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separate relationship with Soviet officials, the Polish communists never trusted him. Although he continued to play their game (at one point he offered to send Pax observers to North Korea to promote “peace”), the government left him out of the creation of the union of “patriotic” priests and did not ask him to help negotiate the church–state accord. At the same time, his public Catholicism did not endear him to the church as much as he might have hoped. Cardinal Wyszyński loathed Piasecki, and at one point forbade clergy to subscribe to his publications, which eventually came to include
Słowo Powszechny
(
Universal Word
), a daily newspaper, as well as
Dziś i Jutro
. Wyszyński was particularly infuriated by Piasecki’s management ofCaritas, the Catholic charity—Pax took it over after the real organizers were removed—especially when unscrupulous Pax priests were caught selling donated penicillin on the black market. 48 The rivalry between the two men may well have been encouraged by the communist party, of course, which had no interest in seeing Pax and the churchcreate a united front. In later years the party allowed rival “official” church groups to proliferate precisely in order to create competition among them. 49
    In the end, Piasecki failed in what he apparently set out to do. He never did persuade “reactionary forces” to join the new system. Nor did he persuade the communist party to make Pax an equal partner. He guessed, correctly, that someday the party would hand over power to an opposition grouping of its choice, which is indeed what happened in 1989. But he appeared on the scene too early to take advantage of such a situation himself, and he paid a very high price for trying. In 1957, his teenage son, Bohdan, was kidnapped and murdered, probably by a faction within the Polish secret police, in circumstances that remain murky to this day.
    Piasecki did open what seemed, at the time, to be a window of freedom for a few people, and he did ensure that an avowedly Catholic discourse remained part of public life. The books and newspapers published by Pax provided some Catholic education for a generation of readers. More importantly, from Piasecki’s point of view, he survived. At a time when other ex–Home Army officers were dead or in prison, he and his colleagues had their own party, their own newspapers, a stable position within the system. And they had influence in all kinds of places. In 1955, Mazowiecki, Zabłocki, and several others rebelled against his leadership. But after they quit their jobs at
Dzi
ś
i Jutro
or Pax, all of them found it difficult to get new jobs elsewhere: every potential employer was warned off by the secret police, and no one wanted them around. All learned a lesson: a fight with Piasecki was dangerously close to a fight with the regime. 50
    Odd though it may sound, newspapers and magazines also provided a way out for reluctant collaborators. Of course, those who wrote about politics had few options in this era. They had to accept the telephone calls from the party brass, listen to instructions, and write as they were told. But others had more leeway.Leopold Unger, a correspondent for
Życie Warszawy
(
Warsaw Life
) in the early 1950s, remembered that even then it was possible to write freely and critically about all kinds of things. The potholes in the streets, for example, or the lack of public buses: “It just wasn’t possible to criticize the system itself.” 51
    Newspapers were not all about politics, even then, and there were other kinds of publications as well.Alexander Jackowski, after trying and failing to find his way in Poland’s Foreign Affairs Ministry in the late 1940s, beganediting a folk-art journal in 1952 “by accident,” as he recalled. He kept that job for forty-six years. During that period, he became a renowned expert in the subject of folk art, which he genuinely came to know and love. He didn’t challenge the system in that job,