1968 - Mark Kurlansky [44]
“The only way I know I am Jewish is anti-Semites call me a Jew,” said Michnik, which is to say that he never thought very much about being Jewish until 1968.
In 1965 he was a history student at the University of Warsaw, one of about fifty young students who gathered around Kuroń and Modzelewski, a twenty-seven-year old researcher in the History Department and a Communist Party member. They were all communists. Michnik said of Kuroń and Modzelewski, “They were the heroes, the leaders.”
Jacek Kuroń, like Michnik, was from Lwov, but he had been born before the war. In 1965 he was already thirty-one. His mother had a law degree and was married when she became pregnant with Jacek. She often complained bitterly that “she was made for better things.” Kuroń’s father was a mechanical engineer and a leader in the Polish Socialist Party. But he disliked the Soviets, and his contact with them made him increasingly anticommunist. In 1949, when Jacek decided to join the Communist Party at the age of fifteen, his father vehemently opposed his decision.
Originally, Kuroń and Modzelewski’s discussion groups were government sponsored. Communist youth had an opportunity to meet with Party officials and ask questions in small groups of close-knit friends. But by the 1960s the questioning was sometimes so harsh that the Party officials simply wouldn’t answer. In response to a Modzelewski speech to younger students, the government closed down the Union of Socialist Youth—ZMS—his discussion group at the University of Warsaw. Banned from the university, the ZMS continued to meet in private apartments, with about fifty students attending.
After many long conversations, Kuroń and Modzelewski concluded that the system in power in Poland was not the one Marx had written about. It was not Marxism but used the name, used many labels to confuse and delude people. In 1965 they decided to write and distribute photocopies of an anonymous open letter calling the ruling system a fraud without justice and freedom. The two young men left their words unsigned because they did not want to experience Polish prison. But somehow the political police had been told of their activities and burst into the apartment where they were photocopying. The police simply confiscated the original and warned them that if they distributed any of the copies, they would face a prison sentence.
Had there been no further retribution, they might have heeded the warning. But Kuroń’s wife lost her job as an assistant professor, and both Kuroń and Modzelewski experienced continual harassment. After several months, they decided that they had no choice but to bring their protest into the open, start an open debate, and go to prison for it.
Kuroń and Modzelewski signed their open letter and next to their signatures stated that they expected to receive three years in prison for this act. “We were exactly right,” Kuroń recalled.
They distributed only twenty copies, but they also got a copy to Jerzy Giedroyc, who published Kultura in Paris and saw to it that more than five thousand copies were distributed in his publication. The letter was translated into Czech and then into most European languages. It was read in Spanish in Cuba and in Chinese in the People’s Republic. Students in Paris and London and Berlin read it.
At age nineteen, Adam Michnik was sent to prison for the first time, with his reluctant heroes, Kuroń and Modzelewski.
By January 1968 the dissident movement had become a major force among students at the University of Warsaw. But it had little impact, was not even known beyond that lovely gated campus. Modzelewski had said that they were cordoned in and had to break out. He always warned that when they did, the government would attack.
That opportunity to break out came with a production of a play called Dziady by early-nineteenth-century poet Adam Mickiewicz, unquestionably the