Irony in Poland

Of all the universities in Poland, none is held in higher esteem among true scholars--and none is in a sadder state of repair--than the Catholic University of Lublin. Its run-down main building still bears the pockmarks left by World War II shells. Its students live five to a room, and the thin stew they get for lunch could well stand more meat. But as all Poles know, there is one thing that Lublin has in abundance. "Throughout all the difficult years." says the rector, Father Marian Rechowicz, "we survived on spirit."

The only private university in the Communist world (it is under the direct management of the Bishop of Lublin) not only kept itself alive, it also kept alive the last vestiges of real intellectual freedom in Poland. When it reopened its doors in 1944 after the Nazis had used it for a barracks and a hospital, students flocked to it from all over the country, and many of Poland's leading scholars joined its faculty. The Communists never dared shut it down, consoled themselves with the fact that one partially free university was good for propaganda value in the outside world. But if they were never able to kill off Lublin entirely, they harassed it without mercy.

Despised Ghetto. By 1950, hundreds of students had learned what it means to be interrogated by the secret police. Lublin graduates found it increasingly hard to find jobs, and the faculty found it almost impossible to get their research published. The government closed the law school and the department of education. It imprisoned four professors, barred three more from teaching, in 1951 sent popular Father Antony Slomkowski, then rector, to jail. "We were," says Rector Rechowicz, "a ghetto, an isolated despised ghetto that was allowed not to live but to exist."

In spite of all the pressures. Lublin never really surrendered to the Red regime. It taught Greek, Latin, French, German and English--but not a word of Russian. It was for a time the only university to offer sociology, the only place to teach economics that was not, as one professor puts it, "all class struggle and the dictatorship of the proletariat." Though cautious, many professors found ways to get around the Communists.

Says one art teacher: "I didn't care anything for Socialist realism. I brought reproductions of real modern art into my classes, and I said 'this is art and I like it.' " One historian would take trusted students on hikes, and once safe from being overheard, would deliver lectures as he had in pre-Communist days. Though there were student spies ("I could always tell," says one facultyman. "They took notes at the wrong times"), teachers and students found subtle ways of communicating. Says a historian: "If I had to refer to the 'Soviet liberation of Poland,' for example, I would inject a tiny pause or hesitation in my voice before and after the expression. No change of tone--just these little pauses. That meant irony, and every one of my students knew it."

Free Channels. When Poland won its first small measure of independence from Moscow last fall, Lublin threw out the weakling rector the government had installed and elected shy Church Historian Marian Rechowicz. But the new era had scarcely begun when a whole new set of troubles befell the university. As more freedom spread to the state universities, some of Lublin's best known scholars left because of the higher pay. Since Lublin gets no state support, it has to spend 70% of its budget on faculty salaries to hold the professors it still has. Its enrollment has fallen from 4,000 in 1953 to 1,400 students, and these must be fed from the meager produce of a 25-acre farm run by twelve nuns. Merely to bring its plant up to par, the university estimates that it will need at least $50,000 more a year from Polish churches and U.S. friends. "Our university," says Rector Rechowicz, "is out of its ghetto. Its life begins to flow again in proper channels, free channels." But the irony is that the university that for so long kept freedom alive has suffered so much now that freedom has spread.

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