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By Root 866 0

of Jews, followed. Poets, philosophers, and professors of Jewish origin throughout the Polish university system were accused of complicity in the conspiracy, and many were fired. On March 18, Roman Zambrowski, a former member of the Politburo, was found to be one of the plotters of the student movement and was removed from the Party. Zambrowski had no particular tie to the student movement, but he was a Jew and a political adversary of Moczar. His son, Antoni, a student accused of being a leader, had no connection to the movement. It became clear to the students as more and more Jews lost their jobs and more and more students were beaten and arrested that the government had chosen its line on the uprising and the students’ grievances were not going to be addressed.

The other factor that spurred on the spontaneous student uprisings was the events in Czechoslovakia. Polish students carried signs saying, “Polska Czeka na Dub^zeka!”—“Poland Awaits Its Dubek!” Some historians say Dubek was doomed the minute those signs went up in Warsaw. Moscow’s nightmare from the moment Dubek had come to power in January was that Czechoslovakian reform would spark a movement that would sweep across central Europe.

Poles cherish a heroic image of themselves, unshared by and little known in the outside world. One of their self-glorifying images is that of the defiant Pole. According to the Polish version of history, the Czechs allowed German occupation and the Poles resisted. The Czechs accepted communism in 1948 and the Poles resisted. The Poles rebelled in 1956 and supported the uprising in Budapest, while the Czechs said nothing and remained loyal to Moscow. Poles recall the fact that they sent a food shipment to support the Hungarian rebels, but the trucks had to pass through Czechoslovakia, where they were stopped. In the complicated pecking order of central Europe’s national images, Poles say that in 1956 “the Hungarians acted like Poles, the Poles like Czechs, and the Czechs acted like pigs.”

Now the Czechs, whom the Poles had sneered at under Novotny´’s Stalinist anachronism, were becoming the vanguard communist nation, the one to be followed. “It was surprising to see the Czechs ahead of us. They were supposed to be the opportunists and cowards,” said Eugeniusz Smolar.

Neither the government nor the students could fully understand this unorganized movement. The activists, cut off from their leaders, didn’t know what to do with it. “We were just not prepared for either the brutal response of the government or the popular response of the people,” said Eugeniusz Smolar. “We just were not prepared.”

On March 22, with the Western press full of stories of student sit-ins in Cracow, Warsaw, and other Polish cities, and with the Polish press writing only of Zionists, hooligans, Stalinists, and troublemakers, the Soviet public read of Polish unrest for the first time. That same day Tass, the Soviet news agency, reported on the removal of Novotny´ from his second post as president of Czechoslovakia while Pravda, the Soviet Communist Party newspaper, and Izvestia, the government newspaper, reported at length on the “anti-Soviet agitators” in Poland.

Also on March 22, the Yippies—Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and Paul Krassner—attended a meeting in Lake Villa, Illinois—a gathering of what had come to be known as the New Left, the youth movements of 1968. The meeting was called by the Mobe, the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam. Tom Hayden and Rennie Davis of the SDS were also there. The topic was how to protest during the Democratic Party convention that would take place in Chicago the following August. Blocking the city traffic with a funeral march as Johnson was nominated was one suggestion. An attack on the convention was another. Abbie Hoffman—rebel, clown, and media genius—was, as always, outrageous. He sat through the meeting smoking marijuana and throwing out ideas. One was calling for an end to paid toilets. Another was a gesture on the part of the Mobe in support of Polish student protesters. Neither suggestion