Trailblazers of Truth: Women Reporters Who Shaped Polish Non-Fiction

biurko_teresa_toranska_reporterka_pap.jpg, full-width, Teresa Torańska’s desk, photo: Marcin Kaliński / PAP

In his book 'Reporterów sposób na życie' (A Reporter’s Way of Life, 1983), Marek Miller quotes Małgorzata Szejnert: ‘The reporter is not a subject. She is not a film star. Nobody cares what she thinks outside of reportage. What matters is what she writes’. Nevertheless, let us try to introduce the most important Polish women reporters of the past century.

Stars of ‘Wiadomości Literackie’

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Irena Krzywicka, photo: Cezary Langda / PAP

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In 1933, an article titled ‘Zalew kobiecości’ (Flood of Femininity) by Hieronim Morstin was published in Wiadomości Literackie (Literary News). The author despaired at the feminisation of Polish literature:

Dąbrowska, Nałkowska, Jasnorzewska (Pawlikowska), Kuncewiczowa, Iłłakowiczówna, Kossak-Szczucka, Naglerowa, Melcer, Samozwaniec, Boguszewska, Czapska, Krzywicka, Przybyszewska […] have completely taken over literary life in Poland.

Most of these authors were also engaged in non-fiction. In fact, they often published their reportages in the above-mentioned Literary News. Another important title was the women’s magazine Bluszcz (Ivy), which published the work of Dąbrowska, Kuncewiczowa, Szelburg-Zarembina, among others. Zespół Literacki Przedmieście (Suburbia Literary Group) was founded in 1933, and it also focused on non-fiction. Their slogan was ‘we are leaving the desk; we are setting up shop in the street’. Here the core of the group also consisted of women: Helena Boguszewska, Halina Krahelska, Zofia Nałkowska, Kazimiera Muszałówna, Halina Górska.

Irena Krzywicka and Wanda Melcer may be considered celebrities of women’s reportage in the 20th century. Krzywicka, remembered today as the first feminist of the Second Republic, made her debut as a reporter in 1932. The author was already known for her journalistic writings on morality and sexual education, which appeared in Życie Świadome (Conscious Life); she had also already written the famous novel Pierwsza krew (First Blood). Now she appeared in the courtroom, which had hitherto been reserved as a subject for sensationalist matinees.

She reported on high-profile trials: the Gorgonowa case; the Blachowski case, in which Blachowski was accused of murdering the director of Zakłady Żyrardowskie (the Żyrardów [linen products] plants); but also minor cases from the municipal court: bagel traders, petty thieves or ‘checkists’, those who had issued bad checks. She did not pretend to be objective, speaking out especially when she saw the accused as victims of the judicial system, of exclusion or of patriarchy. As in the case of Gorgonowa, when she wrote, ‘A cluster of triumphant men surrounding a broken woman is an extremely unpleasant, optically almost unbearable sight’.

Her collection Sąd idzie (Judgement Begins) came out in 1935. As she herself later stated: ‘It was precisely because I was not a specialist, because I had a fresh perspective on issues that had become routine for many that imbued my court writing with a special value’.

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Wanda Melcer, 1936, photo: www.audiovis.nac.gov.pl (NAC)

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Melcer was an expert on sensationalist themes depicting the dark underbelly of the big city. ‘Miasto w mroku’ (City in Darkness) is, in fact, the title of the first reportage (about a police manhunt for prostitutes in downtown Warsaw) from her collection Kochanek zamordowanych dziewcząt (Lover of Murdered Girls). Brothels, squalid basements, shelters, police stations – she reached all of these in her journalistic pursuit. Maria Kuncewiczowa wrote about her: ‘Wanda does not search, does not pick and choose: she seizes reality as if it were a ham under a butcher’s guillotine’.

Together with Krzywicka and Boy, she was active in the Liga Refomy Obyczajów (League for the Reform of Mores). And like Krzywicka, she stirred up controversy: there were rumours about her panther fur coat and her husband, who was a two-time world champion in wrestling. Her next book, Czarny ląd – Warszawa (Black Land – Warsaw), caused a stir. By ‘black land’, she was referring to the Northern Quarter of Warsaw. She described above all its poorest inhabitants. She attacked what she considered to be the barbaric customs of Orthodox Jews: the unhygienic nature of the mikvehs and the ritual of circumcision, the status of women in Judaism, religious education. In doing so, she considered herself to be a philo-Semite who was taking up the subject for the good of the community. As Urszula Glensk wrote in her book Historia słabych (History of the Weak), the texts of the series ‘were clearly biased, and the author made no secret of the fact that she would like to shave the beards of her characters, take off their gabardines and send them to work on Shabbat’.

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Stefania Zahorska, 1934, photo: www.audiovis.nac.gov.pl (NAC)

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‘Local exoticism’ and places inaccessible to the bourgeois reader stirred the imagination (prisons, mental hospitals, shanty towns) and were therefore a frequently exploited subject of reportage during the interwar period. But accounts of distant journeys were also popular: Melcer wrote from Argentina; the leading Ivy reporter, Maria Szpyrkówna, from the United States. Polish readers were particularly interested in the situation in the totalitarian regimes across the border. Reports from the Third Reich were sent to the Literary News by Maria Morska (under the pseudonym MarjuszDawn). Authors such as Wańkowicz, Słonimski and Janta-Połczyński produced their correspondence from the Soviet Union at the time. However, it was Stefania Zahorska, art critic and author of the Literary News, who showed the greatest keenness of observation. She spent three months in Moscow at the invitation of the Film Institute. Anna Nasiłowska, a researcher of Zahorska’s work, wrote:

The most important features of Zahorska’s reportages from the USSR are the art of street observation, conversation, readiness to surrender to the course of events and to draw conclusions on the basis of daily developments rather than the confrontation of opinions and convictions. Like Wańkowicz – a seasoned reporter in his own right – Zahorska builds her reportage narrative from facts both important and minor, but she believes less than he does in the power of broad strokes, statistics and generalisations. She describes everyday life, typical situations and judgements, which is why the picture of Moscow she creates is complex – it consists of more than just black and white.

From socialist realism to little realism

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Zofia Nałkowska, 1950s, photo: Władysław Sławny / Forum

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The initial post-war years were a time for reportage to reckon with Nazi crimes. This was the time of such important texts as Nałkowska’s short stories – reportages collected in Medaliony (Medallions; Nałkowska herself said, ‘I didn't make up anything here’) or the account of Treblinka by Rachela Auerbach, formerly an associate of Oneg Shabbat. The time of propaganda reportages had arrived. An example of this genre is Melcer’s book Wyprawa na Odzyskane Ziemie (An Expedition to the Regained Territories), published as early as 1945.

Reportage shrank during the great constructions of the six-year plan and raised its head during the thaw. Gomułka’s little stabilisation brought ‘little realism’, but we’ll get to that in a moment.

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Barbara Seidler, photo: Aleksander Jałosiński / Forum

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Barbara Seidler continued the tradition of court reporting. There was not a high-profile trial in the People’s Republic of Poland that she would not write about: the meat scandal or the case of the ‘Zagłębie vampire’. Reporters writing about cases from years before turned to her first.

At the age of 12, she became a Grey Ranks messenger girl and took part in the Warsaw Uprising. After the war she was supposed to go to medical school but failed to get in because of her ‘unacceptable ancestry’. Using her connections, she managed to get into law school. In 1949, she reported to the editorial board of Życie Warszawy (Life of Warsaw). As Leopold Unger wrote, despite the Stalinist gloom, the editorial team managed to maintain ‘a character that was reasonably close to that of a normal person’.

Court cases were the launching pad from which Seidler often moved on to investigate their social background. Brawls between housemates were often her starting point for investigating the hopeless situation on the housing market. She took up subjects that were on the margins of the discourse of the period, such as homophobia or the legislative helplessness regarding stalkers that led to tragedy (stalking has been a crime in the Polish penal code since 2011). All this with a great deal of sensitivity and humanism. Her court reports from three decades of the People’s Republic of Poland were rediscovered in 2017 by the Czarne Publishing House in the collection Pamiętajcie, że byłem przeciw (Remember That I Was Opposed).

She took up the case of the 1970 massacre of shipyard workers on the Coast, but her text was disfigured by censorship. She decided to describe ‘all that I saw and heard, what lay heavy on my heart and bothered me for so many years’. That is how her most important book, Kto kazał strzelać. Grudzień ‘70 (Who Gave the Order to Shoot: December ‘70), probably came into being. She collected material for over a dozen years and was eventually able to publish it only in 1991.

She has also written scripts for films and comics. She worked with Grzegorz Rosiński, the future creator of Thorgal, on the bestselling series Legendy polskie (Polish Legends).

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Małgorzata Szejnert, 2016, photo: Wojciech Nekanda Trepka / AG

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The shortest way to explain the tenets of small realism is ‘since one could not write about the general, one wrote about the particular’. One of the masters of this style, Małgorzata Szejnert, said in an interview with Dwutygodnik (Biweekly):

We could not write about causes, we could only write about effects, and the effects were visible in the form of small events, objects, small situations, which is why this little realism in Poland developed to such an extent. But it also proved fruitful at a time when it became possible to speak openly. And for me, it is still useful.

At the beginning of her studies, she wanted to become a sports journalist, but reportage consumed her. Her first book, Borowiki przy ternpajku (Cèpes by the Side of the Turnpike), is about the American Polish community. Her next two books are the quintessence of the Polish school of little realism. We find out, among other things, why a lady on the staff of the Warsaw Supersam store has a nervous stomach-ache every day on her way to work, why in the FSO [Polish automobile parts manufacturer, trans] canteen ‘people are anti-noodle’ and why a greengrocer (actually a flower baron) from the vicinity of Łódź does not have good relations with his neighbours. In 1977 she wrote: ‘She deals with repetitive matters, without dramaturgy or plot. A sensation would interest me insofar as it could be spoiled, broken down into small elements, tamed, made grey […]’.

However, there was certainly one reportage of hers from this period that caused a nationwide sensation. We are talking about the text Mitra pod kapeluszem (A Mitre Under Their Hats) about the lives of the descendants of former aristocratic families in communist Poland. Polityka magazine with this text was later sold in bazaars for hefty sums of money, and the authorities noted the author’s name in their files.

In the 1980s, she wrote two important books: Sława i infamia (Fame and Infamy, about collaboration in the theatre community during the Second World War) and Śród żywych duchów (Among Living Ghosts, about the fate of political prisoners in the 1950s). This heralded a turn towards the historical reportage she would pursue in the 21st century.

After 1989, she was head of the documentary department at Gazeta Wyborcza for 15 years and trained a whole generation of reporters: Szczygieł, Tochman, Hugo-Bader, Irena Morawska. The introduction to her collection My, właściciele Teksasu (We, the Owners of Texas) was given the following title by Mariusz Szczygieł: ‘Jak okradałem Małgorzatę Szejnert’ (How I Robbed Małgorzata Szejnert, meaning that he ‘robbed’ her of catchy phrases such as ‘People will always want to read about other people’).

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Teresa Torańska, photo: Krzysztof Żuczkowski / Forum

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Three reporters from the weekly magazine Kultura (Culture) specialised in asking the simplest possible questions: Barbara N. Łopieńska, Ewa Szymańska, Teresa Torańska. They believed that this was the way to squeeze as much as possible out of reality. Jerzy Pilch recalled Łopieńska: ‘She had a sensitivity bordering on derangement’. He further wrote: ‘She understood the world and that it was mostly unacceptable’.

Reporters of the 1970s and 1980s continued, in a way, the tried and tested traditions of Aesopian language, communicating with the reader over the head of the censor. The perspective of the censor was, in fact, taken by Barbara N. Łopieńska in a famous interview from 1980 (‘No particular sentence here is suitable for deletion, ma’am. The entirety is suitable for erasure’, the censor summed up the interview). Her reportage about a tiger trainer was read as a metaphor for life in the eastern bloc:

Beating is the old method. Now, for the past ten years or so, all trainers have switched to gentle training. Although such training is more dangerous in her opinion. Too much fraternising is not good. […] Halina says that in every country some trainer stands out, but the trainers in the Soviet Union are the best. There, they have a permanent circus in every town. They have good conditions, and in terms of training they represent the highest level.

In her text Syn (Son, 1977), she talks to pregnant women in hospital. She asks them about the values they want to pass on to their children, about how they imagine their futures in 25 years: ‘I wonder how long the wait will be for a flat. We live in a Poland that is still being rebuilt – our kids will probably be living in a Poland that will already have been rebuilt’.

In the 1980s, she, like Torańska, Szejnert and Szymańska, no longer published in the official press. Together with Ewa Szymańska, they published the book Stare numery (Old Tricks) in the underground – a story about the people who created the weekly magazine Po Prostu (Simply), which became one of the symbols of the winds of change.

Teresa Torańska’s first book of reportage contains, already in its title, the answer to what small realism was all about. It is called Widok z dołu (A View from Below; another great title from this time is Ewa Szymańska’s Kwity polskie [Polish Receipts]). As Małgorzata Szejnert states, small realism was no longer enough for Torańska after 1980. This is when her most famous book was written: Oni (They). These are conversations with the architects of Polish Stalinism, later removed from power. In 1986, she won the Solidarity Award for the best underground publication for this book. Later came subsequent great series of conversations: My (We), Byli (They Were), Są (They Are), Jesteśmy (We Are). More recently, her youthful intervention reportages were published under the title Takie układy (Such Arrangements).

In her recent interview with Remigiusz Grzela, she said:

The most important thing about the profession for me is that I’m constantly having to learn something, that I’m digging into these biographies, and every biography carries a puzzle. I’m constantly discovering that the story is not fully related, so I’m picking up the bits and pieces that are left and trying to glue them together. Journalism is my need to live, my blood type. It energises me every day. Over and over again.

Hanna Krall’s ‘Baśnie dokumentalne’

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Hanna Krall, 1991, photo: Witold Szulecki / Forum

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She takes notes so that they are written down. She wrote her first reportage about the courtyard on Targowa Street in Warsaw’s Praga district, where she lived with her mother after the war. She later wrote in the third person about the wartime experiences of ‘a little girl she knew quite well’. She went to Poznań in June 1956 to write an account of the International Trade Fair. After what she saw there, she returned ‘as an adult journalist’.

She and her husband, Jerzy Szperkowicz (a journalist with Życie Warszawy), left for the USSR in 1966. From there she sent reports for Polityka (Politics). Her first book, Na wschód od Arbatu (East of the Arbat), appeared as a result. There she learned to write freely about things one could not speak about freely or, in the words of Mariusz Szczygieł, one had to ‘confuse the pursuit’. These experiences also came in handy in Poland, as evidenced by the collection Sześć odcieni bieli (Six Shades of White). The protagonists are ordinary-extraordinary characters from provincial Poland: a winner of Wielka Gra (The Great Game), a foreman’s beautiful wife, an exemplary railwayman, a self-taught illusionist who presents his tricks at [communist] party meetings. One of the texts is actually titled Mały realizm (Little Realism).

Her best-known book, Zdążyć przed Panem Bogiem (Shielding the Flame), came out in 1977. Her problems with the censorship intensified, Polityka was closed down at the beginning of martial law, Szczęście Marianny Głaz (The Luck of Marianna Głaz, 1976) was shredded for scrap paper, and Katar sienny (Hay Fever, 1981) was cut up (Krall: ‘They said it was depressing. Don’t think I was fighting the system. I wasn’t. I was simply telling it like it is’). Krall’s subsequent books by the end of the 1980s were already coming out abroad (Sublokatorka [The Subtenant], 1985, and Okna [Windows], 1987) or in second circulation (Trudności ze wstawaniem [Difficulties Getting Up], 1988).

The unemployed Krall then got a column in Wiadomosci Wędkarskie (Fishing News). In the series Smutek ryb (The Sadness of Fish), she published conversations with the sociologist Jerzy Szacki (about fish in social thought), with the curator Agnieszka Morawińska (about fish in Polish painting), with the writer Jerzy Putrament (who was also a keen angler, so he could refer to his experiences).

She was also the deputy literary manager of Tor Film Studio in the 1980s. She was Krzysztof Kieślowski’s friend and colleague. Motifs with references to Krall can be found in his films Przypadek (Blind Chance) and Dekalog (The Decalogue). Before these, there was also Krótki dzień pracy (Short Working Day), based on her reportage of the events of Radom ’76. Jan Jakub Kolski has also used Krall’s works: the screenplay for Daleko od okna (Far From the Window) is based on her report Ta z Hamburga (The Girl from Hamburg).

She has collaborated with Warlikowski on many occasions, including Dybbuk and (A)pollonia; Adam Hanuszkiewicz staged Relacja (Relation) starring three characters from her reportages: Lechosław Goździk, chairman of the crew at Żerań FSO (1956); Janusz Prokopiak, secretary of the Radom PZPR committee during June 1976; and Anna Walentynowicz. Her subsequent books, published as early as the 1990s, have been referred to as ‘metaphysical reportage’ (Ryszard Krynicki) or ‘documentary fairy tales’ (Michał Cichy). The stories she tells are usually rooted in the Second World War and the Holocaust, but to consider that to be her main theme would be an oversimplification. She herself has stated that her books are about one thing: how good and how bad a person can be. She has further said:

My work as a reporter has taught me that logical stories, without riddles or gaps, in which everything is understandable are sometimes untrue. And things that cannot be explained in any way really do happen.

Herta Müller wrote the following about her work:

Hanna Krall refuses all commentary; by piling up and arranging facts, a relentless directness is created that begins to roar in your head. The author’s documented realities seemingly tell themselves. But Hanna Krall’s virtuosity consists precisely of this: to abandon commentary and yet, through invisible interference, to stand behind every sentence.

Dissipating fears

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Lidia Ostałowska, photo: Piotr Wójcik

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At the beginning of the collection 20 lat nowej Polski w reportażach (20 Years of New Poland in Reportages), Mariusz Szczygieł cites his notes from the early 1990s. Among them, there is this word of advice from Małgorzata Szejnert for young reporters: ‘[…] she says that as reporters we should tame people’s fears. Most people are afraid. We can understand everything better than they do, but these people cannot be left out. We have to dissipate these fears’.

Many new names appeared among reporters at the time, including the aforementioned Morawska, Lidia Ostałowska, Beata Pawlak, Katarzyna Surmiak-Domańska. The changes in the country meant that ‘it was paradise’ for journalism, as Irena Morawska stated in an interview with Kamil Bałuk. Her reportages in the book Było piekło, teraz będzie niebo (It Used to Be Hell, Now It Will Be Heaven) are one of the best items for understanding the realities of the transformation in provincial Poland. In the 21st century, together with her husband, Jerzy Morawski, she made films and documentary series, such as Ballada o lekkim zabarwieniu erotycznym (Ballad with a Slight Erotic Undertone) and Serce z węgla (Heart of Coal).

Beata Pawlak started out with domestic reportage, then ventured out into the world: India, Israel, Bosnia, Kurdistan, Algeria, Egypt, Turkey. She was particularly interested in the issue of Islamic fundamentalism; texts on this subject were collected in the book Piekło jest gdzie indziej (Hell Is Elsewhere). According to Kapuściński, she wrote about Islam ‘like no one else in the Polish press’. In 2002, she was killed during a bombings on the island of Bali.

Before martial law, Lidia Ostałowska published in Przyjaciółka (Girl Friend) and the student weekly ITD (Etc), then was banned from working in the profession. She returned to journalism in 1989, joining the team of Gazeta Wyborcza (Electoral Gazette). She wrote about young people in ‘poorer neighbourhoods’, about the abortion underground, about bezprizornye children in Russia (lit. ‘unsupervised’, refers to orphaned and homeless children after the 1917 revolution, ed), about the Roma of East-Central Europe (Cygan to cygan [A Gypsy Is a Gypsy]). In their reminiscences about the reporter published in Krytyka Polityczna (Political Criticism), Agnieszka Muras and Anna Cieplak stated that Ostałowska ‘[…] wrote in such a way as not to exclude them even more. She published the text only when she was sure that she was reliably telling a true story and not what she imagined to be the lives of others’.

_Sources:

_{• Jacek Antczak, Reporterka. Rozmowy z Hanną Krall, Warsaw 2015}

_{• Antologia Polskiego Reportażu, ed. Mariusz Szczygieł, 3 vols, Warsaw 2014}

_{• Urszula Glensk, Historia słabych. Reportaż i życie w dwudziestoleciu (1918–1939), Kraków 2014}

_{• Polskie pisarstwo kobiet w wieku XX: procesy i gatunki, sytuacje i tematy, ed. Ewa Kraskowska and Bogumiła Kaniewska, Poznań 2015}

Translated from Polish by Michal Niedzielski

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