1968 - Mark Kurlansky [75]
On March 24, while sit-ins were spreading to every university in Poland and more and more “Zionist conspirators” were being removed from office, a letter was released from the bishops of the Polish Catholic Church saying that the student movement was “striving for truth and freedom, which is the natural right of each human being. . . .” The bishops went on to say that the “brutal use of force disgraces human dignity.” This letter was the beginning of a new alliance in Poland. Never before had the Catholic Church and the leftist intelligentsia fought on the same side. According to Michnik, this letter caused a radical change in thinking. “Traditionally the Left in Poland is anticleric,” said Michnik. “I was too until 1968. When the Church issued a letter supporting the students, for the first time I thought maybe the Church is not an enemy. Maybe it could be a partner in dialogue.”
On March 28 three thousand students in Warsaw demonstrated, demanding an end to censorship, free trade unions, and a youth movement independent of the Communist Party. It was to be the last demonstration. Eight university departments were closed and one thousand of the University of Warsaw’s seven thousand students were left without a curriculum and told they would have to reapply for entry. Another thirty-four were expelled. “All of us have had enough of mass meetings. There will be and can be no tolerance of trouble-mongers and people of ill will,” the Trybuna Ludu announced.
With almost a thousand students in prison, the student movement was shut down. The government continued to find Zionist ringleaders to be removed from their posts.
The universities were irreparably damaged as many of the best faculty members fled to escape anti-Semitism and were replaced by party hacks. A Pole had only to express desire to move to Israel and show proof of Jewish origin to leave. One man was stopped because he could not show that he was Jewish. His only proof was a paper from the government denouncing him as a Zionist. All but about one thousand Jews left the country, essentially ending Judaism in Poland.
But Eugeniusz and Nina Smolar stayed. “March 1968 was the last time anyone believed the system could evolve,” said Eugeniusz. “People used to join the Communist Party to change it. To do anything, to be a player, you had to be in the Party. After March 1968 people who joined were much more cynical, using the Party as a vehicle for personal advancement.”
Michnik was another Jew who stayed. But he stayed in prison. He was later asked if when sitting in prison, with the university destroyed and its intellectual life silenced, he had thought he’d made a huge mistake. Without hesitation, this small, energetic man jutted out his jaw and said, “I never thought that. Part of my education was the silence of my parents during the trials of 1935. You must always protest against dictatorship. It is what Immanuel Kant called a categorical imperative.”
Smolar said, “The 1968 generation was born of fire. They learned from experience and were active in all the movements that followed.” They did learn to join with both the church and the workers, or, as a writer put it in Trybuna Ludu in unwittingly prophetic language, “The events at the University pointed out that apart from the prevailing naïveté and credulity some students had great potential, were ideologically committed and willing to change the country for the better. We now wait for this capital to bear fruit.”
Joanna Szcesna was only nineteen the first time she went to prison. She amused the other prisoners by reciting Gone With the Wind and the Galsworthy novels. In 1981, when the movement had grown, joined by workers and clergy, to such size that the government declared martial law in an attempt to contain it, Joanna’s mother, Jadwiga, was the oldest woman interned. Joanna said, “I think I was a bad influence on her.”
CHAPTER 8
POETRY, POLITICS, AND
A TOUGH SECOND ACT
I have left Act I for involution
and Act II. There mired in complexity
I cannot write Act III
—EUGENE