Reclaiming a Proud Past

The government resurrects Independence Day and an old hero

As the first snow of winter fell on Warsaw last week, the honor guard stepped smartly up to Poland's Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. A crowd of 2,000, including a row of officials, watched in respectful silence as President Henryk Jablonski solemnly placed a wreath at the base of the granite monument. In hundreds of towns and cities throughout the Western world, Armistice Day is observed in much the same fashion. But the Polish ceremony marked a significant break with the Communist past, a symbol of rising patriotism that was finally acknowledged by the government, despite the possibility of a hostile reaction by the Soviet Union.

The modern state of Poland was born on Nov. 11, 1918, the day the country regained its liberty after 123 years of partition among Prussia, Russia and Austria. Until World War II the date was traditionally celebrated as Independence Day. After the war, however, the Communists ignored the anniversary, observing instead Nov. 7, the anniversary of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. In recent years the government has interfered with attempts to commemorate Nov. 11.

But the government not only tolerated last week's ceremony, it joined in. Moreover, the regime later allowed a procession of 20,000 Poles, led by boy scouts, to wend their way through the city from the Cathedral of St. John to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. One of the speakers was applauded when he declared: "A revolution has been going on in Poland for a year. It must continue to be a revolution without revolution, without confrontation, without bloodshed. But Poland must become an independent state."

A related and perhaps even more astonishing event has been the resurrection of a legendary patriotic figure after decades of official oblivion: Marshal Jozef Pilsudski, the military hero who was a bitter foe of the Soviet Union and the person the Poles consider the father of their modern country. As chief of state in 1920, Pilsudski repulsed a Soviet invasion by routing the advancing Red Army at the Battle of Warsaw.

Communists have long derided Pilsudski as a "bourgeois dictator" and an "agent of the Western powers." Although he ran a tough military government from 1926 to 1935, when he died, Pilsudski remained a symbol of proud Polish nationalism. Poles were galvanized last week as the state-owned television suddenly broadcast flickering newsreels of the Marshal and played the marching songs so closely associated with his career.

The re-emergence of Pilsudski and the revival of Polish Independence Day seem to reflect a desire by the beleaguered government of Premier Wojciech Jaruzelski to seek more popular backing by displaying an independence, if only symbolic, from the Soviet Union. The government did not even object last week when the Solidarity trade union named a shipyard in Gdansk after Pilsudski. The irony was palpable: Solidarity had been founded in another shipyard not far away, one that was named for Vladimir Lenin, the father of the Soviet state and a bitter enemy of Jozef Pilsudski.

At the dedication ceremony, a union leader told a cheering crowd: "The nation that loses its culture and history yields to the pressure of other nations." Last week, Poles were clearly using the past to fortify themselves in a shaky and uncertain present.

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