1968 - Mark Kurlansky [72]
She signed a petition and joined a march protesting the arrests of students and demanding the press write the truth. Her mother, Jadwiga, a clerk who had always dreamed of being a social worker, feared that there might be violence and insisted on coming along to protect her. For their defense she carried an umbrella. About one thousand people had joined the march when they were suddenly confronted with workers, some of whom knew Jadwiga.
“What are you doing here!” one of the workers demanded of her.
Jadwiga, umbrella at the ready, answered, “What are you doing here!”
A three-day sit-in was declared. The government cut the campus phone lines so that one part of the university did not know what another part was doing. There was a rumor in Joanna’s part that the rest of the university had given up. But her mother, Jadwiga, arriving with sandwiches for her daughter, had just come from another part of the university, where she had brought sandwiches to her daughter’s boyfriend, and she told her daughter’s group that the other areas were still striking. After twenty-four hours, when students started talking of abandoning the sit-in, it was Joanna Szczesna who made the first speech of her life, insisting that they carry through on what they said they would do and proposing following the sit-in with a hunger strike.
“I was an adult, but I was also a child,” Joanna said. “I wanted to make our parents join us. I knew that if I went on a hunger strike, my mother would attack the Communist Party headquarters.” Someone in the underground heard the speech and asked her to join, and that was how Joanna Szczesna, age seventeen, became a political dissident who would later work with Kuroń, Modzelewski, and Michnik.
The Party said the demonstrators were being manipulated by old Sta-linists. The government would not admit that the demonstrations were spontaneous. According to the Trybuna Ludu, “The events of March 8 did not emerge deus ex machina. They were preceded by long preparation, many campaigns of smaller size and range but in all preparing both leaders and participants for drastic measures.” The leaders they named were Modzelewski and Michnik. But while they and other leaders were in prison, demonstrations around Poland had become a daily occurrence. In fact, they were not being coordinated by anyone. “When I heard I was completely surprised,” said Jacek Kuroń, who was also in prison at the time. “We had had a little contact with Wroclaw, but this was all the universities.” A series of leaders had been elected for the March 8 demonstration, but they had all been arrested. Most subsequent attempts to pick leaders also resulted in their arrests.
Two weeks of demonstrations around Poland followed. Many demonstrators carried signs saying, “Warsaw Students Are Not Alone,” and burned copies of the official newspapers that were not reporting on the movement.
The government may have been caught off guard, but no one was more astonished than the students themselves. Eugeniusz Smolar said that after years of small discussion groups, “it was a surprise to find out these issues were popular. It was a big surprise that so many at Warsaw University rose up, and a bigger surprise that every major university in the country responded.”
It seemed that without discussion many young Poles were questioning their society. Smolar said, “There was something in the air that communism just wasn’t offering the freedom they wanted.” The communist regime had inadvertently revealed itself to its communist youth. Smolar’s wife, Nina, a graduate student at the time, said, “Anti-Semitism was a complete surprise and the violence was another surprise.”
Faced with spreading nationwide protest, the 1967 anti-Zionist campaign raged on in 1968. To many Polish communists, especially Jews such as the Smolars, this seemed to completely contradict their idea of what the Communist Party was. All the communist states had banned the expression of anti-Semitism. Adam Michnik said, “When I saw anti-Semitic articles