amounted to 100% increase in work and the salary was only 5% higher, my father said ÒNo, thank you very muchÓ. There was a knock on our door at midnight, a few guys showed up, asked my father to pack a suitcase, and took him away to police headquarters. It turned out refusing a promotion was equivalent to sabotage or so the Secret Police claimed. Additionally, it looked as if there was a net of saboteurs at this plant Ð a friend of my father also turned down a promotion. The interrogation lasted the whole night and there was suggestion of imminent departure to Siberia as punishment for sabotage. Somehow, for lack of transportation (as they claimed) my father was released in the morning. That scenario was repeated a few times: knocking on the door at midnight, interrogation during the night, and release in the morning. The friend of my father, the co-saboteur, had a total nervous breakdown. My father got away with a slap on the wrist Ð he and all of us were kicked out of Rzeszow and sent to another WSK factory 30 miles away in a small city of Debica.
During my school and university years I had no contact with Secret Police. People whispered that this or that man is a former UBek (UB was official name of the Secret Police in those days) and that was it.
My own encounters with the police started while trying to attend mathematical conferences in the West. The first occasion for such trip happened in 1976. I came back from a conference in Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia, and I got an invitation for a weeklong workshop in Oberwolfach, West Germany. Oberwolfach was the Mecca for mathematicians then (and still is a great place to visit), so I was very excited to go there. In 1976 I was employed by The Math Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences (on the slot vacated by Professor Borsuk upon his retirement) and one day I was called in by Professor Semadeni, the vice-director for research, who informed me that, for various reasons, only one of the three of us who got invited will be allowed to go. One of the other two was Rysiek Rubinsztein, widely admired young (but older than me) algebraic topologist and it did not take me much time to realize I do not want to compete with him for the place in Oberwolfach. And that is what I communicated to Semadeni. RysiekÕs reaction later on that day was totally incomprehensible to me then. He got quite agitated, asked me why was I such a pushover and demanded that we all go to Oberwolfach on private passports and dissing the Institute that way. I did not have a private passport then (or later) and applying for it would take too long. Besides, I was very annoyed by getting into a situation I did not fully understand. I knew I really disappointed Rysiek and I thought he was overreacting at the same time. Semadeni tried his best and offered to send me to Prague for a big conference in general topology the same year but I turned it down. That conference had lots of people I was interested in mathematically, so it was a loss. In the end I never went to any of Prague Symposia during the last 30 years.
In 1977 I received an offer of a visiting assistant professorship from the University of Washington in Seattle. A month or two prior to the trip to Seattle I got a call to report to a police station in Mokotow for the purpose of discussing passport issues. I met two young guys in civilian clothing who declared that, in order to get a passport, I had to show my patriotism. Well, I was taught in civic classes in high school about importance of patriotism, about the dangers from the imperialistic policies of USA, so I was well versed in the lingo. I even knew how to show patriotism by waving a flag on May Day parades and clapping hands during 3-5 hour speeches of the local first secretary of the Party. Actually, I knew much more than that. I knew how to show up sufficiently late for those parades to avoid getting a flag to wave (but not so late as to get an absence mark). So what exactly did those gentlemen mean by showing patriotism? I am just an abstract mathematician far removed from anything political or applicable. Well, the two gents had an answer. Since I am going to Washington it will be very easy to meet a diplomat and learn something useful. OK, are you aware that I am going to the state of Washington far away from Washington D.C.? Well, they were not aware of the existence of the state of Washington and it became quickly apparent that their knowledge of geography was at a pre-school level. Years later I was interviewed by two FBI agents in my Knoxville apartment who were checking on me due to an application for a green card. You should have seen them laughing their heads off hearing about members of Polish Intelligence who did not distinguish the state of Washington from the US capital. Did they get an idea for a new Polish joke out of it? The curious thing about FBI agents was that, as soon as they learned I plan to become a US citizen quickly they looked at each other and lost any interest in questioning me any further.
Back to the meeting in Warsaw. Since the officers were not sure if there are any diplomats in Seattle, they tried other helpful suggestions. How about going to a hotel and picking up a brochure or two? That would be sufficient from their point of view. OK, I was slowly getting tired of the two intelligence geniuses, so I suggested that I think it over and we agreed to meet a week later. In the meantime I planned to talk to my PhD advisor, Professor Borsuk, and my father-in-law, a general in the PeopleÕs Army, on how to get the two intelligence enthusiasts off my back.
General S is an interesting guy. In all of my 30 years in supposedly communist Poland he is the only person I met claiming to be a communist. I met lots of other Party members but none of them ever hinted that they believed in communist ideas. I even knew Party members, parents of a friend of mine in Debica, who were openly against the Party and who tried recruiting me to help building a local church as an act of opposition. They delighted in telling me details of Party meetings at which the high school director was berated for lack of patriotism among students. How did General S become a Party member? He was ÒdraftedÓ by the Red Army on its way towards Berlin in 1943. The drafting was slightly unusual on US standards: he happened to chop wood in the winter of 1943. That is quite a hard work generating a lot of body heat, so Tadek took his shirt off in the process of swinging ax over and over. The Soviet soldiers spotted him and grabbed him so quickly that, perhaps due to language problems, he left his clothing behind. It took his mother three days of chasing the Red Army to bring him a coat Ð I guess she did not trust the quality of supplies of the Red Army. Thus Tadeusz did campaign all the way to Berlin after which he stayed in the PeopleÕs Army and was sent to Leningrad to attend a military school for political officers. When I met him in 1969 he was a dean of a Polish military school at the rank of colonel. I found him very honest and intelligent person. He was a bit critical of my political views. However, we quickly found a common hobby and, on every family occasion, we spent hours playing chess. As a chess player he was very tenacious. In some situations other players would give up but he was fighting until the end and would benefit from it as, by 3 am, I was more tired and I would lose more games. In 1991, during my first visit to Poland after getting divorce and emigrating to US in 1982, I visited the S family and, of course, we played chess until 2 am. He was very interested in meeting my second wife. However, due to strange American superstitions, Susan did not want to hear about having dinner with my former in-laws.
Going back to Polish Intelligence Ð I tried to broach with both Professor Borsuk and General S the idea of giving me pointers on how to get rid of the two dudes. Interestingly, none of them wanted to hear anything about it. It was quite a shock to me Ð the two most powerful people I knew would not or could not help me in getting rid of GED recipients. Groping for some logic and sense of it all, I conjectured to myself that, as generalÕs son-in-law, I pose a security risk to him. For some reason I never discussed that with my own father. Could it be that I did not want to talk it over the phone? I do not remember. After a few days of pondering my options I decided I have to play the game with my handlers. On one hand I had a powerful lure of academic advancement (I did not think about money then) and on the other hand there was a specter of RysiekÕs reaction if he ever learned about it. I tried to anticipate agentsÕ suggestions and I was going to counter it by pointing out difficulties. So yes, I am willing to show my patriotism. However, I have limited opportunities. First of all, I do not have a driverÕs license, so any trips are impossible and so on. I had a detailed game plan for the next meeting. Their first move caught me by surprise. All they wanted from me was to send a postcard to an address in Poland. OK, so what do you want on that postcard? Anything. You are doing great, you are teaching, blah, blah. OK, that is something I can do. I can send a postcard with greetings to any address in the freaking universe. What if somebody sends you a postcard saying they are doing great? Well, it is a free country. Send me any postcards. Who cares? And that was it. Sure, I did not trust them and I was really dreading the slippery slope that I had to brace for and defend against. Thus I never bought a car in Seattle and my postcard to the address, which I do not remember (it was somebody in a university outside of Warsaw) said ÒGreetings. I am doing great. I bought a bike to do groceries. Do not have time for anything but research.Ó Pretty soon after the postcard my wife was allowed to join me with our daughter. I never told neither Professor Borsuk nor General S about the nature of my deal with the dudes but I was hinting sufficiently well that they knew I am very upset about being harassed. Interestingly, after I left for Seattle it took me a while to send a letter to Professor Borsuk and I was very surprised hearing from my family that he made a phone call to General S asking about my whereabouts. Only a few of my friends knew whom my father-in-law was. Did Professor Borsuk worry that I might defect as soon as I land in US? He never liked to talk about his former students who stayed in USA.
A few weeks after my arrival in Seattle we had a visit from Professor Mardesic, a top expert in my field from Yugoslavia (currently Croatia). Almost immediately he took me aside saying ÒDuring my first visit to the States in 1959 I considered staying here but I decided against it and I never regretted itÓ. OK, how did they get an idea that I would be so reckless and eager be at the mercy of people/country I knew practically nothing about? I was not born to be a beggar. I had no intention of making any move in which I would have to ask anybody for favors. Old Devil is better than a new one, as they say in countryside of Poland.
My yearlong visit to Seattle was very interesting. Jack Segal had a friend, Margaret Furst, who was looking for someone dependable to rent a room in her house. My initial motivation was to lower my expenses as much as possible. If you know that my monthly salary in Poland was around $35-40, you can figure out the relative difference between renting an apartment and renting a room. Jack knew the value of dollar to Poles but was very puzzled about my shopping habits. He took me to a huge grocery store called Safeway on the way to MargaretÕs house. I have never seen that many products. In Poland we had 2-3 kinds of bread, one kind of butter, and so on. Here the part containing bread was the size of a Polish super-store. I was quickly overwhelmed by the abundance of choices, so I simply grabbed a few items planning to do more investigative work later on when being alone. The trouble was that I picked quite expensive items inches away from much cheaper ones and that made Jack very perplexed. Soon I learned the benefits of MargaretÕs help. She was absolutely a great person. A retired social worker supplemented her income with babysitting and renting the very room in her house. One day she came back from babysitting of a pair of children during which one said the F word. Obviously, she scolded the boy and told the kids to never use that particular word. Right after that the younger daughter took Margaret aside and complained that her brother uses much worse words than what she just heard. OK, so what is it that he says? He calls the sister stupid. Thanks to Margaret I got a quick introduction to American culture. We used to watch evening news together Ð she liked Cronkite, she encouraged me to read Christian Science Monitor, and she introduced me to the game of Scrabble. In one month my English improved dramatically and I was able to understand studentsÕ questions. I prepared my lectures carefully but in the first few weeks there was no way I could understand anything students asked. Every week, on Saturdays, we would go together with Alma, our neighbor, to Safeway. Both Margaret and Alma spent what seemed to be hours on checking out this and that. I would be happy with grabbing a few items and I was delighted there were no lines to get to Safeway and no lines to pay for groceries. What else did they want? Alma was a curious person. She had five TV sets in her house. That was unheard of. My family in Debica was the first one on our block to buy a TV set in 1960. Even in 1977 I knew families in Poland without a TV set and I saw color TV only for a few minutes prior to my trip to Seattle (I was tutoring the son of a widow of a military man whose pension was large enough to afford a color TV set. That particular tutoring job allowed me to buy a refrigerator at the cost of 3 monthly salaries in 1973.). And here was a single person with 5 TV sets including one in the bathroom. Margaret had only one set and it was barely functioning, a situation I was accustomed to. But five TV sets? Seemed like a mental disorder to me.
A few days after my arrival at her house Margaret threw a party for her friends. That was the first time she told me she is a socialist and some of her friends are communist. That was very interesting! So Margaret is a socialist! And I, who knew only one communist in Poland, will get to meet a few communists in capitalistic USA. How extraordinary! Wow! The first person to arrive was Irene, a communist. Margaret introduced me as George from Poland whose family will soon join us here in Seattle. To which Irene exclaimed ÒI do not want to have anything to do with refugees from Poland!Ó and I never talked to her again despite her numerous visits to MargaretÕs house. A funny thing happened at the end of our stay in Seattle. Margaret asked Irene if she knows anybody interested in renting the room. What about the Polish family? Well, they are going back to Poland. What? Are they crazy? Aside from Irene everybody else invited to the party seemed quite normal. They were very interested in my views of Poland and, as usual, I was very frank with my opinions. After a while one of them, a young man, took me aside and said, ÒBe very careful. My parents can report on you to Moscow.Ó I was speechless. The fact that there were Americans willing to report anything to Moscow did not make any sense to me. But the fact that they would report on my views, which I was willing to say to anybody I knew in Poland and basically all my friends in Warsaw shared them, was absolutely incredible to me. Hey, I could write that report for them myself and all they needed is to sign it. I was quite sure it would be used as toilet paper in Russia. Aside from disconnect with reality most of MargaretÕs friends were very nice people willing to help foreigners. Most fondly I remember Mike and Martha who took us for a weeklong trip to Oregon in their motor home and gave us a ride to the airport when it was time to go back to Warsaw. I think they were mere socialists, not communists. They were the first couple I met who got married through a computerized matching system. Quite extraordinary to me in 1977.
Pretty soon after arrival in Seattle I discovered that the library of University of Washington had a sizable collection of Polish books. Of those I was interested in the series published by the Literary Institute in Paris. Polish dissidents established that institute and the books were blacklisted in Poland as far as I could remember. In Warsaw I managed to read large parts of ÒThe Gulag ArchipelagoÓ in my father-in-law study but I would not dare to ask him if I could take it to my apartment and read all of it. Those books were under strict control and General S was on the distribution list due to his job as the chief political officer of the PeopleÕs Army. Anyhow, in one year in Seattle I was able to read 36 of such books. The system of borrowing books at UW library amounted to filling out a small card with oneÕs name and address. Essentially, all the names on those cards were Polish and I could recognize some of them as fellow Polish mathematicians visiting Seattle prior to me. Well, that did not strike me as very smart. Why would one leave a trace behind of reading illegal books? One week before my departure to Warsaw I went to the library and took out all the cards from those books. I tore them up and discarded pieces in several wastebaskets in the library.
I dreaded the trip back to Warsaw expecting the intelligence fellas to bother me. A few days after my return one of them did indeed call, then showed up in my apartment for a conversation. Surprisingly, he did not want anything from me but inquired very carefully if I was approached by any strange Americans in Seattle. He really expected that someone in US would want to recruit me. At certain moment I realized that I did report to the ordinary local police the fact Jack Segal spent one week in my apartment not so long ago and it occurred to me that either they may test my truthfulness on that or they may try to nab me that way. I decided to go head on by confessing to him on the spot about it. The look on his face was ÒWhy are you bothering me with such stuff?Ó We did not discuss any postcards but years later, in 1983 (one year after I emigrated to the US), an interesting letter (see its translation below) was sent to my Warsaw address from a Polish scientist based in Lodz on a scholarship in Glasgow.
My parents lived in Krakow at that time and during my first visit after returning from Seattle my father asked me curtly ÒWhy are you back to Poland?Ó He summed up my excuses of the form ÒI did not know you wanted me to stay in USAÓ by saying ÒYou are stupidÓ. Yeah, thatÕs great help.
I went again to the States in January 1980 for a one-semester visit to SUNY-Binghamton. I do not remember getting a ÒvisitÓ or a phone call from the intelligence geniuses. This time I went alone and my wife was supposed to join me with our daughter for vacation at the end of my stay.
SUNY-Binghamton is one of the friendliest departments I ever visited. I rented a room right next to Ross Geoghegan house on Vestal Parkway and I was a constant nuisance at Geoghegan household (the cookies were hard to resist, not to mention the atmosphere). My officemate was Eric Robinson whose permanent job was at Ithaca College but he taught a course or two at Binghamton as well. At certain moment he looked at me and asked ÒWhy donÕt you stay in the US? Surely you can find a job in some college hereÓ. Hmm, I was floored as a lot of issues I heard being discussed during dinners and such were quite foreign to me and I really did not see myself as smart enough to contribute anything outside of mathematics. It is possible that I relayed that conversation to Geoghegans in the form ÒCan you believe how na•ve Eric is?Ó The second surprise was that both Ross and Suzanne Geoghegan did not see anything strange in EricÕs question. After a few months I got confident enough to think that I can survive immigration to the US and Ross started the process of looking for a visiting job for me by contacting various topologists while asking them to keep quiet. I dropped a sufficient number of hints by phone to my wife that this time we are not returning back. After she arrived it was clear all her friends read my signals correctly and she was the only person to overlook them. The second day after her arrival it became apparent why she missed the signals Ð she did not see much future in our marriage. We stayed for a few days at the house of Greta Lake (the mother of Suzanne Geoghegan) in Queens, NY after which we went for a week to Binghamton and stayed with Geoghegans while preparing for a two-month camping trip. That trip was well planned by Matt Brin who visited lots of national parks while at graduate school at Wisconsin. I was a bit in a state of shock. We could not even have a good fight and I did not tell Geoghegans about my predicament. In the middle of the camping trip I had to make decisions about offers of visiting jobs, so I tried to extract something from my wife: Do you want a divorce? No, I am not sure. We had at least one big fight but I lost. The result was turning down all offers of visiting jobs by calling from public phone booths near Yellowstone National Park and such. I do not remember what excuse I used as the jobs were at departments with topologists I respected and I wanted to maintain good relations with them in the future.
The curiosity of it all is that I grew up with no possibility of making choices or decisions. I am not even sure there was an abstract concept of rational decision-making in Poland. It would be interesting to know how different my life would be if I stayed in the US in 1980 or accepted the job in Delaware in 1983.
We went back to Poland in July of 1980. Almost immediately, in August, it became obvious what kind of huge mistake it was. A certain electrician jumped the fence in Gdansk and I was sure mierda would hit the fan pretty soon. The end of 1980 and most of 1981 were full of drama and suspense. Government provocations, Solidarity strikes, the Red Army on the border, and so on. I spent most of that time playing tennis with a group of friends, sometimes up to 5 hours a day. I did join the Solidarity Trade Union much to the dismay of General S but I did not participate in any demonstrations.
Warsaw had only one covered tennis court called ÒMeraÓ, so clever tennis players converted a tunnel leading to the sport stadium Stadion X-lecia for use as a tennis court in the wintertime. One could not lob a ball or return balls that were hit close to the sidelines but it was better than nothing. With a group of friends we reserved the time period 10-11 pm twice a week. One advantage of that particular time was obvious Ð little competition from anybody else. There was another hidden plus Ð we bribed the custodian with 100 zl and it allowed us to play as long as we wanted to, which usually meant until 2 am. One night, on December 13, 1981, I was driving back home after a few hours of playing doubles in the tunnel. I did notice an unusual number of trucks but I was too tired to think of it. In the morning I was awaken at 8 am by my daughter Milenka. She wanted to watch her favorite cartoons but the TV set did not work. Indeed, all I could see was a ÒsnowÓ and no fiddling with dials or meddling with antenna seemed to help. After a few minutes of struggling with the silly box it suddenly came alive with a picture of General Jaruzelski, the boss of my father-in-law, proclaiming the martial law. The guano did indeed hit the fan with tanks on streets and dead coal miners in Silesia. All the phone communication was cut off for perhaps as long as three months and curfew was declared in all of Poland at 10 pm. All universities were closed and professors were required to staff entry doors against subversive elements. Aside from dead coal miners we all thought at the university that the martial law was one huge joke.
There was no way to contact my family in Krakow but early in January 82 I applied for a permission to visit my parents claiming the father had a heart attack. The train arrived shortly after 10 pm and I had to hurry despite a document allowing me to be on the street that late on that particular day. I knocked on the door of my parentÕs apartment and I heard the voice of my mother asking who I was. I was so happy to hear her that decided to pull a practical joke on them. ÒOpen up, secret policeÓ. She quickly moved away and, in a few moments, my father opened the door visibly pale. ÒOh, itÕs youÓ he sighed. I could not believe my eyes. ÒWhy are you letting those guys to frighten you so much? You are retired. They would have been really dumb to bother people like you.Ó Only then I learned the story of his arrests in early 50s. Well, I am glad the phony heart attack of my fatherÕs did not turn out to be a real one because of me.
In February 1982 my divorce became official. I agreed with my wife not to oppose it in court after talking to my parents. The procedure occurred in a courthouse on Wola that was surrounded by police. It was obvious a lot of dissidents were tried there at the time. My wife hired a clever female lawyer whose basic claim was that the divorce would be good for the child. There was no evidence supporting that argument but the court consisted of three female judges who nodded enthusiastically to her statements. I have never seen such lazy bastards in my life (up to that time, that is). Yes, communism in Poland created a new kind of morons who believed that divorce is good for children. Did George Orwell think of that? We had a Polish divorce in the sense that we still lived together. We even slept in the same room as the other room was occupied by me ex-wifeÕs grandma (the whole apartment was 400 square feet and consisted of two rooms and a very small kitchen). The divorce came as a shock to the rest of my ex-wifeÕs family who clearly were not kept in the loop by her. My ex-wifeÕs grandmother was getting quite ornery but I had no prospects for finding my own apartment soon. She had waited for that particular apartment for 20 years and was facing occupying it with an interesting configuration of people.
In March of 82 a few dissidents were released from detention. One of them was Rysiek whom I met a few minutes prior to our topology seminar at the Polish Academy of Sciences. He was telling a group of us about being driven for hours towards the Russian border and being fully convinced of ending up in Siberia. Right before the border the trucks would turn around and the whole procedure was repeated again a few days later. Does that sound familiar? Did our friendly government play the same old trick? At certain moment a policeman entered the building and Rysiek turned totally pale. So those tricks do work!
I kept playing tennis and in April it was clear that the government would let some scientists out to prove to the West that things are becoming normal. I contacted Jack Segal about a visiting job in Seattle and my flight was set for the middle of August of 82. This time my intelligence ÒfriendÓ did call and wanted to meet me in my apartment. There was nothing to keep me in Poland, so what will he want in order to let me out? Well, one had to wait and see. I had no cards to play. We had a very short conversation and then he popped the question ÒIs your wife going with you?Ó ÒNoÓ, I quickly replied realizing that he did not do his homework and did not know I got divorced. OK, he had a hook on me (or so he thought), so there was no point in continuing our meeting any longer. The Fatherland called for more work to do and the 007 left my apartment quickly. The trip to the airport was very interesting. My brother, my daughter, my ex-wife and her new husband came to see me off at the airport early in the morning. The weather was magnificent and I was certain I would not see my family for the rest of my life.
In Seattle, during a reception for faculty at the beginning of the semester, I met a new member of the math department. Neal, a self-proclaimed communist, was holding court and proclaimed ÒIf Hinckley was a bit smarter and bought a higher caliber gun, we would have a new president now!Ó. Yes, freedom is a wonderful thing. I had colleagues in Poland jailed for nothing and this dude did not mind showing off his brand of ÒpatriotismÓ. In his beloved Russia he would be shot for a similar remark. How great it is to be a communist in the US.
In December that year I was checking on my daughter by phone Ð General S happened to be at my old apartment and wanted desperately to have a few words with me. The words were ÒBe careful what you say over the phoneÓ. I still have no good explanation for it.
After one year in Seattle I got a visiting job at UCLA. My host, Bob Edwards, got a thrill of his life when FBI paid him a visit asking if I have access to sensitive computers. While in Seattle I went to an immigration consultant trying to figure out the easiest way to get a green card. He looked over my passport, pointed out the word SPLEX in it and advised me to marry an American girl. He explained that SPLEX means I am suspected of having ties to the Communist Party and that issue will be difficult to overcome. I called everybody I knew who came to the US at about the same time. We were all SPLEXes, so I did not worry about it. Due to my visit to UCLA I stayed on visitorÕs visa longer than my friends and other people applied for permanent residence earlier than me, so I had an idea of the difficulties with converting J-1 visa to the green card. In Polish community in Seattle I met a marine scientist who went through the process, understood it well, and was able to guide me through it. Thus I got the green card in January of 86.
In 89 communism fell apart in Poland but I waited 2 years before deciding to see my parents for the first time in 9 years. I was still dreading the visit on a Polish passport, so I informed a few friends to raise hell if something happened to me. One of them, Pepe Sanjurjo (who visited me in Warsaw in 81 during the Solidarity Era), was quite perplexed by my request. OK, nothing happened, nobody was approaching me during the three months I spent in Warsaw. Few months later I became a US citizen and I vowed to never visit Poland again without the US passport. P.S. In 2005 my daughter was getting married in Richmond, VA and her Polish grandma and a Polish uncle were expected to attend the wedding. I decided, on a trip in July 2005 to a topology conference in Poland, to visit 80-year old General S and the family. He did not plan to come to the wedding but asked me a curious question ÒIf I come to the US, will Special Services be interested in my visit?Ó Seems I am not the only one paranoid about Secret Police.
Here is the letter I got from a scientist employed by Lodz Politechnic whom I never heard of before or since:
Glasgow, October 2, 1983
Dear Jurek, As you know from the previous letter, after a long waiting period I got the permission from Lodz Politechnic to extend my postdoc until the end of September 1984. After getting a phone call from LP I signed the next day a contract from Strathclyde University until the end of the current year. It contained the condition of validity as soon as I get the work permit. Getting the permit and visa took about 4 weeks Ð at that time I was supposed to vacation in Poland. In the end I cancelled my summer vacation plans in order to best take advantage of research opportunities. Now only two months remain, funds are evaporating, and future employment is possible only if the team of Professor Graham will get a grant next year. He got a promise of funding of his research but my contract will not be signed for next year unless the money is in. Probably at the end of November I will know if I can count on employment at Strathclyde University. Because of that I planned my vacation in Poland during the period December 11-28 of 1983. Also, I bought a plane ticket of type APEX in order to avoid trouble in case of changing reservations later on. So, if everything goes well, we will see each other in 10 weeks. If I do not get a new contract, I will be back in Poland by Christmas permanently. I do not anticipate the return eagerly as I do not see any definite results of my research yet. Also, packing of all the stuff would not be easy. I learned that during my last change of apartments when I had 15 pieces of luggage, plastic bags, and cardboard boxes. I had to move as the neighbors were too noisy, especially during warm Scottish summer. The building was 30 stories high and the elevator was working the whole night to accommodate neighbors and their guests. Currently, I live in a small house with a garden owned by Poles who emigrated 40 years ago. I commute only 4 miles to the university, a small distance here. I drive a car that performs quite well. In busy city traffic it burns a lot of gasoline though (12-13 liters per 100 kilometers) despite air-cooled engine of capacity 1200 cubic centimeters. I asked my colleagues at university how much their cars burn fuel but I did not learn much. Simply speaking, they do not calculate the rate of burning of gas in the city but they know it is larger than driving outside of the town. My biggest problem is corrosion as most cars are not parked in a garage overnight. Therefore I consider a 6-year warranty against corrosion (with mandatory maintenance checks) that is offered by most dealers as way too expensive. Volkswagen introduced lately a 3-year warranty on surface paint but I do not know any details of it. Let me finish my letter and avoid boring you with small details of my life. Greetings to you and your family, Mirek
My new address: 66 Ashburton Road Glasgow G12 OLZ Tel.041-334-5430
Final comments: I had a few conversations with my Polish friends about the issue of the Wildstein List. Only a few as Poles are very nervous about the subject. My question always was: how could a math professor be useful to Secret Police? I was not being original as my wife would ask a more general question: how can math professors be useful at all? The answer I got is that some students in the math department were dissidents and that was the reason faculty had been bothered by police. I still do not buy it as one would have to know them to some extent to be able to provide any useful information. OK, if a faculty member was already a dissident then it made perfect sense for secret police to try to recruit them. So perhaps the whole deal is about Solidarity activists fighting each other who is holier than thou. I can understand that but why is the rest of society letting itself being dragged into this mess.
I read comments from hardcore Solidarity members that any conversation with secret police inevitably led to trouble. Yes, I understand that but only for hardcore Solidarity members Ð once you give an opening it could be used to extract more. So for Wildstein any contact with Secret Police is tantamount to collaboration/treason/whatever. But why is sane society agreeing to this point of view? I can understand it only if Solidarity wannabes also want to be considered heroes and pretend all they were doing is spitting at secret police agents.
I was using Rysiek Rubinsztein as an example of a dissident (actually he is my only example of a dissident I knew who is an accomplished mathematician Ð I did not know Onyszkiewicz at all) who was admired and who suffered but I did not like him pushing me to do stuff I did not want to do. I had a few classmates (Jan Narozniak, Grzesiek Liese) who like Rubinsztein were continuously harassed and just like him now live abroad. I never understood why did they waste their life to fight idiots.
When I heard of the Wildstein List the first time I thought he is some kind of a lunatic. Now I read his columns in the newspaper Rzeczpospolita regularly and, in contrast to a lot of journalists in Poland, his views make a lot of sense. At the same time I am curious if he knows his publication of the list likely killed lustracja for good.
Also, I regularly read another journalist/blogger/politician (and a graduate of the math department of the University of Warsaw) Jan Korwin-Mikke. Just as in Wildstein texts, Mikke provides a lot of logic but once in a while craziness creeps in. How to explain it?
The same question applies to the whole political life in Poland right now. As I am writing today (August 13, 2007) there is a huge political fight in Warsaw because minister X accused minister Y of saying Z in a conversation the two of them had 2 months earlier. Nobody is asking if Z makes sense or if there is even a chance it can be proved that X said it. In the context of that idiocy Wildstein List or lustracja are really irrelevant.