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'If the Walls Could Speak: Inside a Women's Prison in Communist Poland'

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'If the Walls Could Speak: Inside a Women's Prison in Communist Poland' H-Poland Bell on Müller, 'If the Walls Could Speak: Inside a Women's Prison in Communist Poland' Review published on Friday, February 28, 2020 Anna Müller. If the Walls Could Speak: Inside a Women's Prison in Communist Poland. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. 344 pp. $74.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-19-049986-0. Reviewed by Wilson T. Bell (Thompson Rivers University) Published on H-Poland (February, 2020) Commissioned by Gary Roth (Rutgers University - Newark) Printable Version: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=53665 Women in Prison in Communist Poland While there is now a robust and growing English-language historiography of the Soviet Union’s system of prison camps, the academic literature on prison systems in the USSR’s Eastern European satellite countries is mostly confined to local-language studies. Anna Müller’sIf the Walls Could Speak: Inside a Women’s Prison in Communist Poland is thus a welcome and necessary edition to Anglophone scholarship on Soviet-style incarceration. Yet the book does more than simply help fill a scholarly lacuna: it is engaging, thought-provoking, and meticulously researched, a model of how to combine extensive oral history with in-depth archival work. Müller’s book begins in an unusual way, with a sixteen-page section titled Dramatis“ Personae,” which acts as a useful biographical guide to the women described in the book and also hints at an almost theatrical production, suggesting that readers engage with the text as if a script, picturing the scenes in their imaginations. Müller organizes the book into five chapters, focused on questions of daily life for women in prisons in the first years of the communist period, from roughly the mid-1940s to the mid-1950s. Despite the singular “prison” in the title, the book describes the lives and experiences of women at multiple prisons, mostly Mokotów, Lublin Castle, and Fordon. The introduction and chapter 1 lay out the background for the women’s stories, highlighting source issues, describing the types of women imprisoned, and, particularly in chapter 1, giving a brief history of imprisonment in Poland. The remaining chapters are thematic, focusing on arrest and interrogation (chapter 2), adjusting to life in a prison cell (chapter 3), prison relationships (chapter 4), and boredom (chapter 5). As suggested by the section “Dramatis Personae,” some of the individual women’s stories are quite dramatic. Felicja Wolff, for example, was a woman with multiple identities and involved in anticommunist resistance, who managed to confuse and outwit the authorities for several years; even though they arrested and imprisoned her, they never quite realized the extent of her resistance work. Many of the women had resisted both the Nazis and the communist takeover. There were also communist believers who supported the new regime but nevertheless were caught up in cycles of arrests, such as Stanisława Sowińska, who implicated comrades in supposedly undercover resistance activities but “never admitted her own conscious collaboration” (p. 97). Müller is careful to underline the complexity and humanity of the women she describes, focusing on how they helped shape their Citation: H-Net Reviews. Bell on Müller, 'If the Walls Could Speak: Inside a Women's Prison in Communist Poland'. H-Poland. 02-28-2020. https://networks.h-net.org/node/9669/reviews/5936899/bell-mu%CC%88ller-if-walls-could-speak-inside-womens-prison-communist Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-Poland own stories, even in the face of harsh and abusive interrogations or torture. Partly due to Müller’s frequent use of the term “Stalinist” to describe the prison system, and partly due to my own expertise in the Stalin-era Gulag, I was quite attentive to potential comparisons and contrasts between the Polish and Soviet systems of incarceration. Some of the contrasts immediately jump out. In the Soviet Union, a very high percentage of those arrested for political crimes (Article 58: Counter-Revolutionary Crimes) were convicted due to fabricated evidence and coerced “confessions” and had not, in fact, been involved in any anti-Soviet organizations or activities. In contrast, many of the women described in If the Walls Could Speak were, understandably, active participants in underground anticommunist organizations in Poland. In the Soviet Union, the authorities used prisons mostly for pre-sentencing remand; almost all prisoners were sent to labor camps or colonies (the Gulag) post sentencing. In Poland, however, the prison was the main institution of incarceration after conviction, rather than a labor camp. Unlike the Gulag, where forced labor meant that days were very active (if repetitive), the women of Polish prisons frequently recalled the “idleness of prison life, boredom, and identical empty days” of their post-sentencing experiences (p. 179). Other differences are noteworthy. In the postwar Gulag, for example, an increase in the number of women prisoners, combined with co-ed worksites in the camps and unsupervised time, meant that pregnancies were common in the camps, and male and female prisoners had many condoned and illicit opportunities to meet. In the Polish prisons, however, there appears to have been strict separation between male and female prisoners, although in interrogation prisons, which were co-ed, some men and women fell in love by communicating through the walls. Also, mass death appears to have been much more prevalent in the Gulag in comparison with the Polish prisons. If we consider both systems “Stalinist,” then certainly we must have a flexible definition of Stalinist incarceration. Despite these differences, however, there were key similarities. The brutal interrogation methods, including sleep deprivation, were one such similarity, as was the reliance on confession for conviction. Müller covers the topic of sexual assault by guards and prison officials, directed against some of the women, which was prevalent in both systems. And despite the differences noted above, there were remarkable similarities in the daily lives of prisoners, including the solidarity among women prisoners, the development of same-sex intimacy (and a reluctance to discuss the issue later), and communication between cells via tapping on the walls. Both systems had political-educational departments that organized newspaper readings, political discussions, and movie screenings. In discussing daily life in the prisons, Müller pays close attention to enhanced sensory experiences, in which women became attuned to various smells and sounds that they might have otherwise not noticed. As she writes, “learning a prison cell required the involvement of all of one’s senses—vigilantly looking, alertly touching, carefully smelling, and closely listening to what was happening outside” (p. 107). Like the postwar Gulag, moreover, the postwar Polish prisons were characterized in part by ethnic divisions, as Ukrainian and Polish prisoners kept to themselves. Finally, the tendency of the system to turn on its own communist supporters is a noteworthy shared characteristic of both systems. Müller conducted twenty-seven formal interviews with the women prisoners or those close to them, and also corresponded with other family members. Aside from these oral histories, she accessed interviews previously conducted by historians, journalists, and psychologists. She engaged in Citation: H-Net Reviews. Bell on Müller, 'If the Walls Could Speak: Inside a Women's Prison in Communist Poland'. H-Poland. 02-28-2020. https://networks.h-net.org/node/9669/reviews/5936899/bell-mu%CC%88ller-if-walls-could-speak-inside-womens-prison-communist Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 2 H-Poland considerable archival work, examining records from the secret police and prison authorities, including interrogation protocols and cell spy reports. The thoroughness of her research frequently allows her to cross-reference recollections with reports, or to reflect on absences in the oral testimony. For example, Müller notes that the women were “very reluctant to talk about any sexual relationships between women in prison” but finds documents from the authorities hinting at the prevalence of such relationships (p. 149). Through her thorough, careful, and impressive research, Müller argues that, despite the extreme hardships of both the interrogations and life in a prison cell, many of the women managed to maintain a certain amount of agency. They did so by a process of “self-fashioning,” in which they were authors of their own stories and found ways to use their own bodies as tools of defiance and resistance (for example, with hunger strikes)(p. 5). If the Walls Could Speak is well-written, thought-provoking, and thoughtful, and speaks to multiple audiences. The book should be required reading for academics interested in the communist transition in postwar Eastern Europe, or for those studying communist incarceration practices. Müller’s sensitive and insightful storytelling of these women’s lives, however, should also be of broad interest to audiences well beyond the academy. This review was guest edited by Gary Roth, review editor of H-Socialisms. Citation: Wilson T. Bell. Review of Müller, Anna, If the Walls Could Speak: Inside a Women's Prison in Communist Poland. H-Poland, H-Net Reviews. February, 2020.URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=53665 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Citation: H-Net Reviews. Bell on Müller, 'If the Walls Could Speak: Inside a Women's Prison in Communist Poland'. H-Poland. 02-28-2020. https://networks.h-net.org/node/9669/reviews/5936899/bell-mu%CC%88ller-if-walls-could-speak-inside-womens-prison-communist Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 3.
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