Dworek, sweet dworek

National Review, Sept 15, 1997 by Radek Sikorski

Mr. Sikorski, NR's roving correspondent, is the author of Full Circle: A Homecoming to Free Poland, from which this article is adapted. Copyright (c) 1997 by Radek Sikorski. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

I HAD always wanted to live in a dworek. Every Pole does. An expatriate Englishman may dream of returning to a Georgian Old Rectory somewhere in the Home Counties. An Irish-American may long to go back to a mythical little white cottage. A German or a Frenchman may dream of retiring to a stone farmhouse in Bavaria or Provence. A Pole sees himself as the proud resident of a dwor, a manor house, or better still a dworek, a little manor house. A classic dworek is eighteenth- or early-nineteenth-century neoclassical, and it falls halfway between an aristocrat's palace and a prosperous peasant's house, with an obligatory white porch, pillars, and at least a hint of a park. It need not be grand; in England an average dworek would qualify as little more than a spacious cottage. Thousands used to dot the length and breadth of Poland.

A dworek is not just a nice house to live in, but a calling. Nations that have not lived under occupation perhaps cannot imagine the aura surrounding the places where national aspirations were once preserved. In the nineteenth century, when Poland was wiped off the map of Europe, Polishness was preserved in two places: in church by the peasants, and in the dwor by the nobility. It was from their manor houses that Polish nobles set off on their hopeless nineteenth-century insurrections, and it was the manor houses that the tsarist authorities confiscated as punishment after each failure. Until a couple of generations ago, Polish romantic novels -- the best reflection of popular imagination -- always centered on a dworek.

In Communist Poland, aristocrats' palaces were too big to ignore, and most were saved under the wing of the Catholic Church, as schools, or as old people's homes. Those estates and manor houses which were turned over to agricultural or scientific institutes were also lucky -- the institutes' staffs were more sophisticated than the average collective-farm director. Many palaces were turned into "houses of creative endeavor" for the use of the regime's crony writers and journalists. The really magnificent houses were preserved for show. Others served Party bosses for holidays under the tender appellation of "Cadres' Improvement Centers."

Your average dworek, on the other hand, once the heart of nearly every sizable village, has virtually disappeared from the landscape. Out of over ten thousand manor houses in Poland before the war, less than a thousand survived Communist rule. There was no campaign to raze them, as in Russia; they perished through stupidity and sloth. Under the Communist land-reform decree of 1944, parcels of land of over 125 acres were turned into collective farms, or shared out among the peasants. The remaining 125 acres and the family house were not supposed to be taken away from their owners. But, as a rule, Communists did not respect even their own laws. Squads of police or Party militants ejected landlords, law or no law. The landlords were sent packing, and the local peasantry were encouraged to help themselves to the contents. For years afterward, you could find bits of grand pianos fulfilling a multitude of useful functions in peasant pig sties and cow sheds.

Perhaps exiles are particularly prone to long for a home of their own. I developed my own longing in Britain, where I arrived in 1981. I had thought of spending a few months there between secondary school and university; but during my stay General Jaruzelski crushed Solidarity and imposed martial law. Rather than go back to Poland and face possible arrest -- my friends had been imprisoned -- I chose exile and made myself as irritating as I could to the guardians of People's Poland. My presence abroad, which was illegal according to Communist law, and my role as a journalist always meant extra work for the officials in the local security-police office: more tapping of my parents' phone, more censoring of their mail, more worry about what I might be writing about socialist Poland in the capitalist press.

One of the favorite methods of the security police for applying pressure was the withholding of a passport for travel abroad. My father had tried to slip out to see me under the pretext of attending the World Cup -- but the police saw through it. Another ploy was to pretend to go to Rome for a religious pilgrimage. My parents spent several days and nights in line in front of the passport office to hand in the application forms. Needless to say, the authorities saw through that, too. Finally, at the eighth or ninth interview, the overfed police major lashed out at my mother: "Unless your son shuts up, you will never see him again." My mother left his office in tears, only to be summoned back the next day and told that the merciful People's State would, after all, give her this one last chance to persuade me to mend my anti-socialist ways.