Barbara Toruńczyk was born into a family of intellectuals who were activists deeply committed to the ideals of communism. Her father, Henryk, went to Spain during his youth to fight on the side of the Republicans during the civil war (1936–1939). He spent World War II in the USSR, and in the PRL he was a member of the communist political elite. He married Roma Pawłowska, a pre-war activist of the Young Communist League of Poland. The couple had two children: a son, Adam, and a daughter, Barbara.
Barbara was raised in the spirit of faith in the ideas of communism, but already as a teenager in 1963 she started to attend the meetings of the informal Club of Contradiction Seekers, which consisted in students of Warsaw secondary schools discussing possible reforms to the existing social and political system[1]. Soon thereafter, as a student of sociology at the University of Warsaw (1964–1968), she became one of the founders of the “Commandos”, a group consisting of Polish intellectuals who initially supported Communism but who would later become its main critics and, starting in 1968, the core of the democratic opposition.[2] The “Commandos” owed their name to their sudden interferences at propaganda lectures organised by the University of Warsaw. They would slip in unnoticed and formulate uncomfortable questions about the condition of the Polish state that the lecturers very frequently could not or did not want to answer.
As Barbara Toruńczyk recalls: We wanted to actively influence the intellectual life of the university, and to support the atmosphere of the October changes.[3] Our guru was Leszek Kołakowski, who used to say that he did not care about any survival strategy, that you had to say what you thought. Of course, we were aware that we were pushing the limits tolerated by the authorities.[4]
In 1967–1968 tensions in Poland were growing, as they were in all of Europe. In June 1967 Israel, supported by the United States, defeated the coalition of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan in six days. The Soviet Union, which supported the Arab states, started a campaign directed against its Jewish citizens. The party leaders in the PRL followed in its footsteps, initiating an anti-Semitic campaign that resulted in about thirteen thousand Poles of Jewish background leaving the country. Students and intellectuals were important participants in the social tensions of those days, which are remembered by history as the Polish March of 1968. Already on 25 November of the previous year, the premiere of a modern production of Adam Mickiewicz’s Dziady,[6] directed by Kazimierz Dejmek, was held at the National Theatre in Warsaw in celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the outbreak of the October Revolution. As it turned out, party officials criticised the performance for its anti-Soviet references, and First Secretary of the Central Committee Władysław Gomułka himself said with disgust that “Dziady stabs Polish-Soviet friendship in the back”. After a few initial performances, the show in the Warsaw theatre was closed, resulting in mass student protests. One of the most active circles were the “Commandos”, with Barbara Toruńczyk being particularly visible among them.
The young student of sociology participated in the drawing up of the resolution adopted on 8 March during the students’ rally at the University of Warsaw. This was enough to have her arrested two days later. The political investigation took several months, and finally Barbara was expelled from the university and sentenced to two years in prison. After her release from prison, she worked as a waitress and an office worker at the Municipal Public Transport Enterprise. She was blacklisted and could not study at any of the state universities, so eventually she passed an entrance exam to the Catholic University of Lublin, where she defended her master’s degree thesis in 1974. Despite her talent and having passed the entrance exam for doctoral studies at the Polish Academy of Sciences, she had no chance for a scientific career.
Although her circles were significantly weakened by her arrests and forced emigration, Barbara remained, as she emphasises, “completely immersed in the circles of Jacek Kuroń”.[7] At the beginning of the decade, she supported Jan Józef Lipski in his efforts to provide assistance to the imprisoned members of the illegal “Ruch” organisation. Five years later she joined activities aimed at assisting workers from Radom and Ursus who were repressed because of their strikes in June 1976. It was also the beginning of her career as an editor of underground magazines.
As she recalled in an interview: (…) KOR and “Biuletyn” publications were created on [typing] machines. And we were the ones typing them. Usually, this was done by the ladies, girls. (…) We were typing, distributing them. You were typing eight or nine of them, on thin flimsies. It wasn’t very legible, but we were not thinking about duplicating machines [at that time][8].
Starting in January 1977 and continuing until the introduction of martial law in December 1981, together with writer Wiktor Woroszylski, on Adam Michnik’s request – as Barbara herself emphasises – she created Zapis, the legendary underground literary magazine. Until 1979 she was its editorial assistant. At the same time, she also wrote, among others, for the Biuletyn Informacyjny, a leading political journal of the Workers’ Defence Committee (KOR). In 1979 she also decided to join the editorial team of Res Publika, an independent monthly magazine assembling historians, sociologists, and philosophers from close to her heart circles of attendees of Professor Jerzy Jedlicki’s history of idea seminar.
Zeszyty Literackie: a quarterly literary magazine, published from 1982 to 2018 by Barbara Torunczyk, initially in Paris, Milan and since 1992 in Warsaw.
Jan Nowak Jeziorański. Głos wolnej Europy (współautorka z Wojciechem Karpińskim, Stefanem Kisielewskim i Adamem Michnikiem), Fundacja Zeszytów Literackich, Warszawa 2005 (cover)
Barbara Toruńczyk was abroad when martial law was introduced in Poland on 13 December 1981. She was travelling, among other places, around the United States and Europe to present the “Report on observation of human and civil rights in the PRL”, prepared by the Helsinki Committee of the KSS KOR. Although the borders were formally closed, she still cooperated with Krytyka and Res Publika. In the underground NOWA Independent Publishing Office, for which she served as a foreign representative, she published her book Narodowa Demokracja. Antologia Myśli Politycznej, Przeglądu Wszechpolskiego” 1895-1905. She remained a moving force, this time of the circles of emigrant writers and poets from Central and Eastern Europe associated with the journal Zeszyty Literackie, which she had established in Paris almost, as Adam Zagajewski wrote, out of nothing. Toruńczyk was supported in the editing of that quarterly by Ewa Kuryluk and Ewa Bieńkowska, among others. The aim of the journal was to form a link between domestic literature and emigrant literature, and the best writers, foreign ones as well, published in it, including Czesław Miłosz, Zbigniew Herbert, and Joseph Brodsky.
Barbara Toruńczyk returned to Warsaw in 1992, and there she continued to publish Zeszyty Literackie until 2018. She is a member of PEN Club Poland.
Written by Marek Blacha
