In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

26 Chapter Two Christmas Presents Our flight from Rome was the last plane to arrive in the snow-covered Polish capital of Warsaw that cold and dark Saturday evening. In fact, although we didn’t know it at the time, our flight was the last regularly scheduled flight allowed into the country for weeks. Purely by chance, we would soon be cut off from the outside world and plunged into the middle of a world event. It was December 12, 1981. There were three of us from CNN: me, in my first year at CNN after leaving Newsweek; our camera operator Jim Allen, a wiry, chain-smoking, no-nonsense Texan with years of experience; and Ron Dean, our sound technician, a style-conscious, fun-loving younger man from Atlanta. We thought we would be doing feature stories about the Christmas season in Poland. The country was in the news because of Soviet pressures to crack down on the pro-democracy movement. Perhaps we could produce some profiles of people as they reacted to the tension. We were greeted at the airport by Ela Volkmer, a slim, bespectacled Warsaw University student who worked as a translator for Interpress, the government agency that dealt with foreign journalists. Ela was bright, savvy, and courageous. Even though she was an employee of the Communist-run government, she, like many Poles, sympathized with the anti-Communists of the pro-democracy movement known as Solidarnosc or Solidarity.On the taxi drive to the modernisticVictoria Hotel,Ela told us that Solidarity leaders including Lech Walesa would be meeting soon in Gdansk, to the north.We made tentative plans to go there the next day. As we arrived at the hotel, we did not know it but preparations were under way to shut down airports across the country. Borders were being closed. Communications with the outside world were being cut off. In fact, when I got to my hotel room, I picked up the phone to call Atlanta, as usual, to let the foreign desk know that we had arrived, but I was unable to get through. I assumed that there was some technical problem and went to bed.´´ Christmas Presents 27 Next morning the phone was still dead. I turned on my shortwave radio to get the news, the usual way to begin the day. I heard static on most shortwave bands. I wondered if there might be some hotel equipment in use causing interference . I kept trying to tune in different stations until at last I got a strong signal that turned out to be a shortwave broadcast of Polish state radio in En‑ glish beamed to the outside world. The announcer was in the middle of an item, something about a “state of war,” and at first I could not figure out which country he was talking about. Some country in Africa? Slowly it dawned on me that he was talking about Poland. We were in the middle of a “state of war,” whatever that meant. Had the Russians invaded? I went downstairs to the lobby and found Ela, looking tense. She said that shortly after midnight the Polish government had proclaimed martial law (badly translated from the Polish language as “state of war” on the state radio ). The army had rounded up the leaders of the pro-democracy movement and cut off all communication with the outside world. There were tanks in the streets. There was a curfew. Jim and Ron and I huddled with Ela. We really had almost no idea what to do. Would it be safe to travel around the city? Were our competitors already on the air with their reports, beating us badly? Being unable to contact Atlanta or anyplace else outside this country, we were in neartotal ignorance. We hired a taxi outside the hotel entrance and I asked Ela to tell the driver to take us around the city center, to see what we could see. It was a bright, sunny Sunday morning, cold and crisp. Jim slumped down in the back seat, cradling his television camera in his lap as low as possible so as not to attract attention, and occasionally raised it and aimed it through the window. At first the streets seemed normal. Pedestrians were bundled up in overcoats and fur hats, trudging down the streets, going to church or wherever. Taxis and buses and trucks were moving along. Then I saw an olive-drab tank with a long gun looming over the cars and...

Share