From my early childhood, I remember that in home conversations, people were told that this 1 and that 1 “fleeed to the West”.
As a fewer years old, I did not realize what it meant, but I remember that it sounded mysterious and a small dangerous, all the more so due to the fact that older people telling each another specified stories kept their voice down and refused to explain to their children who, where, where and why “he ran away”. In specified situations, it was mostly people who legally left for the West or first south, somewhere behind the Iron Curtain, and then refused to return, sometimes asking for asylum, another times settling for stateless position and seeking citizenship in any another country in the West.
Sometimes the verb “flee” was replaced with “remained”. This was due to the fact that permits to go to the West were strictly limited until the collapse of the old system. Passport forms required stamps from workplaces, passports were issued for a strictly limited period of time, and upon return, they had to be deposited immediately in the passport offices, before which many hours or even multiday queues were set. The destiny of families whose successors, and do not give God's closer comparative "flee" or "remained," was besides fatal, specified unlucky men were in problem in the country, and they did not in rule get approval to leave to meet or even worse join the fugitive.
I personally experienced specified a situation in a alternatively dramatic version, and the individual from the closest household lost his occupation at the university, due to the fact that his father "was left illegally", so he could have had a bad influence on the young students, going to the Church and refusing to sign up for the PZPR decided the matter. Recently, I received more than a 100 pages of materials from the IPN, in which various directors of the MMA and MFA departments had long discussions about whether my father's passport was extended or not. They carefully analyzed his character and intentions. Fascinating reading. In any case, the wife and children consistently refused a passport for a twelve years, then let go alternately, declaring to the parent that “escape” or “staying there” would origin “taking care of” the children.
This began to change rather clearly in the second half of the 1970s, and with the systemic transformation the word "flee" and "stayed" faded into memory. The younger ones associate them more frequently with crime movies present than with what was part of everyday life for any of their parents' generation, seemingly average people.
For any time, however, I have felt déjà vu. I mean, like 1 of my professors erstwhile said, who got the incorrect speech, it's expected to be like I said, just the another way around. However, while in my childhood they were fleeing or staying in the West, the direction of escape is now increasingly the opposite. They escape as symbols of freedom and democracy so praised erstwhile in the West as whistleblowers Edward Snowden, in the embassy of 3rd countries search refuge defenders of fact and freedom of speech of a kind Julian Assange, (when a akin destiny happened to Hungarian Cardinal Mindszent, but at the time it did not end with arrest and many years of martyrdom which for the Australian inactive persists), people flee and stay in the East who have had adequate of increasing totalitarianism in the field of moral, taxation or health. In times of tyranny and covid psychosis specified an island of freedom and normality was Belarus. In private conversations, too, we hear more and more debates about where to "run away", "be" or make any reasonably safe pied a terre. It is not always the east, sometimes Turkey, Hungary, Slovakia, South America.
Case of the justice Tomasz Szmydt is circumstantial and ambiguous, but it besides evokes the memory of times would seem past. The analogy that came over me from the beginning is moving away. Joseph Light, a advanced Stalinian safety officer and popular in this formation of origin, who visited the American embassy in West Berlin in December 1953. A fewer months later, he became a star of Radio Free Europe, in which he revealed the compromising spheres of functioning of Stalin's Poland, and besides utilized a fresh function and grandstand for national clashes with PAX Boleslaw Piasecki.
As in the case of the 3rd Polish Republic and the escape of justice Szmydt, the authorities of the Polish People's Republic accused the Light of espionage, but any historians uncertainty this version and attribute the decision to escape the desire for a little dangerous life, and I personally fishy a hunch of thawing after Stalin's death, which in the case of respective companions Lights ended not very severe compared to the crimes committed, but inactive in prison. There is no reason to believe that justice Szmydt has specified concerns. However, the comparison seems justified, that in both cases we are dealing with people of the elite of power, but acting more on the interior front than military or diplomatic.
Therefore, the accusations of espionage are alternatively a manifestation of panic, possibly an excuse to introduce greater repression or censorship, but not a justified fear of spying on the strict sense as in the case of Ryszard Kukliński. specified an accusation is simply a preemptive blow designed to weaken the effect of revealing the grim spheres of the apparatus of repression, surveillance, corruption, submission to the apparatus of abroad power. So it would be treason, but as in the case of Light treason to the elite of power, which itself is not very loyal to its own nation – to put it mildly, it would be a kind of espionage ignorant and asymptomatic, so as we know from the time of the "pandemic" the more dangerous, or contagious. For now, the justice is medially moderate, but in times of Twitter and the net we can almost be certain that we will hear something from him.
Olaf Swolkień
Photo X profile by Tomasz Szmydt
