Martin Krygier

An intimate and foreign affair

The Cold War was a foreign import. Its origins and central battlegrounds were elsewhere. It was only here because it was everywhere. Yet I have long had the sense that for many Australians it occupied a space framed on the one hand by local imaginaries and on the other by free-floating fantasies. In particular, sympathies for communism were more closely, though inversely, related to affection for local arrangements than they were to what had been done, and was being done, in and by communist regimes. Either there was little knowledge of foreign doings, or where facts were known, even well known, they were interpreted in terms of local categories and examples, and so misunderstood. Ostensibly many of the major fights and ideological divisions were about those regimes and the language of dispute was redolent of foreign names, alien and exotic heroes and villains and distant places, but many people invoking them seemed not to know much about them, or care how little they knew. And they were slow to change, even when they got to know more.

That kind of solipsistic imaginary is not always misplaced. We don't need to know much about Denmark to appreciate Hamlet; enough to 'hold a mirror up to nature' (and Hamlet helps us in that too). But in the Cold War the nature of communist regimes was at the centre of many of our deepest political divisions, and it seemed to matter whether we knew what we were talking about. Certainly many people argued as though it did. And yet our local imaginative repertoires were poorly stocked to help us grasp the specific and horrific characters of Stalinism, say, or Maoism, or just of ordinary lives in extraordinary circumstances. Yet these repertoires framed our debates, even when these were conducted in the most cosmopolitan terms. It was about us, even when it purported to be about them.

That was true in many other countries too; Australia didn't invent parochial responses to distant exemplars, heroes, villains, and challenges. But conditions for parochialism have always been particularly good here; pending challenge from New Zealand, we might indeed be world leaders. Distance has contributed mightily, along with the absence of overwhelming man-made tragedy – with the signal and long ignored exception of Aborigines. Fortunate though it might be, it was not an ideal vantage point for coming to terms with the 20th century. At least not with those aspects that moved Isaiah Berlin to say: 'I have lived through most of the twentieth century without, I must add, suffering personal hardship. I remember it only as the most terrible century in Western history.' Perhaps I am wrong about this, but I am trying to recover how it has seemed to me – not to write the history of the period.

Some people brought different experiences and imagination to thinking about the Cold War. They were not always thanked for it. One was Richard Krygier, my father. He was, for his whole life in Australia, an anti-communist activist. Among his better known activities were the founding and running of the Australian Committee (after 1957, Association) for Cultural Freedom from 1954, and in turn Quadrant magazine, which he founded in 1956 and published until he died in 1986. In his Cold War, Australia was not – could not be – the key reference point to understanding communism, even though he spent most of his life here. For he had already been formed elsewhere. So I begin there.

Poland

My parents were both born in Warsaw, Richard a month before the Russian Revolution and my mother, Roma, six months later. It's no exaggeration to say it was a key, malevolent, accompaniment to their lives. She saw the Cold War out, living until 1999; he did not, though he sensed by the time he died in 1986 that the ground was shifting. He wasn't confident, but he was a congenital optimist and was tentatively pleased.

They were both Jews, neither of them observant and both anti-Zionist and Leftist. Their Jewishness caused them little difficulty in their early years but some troubles at university in the '30s, when anti-Semitism became particularly virulent. Jews were periodically pursued and beaten by nationalist Polish students (my father had his jaw broken), whose characteristic implements included, among other things, razor blades on sticks. Apart from being subjected to attack, Jewish students were required to sit in so-called 'ghetto benches' at university lectures. My parents were among those who refused; my mother's group had to attend lectures but refused to sit in the benches, and she stood for the whole of her degree (in economics). My father found he could get by (in law) without attending lectures, and turned up at only two in his four years of study. At one point, in 1938, he was elected chairman of a Jewish Boycott Committee, when the (nationalist) Dean of Law tried to force students to attend and sit in the ghetto benches. The boycott won that year, though the requirement was reimposed the next year. But by then, Jews faced more serious problems.

Notwithstanding these difficulties, my parents' language, culture and national allegiance was Polish; not a straightforward or unproblematic allegiance but real. Their Jewishness was part of their make-up and indeed their predicament, and was about to become even more so, but it was a secondary part of their self-conception.

It might have had something to do with their politics, though. They were politically active, both already at school and then at university. She was a member of an illegal communist youth organisation. He was never a communist, but rather an unaligned Popular Front socialist, warmly disposed to communist friends, admiring of Polish communists and of what he took to be the achievements of the Soviet Union. He was happy to hide illegal papers from the police for his friends, who risked ten years' imprisonment. Among those for whom he hid such papers was the girl who became his wife.

While a student, he wrote a good deal of left-wing political journalism, particularly on international affairs. Once he was hired to start a column reviewing the international press for the only daily Popular Front paper in Poland, but the day he delivered his first copy the paper was closed down by the police. He was arrested, but released after questioning. Though she was the Party member, my parents were tipped off by a friend in the public service that my father was the one with the damaging security report. He was approached twice to join the Party, but declined, not heatedly but simply because he could not believe anything that was coming out of the Moscow Show Trials.

My parents married in January 1939, just before Poland, and the world, were tipped into the Second World War. They started life together in Warsaw, he still studying and working part-time as a clerk in his deceased father's firm. When, in alliance with the Soviets, the Nazis invaded Poland in September, unenlisted men were ordered to make their way east however they could, in the hope of joining a regrouped Polish army there. My father was advised to go north to Lithuania rather than south to Romania, because Ukrainians were murdering Poles travelling that way. He took a train and, with some money won playing cards, bought a Polish officer's winter cap. As he describes it in the oral history JDB Miller conducted with him for the National Library:

On the train the Russians were already picking up officers who finished up, you know, in Katyn [where 10 000 Polish officers and other elites were murdered – each shot in the head – by Soviet forces in April-May 1940], and these places [another 10 000–12 000 were killed in other locations]. And they took me off the train because I had this officer's cap. I didn't know what they were doing, but we could see that officers were running, moving under the benches, and there was a panic. Luckily enough, being a Socialist, I had insisted on having an ID [that listed me] as a clerk, not a student. That saved me.

He arrived in Vilnius, from where he managed to send word to my mother to join him there.

The Soviet authorities confiscated their travel papers, and they were trapped in Lithuania for about a year under increasingly oppressive Soviet occupation, unable to leave until (itself quite a story) they and several thousand others were saved by the Japanese consul in Lithuania, who off his own bat issued transit visas through Japan until he was recalled. Had that not occurred, my parents would doubtless have perished soon after June 1941 when the Nazis ended their alliance by attacking the Soviet Union and immediately began murdering almost all the Jews in Lithuania.

On New Year's Eve 1940, however, they boarded the Trans-Siberian railway to Vladivostok, and from there got to Japan, where they both worked for nine months for a Polish refugee relief committee, he as deputy director, attached to the Polish Embassy. They then left by ship, through Shanghai and Indonesia, to arrive in Australia on two-week transit papers at the end of November 1941. Their plan was to get to Canada, but on December 7, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and my parents were stuck here. They came to be extremely grateful for their luck. They were then early boat people. That was not a fact they forgot, and my father sought to remind Australians when protests against Indo-Chinese refugees, similar to those against boat people today, arose in the 1970s.

My father was more politically active than my mother in all the time I knew them; my mother had other interests and talents. So from now on, the story mainly focuses on him. By the time he arrived in Australia, my father had come to the conclusion that there was much in common between the two regimes that had destroyed so much that he valued. As he later put it: 'I was anti-Nazi before the War; I'm anti-Communist now. I haven't changed.' Well, he had changed in many respects, but perhaps not in his fundamental values. However, he had experienced, seen, and read a lot since his student days.

His sympathies for communism had suffered cumulative shocks. They began locally, even personally, but quickly spread. There was the execution by the Soviets of Viktor Alter and Henryk Erlich, leaders of the Polish Jewish socialist party, the Bund, for 'collaboration with the Nazis'. Apart from the crazy absurdity of the charge (like virtually all the other fatal accusations at that time) – during the Russian Revolution, Erlich was a member of the executive committee of the Petrograd Soviet and later part of the Soviet delegation to England, France and Italy – Erlich was father of my parents' close friend, Victor Erlich, later Professor of Russian Literature at Yale, with whom my father had made his way from Warsaw to Vilnius. My parents knew this allegation was false, but then they came to realise they all were.

Again, almost all active pre-war Polish communists, some 5000, were liquidated by Moscow in 1938 and '39. My parents knew and admired many of those people. The best way for a Polish communist to survive in the late '30s, as the historian Norman Davies has observed, was to be held as a communist in a Polish prison or to be recruited to the Soviet security police. In the 1940s a new Polish communist party was formed in Moscow under Soviet direction and then imposed on Poland after the war. My parents were by then in Sydney, looking on in dismay.

The fate of erstwhile friends aside, they had learned a great deal more than they had known before about the horrors of Stalinism and what proved to be systemic features of communist regimes wherever they had come to power. Some of this they experienced 'on their skin', as the Polish phrase has it, in Lithuania and in their escape through the Soviet Union; the rest – mass starvation, denunciations, executions, tortures, show trials, camps, state terror, murder on mega-industrial scales – they learnt of from many sources.

And then there were the lies, constant crazy lies, on matters great and small. There were the conspiracy charges that linked every villain with every other villain – Trotsky, Hitler, the Jews, the Japanese, the international bourgeoisie, and poor Bukharin, or Radek, or Zinoviev, or ... There was the liquidation of countless thousands of miserable 'wreckers, diversionists, spies, and killers' (Stalin's words), like the engineer, Nikolai Karlovich von Meck, of the People's Commissariat of Railroads, charged with plotting to leave the Soviet Union bereft of railroads, and so open to foreign intervention, by overloading trains and thus weakening the rails. There was the airbrushing out of Trotsky's significance in the Revolution and reinventing Stalin's, even while everyone could remember their respective revolutionary roles, and so on. My sense is that it was the palpable fraudulence of these lies, perhaps even more than what was being lied about, that was decisive for my father. From time to time he mentioned a few turning points in his ideological development, and they all had to do with outrageous Soviet lies. All politicians lie, a sceptical Australian might respond, but that just returns us to where I began. There are lies and lies. Totalitarian regimes have a special need and talent for the biggest ones. Try though we might, we can't compare.

Experience was deepened by reading. There was a lot available, and my father was a voracious reader in several languages, including Russian. He made it his business to be well informed about what was happening in the expanding Soviet empire. He had also read a great deal of the literature of ex-communist disillusionment, that revealed much about communist patterns of thought and act, about the distinctive demands of communist parties on their members, of the aims and methods of the Comintern, the compulsorily (but also enthusiastically) servile role of national communist parties, and much else.

By the time they reached this country, my parents' lives, families, friendships and country had been ripped apart by the war and its aftermath. Both my mother's parents and her brother were murdered by the Nazis; other relatives spent years fighting or being imprisoned by them, and what was left of the family was dispersed around the world. They left Poland out of necessity, arrived in Australia by accident, and stayed because, after the communist takeover of Poland, they couldn't go home. They came to love this country and to participate actively in its affairs, but that was later.

Australia

After a couple of tries as a storeman-packer, at which he did not excel, and an enjoyable period as a waiter in the restaurant Romano's, my father was hired as press officer in the Polish Consulate in Sydney, where he became very close to the Polish Consul-General, Sylwester Gruszka, a distinguished diplomat who had been demoted from his former post in New York by the Polish Nationalist government which he opposed. Richard often recalled being told by Gruszka to look around here 'because this is the first democratic country you will have experienced'.

He was keen to join the army. He applied to the AIF but when asked to swear allegiance to the King explained that he couldn't, since he was a Polish subject. This caused some confusion, it appears, and though he awaited call-up for two years, it never came. Eventually, after some time working with the Consulate in Sydney, he managed to gain accreditation as a Polish war correspondent in the South West Pacific, and went with MacArthur's troops to New Guinea and the Philippines. When the war was over, the Polish government-in-exile ceased to be internationally recognised as the government of Poland, my father lost his job, and my parents' new post-war life started here.

To support himself, and also give Gruszka something to do and live off, he set up a Polish bookshop, Vistula (Australia). The business, never especially healthy, partly because he was never especially a businessman, ran into the ground as Poles learned English and had children. He later branched into importing European magazines, mainly French and German, French books (he was, for some time, the agent of the publisher Hachette) and Dutch art books that he liked, but this only ever occupied half of any day. The other half he spent as an anti-communist activist.