It has happened! On 19 June 2023, my play Reytan of Prague was shown for the first time at the Two Theatres Festival in Zamość. Tomasz Drozdowicz directed this play for TVP (and had a major influence on the final version of the script). "Rejtan" (or "Reytan", as it can be spelled either way) was shown out of competition as a pre-release show. The premiere will take place in early September.

I am not going to review my own text or describe the staging. Although I rate it otherwise highly, the credit goes to the director, set designer Klaudia Solarz, the excellent Nicponie band with soloist Karolina Czarnecka, twenty wonderful actors and many others. I encourage you to watch it when it comes time to broadcast.

I would like to write a few sentences about why I wrote this text in the first place. It followed me for years. I was writing my novel 'Zgliszcza' (The ruins), which was finally published in 2017. It is a socio-political panorama of Poland in the first years after the war, with a special focus on the experiment of Stanisław Mikołajczyk. He was trying with his Polish People's Party (PSL) to compete in the elections with the communists masquerading as the Polish Workers' Party (PPR), who controlled the situation. Others, such as anti-communist partisans, also appeared in the background in the novel.

PSL or national upsurge

The experiment of that PSL was doomed to failure, but the question is whether it should not have been tried, without, after all, having the gift of prophecy. It was certainly a controversial attempt, requiring ambiguous compromises. The point is that the mass of Poles treated the PSL as a kind of anti-communist mass movement, and in fact a national upsurge (like Solidarity in the early 1980s). Not involving shooting at communists, which is not to say that it was entirely bloodless.

Many PSL activists were killed, especially during the election campaign before the 19 January 1947 parliamentary elections. Others were beaten, locked up in detention centres, and some had their political trials plotted.

I have the impression that this experience of a mass movement has been largely pushed out of the consciousness of Poles. On the one hand, because of the finale: the flight in the autumn of 1947, after the elections were rigged and therefore lost by the PSL, of Mikolajczyk himself, welcomed more than two years earlier as a saviour. On the other hand, it was the Poles themselves who capitulated.

They were unable to last - after five years of war and more than two years of civilian (though also armed) resistance. To persist with such great biological losses and in the face of terror whose end could not be anticipated (unlike the German occupation). This abandonment of an attitude of open resistance was later an embarrassment for our parents and grandparents. The break-up of the PSL led to a general atomisation, to the choice of different paths for individual survival. What was left on the battleground was the apparatus of a closed, Stalinist totalitarianism.

However, it was worth returning to it. To dig up this collective movement that challenged definitively the stereotype of an egalitarian and mass communist revolution. The masses were Polish patriots opposed to the installation of communism in Poland. To remind us of this, I wrote 'The Ruins'.

Bolek worth any reward

While writing, I was intrigued by the story of Bolesław Chmielewski, a brave lad from Praga Północ (Praga North), curator of the PSL youth circle. He was probably the last man in Poland to stand up for Mikołajczyk after he had already fled - at the Warsaw PSL congress in December 1947.

He did it from the convention stand, so in public (he was arrested immediately afterwards). He had appeared as one of the side plots of 'The Ruins'. And now he has become the main, one might say titular, character, of a play that has changed the novel's situations and dialogues a little.

Almost everything here is authentic, the texts of reports and denunciations, sometimes quoted in extenso, such as Bolko's fatal letter to the Security Office in June 1949. Almost all the characters are real, from the torturers dealing with Bolko to his colleagues. For the sake of a bit of fiction in the personal plot, I changed my protagonist's name. In the play, he is Bolko Chmielarz.

From the papers collected in Bolek's Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) dossier, suffering emanated. From his own testimony and from the secret police reports about him. I asked myself a question: how was it possible that this boy, a soldier of the Zoska Battalion during the war, who lost his brother in the Warsaw Uprising and then, caught in a round-up, was sent to a German camp, did not live to receive all possible awards after the war.

Why was he instead beaten, carried away, and finally quite trampled into the ground and broken? That was the logic of Polish history. I decided to commemorate him. Together with his breakdown and actually his fall.

Stalin's Poland resembled no other era in our history, not even, I repeat, the German occupation, where there was terrible terror, but there was nevertheless hope for a change in the wartime situation. After 1945, this hope was finally taken away from the Poles, which is why I do not subject my protagonist to easy judgments. But, without summarising the plot, I also wrote about the rebirth of Bolek, about his getting back on his feet.

Jan Olszewski and his colleagues

My snooping in the IPN archives was supplemented by my conversations with Jan Olszewski, in the last period of his life, when he was already recovering from a stroke. A lawyer and politician, he was already a member of the Grey Ranks in Praga during the war. After the war, he treated his activity in the PSL youth group as a natural consequence of those wartime choices.

Born in 1930, he was 17 in the year of the rigged elections. He was active in the structures commanded by Bolek. He remembered perfectly the atmosphere, but also the drama of the fundamental events.

Did you know one fact? It was 26 October 1947, a Sunday. Mikolajczyk had disappeared, fled abroad. Colonel Franciszek Kamiński, former commander of the Peasant Battalions and PSL MP, asked a group of boys, high school students from the aforementioned PSL youth group, to guard the party's building in Aleje Jerozolimskie amid the political turmoil. SIGN UP TO OUR PAGE They came there to a reading of PSL activists. But they treated it as a war task. They didn't let in the PSL-Left splitters trying to take over the building and the party. But they naturally succumbed to the secret agents who beat them severely.

For me it was another Polish Thermopylae. They were expelled from schools. A few of them went after that in March 1948 to join the forest partisans, with a national tinge, by the way. One of those who made this choice was Józek Lukaszewicz, a boy from the village. His parents sent him to school in Warsaw, as he came from the Plock area incorporated into the Reich during the war. He became a colleague, indeed a school friend, of Janek Olszewski, and sat with him in the same bench.

Olszewski urged them not to go to the forest. A classic situation from Polish history, one of the many dilemmas over which attitude to choose. After three months, the unit was broken up. Józek and several of his colleagues were sentenced to death.

Jan Olszewski had a lifelong dialogue with his late friend. And he asked himself what would have happened if, on that fateful October day, he himself had ended up in the PSL building. What choice would he have made then. And so, saved by chance, he was admitted to law school in 1949.

Praga also fought against communism

How could it not be told? About Bolek, the Rejtan of Praga, albeit with a blemish, with a breakdown to his credit. And about the boys who put up a hopeless fight, although they initially chose civil resistance, in theory somewhat safer. They were all children of the workers of Praga, sons of bakers, chauffeurs. Bolek is the son of a railwayman, as is Janek Olszewski, who is also one of the protagonists of my play - under his own name.

They were shaped by their schools (including those during the war, when certain subjects were taught illegally), and the scouting movement was very important. It was through them that the workers' son Bolek and his two brothers became friends with boys from the intelligentsia and ended up together in the Zoska Battalion. In some cases, families were also influential. Janek Olszewski was the cousin grandson of the executed Polish Socialist Party (PPS) fighter of 1905, Stefan Okrzei. Bolek's father was also a member of the PPS.

They wanted social change, but not the kind that the communists were bringing with them. They understood perfectly well the difference between their own aspirations and the reality the new system was cooking up for them. The 'beautiful people' shaped by the war did not have to come from manor houses. They could have been from Praga's red-brick tenements. That is what this is about. Also about.

From somewhere in the secret police papers, a picture emerges of anti-communist sentiment in the working-class Praga district, including that of the shady ones. They were later suppressed, as in the whole of Poland. But they were a fact worth recalling.

Second-class people

And here is another point. I understand the various post-war choices, I do not judge anyone prematurely. But when I read about the young enthusiasts of the new regime who later, sometimes after 1956 and sometimes only after 1968, began to experience a daze, I cannot help but remember Bolek. At a time when they were running amok ideologically in line with the expectations of the authorities, he was a captive animal. Even broken, it was only after 1956 that he was able to matriculate.

This did not only apply to Warsaw. One of the heroes of my 'The Ruins' was Arkadek, a boy from the small town of Ryky, also modelled on an authentic character. His brother was in a branch of the Home Army (AK), after the war in the Freedom and Independence (WiN), and he himself helped the partisans.

In the book, his teacher says that families like Arkadka's will be second-class citizens because of their AK entanglements. This is an authentic opinion. It applied to towns like Ryki. It also applied to villages. Social hierarchies were reversed, and not only to the disadvantage of the former heirs. Scum sometimes came to the surface. Let us remember this.

I invite you to the September broadcast.

– Piotr Zaremba – Translated by Tomasz Krzyżanowski

TVP WEEKLY. Editorial team and jornalists