l political trends unless they return and accept the inevitable necessity to work with the PPR and the USSR. Their abstract ideals cannot now be applied in Poland. Zulawski's concept of integral democracy would mean that if the reactionaries grow strong enough they could win power legally as Hitler did in Germany. Such intellectuals cannot govern, cannot make a revolution. They would only slow up the wheels of progress, and that cannot be permitted." I asked him about the Russian officers in the Polish army. He answered that just as French officers were engaged as instructors of the Polish army after World War I, so Russian officers are now teaching the Polish soldiers, but they are only technical instructors who will soon leave. All my observations in Poland contradict Cyrankiewicz' statements. In fact, I doubt that he believes half of them himself. I am convinced that he does not relish his task, even if he is an unconscionable careerist. He dislikes the role of a Jewish policeman in a ghetto, spying upon and denouncing his comrades. He knows that he and his party are prisoners of the Kremlin and of its agent-the Polish PPR. He knows that the PPR has less than half of its claimed 600,000 members. He knows that a united front, not with the PPR but with the PSL and other democratic forces could easily defeat all forms of reaction including Fascism and anti-Semitism, and wipe out banditry. He knows that an Eastern Bloc does in fact exist and that the potential formation of a Western Bloc is only a reaction to this fact. He knows that the trend in Poland is toward a totalitarian, one-party dictatorship. He is far too intelligent not to know these things. Cyrankiewicz also knows that critics of the present regime, could safely return only if they agreed to be silent-to become as he is, apologists for totalitarianism. Polish democratic Socialists in London expressed the opinion that Cyrankiewicz was profoundly affected by his concentration camp experience in Mauthausen. He witnessed Nazi atrocities and suffered them himself. He lost his respect for human dignity. War and revolution make life cheap. He became 19 BibliotecaGino Bianco
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTExMDY2NQ==