The Birth of Freedom: Shaping Lives and Societies in the New Eastern Europe. - book reviews

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Oct 18, 1993 | by Arnold Beichman

It would never have occurred to me that the three most interesting capital cities of the new world order are Warsaw, Prague and Budapest, where ongoing miracles have almost become routine. But after reading Andrew Nagorski's superb reportage in The Birth of Freedom (Simon & Schuster), I am convinced that, amid the unending sanguinary horrors of the former Yugoslavia, the most heartening event of post-Cold War Eastern Europe after decades of socialist central planning is the peaceful transformation of Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary into stumbling yet flowering, market-oriented democracies.

But the miracles are blemished by the racism that still afflicts these countries, mostly against Jews, but also against Asian, African and other Third World students.

Too little attention has been paid to that part of Eastern Europe where 60 million inhabitants are seeking a way of life denied them for so long by Soviet mastery. What they are trying to achieve in a decade or less took the older Western industrial democracies a century or more, spanning economic depressions, currency debasement and erosion of savings, mass unemployment and two world wars.

Nagorski, of Polish descent, is a former Newsweek correspondent with a knowledge of East European languages, cultures and leaders. What makes his reportage so readable is that while he deals with many topics, he also supplies the reader with the kind of intimate detail, both historic and current, that is almost novelistic.

Nagorski focuses on four broad subjects: the widespread hatred (and that's not too strong a word) for socialism of whatever variety, "democratic," "non-Stalinist" or "reform"; residual anti-Semitism (seeing how few Jews live in Eastern Europe, the phenomenon is now called "anti-Semitism without Jews"); the environmental disaster and the billions needed to clean up what socialist "economic planning" left behind; and the role of religion and the rise of anticlericalism, especially in Poland.

Probably the book's saddest chapter, "God and the Devil," deals with the problem of anti-Semitism, especially in today's Poland, where the phrase Poles and Jews" is a perennial topic of discussion.

Nagorski tells the story through an emigre friend, Henryk Grynberg, with whom he travels to eastern Mazowsze, a rural area near Warsaw. Almost all the Jews who lived in the towns and villages of the region perished in the Holocaust. Grynberg, who lost his family, was one of the few survivors. He returned to Warsaw after the war, but with the first signs of a communist-inspired, anti-Semitic campaign he immigrated to the United States. The author quotes Grynberg:

"I know many instances of people who had hidden Jews throughout the whole war and then asked that no one be told. The pressure was so strong that even after the war it was very awkward, especially in a small community, to be seen as someone who had helped the Jews during the [Nazi] occupation."

Nagorski himself is ambivalent about Polish anti-Semitism but concludes with a sentence from historian Andrzej Bryk, who warns that Poland is a country where "anti-Semitism [has become] a matter of opinion, not a moral crime."

Nagorski says the one institution in Poland that could have created "mechanism" to counter racism, namely the Roman Catholic Church, "has largely failed to do so -- or even to make a sharp break with its own xenophobic traditions'"

Perhaps the issue in Poland and Eastern Europe was best expressed by a former Polish dissident, Adam Michnik, when he wrote: "Today Poland is a country without Jews, and when anti-Semitic opinions are expressed in Poland, Jews are the issue, whatever the authors . . . themselves might think.... The question is whether the nation is to be open and the state tolerant and multicultural or whether the state is to be based on authoritarian principles and nationalist doctrine."

Arnold Beichman, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, is a columnist for the Washington Times.