1968 - Mark Kurlansky [47]
The night of January 30, after the final curtain, three hundred students from the University of Warsaw and the National Theater School demonstrated in front of the nearby National Theater, marching only a few hundred yards to the statue of Adam Mickiewicz. They did not see this as a particularly defiant act. They were just communist youth reminding their parents of the ideals of communism. Michnik said, “We decided to lay flowers on the poet’s monument.” Michnik himself, known to the authorities as “a troublemaker,” did not march.
“We thought a Czech-style evolution was possible,” said Michnik. The students did not fear a violent response. “Since 1949 there had never been a police act against students in Poland,” Michnik reasoned with perhaps too much logic. There among the willows, in front of the rose garden with Mickiewicz frozen in bronze in midrecital, his right hand touching his chest, three hundred students were beaten with clubs by truckloads of “workers” who arrived at the protest ostensibly to talk to students but clubbed them instead. Thirty-five students were arrested.
Not surprisingly, there was no press coverage of the incident. Michnik and a fellow student dissident, Henryk Szlajfer, spoke with a Le Monde correspondent whom Michnik characterized as “an extremely dangerous man. Very reactionary and mostly interested in promoting himself.” But the two young communists had few options if they wanted the Polish people to know what had happened. From Le Monde the story would be picked up by Radio Free Europe in Vienna and broadcast throughout Poland. But the two were seen talking to the correspondent by the secret police, and when the article ran in Le Monde, Michnik and Szlajfer were expelled from the university.
All of this connected expediently with the “anti-Zionist campaign.” Michnik, Szlajfer, and numerous students who had demonstrated were Jewish. This is not surprising considering the university dissidents were from good communist families, who had taught their children they had an obligation to fight for a more just society.
But this was not the government’s explanation for Jews in the student movement. The government, which had been removing Jews from their jobs throughout the bureaucracy, accusing them of Zionist plots, now said that the so-called student movement had been infiltrated by Zionists. The arrested students were interrogated. If they were not Jewish, they were asked, “You are a Pole. Why are you always with the Jews?” Non-Jews were asked to give them the names of Jewish leaders.
When interrogating a Jew, the police would begin, “You are Jew?”
Often the student would answer, “No, I am a Pole.”
“No, you are a Jew.”
It was a very old dialogue in Poland.
PART II
PRAGUE
SPRING
The first thing for any revolutionary party to do would be to seize communications. Who owns communications now controls the country. Much more than it’s ever been true in history.
—WILLIAM BURROUGHS, interviewed in 1968
CHAPTER 5
ON THE GEARS OF
AN ODIOUS MACHINE
Employees are going to love this generation. . . . They are going to be easy to handle. There aren’t going to be any riots.
—CLARK KERR, president of the University of California at Berkeley, 1963
Our young people, in disturbing numbers, appear to reject all forms of authority from whatever source derived and they have taken refuge in the turbulent and inchoate nihilism whose sole objectives are destructive. I know of no time in our history when the gap between generations has been wider or more potentially dangerous.
—GRAYSON KIRK, president of Columbia University, 1968
BY THE SPRING OF 1968, college demonstrations had become such a commonplace event in the United States, with some thirty schools a month erupting, that even high schools and junior highs were joining in. In February, hundreds