The letter was sent to Anne Applebaum’s mailbox at Washington Post on May 22, 2013. Her husband Radek (Radosław) Sikorski was Minister of Foreign Affairs at that time. The letter was not answered.
The letter is also available on Researchgate: Letter to the Washington Post 22 May 2013.
It is both interesting and disturbing that historians, sociologists, political scientists or journalists do not tell the truth about contemporary Poland. Even Poles themselves do not have the courage to face the truth. They do not have the courage to admit that they are flooded with lies. The reality is falsified in all possible ways. What the world is learning about Poland from the media is mostly not true.
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The Communists worked hard over the years to perfect their killing ways. From the murder of the body they evolved towards the murder of the soul.
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In order to defend my dignity and honor I had to reveal mechanisms of action of an organized crime group whose task was to liquidate me and erase the traces of my existence. No one of those in power, no one responsible expressed any desire to talk to me. I suppose normal conversations normally occur in a normal country. However, Poland is not a normal country. The liquidators devoted an enormous amount of energy and time to develop an endless sequence of provocations. Recently the liquidation group reduced their profile somewhat. The repressions continue of course, although less openly.
It is hard to imagine the suffering of a person subjected to a liquidation procedure. I could not eat, I could not sleep. I had trouble breathing. My stomach ached. My whole body was in pain. The coughing bouts prevented normal communication with people around me. I was taking large quantities of sedatives and psychotropic pills. Days, weeks and months were passing. I felt completely isolated and alone. There was no help from anywhere. Here in the middle of Europe a human soul was being murdered in front of a crowd. This was an attempt to murder a human being. Because the murder of a soul is the murder of man. This is a crime although for reasons unknown the mankind does not want to deal with it. I suppose, if evil is not called by its true name, it makes it easier to pretend it does not exist. This is a huge inequality: the soul treated as vastly inferior to the body.
The psychological torture was administered methodically, day by day, in a planned and thoughtful manner. For a long time. I was forced into situations where there was no good choice. I was ordered to thank publicly my oppressors. I was pressured to do things against the law. I was many times pressured to explain matters that I already explained earlier. I was falsely accused of neglecting to fulfill some obligations, although at the same time I was prevented from meeting those obligations. I was slandered, accused of theft. I was vilified in the eyes of all school employees, our school students, their parents and the entire artistic community. The repressions continued also outside school. I was harassed and bullied with telephone calls, emails, letters and phone text messages. It was an attempt to strip me of honor, dignity and humanity. This was very similar to a gang rape, with the exception that the target of the rape was not my body but my soul. The scars in my psyche will remain forever. You cannot erase this.
I desperately looked for help. I notified people and institutions who were supposed to be the guardians of law and order, whose task was to preserve citizens’ dignity and safety. It turns out those institutions do not fulfill their duties. Quite the opposite. They are actively engaged against the victim on the side of the oppressors. A large number of functionaries contribute to an extended, slow execution of the victim. Who are they? They are representatives of the government ministries, prosecutors, trade unions, lawyers and doctors.
The henchmen follow prescribed scenarios. Well-trained schemes of action. The basic tools are various types of provocations and other efforts to destroy the victim’s psyche. They prepare traps for the victim to fall into. The attack is usually conducted from several sides simultaneously. Among the attackers is an old friend from school, a friend from my hometown, people I have known (or more precisely, I have thought to know) for years, as well as people previously unknown to me. Their faces expressed happiness and satisfaction, which grew in proportion to my pain. Assured of impunity they had no moral brakes or scruples.
The Nazi and Communist henchmen behaved similarly in the recent past. Perhaps this should not surprise us greatly since we are living on the civilization’s cemetery. We are walking on the killing fields. These are fields of not just the physical death. After all it was here, in the center of the 20th century Europe, where truth, dignity, decency, common sense, respect for old customs, traditions, beliefs were murdered during the Second World War and in the decades that followed. Here the concentration camp of the human conscience lives on, although most people in Poland and elsewhere are in denial about this.
Anyone from the crowd witnessing my public execution, who joined the oppressors, for example by vouching against the truth, was immediately rewarded. This was the case of the current head of the piano section [Maria Kuna]. This seemingly docile and somewhat lost woman, a recent immigrant from Russia, did not hesitate to lie in public, supporting the henchmen version and pressured me to do things against the law. She was one of the spies reporting to the higher authorities. What is her real identity? Who was the recipient of her photographic documentation during one of the school’s meetings when she meticulously photographed everyone in the room at the time? My husband and I are important objects of this documentation, although she did not ask us for permission to take our picture. This woman is so fascinated with Russia that she is using in her class the falsified Russian and Soviet editions of the works of Vienna classic masters, something which in the civilized world is absolutely unthinkable. The following obvious questions therefore arise: why are so many Russians employed in the Polish artistic education, while at the same time creative and bright Poles cannot find work? Why some of the Polish artistic schools are even directed by the Russian cadre?
The loyalty to the mob, the falsifications and the active participation in the process of liquidating a human being are all rewarded with money, advance on the professional ladder, special privileges and total impunity.
I have been asking myself a question: how is this all possible?
My parents taught me to respect fundamental human values. I live in a country that is usually classified as a civilized, predominantly Christian country in the middle of Europe, the birthplace of the recent pope John Paul II. I do see my oppressors sometimes in church during a mass. One of the perpetrators led the church choir.
And here, in this country, people of dignity and honor are attacked brutally and ruthlessly.
Dignity and honor are universal concepts. Respect for dignity of a human being is codified in the Polish Constitution and in the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union. Still, human dignity is assailed on a large scale, in exactly the same manner as during the Communist dictatorship.
Attacking teachers representing high professional standards, dignity, honor, honesty and decency is of course a carefully designed strategy, whose aim is to eliminate positive role models for the young people.
Seemingly a lot has changed in recent years in Poland. We have got higher wages. It is easy to travel. The political pluralism has been officially declared. And ever larger statues of John Paul II and Christ the King can be erected.
This is supposedly the best time for Poland in her thousand-year-old history. This view was expressed not so long ago e.g. by the current Polish President Bronisław Komorowski and Zbigniew Brzezinski, former national security advisor to the US President Jimmy Carter. Unfortunately, the process of liquidating free, independent human beings, which started with the invasion of the Soviet Russia in 1939, and later again in 1944, has never been stopped. In this sense there is absolutely no difference between the Communist junta and the regime of the present day.
The Solidarity movement was a skillfully manufactured lie.
I can now say with full certainty that there is no democracy in Poland. There has been no democracy here since 1939. We have only Potemkin-style democratic decorations. I live in the country governed by junta, where dignity and the social function of the human being are murdered. It is only natural that the result of such action by organized liquidation groups is not only the death of the soul but often also the death of the victim’s body. The perpetrators remain unpunished.
Today Poland is a country without natural social activity. The entire public life remains firmly under control of junta, who simulate a democratic system, but in reality destroy everyone whom they classify as an inconvenient person. Those who might pose a threat to junta’s hegemony are identified at a very early stage. Their lives and careers are often destroyed before they even have a chance to spread their wings. The know-how of the Communist secret police has not gone to waste. The hunt continues. Anyone who raises his or her head will be silenced or liquidated. The totalitarian state silences its opponents, as Hannah Arendt described in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem.
The Polish junta is a far more advanced product of totalitarianism than e.g. the Argentinian junta of the second half of the 20th century. In Argentina people were kidnapped and murdered secretly in isolated locations. In Poland people’s souls are murdered “on-site”, in exactly the same location where they live and work. Observers have an excuse to claim that nothing evil is taking place. This technique is far more sophisticated than the relatively ancient methods of an average Latin American junta.
My country, to which I returned with a great joy after traveling in Europe or the United States, is subject to Bolshevik rules. Contemporary Poland is actually a Communist concentration camp, in which the Communist perpetrators donned democratic uniforms. Certainly, number of political scientists must have at least asked themselves a question, how was it possible, that the totalitarian regime so easily and simply withdrew in 1989-1990. Was it really so, that the guards of the Communist concentration camp Poland simply got up from their desks, opened the camp’s gates and went home to live ordinary lives? And the next day they became pious Catholics and democrats? Was this a miraculous conversion? After the murder and expulsion of millions? After several decades of increasingly more perfect cruelty?
No, this is not true. The Communism did not fall. It was transformed, modernized and adapted to the new times. The banner of Communism was taken down and hidden away. But the dictatorship remained in place. In many ways the actions of the junta are bolder than before 1990.
I will soon visit my grandmother’s grave. It is far away, on the other side of Poland. I will tidy it a little and say a prayer. I will also tell her that the Evil started by the Nazis and the Communists lives on. A great progress has been made towards destruction of a human being.
Małgorzata Głuchowska
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