Billiards on the High Seas

THE CAPTAIN LEAVES HIS SHIP (313 pp.) --Jan Cwiklinski, as told to Hawthorne Daniel--Doubleday ($4).

History can sneak up on a man when his back is turned. Captain Cwiklinski, master of the Polish passenger liner Batory, was not looking one May day in Manhattan six years ago, when a baldish little man with glasses came aboard on a 25-c- visitor's ticket and sailed as a stowaway. Unlike most stowaways, he soon dug first-class passage money from his pocket. He also owned up to the name of Gerhart Eisler. For unwittingly aiding in the escape of a key Communist agent, badly wanted in the U.S., Captain Cwiklinski got involved in a nasty, three-cushion carom on the international billiard table.

The captain neither agreed nor resisted when Scotland Yard men took Eisler off the Batory at Southampton. For this, when he docked at Gdynia, Cwiklinski sat through a palm-sweating grilling with his bosses and the dreaded U.B. (for Urzad Bezpieczenstwa), Poland's secret police.* On the return trip to New York, the Batory's crew and passengers were in turn grilled by U.S. Government agents, and the eventual loss of pier privileges forced the Poles to give up the transatlantic run. No Communist or proCommunist, Cwiklinski tried to coexist with the Polish satellite regime for the sake of his wife and two children. He gradually became a figurehead on his own ship, with all disciplinary matters handled by secret-police men. In 1953, tipped off by a friend that he was slated for a phony spy trial, the captain jumped ship in England and began writing his experiences.

His autobiography is a story without surprises, but still a sobering account of the Communist tyranny as only those who have lived under it can know it.

* Two weeks later Eisler was released and made his way to East Germany, where he was propaganda boss until he lost favor in 1952. He now heads an East German version of the Gallup poll.

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