Martin Krygier

An intimate and foreign affair

The Cold War was a foreign import. Its origins and central battlegrounds were elsewhere. It was only here because it was everywhere. Yet I have long had the sense that for many Australians it occupied a space framed on the one hand by local imaginaries and on the other by free-floating fantasies. In particular, sympathies for communism were more closely, though inversely, related to affection for local arrangements than they were to what had been done, and was being done, in and by communist regimes. Either there was little knowledge of foreign doings, or where facts were known, even well known, they were interpreted in terms of local categories and examples, and so misunderstood. Ostensibly many of the major fights and ideological divisions were about those regimes and the language of dispute was redolent of foreign names, alien and exotic heroes and villains and distant places, but many people invoking them seemed not to know much about them, or care how little they knew. And they were slow to change, even when they got to know more.

That kind of solipsistic imaginary is not always misplaced. We don't need to know much about Denmark to appreciate Hamlet; enough to 'hold a mirror up to nature' (and Hamlet helps us in that too). But in the Cold War the nature of communist regimes was at the centre of many of our deepest political divisions, and it seemed to matter whether we knew what we were talking about. Certainly many people argued as though it did. And yet our local imaginative repertoires were poorly stocked to help us grasp the specific and horrific characters of Stalinism, say, or Maoism, or just of ordinary lives in extraordinary circumstances. Yet these repertoires framed our debates, even when these were conducted in the most cosmopolitan terms. It was about us, even when it purported to be about them.

That was true in many other countries too; Australia didn't invent parochial responses to distant exemplars, heroes, villains, and challenges. But conditions for parochialism have always been particularly good here; pending challenge from New Zealand, we might indeed be world leaders. Distance has contributed mightily, along with the absence of overwhelming man-made tragedy – with the signal and long ignored exception of Aborigines. Fortunate though it might be, it was not an ideal vantage point for coming to terms with the 20th century. At least not with those aspects that moved Isaiah Berlin to say: 'I have lived through most of the twentieth century without, I must add, suffering personal hardship. I remember it only as the most terrible century in Western history.' Perhaps I am wrong about this, but I am trying to recover how it has seemed to me – not to write the history of the period.

Some people brought different experiences and imagination to thinking about the Cold War. They were not always thanked for it. One was Richard Krygier, my father. He was, for his whole life in Australia, an anti-communist activist. Among his better known activities were the founding and running of the Australian Committee (after 1957, Association) for Cultural Freedom from 1954, and in turn Quadrant magazine, which he founded in 1956 and published until he died in 1986. In his Cold War, Australia was not – could not be – the key reference point to understanding communism, even though he spent most of his life here. For he had already been formed elsewhere. So I begin there.

Poland

My parents were both born in Warsaw, Richard a month before the Russian Revolution and my mother, Roma, six months later. It's no exaggeration to say it was a key, malevolent, accompaniment to their lives. She saw the Cold War out, living until 1999; he did not, though he sensed by the time he died in 1986 that the ground was shifting. He wasn't confident, but he was a congenital optimist and was tentatively pleased.

They were both Jews, neither of them observant and both anti-Zionist and Leftist. Their Jewishness caused them little difficulty in their early years but some troubles at university in the '30s, when anti-Semitism became particularly virulent. Jews were periodically pursued and beaten by nationalist Polish students (my father had his jaw broken), whose characteristic implements included, among other things, razor blades on sticks. Apart from being subjected to attack, Jewish students were required to sit in so-called 'ghetto benches' at university lectures. My parents were among those who refused; my mother's group had to attend lectures but refused to sit in the benches, and she stood for the whole of her degree (in economics). My father found he could get by (in law) without attending lectures, and turned up at only two in his four years of study. At one point, in 1938, he was elected chairman of a Jewish Boycott Committee, when the (nationalist) Dean of Law tried to force students to attend and sit in the ghetto benches. The boycott won that year, though the requirement was reimposed the next year. But by then, Jews faced more serious problems.

Notwithstanding these difficulties, my parents' language, culture and national allegiance was Polish; not a straightforward or unproblematic allegiance but real. Their Jewishness was part of their make-up and indeed their predicament, and was about to become even more so, but it was a secondary part of their self-conception.

It might have had something to do with their politics, though. They were politically active, both already at school and then at university. She was a member of an illegal communist youth organisation. He was never a communist, but rather an unaligned Popular Front socialist, warmly disposed to communist friends, admiring of Polish communists and of what he took to be the achievements of the Soviet Union. He was happy to hide illegal papers from the police for his friends, who risked ten years' imprisonment. Among those for whom he hid such papers was the girl who became his wife.

While a student, he wrote a good deal of left-wing political journalism, particularly on international affairs. Once he was hired to start a column reviewing the international press for the only daily Popular Front paper in Poland, but the day he delivered his first copy the paper was closed down by the police. He was arrested, but released after questioning. Though she was the Party member, my parents were tipped off by a friend in the public service that my father was the one with the damaging security...