How Polish Pyza revealed a state secret. Hanna Januszewska’a fairy tale in the records of GUKPPiW

Abstract

A censorial review of Hanna Januszewska’s Jak polska Pyza wędrowała, a work published in 1951, was preserved among the archive materials of GUKPPiW (collected in Warsaw, in Archiwum Akt Nowych). Permission to printing was connected with an order to rephrase the fragment containing a certain reference to the dam on the Bóbr River. In a terse justification a censor included an instruction about obligation to maintain military secret, i.e. one of fundamental duties (under the name of the official secret protection) imposed on GUKPPiW by the decree dated July 1946 and valid until the dissolution of the office in April 1990.

This decision seems to ignore not only the fairy-tale convention of the poem addressed to younger recipients. Even if from the fictional adventures of the protagonist some elements of Polish reality could be isolated, this restriction referring to the information about the location of the building, which was given back to use in the 1912 by Wilhelm Hohenzollern, seems to be a huge misunderstanding or a joke. The analysis of the questioned verses does not allow to deny that such an absurd was a key point concerning the final form of the volume. Furthermore, the context of other censorial archives questions the hypothesis about the official who signed the review.

The circumstances and procedures of preparing opinions on Januszewska’s work in GUKPPiW give rise to considerations on the scale and restrictions pertaining to the freedom of speech in the Polish People’s Republic. It is also an illustration of many internal oppositions and numerous inconsistencies in the functioning of state censorship. A certain authorial and editorial strategy according to which the book was described in the official form as a “reprint” deserves a separate presentation. In fact, it was just continuation of the series initiated in the interwar years. With the repetition of the title used in 1938 and the same form of the work, Januszewska provided readers with the new content. Instead of referring to the pre-September map of the country, she presented the post-Yalta Poland.