Asylum Granted

Towards the end of May, the 16,000-ton Polish luxury liner Batory moved into drydock at Hebburn-on-Tyne. That night the British harbor pilot, Harry Leslie, had dinner with cheery, gold-toothed Captain Jan Cwiklinski in his two-room suite below the bridge. But when Leslie went back on board two weeks later, the captain was missing. "The officers gave me to understand he was sick on shore," he said, "but . . . there was a studied avoidance of any mention of him."

Word spread through Tyneside's grimy dockland that Cwiklinski--Captain Jan, some called him--had gone ashore to see a movie, The Cruel Sea, and then got in touch with the local Polish colony. The ship's medical officer was gone, too. Last week Britain's Home Secretary confirmed the news: the ship's doctor and Captain Jan, holder of the Gold Cross of Merit for "outstanding service" to the Polish Communist regime, had separately asked for political asylum in Britain, and it had been granted.

Captain Jan was grilled by British intelligence; he agreed to broadcast behind the Iron Curtain on the BBC's Polish program; then he called a press conference. He told of the famous trip from New York in 1949, when Communist Gerhart Eisler was stowed aboard and delivered to Poland; discussed how he and all aboard were under constant order of a political officer named Peter Szemiel, so that his own duty was "strictly navigational--I was only the driver." He said that 500 officers and men had recently been purged from the Polish merchant navy. He himself had never joined the Communist Party: "I told them I was too old an apple tree to grow pears."

"Wasn't there some dramatic incident," asked a reporter, "when you fled your ship?" "Left--not fled," said Captain Jan. "I just walked off with my--what do you call it--grip, valise."

Why had he left his ship, when his wife, 17-year-old daughter and nine-year-old son were still in Poland? He was warned, he said, that he would be arrested for his friendly contacts with British and American passengers. "That is the only charge they need."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.