1968 - Mark Kurlansky [70]
Young Polish communists, the children of the country’s elite, made up this new and unprecedented movement. Three of them were children of government ministers. Many had parents who were important Party members. Up until then, an idealistic young Pole, not entirely in agreement with his or her parents, still joined the Communist Party in order to change it, to force it to evolve. Now they were seeing that it was a brutal system prepared to use violence to oppose any change.
The pre–World War II generation of Polish communists had a cynicism that the postwar generation, raised in safety and security, did not learn until 1968. Konstanty Gebert, who was only fifteen years old, joined the protest movement in 1968. His father, who had been a communist organizer in the United States before the war and had returned to Poland after the war to build the new communist state and was serving as a diplomat, was a tough, old-time communist who knew about demonstrations and being arrested. Young Konstanty imagined that his father would be proud of his son, out demonstrating in the streets like a good communist. But that wasn’t how his father saw it.
“My father disapproved that I was a hysterical kid engaging in politics, which was terribly disappointing for me. . . . I was brought up in a communist mentality. So here comes a demonstration that shouts socialism, freedom, independence. I thought it was great. I joined it. We fight the police, whatever. I come back home three hours late. ‘Dad, we fought the police! For independence!’ I was expecting he’d crack open a bottle of vodka and we’d have a great time. They locked me up at home for three days. Exactly what I would do if it happened to my kid. Fifteen years is not the right age for fighting on the streets. But what heartbreak. I thought I’d become one of the boys. Just like Dad.”
Young Poles very quickly did learn that it was dangerous and violent to protest in the streets. But far from intimidating them, this brought them out. The next day, students met to protest the arrests and the invasion of their campus and the closing of Dziady. Students from the Polytechnical School went out into the streets, cheering Czechoslovakia, denouncing Minister of Interior Moczar and his “Gestapo,” and throwing rocks at the police, who responded with tear gas. Traffic police cordoned off the area and plainclothesmen were brought in by truck. They leaped out of the vehicles and once again began clubbing. Other students, demonstrating in a small group by the University of Warsaw campus in front of a church where the heart of composer Frédéric Chopin is buried, were also beaten by plainclothesmen.
On March 11, thousands of students marched into the center of Warsaw to the gray, totalitarian, art deco facade of the Polish Communist Party headquarters. There, with Party officials looking down from a sixth-floor terrace, the police again emerged, pounding young skulls with thick clubs, knocking young people to the ground, beating them bloody, and dragging them away. Some fought back, throwing debris at police. The battle lasted two hours. The few thousand demonstrators were a small number compared to those who had gathered in Berlin, Rome, and other Western cities to protest the Vietnam War, but for a Soviet bloc country it was a startling occurrence, reported as a front-page story around the world.
Outside the university campus, trucks full of plainclothesmen who arrived were greeted by demonstrators shouting, “Gestapo!” In 1968 there was hardly a demonstration from Warsaw to Berlin to Paris to Chicago to Mexico City that did not compare police to the Nazi storm troopers. In Warsaw, these plainclothes shock troops who arrived by truck, the ones the students called Gestapo, were often workers’ militia, who were told that the student protesters were privileged