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First stop was Poland, which provided Carter with a Communist forum for reaffirming his stand on human rights. Polish Party Chief Edward Gierek, a former coal miner, warmly greeted the President at a remote area of Okecie Airport, but then slyly made a pre-emptive strike on his guest's issue. Said Gierek: "To the people of Poland, which has so dreadfully experienced the atrocities of war, security is the supreme value; while life and peace are the fundamental rights."
Carter in turn spoke fondly of the traditional ties between Poland and the U.S., but the welcoming party seemed oddly unresponsive-almost hostile. The problem was that the President's message had been badly mangled by Steven Seymour, a freelance interpreter from New York City, hired by the State Department at $150 a day for the Polish leg of Carter's trip. When Carter said he had come to learn about the Polish people's desires for the future, the translator used a Polish word meaning sexual desire. When the President said that he had left the U.S. that morning, the interpreter used a word meaning that he had abandoned the U.S. forever. Carter's praise of the Poles' much revered Constitution of May 3,1791, came across as if he were holding it up to ridicule. Seymour even substituted a few Russian words for Polish. Gierek and the welcoming party of about 300 Polish officials were alternately annoyed and amused; Seymour was demoted to translating only Polish into English for the rest of the visit.
Next day, when Rosalynn called on Catholic Primate Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski, a symbol of resistance to Communism, Polish-born Brzezinski did the translating. The President meantime laid a wreath at the Tomb of Poland's Unknown Soldier, as more than 500 people broke through police lines, shouting "Carter! Car-ter!" and "Niech zyje [long life]!" It was one of the few occasions when he had firsthand contact with ordinary Poles, many of whom regard him as a symbol of freedom because of his support for human rights. Later, when he placed flowers at the Nike (Greek for victory) monument to the Poles who died in a 1944 uprising against the Nazis and at the memorial to the Jews massacred in the Warsaw ghetto in 1943, police kept away all but a handful of official observers. The Polish government had tried to persuade Carter not to visit either site. The first is a painful reminder that Soviet troops could have intervened in the uprising but instead waited, just across the Vistula River, until Warsaw was leveled; the second recalls for many Poles the fact that anti-Semitism still exists in their country.
Joined by Brzezinski and Vance, Carter lunched with Gierek and other high-ranking Poles at the Sejm (parliament) building. For three hours and 45 minutes, they discussed stalled negotiations on troop reductions by NATO and the Warsaw Pact countries, Poland's complaints that U.S. antidumping regulations have unfairly hurt its exports and Carter's plea that more Poles be allowed to join their families in the U.S. Afterward Carter announced that the U.S. will provide Poland with $200 million in credits to buy food and feed grains-in addition to an earlier $300 million deal-to help make up for four years of Polish crop failures.