516 WOLNOSCJewish side and which continued to deny all Jewish involvement in the murder-
ous organs of Stalinist oppression. The true history of a lost, multinational soci-
ety can only be satisfactorily addressed by historians who are fully equipped
with multinational sensitivities.
Yet mainstream literature remained in the hands ot established figures. The
best-selling poet was Father Jan Twardowski, a writer of stylish, moralistic but
conventional verse. The best-known name belonged to Wislawa Szymborska
(b. 1923), who won the Nobel Prize in 1996 for an oeuvre going back to the
1950s. Apart from Szymborska, the literary pantheon was still filled by older
writers of pre-war vintage such as Milosz, Herbert, and Rozewicz. Rozewicz
wrote of the banality of the so-called period of transition:
robia wiec to i owo so they do this and that
i tak dalej and so on
po koncu tamtej epoki after the end of the former epoch
i na poczatku nowej epoki and at the start of the new epoch
nie tylko artysci and not just artists
cos sie skoriczylo something has ended
nic sig nie chce zaczac nothing wants to begin
moze sie juz zaczelo Perhaps it has already begun
In the long run, however, by far the most important development of the
decade lay in the reorientation of Poland's international relations. Much of the
credit in this connection must be attributed to three successive Foreign Ministers- Professor Skubiszewski, an international lawyer; Professor Wladyslaw
Bartoszewski, a wartime resistance hero; and Professor Bronislaw Geremek, a
medieval historian and long-term Solidarity adviser. In less than a decade, the
Soviet Union's chief ally was refashioned as a fully accepted member of the
Western community. The turnaround was no mean achievement. The ground-
work had to be laid whilst a standard Soviet garrison remained in its Polish bar-
racks, living, among other things, on the organized theft of second-hand cars
from Germany. The last foreign troops did not leave until 1994, leaving a trail
of devastation behind them in garrison towns like Legnica. Nor was there any
shortage of practical obstacles. A minister charged in the early 1990s with
NATO liaison described how the ancient international telephone in his Warsaw
office was only linked on a fixed circuit to Moscow. In order to contact the
Polish representative in Brussels, he had to go in search of a phone booth on the
street.
Of course, the public climate was entirely favourable to the change. No
significant political group opposed it. Poland's adherence to the Eastern Bloc
had been involuntary. But it had gained a modicum of acceptance thanks to
memories of the Second World War - or rather to the selective memories of Nazi
oppression, which the Communists did everything possible to keep alive.
Knowing that Poland had been ground to pieces between Hitler and Stalin,
many thinking Poles had accepted that belonging to the Eastern Bloc, though