[Michel Lowy, well-known Marxist scholar, shown above speaking…]

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Michel Lowy, well-known Marxist scholar, shown above speaking to over 100 people at a New York Socialist Action forum. Lowy and Eleni Varikas, a Greek feminist, addressed hundreds of activists at several campuses and Socialist Action forums during a successful six-city tour of the United States.

Adam Michnik, one of the founders of the KOR (Workers Defense Committee), has been imprisoned at Warsaw's Rakowiecka St. detention center since martial law was imposed in December 1981. He is one of five KOR members who is awaiting a trial at the hands of the Jaruzelski regime.

On Dec. 10, 1983, he sent a letter to Interior Minister General Kiszczak denouncing the subhuman conditions in his prison cell and responding to the government's offer to allow the KOR leaders to seek exile in Western Europe. We are reprinting excerpts from this letter which are translated from the French.

I know very well, General, why it is necessary for you that we leave Poland. You would like to drag our names through the mud in your newspapers to an even greater extent, explaining that we have finally shown our true face. You would like to be able to say that we have been receiving orders from abroad all along and that now we are finally giving in to the attraction of capitalism's luxuries. You would like to demonstrate to the entire world that you are goodhearted liberals and that we are spineless creatures. You would like to tell the Polish people: "Look at them! Even they have capitulated. Even they have stopped believing in a free and democratic Poland."

Well no, General, I will not do you this favor. I do not know what will await me in the future. I don't know if I will Adam Michnik have the fortune to live to see the great day when truth will triumph over falsehood and when Solidarity will triumph over the current anti-working class dictatorship.

But it is a fact that for me, General, the value of our struggle does not lie in the chances of our victory, but in the righteousness of the cause for which we have carried out this struggle.

I hope that my refusal to be banished from Poland will contribute to develop the honor and dignity of a country which you are making more miserable with each passing day. May you receive this refusal as a slap in the face; you who so easily thinks you can trade with the freedom of others!

For me, General, prison is not a particularly harsh affliction. On this December night, it is freedom which is being proscribed, not l. It is not I who am imprisoned today. It is all of Poland which is behind bars. • Socialist Action February 1984 3

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Letter from Polish Prison