Across the Line

Marek Hlasko was seven years old when the Nazis invaded Poland. He was 13 when the Communists took over. He worked as a bellboy in a Warsaw hotel, put in six years as a taxi driver. Out of his experiences he wrote savagely realistic short stories that made Polish Reds wince. A tall, blond, flop-haired youngster who resembled the late Hollywood hero, James Dean, Hlasko headed a coterie that was analogous to Britain's Angry Young Men and the Beat Generation of the U.S. The difference was that Hlasko had more to be beat about--a fact that gave his work authority.

Four of Hlasko's stories were made into movies. He became literary editor of the student newspaper Po Prostu, an audaciously outspoken weekly, until it was banned; he helped found the magazine Europa, but it was suppressed before its first issue reached the newsstands. Party-line critics railed that Hlasko was a "cynic and demoralizer," but a poll of Polish youth named him their favorite writer. Last year his novel, The Eighth Day of the Week, which dealt with the homelessness of a pair of Warsaw lovers, won Poland's highest literary award, though the Polish-West German movie made from the book was banned in his homeland.

Moral Atrophy. Seven months ago Party Leader Wladyslaw Gomulka's Red government, which wants to silence all "destructive" criticism but hesitates to act too precipitately, gave Marek Hlasko a passport to visit Western Europe. In Paris he was interviewed by the weekly L'Express. Was he a Communist? "There is no such thing as a Communist." What were the differences between France and Poland? "I think that people here are able, at least to some extent, to get an element of joy out of life." What was it like to live under Communism? "The misfortune of a man in a totalitarian country is the feeling, a feeling that never leaves him, of the grotesqueness and ridiculousness of one's own self--the reduction of dreams--the reduction of desires--a moral atrophy--the inability to react to the vileness one sees at every step, every day."

Soon Marek Hlasko was sampling the joys of the free life. He moved in with friends who edited the Polish exile review, Kultura. Receiving sizable royalties from Western publishers, he traveled to West Germany and Italy in a beat uniform of blue jeans and cowboy shirt, boasted that he had run through $4,000 in just a few weeks of high living on the Riviera. He reportedly fell in love with German Actress Sonia Ziemann, who had starred in the movie version of The Eighth Day of the Week.

Unsmiling City. All the while, the heat was building up against him at home. The Soviet Union denounced him in the Literary Gazette. A provincial Polish town burned his books. The Warsaw party daily Trybuna Ludu blasted him as a disciple of George Orwell, "that classical master of anti-Communist pamphleteering." Marek Hlasko wrote an answering letter that Trybuna Ludu refused to publish. "It was not I who made Warsaw," said Hlasko bitterly, "that Warsaw that was for so many years a city without a smile; it was not I who made the Warsaw in which people trembled with fear; it was not I who made the Warsaw in which the greatest treasure of the poor was a bottle of vodka; it was not I who made the Warsaw in which a girl was cheaper than a bottle of vodka--it was that Warsaw that made me."

Hlasko knew that this sort of attack could mean imprisonment on his return, but he wrote that "a writer without a fatherland is nothing, and I see no possibility, no accusation, no consequence which could tear me away from my land and my home." Last week Hlasko appeared at the Polish military mission in West Berlin, asked for an extension of his passport so that he could "attend school in France or West Germany." When the passport extension was refused, Marek Hlasko, 26, the most promising young writer of postwar Poland, defected to the West. Explained Hlasko: "They told me I would have to go back to Warsaw for at least three days, but I knew what that meant."

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