In Europe

Kiev, was eleven and heard about it on the radio: ‘I started crying loudly, it was as though the world had ended. My parents were also very afraid of an atomic attack by the Americans, during those weeks everything was in a state of alarm. My father had barely escaped being convicted in an earlier purge because, as he put it, “I was wearing the wrong shoes.”’
    Anna Smirnova was a young mother at the time: ‘I was upset, that above all. Not because of Stalin, but because of the feeling that something very bad was on its way again. What would the next regime have in store for us?’ Ira Klejner, daughter of a high-ranking officer in Sebastapol: ‘I was seven. I can remember eating a slice of bread with a fried egg. I realised I was supposed to weep, like everyone else, but all I could summon up was one tear. One tear. It fell on my egg.’

    ‘I'm not the right person to ask. In those days I was on the wrong side. I was one of those in control. It would be like denouncing myself.
    ‘But all right, since you insist. My name is Wladek Matwin. I was born in 1916, in a village not far from Katowice, close to the Silesian border. As boys, we were taken to school in the back of a lorry. The town in those days was inhabited almost solely by Jews, and we threw stones at them. Because the Jews were different. They wore strange clothing, they had funny hats, they didn't speak Polish, they didn't belong.
    ‘As I said before: my lifetime was a time of great violence. In most of the things I experienced, I had no choice in the matter. There were these huge outside forces dragging me along by the hair: during the war, with the communist rebels, in the army, in the party, and finally in the factory as a mathematician. Only much, much later did I realise that we are all limited. Our points of view, our intelligence, it's all very limited. My own life was already too much for me to understand.
    ‘I went to school in Poznan, joined the Polish communist youth organisation at eighteen and finally ended up in the Soviet Union. I fought in the Red Army, helped to reopen the Polish embassy in Moscow, and by 1946 I was back in Moscow. That's how it started.
    ‘I became a party official. Chairman of the communist youth organisation, party overseer of Wroclaw and Warsaw, secretary of the central committee, and, in the end, more or less the right-hand man to Gomulka.
    ‘During those first few years it was simply a matter of clearing the debris, literally as well, the way I suppose it was everywhere in Europe. All of Wroclaw had been blasted to pieces, we had to bury thousands of bodies, countless Germans were driven out, millions of Poles came intheir place, it was one huge chaotic mess. Often, what we did wasn't nice, it was violence, violence against people, violence against the opposition, violence against all forms of reflection, but we thought of it as a struggle; we considered everything a struggle.
    ‘But it would be untrue to say that everything was bad back in those days. We weren't Stalinists; for example, we kept Polish agriculture from being collectivised. We were driven by a desire to help, we did our duty, we lived and worked for a cause, and everything was subservient to that. Duty is a military thing, and also something religious. We believed in many things, the party was almost a church. These days I know that real Marxism is essentially a scientific theory, with all the associated room for doubt. The most difficult thing, of course, is to combine that sense of duty and that doubt – which is what happened after 1956 – but right after the war we were still pure believers.
    ‘A lot of things were swept under the carpet in those years, there were things we didn't talk about, subjects we didn't touch upon. The worst year was 1948. At first Gomulka had taken part in the communist takeovers, but he refused to go on and collectivise the farms, and he was also interested in receiving aid from the Marshall Plan. But well, we knew it wouldn't be very wise to start a full-scale revolt against the Russians. That has never worked out well here, and besides, the country was full of Russian garrisons. We Polish communists were angry about that as well. As if Poland was part of Germany!
    ‘Gomulka felt that he had made a big mistake by involving the Russians too much in the country's affairs. He was a real worker, not much of a reader, not particularly interested in the nuances, he was mercilessly frank and absolutely