Poland: A Symptom

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The heavy-set man in a neatly pressed blue suit and beret stepped out of War saw's shabby district court at 127 General Swierczewski Street into a welcoming crowd of 300, mostly writers and students. They surrounded the old man and patted him on the back. Two girls embraced him and handed him red roses. Said he: "All the nice people seem to be here." Melchior Wankowicz, 72, one of Poland's most popular novelists, had just been convicted by the not-so-nice people in courtroom No. 16 of "slandering the People's Republic of Poland."

The case was a symptom of what is happening to the once relatively liberal regime of Party Boss Wladyslaw Gomulka. At the start of World War II, Wankowicz fled Nazi-occupied Poland, accompanied Polish army units in the Italian campaign as a war correspond ent, and told their story in his best-selling book Battle of Monte Cassino. Soon after war's end he settled in the U.S. with his wife and daughter, became an American citizen. Homesick and impressed by the new intellectual freedom under Gomulka, he visited Poland in 1958, then four years later settled in Warsaw permanently. At first he was lionized by the regime. But last March he joined 33 leading Polish intellectuals in issuing a sharp protest against growing intellectual repression.

Promptly the police obtained retractions from a majority of the signers, but Wankowicz was one of a dozen who refused to recant. Then suddenly, on the night of Oct. 5, he was arrested. Chief evidence produced at his trial was a speech critical of the government that he had written in June; he never delivered it, but had allegedly sent a copy to his daughter in Washington. Under a decree dating back to the Stalin era, Wankowicz was sentenced to three years in prison. The judge cut the sentence in half because of a recent amnesty and allowed him to go home pending appeal.

By Stalinist standards this was mild treatment, but was nevertheless clear warning to Polish intellectuals to stop their criticism. To judge, however, by Wankowicz' enthusiastic reception after the trial, at least some of them were flouting that warning.