1968 - Mark Kurlansky [71]
That same day, March 11, students simultaneously demonstrated in Gdansk, Cracow, Poznan, Wroclaw, and Lodz, all attacked by police with clubs and sometimes with water cannons and tear gas. Students borrowed some of the techniques they had read about from the American civil rights movement. They staged boycotts and sit-ins. At first many students did not understand that they had to actually sit down in a sit-in.
The government reasoned that Warsaw and bourgeois Cracow had demonstrations because of their large elite student populations. But the strong working-class communist roots of the populations in Lodz and Gdansk made it more difficult to explain demonstrations in those cities. In Gdansk the student demonstrators asked the workers to join them. It was well known that in the United States, antiwar demonstrators were calling out to people to “join us!” The students in Gdansk had no more luck with the workers than did the students in Washington with the National Guard. In Poznan students shouted, “Long live the workers of Poznan,” but the workers did not join the movement there, either.
Jacek Kuroń recalled, “Before the play, we students wanted to approach the workers. But in very shy and timid ways. No one expected such an outburst. And when it came, the government explained that the students were spoiled privileged Jews, children of the elite.”
“In 1968, students had a motto, ‘There is no bread without freedom,’ ” recalled Eugeniusz Smolar, a student activist son of an influential Party member. “Workers thought this a ridiculous slogan—there is no freedom without bread. Bread always comes first. Most of us had never gone without bread. We didn’t understand each other.” For years to come the government was able to contain protest because either the workers did not support the students and intelligentsia or the students would not support the workers.
Demonstrators carried signs and shouted slogans denouncing the Polish state-controlled press, which wrote of the student movement as hooliganism but refused to actually cover the demonstrations or write about the issues. “Lying press” became one of the leading student grievances. A February writers conference that first attempted peacefully to raise the issue of censorship and the closing of Dziady was first mentioned in Trybuna Ludu a month later, at the end of March, after weeks of open protests, sit-ins, and street battles. But the violence was being widely reported around the world. In Vienna, Jan Nowak had only to sift through the daily accounts of Le Monde and The New York Times and other papers in order to broadcast the events in Polish throughout Poland.
In Lodz, Joanna Szczesna was a seventeen-year-old freshman in the university. From a lower-class background, she was a bookworm who had learned of the evils of capitalism from nineteenth-century French novels. She was grateful to be living in a socialist country. “I didn’t think that I wasn’t free. I could say whatever I wanted at the university. In March, a student at the University of Warsaw who was from Lodz came home and said that Warsaw students had demonstrated against censorship, against the closing of a play, and that the police had beaten them up.
“Maybe I lived in the world of my books, but I was shocked,” said Szczesna. “I didn’t read the newspaper except the movie section, but now I looked and it was so different. The newspaper talked of hooligans, adventurers, children of the rich, Zionists. This was unacceptable. It was clear that I should participate.