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most flourished during periods of relative freedom. Gierek couldn't go after Western loans while he was busting up meetings and arresting intellectuals. When he eased the repression, it gave an opportunity for groups to organize. An accidental by-product of the anti-Semitic campaign of 1968 was that for a rare moment in Polish history, Jews and the Catholic Church were thrown into the same camp. Then the Catholics and the Jews began working with trade unions. By 1980, a wide range of opposition groups had formed an unlikely but solid coalition called Solidarity. The coalition between Catholics and Jews lasted throughout the early 1980s. Gebert, as a Jewish dissident, was sometimes invited to speak at Catholic churches, which, like synagogues, he had never expected to enter. The congregations always seemed very excited and a little embarrassed to have a Jew among them. One priest introduced him as “Mr. Gebert of the Mosaic persuasion.” Just as the influence of the Catholic Church was increasing in Poland, Karol Wojtyla from Katowice became Pope in 1978, giving the Polish church even more confidence.

This prosperous time for Konstanty Gebert, Marian Turski, and many other people in Poland ended harshly in 1981. The meat price went up again, and Lech Walesa, the Solidarity leader with his base as an electrician in the Gdansk shipyards, organized nationwide strikes. The Gierek regime suddenly realized something astounding: Most Polish workers were now Solidarity members. Ten million Poles belonged to Solidarity. To settle the strike, Gierek agreed to sweeping reforms and then resigned. Most of the reforms were not carried out, but the Communist party was now in such disarray that Poland by default became the freest society in the Soviet bloc. But on December 13, 1981, General Wojciech Jaruzelski led a coup d'etat and established martial law. The small measure of Polish freedom was over.

The little Polish Jewish revival also ended with the coup. Gebert's group was discontinued, because any gathering of more than eight people had to register with the police. Since almost all of the sixty group members were active in the underground political opposition, they could not afford to do this. But the group still unofficially met on Jewish holidays and observed its own annual commemoration of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, shunning the official one. Fifty Jews would quietly walk through the few monuments in the 1950s housing project where the ghetto had been. The police didn't object until 1983, when Solidarity decided to join in and invited the people of Warsaw to participate. Not coinci-dentally, this was the year when the government, trying to improve its badly degenerated international image, invited Jewish leaders from abroad to come to an official commemoration of the fortieth anniversary. Marek Edelman, the last surviving veteran of the ghetto uprising, was now involved in the underground opposition; he urged world Jewish leaders not to come because they were being used to give the regime the appearance of international approval.

Gebert's little group could barely be found among the thousands of Solidarity supporters and sympathizers who joined in the unofficial ceremony. They were surrounded by police with clubs and machine guns as they made their way through the trim, straight streets to the Umschlagplatz. The plan was that survivors and relatives of survivors would lay wreaths in front of the plaque that marked the site where the ghetto Jews had been herded for deportation. But as these elderly mourners approached, the armed police blocked them from coming near the plaque. The crowd grew as angry Poles from the neighborhood joined the mourners. It was not that Poles were supporting Jews but that they were all opposing the regime together.

World Jewry ignored Marek Edelman's plea, and the government was able to bring more rabbis to Warsaw than had been seen there since the war. The fact that none of these visiting Jews would participate in the unofficial ceremony to which they were also all invited left Gebert with a lingering