“I like it when they beat up students,” he confessed with a smile. I didn’t go so far but I agreed that in America, France and West Germany they had it too good and it wouldn’t do them any harm to get a bit of a kick up the hole.

Who could this charming humanitarian be? Step forward Henryk Grynberg, from whose Uchodźcy (Refugees) the above is taken (p.159 of the 2004 Świat Książki edition). The first speaker is Marek Hłasko, the Polish (according to Poles) James Dean, and the conversation takes place in the 60s. Grynberg is too canny to specify the exact protests that irked them so much but 1960s USA…? It’s got to be civil rights and the war against Vietnam.

What Grynberg appears unable to understand, despite many years spent in the west, is that Vietnamese people were being murdered on the orders of the democratically elected representatives of the privileged, selfish, long-haired etc students. They did not rebel, as he claims, because “they were in no danger” (159, conveniently forgetting the draft) but because they had a moral obligation to do so. No Pole need feel ashamed that a Soviet satellite named “Poland” invaded Czechoslovakia in that memorable year of protests, 1968. Poland was a dictatorship. Americans chose to invade Vietnam.

“We [Poles] had something to rebel against, but them?” (159)