I arrived in Warsaw, coming directly from Kielce. There, I was to be host by Gwido Zlatkes, a poet, librarian and Polish-English translator, Gwido was active, writing during the times of censorship. He is auther of Duplicator Underground, – an extremely useful book on the Underground Print Movement. He was part of the Freedom and Peace movement, worked in Poland’s experimental theatre. He was a journalist for the Solidarity movement; later he briefly worked as a foreign desk editor for the newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza. In the 90s he moved to America working in UC Riverside as a librarian. He is currently a collector of rare artist books when we met last year; he was running the Gallery of Beautiful Books, in the very heart of Warsaw. However, he was in the process of moving, due to the recurring story amongst artists of the rent being put up. He kindly hosted me, and I was hoping that during this time I would assist with the manual work of setting up the new studio, but the floor had not been put in (oh drat). He did show me around his intriguing new site. It is in the basement on a typical Soviet estate, below A Georgian Orthodox Church- something which I had never been inside before and was painted with brilliant blues and reds. Then we headed underground into the basement of the building. It was a number of hidden artists’ studios, buried in brick tunnels. Long and dimly lit, the kind where you flick a switch, and it takes a few momentary hums before the ballast kicks the fluorescent tube into action. That musty smell which infiltrates and lingers. It invoked the underground movement. There was even a hidden room, through a wardrobe with a mimeograph – one of the most powerful tools of the underground movement. The mimeograph was obsolete and unused in many other countries since the fifties, but during censorship, the poles embraced it to create their own publications; telling their own stories.
That evening we got into conversation about Alexander Wat; Gwido is currently producing a compendium of his work and life. I asked him how his interest began. He talked about his first encounter at a flea market, where he found the book ‘In the 1980s everyone collected books, books aligned you with being part of the intelligentsia, books showed you were outside of the state.’ He had originally intended to purchase a different rare book, but the stall owner had insisted that he buy two books – as it was the end of the day and to make up for his time. ‘It was a funny time; the state was producing books in their thousands. These were not just propaganda, but other books, books on social sciences, inoffensive books. Books were everywhere, and books were nowhere. I remember people queuing for Lord of the Rings…’ So, he picked up the first book he found and within the first few pages of Wat’s poetry, he found something which profoundly resonated with him.
It sounds like a scary time for publishers, you were able to produce work, but it had to be state approved. If you wanted to produce independently, as Radosław Nowakowski had told me, it had to be done in a run of under one hundred copies. ‘Anything to do with Polish history was banned’ – the Russians had played a huge part in the extermination of many Polish officers during the first part of the second world war, as well as putting many of the Polish intelligentsia and landowners into Siberian work-camps. So of course, it was crucial for the state to keep this out of mainstream media. I wondered whether there could be parallels drawn with the current actions of the Polish government, who have not only banned all acknowledgement of any Polish involvement with the Holocaust but are currently rewriting history with themselves in the spotlight. Not to mention that the media law that took effect in January, this empowered the treasury minister – not an independent body – to appoint the managers of Poland’s public television and radio broadcasters. By April, over 140 public media employees had resigned or been fired. The difference is, currently we are still able to have these conversations without the fear of being overheard.
After a few days, it was with a heavy heart that I left Warsaw.
