Excerpt
The CIA Book Club
Hope1980–19811
A Snaggle-Toothed Thought Machine
And so they burst into our poor, hushed apartments as though raiding bandits’ lairs or secret laboratories in which masked carbonari were making dynamite and preparing armed resistance.
Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope
One Tuesday evening in March 1980, they came to arrest the publisher Mirosław Chojecki for the forty-third time.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn called it the “night-time ring,” the moment state security agents show up at your door after dark, trailing their insolent, unwiped boots across your floor, and announce that they have orders to take you in. They are experts in arrest science, and they know from millions of cases such as yours that the evening, at home, is the time and place of least resistance. The best response most can bleat is “Me? What for?” But the agents do not give answers. So you race with trembling hands to grab some things for the unknowable journey ahead, and within a few short minutes you are walking out to the transport that stands idling in the street, wondering how you haven’t found time even to say goodbye.
“Each of us is a center of the universe,” Solzhenitsyn wrote in The Gulag Archipelago. “And that universe is shattered when they hiss at you, ‘You are under arrest.’ ”
Chojecki, pronounced hoy-yet-ski, was thirty years old that night—a tall man, with a mane of red-brown hair and a penetrating, blue-eyed gaze. One Polish author described him as Christlike, “only somehow bolder,” with the same patriotic zeal to fight evil shown by his war-hero parents. He lived with his young family in a third-floor apartment in Żoliborz, a vibrant suburb of northern Warsaw, and was cooking dinner for his young son and talking to his father-in-law, Jacek, when they heard the door. There were three men outside, a local cop in the jackboots and gray tunic of the Citizens’ Militia, and two plainclothes agents of the SB security service. They flashed their badges and told him to get his coat. There was no explanation. He had just enough time to calm his crying son, grab a toothbrush and a pack of cigarettes, and whisper in Jacek’s ear, “I think it’s going to be longer this time.” Then they clapped handcuffs on his wrists and took him to the police Fiat waiting in the road below.
It was March 25, and the air was still sharp with winter. An iron lid of cloud had stood over the city all day, releasing a light snowfall that caught in the beams of the Fiat’s headlights as they drove south along Stolichna Street, with its plaintive, tolling streetcars, past Paris Commune Square, toward the haunted ground of the Nazi-era ghetto. Warsaw, city of cursed heroes, what horror had unfolded in these blood-soaked acres. Here was the Umschlagplatz, the holding yard where the SS assembled Jewish men, women, and children before loading them into the boxcars that would carry them to Treblinka. There was the Old Town, rebuilt in facsimile on the dynamited ruins that were all Hitler left. Ahead rose the city’s tallest building, whose original name, Józef Stalin Palace of Culture and Science, could still be read in its weathered stonework, and close by it the statue to Feliks Dzerzhinsky, Polish founder of the Soviet secret police, who had murdered and deported hundreds of thousands of his compatriots.
A hundred yards before Dzerzhinsky, the Fiat swung into the headquarters of the metropolitan militia, the KSMO. They took Chojecki down to a crowded underground cell, where he passed a sleepless night. In the morning they brought him before the prosecutor, Anna Detka.
Detka sat behind a desk, typing. At length she cranked the paper from the machine and gave it to him to sign. He was being detained for three months, the document said, for stealing a state-owned duplicating machine worth around fifty dollars with three co-conspirators. This was an act that was “highly prejudicial” to the People’s Republic of Poland.
He protested. He hadn’t stolen any duplicator and had never met two of the men whose names Detka had listed. What was the evidence against him?
“I’m the one who asks the questions,” snapped the prosecutor. Did he have anything to say to clarify this matter or not?
He did not.
Harassment, assault, imprisonment: this had been the publisher’s lot for the past half-decade. Sometimes the agents the SB sent against him were violent. A gang had once dragged him off the street, laying into him with fists and boots. Another time, professional thugs ambushed him in a courthouse, headbutting him and pushing him down a staircase. His face was black with bruises for weeks afterward. They had targeted his family, trying to expel his kids from childcare, and his livelihood too: he had been fired from his job at the Institute of Nuclear Research and put on an employment blacklist.
They kept a round-the-clock watch on his apartment and hauled in his friends and contacts to try to turn them into informers. They eavesdropped on his conversations and sent spies to win his trust. Their most time-consuming tactic was arrest. They had the power to hold you for forty-eight hours without a warrant, so that’s what they did, over and over again. They would release him from one detention, watch him cross the street, then pick him up again on the far side. On average, he reckoned he spent a day a week in the police cells.
Now he was heading to Mokotów jail, a house of terror to rival the KGB’s Lubyanka headquarters in Moscow. A fortress of high walls topped with barbed wire, Mokotów prison was one of the few structures to have survived the leveling of Warsaw in 1944. The Red Army had captured it intact, and the communists straightaway put it to use. It stood now as another symbol of Russian oppression, a place where Polish freedom fighters had been brought down the decades, for interrogation and torture in the tested Soviet manner.
Chojecki entered through the main gate, beneath a guard tower. He was made to change and check in his clothes and belongings, before being issued with a bowl, a spoon, and a fork. He was then led down a vaulted brick corridor into the dark interior, which rang to the tune of slamming doors and jangling keys and reeked of testosterone, fear, and rotting brick. Each block was an open-plan rookery of cells reaching up to the roof, with steel staircases linking the landings, and suicide netting to stop the “jumpers.” In future decades, researchers would find hundreds of skeletons buried in the prison grounds. Some had been killed in the efficient manner of the NKVD, forerunner of the KGB, with a single bullet to the back of the head; others had been hanged, either outdoors in the yard or—in special cases—in a basement cell, where the execution was hidden from other inmates. The priest who took the condemned prisoners’ last confessions was working for the security service. Many of the human remains showed signs of torture. Popular methods used by the Polish secret police included slowly tearing out fingernails, applying “temple screws” that steadily crushed a victim’s skull, and putting on “American handcuffs,” which constricted the flow of blood in a prisoner’s hands until the skin burst. They would place lovers and married couples in adjacent cells, so that the strangled cries of one would encourage the other to confess.
Chojecki was brought to Block III, a wing that had been reserved for political prisoners and “swallowers.” It was common for inmates in Polish jails to force bucket handles, welding rods, or anything else that would show up on X-ray down their throats to get transferred out to a hospital, but the authorities had grown wise to this and decreed that such prisoners should be held in the jail until the foreign object showed signs of piercing their internal organs. He had been in Block III before, once for “vilifying the Polish People’s Republic” and again for “organizing a criminal group with the aim of distributing illegal publications”—at least then he had known the real reason for his detention. They put him in Cell 13 on level two, a bare room with four child-sized bunk beds, a basin, and a barred and frosted window. There were two men in here already, both around forty years old, who had been sharing this small space for months.
Chojecki dumped himself on a spare steel bed. As the days dripped by, he and his cellmates talked politics and played chess with a set made from heavy black prison bread, and he tried to secure his release.
He wasn’t allowed a lawyer. He hadn’t even been given a copy of the charge sheet, so he asked the prison supervisor how he could challenge the indictment. The supervisor told him to look it up in the library. When he mentioned this to his cellmates they laughed out loud: the library had been shut for months. How then could he get hold of legal textbooks? A guard told him to speak with the supervisor. The Kafkaesque circle of Polish justice closed.
