The Long Night of Martial Law

A prisoner's diary tells of roaches, radios and smiling visitors

Since General Wojciech Jaruzelski imposed martial law on Poland last Dec. 13, his security forces have interned more than 6,000 officials and sympathizers of the independent trade union Solidarity. Until now, little has been known about the treatment of the 3,600 who, according to the government, are still held in about 40 camps around the country. Among the few visitors they have been permitted to receive is Archbishop Jozef Glemp, the Primate of Poland, who is said to have traveled to all the camps. Last month he was allowed behind the walls of the top-security Bialoleka prison near Warsaw, where some 300 Solidarity activists are held in isolation. TIME has obtained a rare photo of the Primate's visit to Bialoleka, as well as the remarkable diary of a Solidarity member who is imprisoned there. Smuggled out of Poland, these documents reveal for the first time the extent of the ordeal faced by Poland's prisoners. Excerpts from the anonymous diary:

It is night, the cell is asleep. The yard in front of the building is shrouded in snow and washed with fluorescent light. The barking of the police German shepherds and the squeak of the warden's shoes can be heard through the bars. There is no way of knowing what time it is: the prisoners are deprived of watches. The warden is making his rounds. A miniature walkie-talkie attached to his chest emits a muffled cacophony of incomprehensible orders.

The warden stops. Silhouetted behind him is a high metal fence topped by barbed wire. He peers suspiciously into a barred window. Inside, everything is dark and quiet. Only the heavy breathing of the sleeping men is audible. Through the black of night can be glimpsed twelve steel cots that have been pushed together and stacked to the ceiling in the cell. Earlier the prisoners had formed a choir. Singing through the slightly opened window, they had intoned: "Unto Thee, Lord, we call: restore a free Fatherland to us all."

Singing such hymns could well provoke another nighttime search of the cells of the 300 men imprisoned here in the Bialoleka detention camp. Suddenly the cell doors burst open and the detainees are thrown out into the corridors to be frisked meticulously. In the meantime, police tear the cells apart, looking for cameras, tape recorders and especially the small radios that are the prisoners' main source of news from the outside world. The news is passed on in bulletins that travel from cell to cell via hidden openings drilled through the walls.

Twelve persons were put in each cell after the Dec. 12-13 raid [when martial law was imposed]. That was the night when people were taken from their homes, when doors were pried out of their frames with crowbars; when women in handcuffs were led out into the cold; when children, the handicapped, the ailing and the elderly were put on trucks and taken away. That was the night when a woman in labor and her two young children were left at home alone while her husband was taken out into the frosty night, dressed only in a bathrobe, then pushed into a cell with broken windows. This was the same cell where Professor Klemens Szaniawski had fallen sick with pneumonia right after he finished chairing a session of the Congress for Polish Culture.

So each cell had twelve people in it. Everybody got two dirty blankets, two sheets, a small pillow, two aluminum bowls, a flat spoon, and a cot consisting of a steel frame with planks and a rag-stuffed mattress. Just before Swiss representatives from the International Committee of the Red Cross paid us a visit to see how we were being treated, half the prisoners were taken to other barracks. Now there are only six of us in each cell.

The food trolley that sails through the corridors has been nicknamed the Batory [the name of a Polish ocean liner]. The Batory is commanded not by political prisoners but by two common criminals. At 6 a.m. one of the criminals fills a bucket with coffee. It contains no sugar, but it does have a faintly detectable brown tinge to it. There is a bromide in the coffee that helps the prisoners forget about women. Sometimes cockroaches float in the bucket. Cockroaches? They were dismissed as a mere prisoner's fantasy by those smiling Swiss on their inspection tour.

The other criminal deals out the daily portion of 1 1/2 oz. of margarine onto aluminum plates. Sometimes there is some marmalade, sometimes 2 oz. of waterlogged sausage or a 3 1/2 oz. portion of cheese spread. At noon the Batory will call with lunch: a thin soup and a ball of mashed potatoes dipped in brownish fluid. Occasionally one can fish out of this mixture a shredded bit of hairy pig flesh, even a piece of cold bacon fat. Once lunch was served late. That was when Primate Glemp visited Bialoleka. Since he went through all the cells at lunchtime, it was considered bad manners to let the Primate see such food.

At about 4 p.m. the Batory arrives with water for tea. If it crossed the yard quickly enough, the water is hot. If not, the tea leaves just don't drop to the bottom of the jug. Two hours later everyone gets a pint of watered-down milk soup containing lumps of rice or buckwheat. That's why everyone here eagerly awaits the twice-a-month parcels. The families of internees can't find the food the prisoners need in the shops. Fortunately, Piwna [a volunteer organization] provides food parcels as well as legal advice to the internees and their families, and since it operates under the auspices of the Roman Catholic Episcopate, the martial law authorities tolerate it.

It is night. The time for the rats and mice to scramble out of the crevices and sewer pipes. The six men in our cell sleep on the upper bunks to avoid being crawled upon by rats. Rats? "Impossible!" said the benevolent-looking inspectors from Switzerland. Now the prisoners are asleep in the stuffy, dingy cell. Across the yard is a small, squat building where the security forces reside. Every day prisoners are summoned there and pressured to sign loyalty oaths. Prisoners are promised freedom, or blackmailed. Sometimes they are asked: "Why don't you want to talk to us?" Most prisoners refuse to talk because they know the procedure is illegal.

On Sunday a priest will come to Bialoleka and say Mass in the assembly hall. There have to be several Masses; that is one of the ways of limiting contact among prisoners. Before Mass the prisoners will be searched to try to prevent them from giving the priest notes. Messages must be sent out the official way, through the militia, but they often get lost in the files.

It is night again. The men in the cell are asleep. Behind the security officers' building looms a taller structure. It's a special building, and it is guarded with particular care. Its cells are filled with members of the Solidarity National Commission. The conditions of their imprisonment are worse than ours because they tried to rid the country of a venomous red spider. So now they must be isolated. They cannot attend Mass. They are regarded as very dangerous; even the hunger strike by all the Bialoleka prisoners protesting their treatment did not improve conditions for the Solidarity leaders. The strike just showed our solidarity.

Probably the martial law general [Jaruzelski] has not decided how to punish them. Maybe he will give them long prison terms, maybe he will kick them out of the country.

It is night. The fluorescent light flickers, and the snow under the warden's boots crunches. Outside the bars is the walkway where small groups of prisoners will be allowed to exercise for half an hour, maybe 45 minutes tomorrow. The prisoners are separated from the world by a wall with watchtowers, by armed guards and barbed wire.

On this side of the wall there is the detention camp. On the other side is the Military Council for National Salvation. It is night.

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