This lack of empathy from outside meant that Polish society had to come to terms with its predicament on its own, and this had a profound influence on the development of literature and the arts. The war had scythed through the established writers of the 1930s, and those who were not killed were scattered—to London, Paris, New York, Buenos Aires or Tel Aviv. Their writings, published by independent émigré presses, nevertheless found their way back to Poland, where they played a part in a remarkable literary flowering whose best-known figures were the poets Tadeusz Różewicz, Zbigniew Herbert and Czesłlaw Miłosz, the novelists Jerzy Andrzejewski, Stanisław Dygat, Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz and Tadeusz Konwicki, the playwright Sławomir Mrożek, the writer Stefan Kisielewski and the philosopher Leszek Kołakowski. This was run close by a similar flowering in film-making, whose greatest exponent was Andrzej Wajda, which explored Polish realities in subtle but penetrating ways.
The holiday did not last long, and in 1958 a clampdown began. Books were banned and periodicals shut down. Censorship was imposed more ruthlessly than ever, with the censor’s office deciding how many copies of each book could be printed and how many performances of a play could be staged. Writers who did not conform were harassed and arrested. And while they responded by retreating into allusion and other subterfuges to evade the censor—or, in the case of Stanisław Lem, into the realms of science fiction—the state’s manipulation of language reached Orwellian proportions, for different reasons.
In 1965 two young Party activists, Jacek Kuroń and Karol Modzelewski, wrote an open letter demanding a complete overhaul of the political machine and a return to the basic values of socialism. They were immediately arrested and sent to prison, but others, most notably their colleague Adam Michnik, carried on the discussion, in universities and youth organisations. While Gomułka grew more reactionary, a faction within the Party viewed him as soft and incompetent. General Moczar, now Minister of the Interior, was biding his time.
The Church had been preparing to mark a thousand years of Christianity in Poland in 1966, and as part of this preparation, in November 1965 the Polish bishops sent an open letter to their German counterparts calling for mutual forgiveness and reconciliation between the two nations. Gomułka had already launched a rival programme of celebrations to mark the millennium of the Polish state, to provide an excuse for the disruption of the Church’s celebrations by police and ‘worker activists’. Now Moczar’s faction seized on the bishops’ letter and accused them of encouraging ‘German revanchism’ and undermining the Polish state.
The Six-Day War between Israel and the Arab states in 1967 raised the political temperature. The Soviet Union and her satellites backed the Arabs, but most Poles were on the side of Israel and greeted its successes with delight, partly as a slap in the face to Russia, partly because they could identify with the Israelis, many of whom were of Polish origin. The deputy Konstanty Łubieński cast one of the only two votes ever registered against the government in the Sejm on its condemnation of Israel, one of many open manifestations of sympathy for the embattled state. Gomułka responded by declaring that Poles could only have one motherland and denounced Israeli sympathisers as ‘Zionists’.
In January 1968 Mickiewicz’s