How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed

I realize that I only have words and that, from time to time, as I hold them in my arms I am less lonely.

Why communism failed: it failed because of distrust, because of a fear for the future. Because deep down no body believed in a system that was continuously unable to provide for its life citizen's basic needs for forty years or more.

How is a woman to tell the story of her life and not stumble upon men?

It's hard to recognize discrimination when you live with it

Only when there is no privacy can there be total control

Humor is the only way to overcome depression

Yes I don’t like to live here,’ she said, more to herself than me. Then she turned toward me: ‘But if I have learned anything from my life, it’s that since I don’t belong anywhere, only the movement matters.

Every public space is like a billboard, with messages from the collective subconscious of the nation. There one can read passivity, rage indifference, fear, double standards, subversion, bad economy, a twisted definition of 'public' itself, the whole Weltanschauung - an entire range of emotions and attitudes is exposed.

That evening, in her apartment, still in Warsaw, Ana takes down a book from her shelf – a rather thick, ordinary paperback. It looks old, because it's worn out and somehow shabby. But it's not ordinary. I can tell by the way she handles it so carefully, like something unique. 'This is the book I told you about,' she says, holding out the Anthology of Feminist Texts, a collection of early American feminist essays, 'the only feminist book translated into the Polish language,' the only such book to turn to when you are sick and tired of reading about man-eater/man-killer feminists from the West, I think, looking at it, imagining how many women have read this one copy. 'Sometimes I feel like I live on Jupiter, among Jupiterians, and then one day, quite by chance, I discover that I belong to another species. And I discover it in this book. Isn't that wonderful.

Category of 'enemy' could spread to the whole nation

How could you forget something you never learned or had?!

Perhaps to them and their peers their ecological consciousness is a bigger sign of prestige than a fur coat.

Growing up in Eastern Europe you learn very youg that politics is not an abstract concept, but a powerful force influencing people's everyday lives.

Look now,' Vesna's mother continued, 'what do you know, a civil war might break out any minute: Serbs would fight with Croats, Czechs would fight with Slovaks, Hungarians would fight with Jews. how can you be sure of anything?' 'But, Mother, if this happens, then it will such big trouble that nobody would think about a shortage of pantyhose,' protested Vesna. 'You'd be surprised, my dear, to know that people have to live and survive during wars, too. Besides, how do you think we survived communism?

To say it's the poor quality of the paint under socialism is correct, but it is not enough. To say it's soft-coal exploitation and air pollution, bad gasoline and bad cars, or lack of money - that again would be correct. But not the whole story. All these reasons (and probably many more) are not enough to explain the decrepitude. I think the reason is in us. The cities have been killed by our decades of indifference, by our conviction that somebody else - the government, the party, those 'above' - is in charge of it. Not us. How can it be us, if we are not in charge of our own lives?

And even those who would like to believe in egalitarianism must ask themselves why we have to be equal only in poverty.

I know them, the American men (and women) of the left. Talking to them always makes me feel like the worst kind of dissident, a right-wing freak (or a Republican, at best), even if I consider myself an honest social democrat. For every mild criticism of life in the system I have been living under for the last forty years they look at me suspiciously, as if I were a CIA agent... But one can hardly blame them. It is not the knowledge about communism they lack - I am pretty sure they know all about it - it's the experience of living under such conditions. So, while I am speaking from 'within' the system itself, they are explaining it to me from without. I do not want to claim that you have to be a hen to lay an egg, only that a certain disagreement between two starting points is normal. But they don't go for that; they need to be right.

They were forced to vote for communists, as if communists needed voting for.

I wish I could have written to you about something transparent and as light as the feeling that photograph of the empty room gives me, but then I'd be sending you something else -- that would be poetry. I realize that I only have words and that, from time to time, as I hold them in my arms I am less lonely.

I wonder — this feeling of insecurity, of vulnerability, of having the carpet pulled out from under one’s feet, this fear in the face of the desired but unknown — is this the price that we have to pay to reach towards a future that is constantly escaping us?