In March 1984 Polish customs officers noticed a suspicious truck. It had arrived on an overnight ferry from Copenhagen, docking at the Baltic port of Świnoujście. The truck’s interior was smaller than its exterior. Workmen broke through a walled-off inside panel. To their surprise, they found a cache of books – 800 of them – and illicit printing presses. And forbidden walkie-talkies. “Oh shit! Reactionary propaganda!” the officer exclaimed.
The shipment was to be delivered to the Polish opposition movement Solidarity. The country’s communist leader, Gen Wojciech Jaruzelski, had banned Solidarity three years earlier. The forbidden books included critiques of the socialist system and pamphlets on human rights. Other works smuggled behind the iron curtain included Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, philosophical texts by Albert Camus and Hannah Arendt, and copies of the Manchester Guardian Weekly.
