Roman Polanski's Cracow (2003)

This 1984 biography covers the first two-thirds of a career that has had its ups and downs and been overshadowed by personal tragedy and scandal. Polanski was born in Paris in 1933, but spent his formative years in Cracow. He faced mortal danger during the Second World War and more brushes with death afterwards. 


His father was a plastics manufacturer in a small way, and the boy had a comfortable early childhood in a city where many relatives lived. He showed tremendous imaginative powers.
"For as far back as I can remember," reads the first sentence, "the line between fantasy and reality has been hopelessly blurred." Fantasies based on the familiar Cracow fairy tales (the story of Wanda's suicide, and the "Wianki" ceremonies that commemorate it, were his favorites) helped make up a childhood reality that featured walks through the Planty, Wawel Castle, and the Vistula river. He watched the fireworks and the  candlelit wreaths floating downstream at the Wianki festivities in June and, at Christmastime, tried out his first pair of skis on the Vistula levee.


He was six when the Germans invaded. The Polanskis may have celebrated Christmas, but now only their Jewish background counted. They ended up in the newly-established ghetto. In the early stages, Roman passed in and out of the "closed district," with his father or alone. His mother disappeared on an early transport, and he never heard of her again. His father (who survived the liquidation of the ghetto and Plaszow concentration camp) prudently arranged a "trust fund" and a non-Jewish family outside the ghetto who would make sure that the boy had a hiding place. Largely left to himself despite having various "homes," Polanski spent much of his time in the safe darkness of movie houses while he was in Cracow; later, he passed empty months at a dirt-poor farmstead at the back of beyond.


Twelve when the war ended, Polanski shared a problem with many other Jewish children his age: he had an incredible range of disturbing experiences, but no schooling. On the farm, especially, there had been nothing to read except a single back issue of Maksymilian Kolbe's pious Knight of the Immaculate Conception (Polanski does not mention its notorious anti-Semitism). Additionally, his father, the recent widower, returned to Cracow with a new bride, and Roman chose not to live at home. So he found himself living on his own, in a rented room, without having gone to first grade. 


Movies, photography, audiovisual equipment, and racing bicycles were the boy's first obsessions. The latter almost cost him his life when a stranger lured him into the "bunker," a spooky abandoned German aircraft shelter in Park Krakowski, on the pretext of selling him a prewar racing bike hidden there. In the darkness, the stranger bludgeoned and robbed Polanski; it later turned out that the assailant had already committed three murders. 
Yet the boy had great native talent for acting and drawing. Time after time, he also had the good fortune to come to the attention of people who recognized his talent and gave him a chance. Before long, he was acting on the radio and then, at 16, in the Groteska Theater, where he operated a puppet clown called Gagatek in The Tarabumba Circus.


The director, Wladyslaw Jarema, was "an eccentric perfectionist and admirer of British theatrical traditions who was forever quoting an aphorism--coined, I believe, by Gordon Craig--to the effect that the best theater is one with no actors." These ideas were in the Cracow air and can be compared both to the prewar Cricot theatre and to Tadeusz Kantor's later work, in terms of both the puppets and the attitude towards actors. "Jarema, who fundamentally abhorred children, put on children's shows only to keep his municipal grant. He attracted a number of dedicated, talented designers and actors who looked on their work with him as a valuable apprenticeship." 
Polanski and his boy-actor friend Renek Nowak "were treated like adults, and in this new environment my boy Scout principles started going by the board. A lot of vodka was consumed backstage after rehearsals, and parties were regularly held in the lobby of the theater itself." At a New Year's Eve party, "[f]ood and drink abounded, and papier-mache animals from the Tarabumba Circus were disposed around the balcony like human spectators of the festive scene. A great deal of sexual activity was going on in the unlit parts of the theater." Polanski's friends set him up with "a busty brunette of eighteen," but he lost his nerve at the last moment and went home kicking himself. 


In educational terms, the situation looked dire. Polanski had been spotted by the dictatorial director of the Fine Arts secondary school, and then arbitrarily expelled. With no prospects of getting his matura, Polanski would not only be left without any opportunity for further education, but would also face a three-year stint in the army. Times were hard for tender artistic spirits in the desperately poor, war-ravaged country. One of his best friends had to take a job in a Silesian coal mine and reappeared as a ghastly, tubercular figure in rags. 
But Polanski's luck held. His work at the young people's theatre led to a bit movie part where he caught the eye of a student director named Andrzej Wajda. Just when everything seemed hopeless for Polanski, he received a call from Wajda to play in the latter's first feature film, Pokolenie (A Generation). One future Oscar winner came to the rescue of another -- they were just a pair of unknown, aspiring youths. The substantial film role marked the beginning of a career. 


As a budding seventeen-year-old actor in Cracow, Polanski had a circle of non-conformist friends. "We listened to the Voice of America and the U.S. Armed Forces Network, with its continuous output of jazz, and dressed as provocatively as we could. The official term for us was 'hooligans'." 


Being modish was not easy in a time of consumer shortages. Gilded youth haunted the flea markets. "Shoes were all-important. The most sought-after had no toe-caps. Black leather was the conventional material, although blue suede was even more highly prized. Ankle-tight trousers were surmounted by long-skirted plaid or corduroy jackets with ski-jump shoulders. Shirts had to have shallow, wide-angle collars. Most of us doubled the ends under or, if we had mothers or girlfriends who could sew, got them to stitch the points back permanently in imitation of the Edwardian roue look. This was accentuated by a tie with a huge one-color Windsor knot. My own particular pride and joy was a huge American fishtail, ultrawide, part yellow and part maroon, with a stylized rose in the middle. Hair was worn upswept at the front and brushed back into a 'duck's ass' behind." This was 1950; Polanski and his friends were already cool in Cracow.


But the communists were taking one ominous step after another to consolidate their power and reduce the margin of freedom. One key move aimed at eliminating black market fortunes and "old money" through a surprise currency swap. 


"One Sunday morning [October 29] in 1950 I noticed that the inhabitants of Krakow were behaving oddly. Everyone was out on the streets, perfect strangers were accosting one another, little knots of people standing around. From their faces, some feverishly animated, other stunned and ashen, it seemed that a calamity had occurred.


"It had. Overnight the government had declared all existing Polish currency worthless. Millions of people suddenly had their savings wiped out; the few remaining small entrepreneurs, my father among them, found themselves ruined once more. Not having any savings at all, I wasn't personally affected. But this arbitrary measure signaled the start of a new era--a process that was to transform Poland into one of the most repressive police states in Eastern Europe." The monetary reform hit Cracow's traditional middle class hard but, as they had with the regulations that the Nazis imposed during their occupation, Cracovians found ways around them.


Cracow, "with its wealth of cultural tradition and its cosmopolitan atmosphere, was a particular thorn in the side of the new regime." This had been glaringly apparent to the commissars in Warsaw since 1947, when only Cracow voted against the referendum that overturned the constitutional basis of the prewar "bourgeois" Polish republic. "The Communist authorities resolved to change [Cracow's] character by expanding and industrializing it. They decreed the construction of the Nova Huta steelworks, a monstrous plant on the city's outskirts." These remarks show what a true Cracovian Polanski is, for he remains convinced (see below) that building the Lenin Steelworks was an act of vandalism directed against the city. and he felt the pain. That it backfired on the communists is a different matter; what made it monstrous was the environmental damage it inflicted. 


Polanski moved in ever-higher social circles. Through Wieslaw Zubrzycki, "a Catholic intellectual and avowed political reactionary" opposed to "the modern egalitarian world," Polanski "started meeting the remnants of the [Cracow] nobility, who lived in crumbling mansions or cluttered apartments, selling off the last of their family heirlooms now that all their estates had been seized. Their manners were those of a bygone age. They habitually spoke French and talked of Western Europe as if it were still a part of their daily lives. . . . Their superior knowledge and sophistication dazzled me. I found that I not only shared their enthusiasms but had arrived, quite independently, at similar conclusions about the state of our country. My political views had come full circle even before I met them."  


Polanski's new friends did everything to flaunt their opposition to communist conformity. "They displayed their contempt for authority by taking a keen interest in contemporary Western literature and music, notably jazz, by baring their souls in a very un-Polish manner, and even by engaging, almost as a matter of principle--in homosexuality. They likewise felt that deliberate idleness and excessive drinking were blows struck for freedom."

With friends including Piotr Skrzyniecki -- "a hippie before his time" who later founded the celebrated cabaret in the Piwnica pod Baranami -- Polanski "devoted long afternoons to idle cafe chitchat and longer nights to endless debates on aesthetic, cosmopolitan 'reactionary' topics. The setting for our discussions could have not been more atmospherically suitable. Wieslaw Zubrzycki lived in the tower room of a weirdlooking neo-Gothic mansion designed by his architect father. Here it was that we drank and smoked and talked for hour after hour, largely about our obsession with the West."


Polanski and Zubrzycki became theatre fanatics, traveling around Poland to catch performances by such troupes as the Berliner Ensemble, by which they were "bowled over," and the Peking Opera at the Slowacki Theater in Cracow. Unable to obtain tickets for that performance, they scaled a drainpipe and made their way into "the gods." An usher caught them and took them to the manager, Ludwik Solski, who admired their gumption so much that he lent them his private box. After being caught gate-crashing by a less understanding theatre director in Wroclaw, Zubrzycki ended up punching the official out.


Polanski also threw himself into a musical scene that went temporarily underground as the country drifted towards totalitarianism. "Unless he had already been successfully indoctrinated, any normal young Pole developed a craze for jazz during the Stalinist period. It was not only a window onto a completely different world but a form of protest, for American jazz was officially decried as a product of 'putrid imperialism.' There were some remarkably fine jazz musicians in Cracow, mostly students who met for weekend jam sessions the venues of which were advertised by word of mouth. Though never raided, these sessions were held clandestinely, in classrooms or 'safe' apartments, and devotees paid substantial sums to hear their idols perform. Different groups essayed different styles. There was bebop, New Orleans, and Dixieland, but the most popular groups were those that emulated the Modern Jazz Quartet. Gradually, in the years following Stalin's death, jazz became more respectable; during those summer months in Cracow it was still banned, and illegality added a touch of spice to every jam sessions" 


His counter-cultural idyll in Cracow ended when Polanski won one of six coveted spots in the director's class at the Lodz Film School. Within a few years, he embarked on his international career, and seldom looked back. Yet his blurring of fantasy and reality, tendency to turn things upside down, black humor, and constant war with conventionality all seem rooted in his Cracow beginnings. Similarly, the horror just beneath the surface of his work must reflect not only his wartime experiences, but also much of what happened afterwards.


He returned to Cracow in 1976. Driving into the city at 4:00 a.m., he noticed how people were already standing in line in front of the "meat" shops. His first walk into town made him "feel like Rip van Winkle. The city seemed entirely familiar--there wasn't a doorway, shopfront, or cafe that didn't evoke a flood of memories--yet utterly different. Its black, pockmarked facades were crumbling away, and whole streets had been condemned and cordoned off on grounds of public safety. My beloved Cracow was being destroyed by the Nowa Huta steelworks and a nearby aluminum plant; their horrifying output of chemicals was eating into the very fabric of the city, ravaging the fine Renaissance architecture, pitting the cathedral's irreplaceable stained glass windows. It was all part of the Communist authorities' calculated attempt to industrialize and proletarianize an essentially 'bourgeois,' cosmopolitan seat of learning and culture--the only Polish city to have rejected them in the postwar referendum.
"I noticed other changes as well. Young people seemed better dressed, better educated, and more polite than when I'd left Poland for the West. They were also surprisingly well informed about political and cultural developments in the outside world. A visit to a satirical cabaret directed by my friend Piotr Skrzyniecki . . . left me amazed by its audacious skits and frontal assaults on the regime, not to mention the way Piotr taunted the ever-present party censor in the audience. He even violated the most sacred taboo of all by hurling several veiled but wittily effective gibes at the Soviet Union."  


The two merry pranksters, Skrzyniecki and Polanski, were both audacious Cracovian transgressors. Polanski violated taboos on a stage far more exposed than the small cellar room in the Pod Baranami palace off the Rynek, where Skrzyniecki reigned over his cabaret. 

Review of:  Roman Polanski. Roman by Polanski. William Morrow: New York, 1984. 461 pp., illus.