If the Walls Could Speak by Anna Müller

Author:Anna Müller
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2018-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Five Women, One Cell

Regardless of what we know about relations between certain national groups, existing documents do not provide much information that would help us understand the dynamic in particular cells. It most likely was a mixture of erratic, and often chaotic, decisions that stemmed from institutional protocol mixed with arbitrary decisions of prison guards or MBP officers. While the women tried to create and maintain privacy, some normalcy, and stability in their cells, prison authorities treated cell life as an element of the prison’s institutional structure that played a role in investigations. It is difficult to gauge how these circumstances affected cell life without the benefit of hindsight that most memoirs present. Accessing documents created in a cell is rare. In most cases, even establishing the exact composition of a cell at a given time is problematic, because inmates were shuffled around and their movements were not recorded. However, rich resources from cells in Mokotów prison allow for insight into the internal cell dynamic: the relationships the women developed, their accommodations of their differences, and their responses to the violence and arbitrariness of prison life.

For four months, from September 1949 to early 1950, five very different women were housed in one cell: Sabina Stalińska, Halina Zakrzewska, Tonia Lechtman, Ewa Piwińska, and Vira Szot. Stalińska and Zakrzewska belonged to the Home Army. Lechtman and Piwińska, committed and active Communists, stood on the opposite side of the barricades. Szot, arrested for her participation in the UPA, was probably the most alienated person in the cell. She was arrested in 1947 for admitting UPA couriers coming from western Germany into Katowice, Poland.80 She not only represented a very different ideological stance but, as a Ukrainian, was also the cell’s only non-Polish member. She spoke fluent Polish, because she was born in Lviv and attended a high school in that city.

The five women’s interpretations of their imprisonment as well as their allegiance to postwar Poland differed. Whereas the Communist women trusted the state and their interrogation officers, the Home Army and the UPA women did not. While the former wanted to discuss publicly their political engagement, the latter denied the possibility of an open dialogue with the state. Yet the existing sources show that despite the women’s ideological differences, the cell that they shared became an emotionally and intellectually open space, where the women were able to support each other regardless of their past engagement. The documents also show how differently the women reacted to the conditions of imprisonment. Since they decided not to talk about their homes and children, Communism was the most neutral topic of their discussions. These talks became the framework of their self-exploration (especially for the Communist women), which led to the close relationships that some of them maintained years after their release. The cell turned into a space where the women learned to respect their differences without changing their respective political points of view.

In September 1949, when forty-two-year-old Ewa Piwińska entered cell number 26 in the 11th Department

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