306 NIEPODLEGLOSC'Beacon Fires' (ZMW - Wici) - were calling the peasants to a campaign of active
struggle. This was the most important manifestation ofAgrarism (Peasant
Power) in modern Poland, and a prelude to the formation of the Peasant
Battalions in the Resistance of the Second World War. Despite the closure of its
branches, and the arrest of its most prominent supporters, such as Professor
Stanislaw Kot, the historian, the SL continued to expand its membership and
influence. In August 1937, the extraordinary solidarity of peasant strikers in the
districts of Cracow and Kielce led to more brutal repressions, and to some forty
deaths. Because the strikes were so widely scattered, however, the authorities
had no easy means of dealing with them:
When the strike started, the roads leading to Brzesko Nowe were closed. Numerous peas-
ants joined in, some from conviction, others from curiosity. A small number of blacklegs
heading for the market were left to the care of our SL members from Grobla, who, in the
best of humour, broke a few of the eggs concealed in their pockets and bosoms. There
were no loaded carts at all, except for that of a certain Piorow, a cattle dealer, whose
shaft was smashed.
At 8 o'clock the police arrived with five men. They fixed bayonets, loaded their
weapons, and ordered the strikers to disperse. They arrested me, together with my
colleague, Zygmunt Mackiewicz, the local secretary of the Wici.... When one of the
gendarmes tried to prod comrade Siudak with his bayonet, Siudak pulled a sabre from
under his overcoat and parried the attack with professional skill. Overawed by the strik-
ers' resolution, the police retreated, taking us with them. But on the way to Brzesko we
met with a gang of peasants working on the Vistula dykes, and they released us from
arrest. In this last incident, the initiative was taken by a non-unionized peasant, Antoni
Zakrzewski, who started to belabour the policemen with a shovel...
The epilogue to the story took place in the District Court at Pros-zowice... where on
the basis of charges laid against me, I was given concurrent sentences of two months'
imprisonment.^19Clearly, tensions in the countryside were running high. No one could have
dreamed that within a couple of years these same rural backwaters would offer
the only tenuous refuge from disturbances of a far more catastrophic kind.
The problems of the industrial proletariat, though real enough, were less fun-
damental than those of the peasantry. In a stage of limited industrialization, the
Polish worker often regarded the chance of employment in industry as an extra
bonus, as a stroke of good fortune; and he could usually return to his village in
hard times. Industrial wages, which to modern eyes look derisory, ensured an
income that was twice as high as that of the average peasant family. Official un-
employment figures which reached a maximum of 446,000 or 10 per cent of the
industrial labour-force in 1936, ignore the far more serious unemployment con-
cealed in the over-populated rural areas, usually estimated at between 5 and 6
million, or up to 45 per cent overall. In this situation, the workers' tolerance of
harsh conditions was much higher than it has since become. The problems which
arose were of a different order than those encountered in Western Europe, where
an over-all unemployment rate in Great Britain of 10 per cent in the 1930s was