Free Iron Curtain by Anne Applebaum Page A

range of literature, to discuss material not available to most people in the East, to make contact with Western priests and churches while at the same time avoiding conflict with the regime and being of some help to its victims. 36
    But others did not calculate, did not measure, and did not plan. Occasionally suppressed religious feelings simply burst into the open.
    Perhaps the largest spontaneous outburst took place in 1949, in the Polish city of Lublin. It began in the summer, on July 3, when a local nun noticed a change on the face of a Virgin Mary icon in the city’s cathedral. The Madonna—a copy of the Black Madonna of Częstochowa, Poland’s most revered icon—appeared to be weeping. The nun called for a priest. He witnessed the miracle too, and both began to pray. Others followed suit. With astonishing speed—this was before telephones were common—the news of the miraculous weeping virgin spread across the city. By evening, the doors of the cathedral could not be closed because of the size of the crowds.
    In the days that followed, the news spread farther and pilgrims from all over Poland began to make their way to the cathedral. Of course, there was no public announcement of the miracle, and the regime did what it could to discourage the faithful. The authorities blocked public transportation into the city and placed policemen along the roads to prevent people from getting there, but to no avail, as one eyewitness remembered:
    It was in July 1949. Five of us went on foot since they had already stopped selling tickets for the train to Lublin. When we got to the cathedral we stayed there all night and in the morning there were already thousands of people, and at about seven o’clock they began standing in a queue waiting for the cathedral doors to open. Aftersome time a policeman came and took away the priest but people still waited longer. And then they came again and took the keys to the cathedral and still people waited.
    And then a bishop came and told people to go home because the cathedral was not opening, so then people were really shocked and sang and prayed and that went on until afternoon when I went to the side entrance of the cathedral and at first I didn’t understand what was happening and then … I saw that they were breaking down the doors and I am helping and people are singing and praying and shouting “Don’t close our church.”
    Eventually, he entered. He saw the face of the Virgin Mary light up. Tears of blood flowed down one of her cheeks. “I believe it was a true miracle,” he wrote. 37
    Communist officials were stymied. At first, they kept the story out of the newspapers in the hope that it would go away. But as more and more people came, and as the cathedral square filled up with pilgrims, they changed tactics. On July 10 they launched an “anti-miracle action”: an extra 500 policemen arrived from Warsaw and Łódź, and the newspapers were given the go-ahead to begin a negative propaganda campaign. The pilgrims were described not as “peasants” (a positive word in the communist lexicon) but rather as a “crowd” or “mob” of “country people,” naïve illiterates, even “speculators” or “traders” who could be spotted carrying vodka bottles in the evening. Government authorities solemnly examined the miraculous painting, declared it had been damaged during the war, and said that any apparent markings on the face must be due to humidity. Church leaders, including Cardinal Wyszyński himself, were pressed to declare the miracle false. Fearing that the pilgrims could face terrible repercussions, clergymen told the faithful to go home.
    But the faithful kept coming, pitching their tents in front of the cathedral doors. The following Sunday, July 17, the inevitable confrontation took place. Local party leaders organized a demonstration in Litewski Square, in the city center. They denounced “reactionary clerics” through megaphones so powerful they could be