As today is the 20th Anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, I wanted to share some text from a series of interviews I conducted with Wiktor Kulerski in the late 1990s. Kulerski was a leading member of Poland's Solidarity movement in the 1980s and 1990s and was elected to the Polish Parliament in 1989 just after the fall of Communism. Kulerski was a science teacher and served Poland as the country's vice-Minister of Education from 1989-1991. Kulerski's father and grandfather also served as high ranking officials in the free Polish governments between World War I and World War II.
In the paragraphs that follow, Kulerski makes clear how horrible Communism was to the political leaders of Poland who had sided with the West in World War II (which included Wiktor's father Witold), and why the collapse of the Berlin Wall was such a huge victory for people who value freedom and justice.
On October 5, 1951, while I was studying in the secondary school of fine arts, my father's trial on charges of espionage and treason began. Whenever I could I would attend the trial at the military court and watch as guards delivered my father to the courtroom. He was led in by chains and made to sit in the second row. My father and his fellow conspirators were seated alphabetically according to their last names. Bryja, Wincenty; D????browski, Mieczyslaw; and Hulewicz, Maria were in the front row, while my father Witold Kulerski sat with Pawel Siudak in the second row.
All of those on trial were good friends of my family. Wincenty was a Tatra Highlander who, during the Nazi occupation, had worked in the underground as chief of the financial section of the Home Branch of the Polish Government in exile. Whenever I saw him I always thought of the time he and my father had spent together in his mountain cottage right after the war. Wincenty was sentenced to 10-years for crimes against Communist Poland. During the war Mieczyslaw had worked in the Polish underground in Hungary. He had organized the smuggling of Polish couriers between London and Poland. He was sentenced to five-years in prison. Maria, Mikolajczyk's secretary, came from a well-known family of intellectuals and was one of the most knowledgeable people my father knew. She carried herself with great modesty. After several years of torture during her captivity she was sent to a mental hospital. The court sentenced her to seven-years in prison. Pawel had worked with my father in London, and immediately following the war he had returned to Poland to marry his sweetheart. I spent a lot of time in his wife's secondhand bookstore. He was sentenced to 11-years. When they were all seated together among their captors I could see how all their faces had changed and become ashen.
In 1994 my father wrote a deposition about the severe treatment he received during his interrogations before and during the trial for the Main Commission for Research of Crimes against the Polish Nation. He wrote:
"The interrogations continued in sum almost four years...they took place every day and every night with one short break in the morning and one in the afternoon. As a rule I was forced to stand...Swelling, and pain in my legs, combined with lack of sleep led to extreme exhaustion and a nervous breakdown after a dozen or so days...The interrogating officer regularly beat me on the chest, in the exact same place many times in a short span of time...after these beatings I had swelling, internal hemorrhages, and acute pain...He regularly pulled at my hair and even pulled hair out of my scalp...He trampled on my exposed toes with the heels of his military boots...For three winters I was kept in an unheated cell. For this reason I experienced frostbite and severe swelling in my legs. After the frostbite every kick to my legs during interrogations were especially painful...During the night I would hear the cries and groans of other prisoners being tortured. The guards would throw unconscious and bloodied prisoners into my cell...I was prohibited from bathing for two years, and not allowed to take a walk for four years."
During interviews with the Polish writer Hanna Krall in 1987 my father testified, "for three years I never received any letters, newspapers, or books. For the possession of a pencil a prisoner would be sent to the dark cell punishment. The dark cell measured about one square cubic meter. One dark cell was showered with excrements, and in another cold water continually fell on the prisoner from above." However, despite the cruelty, whenever my father was questioned by his judge a transformation would occur. When he spoke he sounded more like the accuser than the accused. He would ask the judge questions and accuse him of betraying Poland. He never showed fear, and in fact he was so stubborn that it got to the point where the judge told my father that if he didn't stop asking questions he would be tried in absentia from his prison cell. Even after the warnings he let it be known that he wasn't being tried for any crimes against Poland, but rather for his loyalty to the legal Government of Stanislaw Mikolajczyk. The former elected Prime Minister who had escaped from Poland on October 20, 1947.
After the trial the Inquiry Officer (the State Prosecutor), lieutenant Mieczyslaw Habinka wrote a report about my father's comments during the trial and in October of 1951 submitted them to Colonel J????zef Rozanski, the Director of Inquiry at the Ministry of Public Security. Habinka wrote: "Kulerski behaved provocatively from beginning to end...He repeatedly tried to present Mikolajczyk as a hero and a democrat...He declared that his depositions are distorted and inconsistent with the actual statements he gave." A few years later, in April of 1953, Major J????zef Troszczynski, Chief of the Central Penitentiary in Wronki, wrote of my father, "he continues to stick by his false ideology. He refuses to accept that he led a movement hostile to the People's Poland...He is unrepentant and hostile to the present reality...In his opinion the sentence he received is unjust. The Local Special Section has no use for him." The Local Special Section enlisted informers from the prisoners.
On October 8, 1951, my father was sentenced to 12 years in prison for "carrying out espionage on behalf of the American and British secret services." He was deprived of all his civil rights, and had all his property confiscated. He was also convicted of "attempting to overthrow the Communist regime by sheer force." His sentence was legally carried out by the Communist justice system. My father wrote for the Main Commission for Research of Crimes Against the Polish Nation in 1994: "...They made it impossible for me to go into the files of cause (for prosecution)...They never issued a formal indictment, but only read the charges...(During the entire trial) I was allowed to speak with my lawyer only once, and that was for half an hour and in the presence of the prison warden...Before and during the trial we were prevented from taking any notes. We were allowed no pencils or paper...During the trial we were always isolated from our lawyers...The sentence was never directly read to me, and after sentencing none of my appeals were ever acknowledged."
For those interested in justice it is worth noting that in 1996, Colonel Adam Humer, who had been one of my father's torturers, and had prepared him for the trial, was sentenced to seven and a half years in prison for crimes he committed during the Stalinist period.
Upon receiving his Master's degree in 1994, Terry was awarded the Paterson International Fellowship from the University of Denver to work with educational policy makers in Warsaw, Poland. He also taught primary and secondary school pupils English in Poland from 1990-1991 and again from 1994-1995. As a teacher he helped to start one of Poland's first student-run newspapers.
