CHAPTER 4
I want to rule as Thou dost—always, secretly.
—ADAM MICKIEWICZ, Dziady, or Forefathers’ Eve, 1832
The communication of opposites, which characterizes the commercial and political style, is one of the many ways in which discourse and communication make themselves immune against the expression of protest and refusal.
—HERBERT MARCUSE, One-Dimensional Man, 1964
NO ONE was more surprised to discover a student movement in “the happiest barracks in the Soviet camp” than the students themselves. Happy barracks is perverse Polish humor. It was not that the Poles were happy, but that they had managed to secure from the Soviets certain rights, such as freedom to travel, that had been denied in other Eastern European countries. They were certainly happier than the citizens of Novotny´’s Czechoslovakia. The Polish government would even sell $5 in hard currency to a Pole who wished to go abroad.
By 1968, the belief that the Soviet bloc was crumbling had been widespread in Western academic circles for a number of years. In the summer of 1964, a group of economics and business experts offered a series of seminars in Moscow, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia on the disintegrating bloc. Clark Kerr, president of the University of California at Berkeley, participated, sensing trouble in the communist world, but without the slightest notion that he would return to campus in the fall to face the first important student uprising in the West.
Now many thought the hour had arrived for the Eastern bloc. When Dub
ek came to power in Czechoslovakia and Brezhnev rushed to Prague, experienced Soviet watchers were quick to recall October 1956, when Nikita Khrushchev rushed to Warsaw faced with the onetime disgraced Władysław Gomułka, now managing a political comeback and overwhelmingly popular. Despite Khrushchev’s intervention, Gomułka came to power, and this Polish defiance had been all the encouragement needed for the Hungarians to rise up against Moscow. Was Brezhnev’s unsuccessful rush to Prague a prelude to uprisings in the Soviet bloc?
This was Moscow’s great fear. They had newly rebellious Romania to worry about, and Tito’s Yugoslavia. Even Fidel Castro’s Cuba had been causing them trouble. In the midst of Soviet difficulties with Romania, a February meeting of world Communist Parties in Budapest was boycotted by Cuba, which was in the midst of an anti-Soviet purge in its government. In January the Cuban Communist Party had “discovered” a pro-Soviet “microfaction” in its midst and prosecuted and convicted nine pro-Soviet Cuban officials for being “traitors to the Revolution.” One Cuban official was sentenced to fifteen years in prison, eight were given twelve-year sentences, and twenty-six others received two-to-ten-year sentences.
But while Poles had a reputation in Eastern Europe for rebelliousness, Poland was not high on Moscow’s lengthening list of worries for 1968. Gomułka, though at sixty-three he had outlasted Khrushchev, had lost some of his popular appeal. He understood that he had to balance Polish nationalism with Moscow relations and avoid the kind of debacle Hungary suffered in 1956. But the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary and the accompanying world condemnation had been difficult for the Soviets as well. Gomułka understood that the Kremlin had weaknesses and there were chances for concessions. The Soviet economy had been performing badly, and the Soviets could not afford the kind of hostility in the West that was produced by the crushing of Hungary in 1956. So with Moscow hesitant to act, it seemed a good time to test the limits. What those limits were was unknown, but all the bloc leaders, including Dubek, understood that there were at least two things the Kremlin would not accept: withdrawing from the Warsaw Pact military alliance and challenging Moscow’s power monopoly.
Władysław Gomułka was the kind of enigma that CIA agents and KGB agents could earn their salaries trying to analyze. He was an antinationalist with a streak of Polish nationalism, a man with a history of rebellion against Moscow and yet a leader eager for good Soviet relations, an alleged anti-Semite married to a Jew. Being married to that woman would make anyone an anti-Semite, Polish Jews used to joke. Marian Turski, who covered the Gomułka years for the Polish weekly Polityka, said, “In a way there was something in common between him and de Gaulle . . . a very selfish man with a very large, unlimited ego.”
Gomułka was juggling at least three problems at once, all of which tugged in different directions: internal discontent partly but not entirely related to the failure of the economy, Moscow’s paranoia, and an internal power struggle with an ambitious general who plotted for years to replace Gomułka. According to Jan Nowak, head of the Polish-language service of Radio Free Europe at the time, Interior Minister Mieczyslaw Moczar began plotting Gomułka’s overthrow as early as 1959.
Moczar had not read Marx or Lenin or, for that matter, many other books. Uneducated and unrefined, he understood power and wanted to turn the “happy barracks” into a police state run by him. He was one of a group of extreme Polish nationalists known as the Partisans who had fought the Nazis together from inside Poland. The Partisans were bitter rivals of the so-called Muscovite faction that backed Gomułka, those who had fought the Germans by fleeing to Russia and joining up with the Soviets. The Jews, forced to flee Poland, became Muscovites and not Partisans. To help bring himself and the Partisans to power, Moczar did something that had often been done in Polish history: He played the Jewish card.
By the eighteenth century, Poland had the largest concentration of European Jewry since the 1492 expulsion from Spain. But the Poles became increasingly anti-Semitic, and during World War II many Poles, while they resisted German occupation, cooperated in the murder of all but 275,000 of the 3.3 million Jews living in Poland. After the war, Jewish survivors faced further massacres and pogroms by Poles. Socialism had not ended anti-Semitism, as it had promised, and wave after wave of Jews left Poland in response to periodic outbreaks of it. The Polish government encouraged Jews to immigrate to Israel, offering them passports and transportation to Vienna. How does a smart Jew talk to a dumb Jew? went a popular Jewish joke in Poland. The answer: On the telephone from Vienna.
By the mid-1960s only about thirty thousand Jews remained in Poland, and most of these identified more with the Communist Party than with Judaism. Despite recurring Polish bigotry, they were oddly comfortable, convinced that communism was the only hope for constructing a just society and ending anti-Semitism. In fact, communism would make both Judaism and anti-Semitism obsolete. Anti-Semitism, like Judaism, was a thing of the past in Poland.
In 1967, Moczar discovered that the Gomułka government had been infiltrated by Jews. Many of the Muscovites who supported Gomułka were Jewish, and many of them held high-ranking positions in his government.
The Polish anti-Semite accepted and needed no proof that Jews were foreigners, that they were not loyal to Poland, and that they were agents of foreign governments. In Poland, a Polish Jew is always called a Jew. A Pole by definition is Christian. Jews were often accused of siding with the Soviets against Poland or with the Israelis against the Soviets. Now Moczar was suggesting that they were guilty of both.
All of this came together in 1967 when the Arabs were defeated by the Israelis in the spectacular Six Day War. Poles congratulated Israel. Gomułka received transcripts of telephone calls of congratulations to the Israeli embassy by high Polish officials of Jewish background. Of course, the transcripts had been produced by the Moczar faction, and no such communication had taken place. But it was hard for Gomułka to ignore this accusation.
The Israeli embassy had been getting flowers and notes of congratulations from all over Poland, though not from officials of his government. The congratulations were not all coming from Jews, either. Poles asked, were not the Israeli fighters Poles—the very people who had left Poland through Vienna? Suddenly a Jew from Poland was a Pole. Was not the Israeli Defense Force, the Haganah, founded by Poles? Actually, it was founded by a Jew from Odessa, Vladimir Jabotinsky, but it was true that many Israeli soldiers were of Polish origin. Had not the jojne, an anti-Semitic stereotype of the cowardly Jew, gone to war? Jojne poszedl na wojne—the jojne went to war—it even rhymed in Polish. And the jojne even won, beating Soviet-trained troops in six days. It was a wonderful joke, and everyone—not the Jews, but the Poles—was laughing a little too loudly.
Gomułka was not a great lover of Russians, but he knew this was not a good time to be laughing at them. Since the fall of the Soviet Union it has been learned that at the time of the Six Day War, Brezhnev sent nuclear submarines into the Mediterranean. He then called Johnson on the hot line, and the two labored to keep Israel from marching to Damascus. While this was going on, Gomułka and other Eastern European leaders were meeting with Brezhnev. Notes by Gomułka’s secretary indicate that news of the Arab defeat, step by step, was reaching Brezhnev while he was meeting with Gomułka and other leaders. The Russians had a sense of not only defeat but humiliation. Gomułka returned to Warsaw, deeply troubled, saying that the world was inching toward war, and then he received reports from Moczar, the minister of the interior, and the head of the secret police that Polish Jews were sympathizing with Israel. The report said nothing about the fact that non-Jewish Poles were doing the same thing.
On June 18, 1967, in a speech to the trade union congress, Gomułka spoke of “Fifth Columnist” activities, and that speech was interpreted as a signal that the purge of Jews or, as it was known, “the anti-Zionist campaign” could now begin. The terms Fifth Columnist, to indicate an underground traitor, and Zionist were now to be found in proximity. Zionists were to be rooted out and removed from high places. The worker’s militias, always available in the service of the government, dutifully began demonstrating against the Zionists. But the word syjoninci, meaning “Zionist,” was not well known, and some workers, told to demonstrate against the syjoninci, carried placards saying, “Syjoninci do Syjamu”—“Zionists Back to Siam.”
While Gomułka had Moczar on one flank and Moscow on the other, a Polish dissident movement was growing among students. University students were an unlikely source of discontent, since they were the privileged children of good communist families. From the rubble of a society that became a nightmare, their parents had built through communism a society of greater social justice and, for those of Jewish origin, a society that did not tolerate racism.
Toward the end of World War II, with the Red Army rapidly driving the Germans west, the Polish Home Army rose up against the Germans in Warsaw, expecting the Soviet arrival. But the Soviets didn’t come, and both the Home Army and the capital city were destroyed. The Soviets said they were held up by German resistance, the Poles say the Germans wanted a crushed and supplicant Poland. According to the Soviets, Warsaw was 80 percent destroyed. According to Polish historians, it was 95 percent rubble.
When the Red Army entered the capital, only a tenth of the population, 130,000 people, still lived in Warsaw, huddled on the far side of the river or camped in dangerously unstable ruins. For the Polish communists, almost the first order of business was to rebuild the historic center of Warsaw, the cultural showcase of the capital, with its fine old pastel buildings, the imposing Roman-style national theater with tall colonnades and bas relief ornament, and the university with its gardened and gated campus. There, behind the black iron gates on the leafy campus, in the restored historic center of a ruined city, the daughters and sons of the communists who built the new Poland studied peacefully.
It wasn’t exactly a democracy. There wasn’t exactly free speech. It was a little like German playwright Peter Weiss’s 1964 play, The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade or, as it became popularly known after Peter Brook’s British production and 1966 film, Marat/Sade. Not only did this play start a vogue for long titles, but it was one of the most talked-about international works of theater in the mid-1960s. Expressing the sentiments about freedom of young people in much of the world, Marat/Sade takes place on the eve of Bastille Day 1808. It is a little after the French Revolution, and the people are sort of not quite free. In the end, following a song titled “Fifteen Glorious Years,” the inmates sing:
And if most have a little
and few have a lot
You can see how much nearer
our goal we have got.
We can say what we like
without favor or fear
and what we can’t say
we will breathe in your ear.
Polish communist youth, not always in agreement with their parents, felt this “unfreedom,” as another extremely popular German writer of the mid-sixties, philosopher Herbert Marcuse, called it. Poland and much of the Soviet bloc exemplified Marcuse’s theory that the communication of opposites obstructed discourse. To criticize the government or “the system” in Poland required an aptitude for speaking opposites in reverse. Polityka, a weekly considered to be liberal and free thinking, reported on Dubek and Czechoslovakia, though mostly in the form of criticism. It often reported in reverse. If a student protested, Polityka would not report on it. But they might report that the student had recanted his protest letter and might even enumerate some of the lies he told, which he now retracted. From this, the Polish reader could learn of the protest letter and even a bit of its contents. When Mieczys™aw Rakowski, the editor of Polityka who decades later became the last first secretary of the ruling Polish Communist Party, wanted to criticize the government, he would write an article praising the government and then a week later run an article criticizing his article. He would breathe in your ear.
As Polish youth became more adept at being dissidents, they mastered another technique of spreading information. They would leak to the foreign press whatever they wanted the Polish people to know. The New York Times and Le Monde were favorite recipients. But any news media would work, as long as it was read the next morning by Jan Nowak and his staff in Vienna, where the Polish-language service of Radio Free Europe was based. The Polish service and the Czech service would work together, so that the Poles could be informed about events in Czechoslovakia and the Czechs were informed on events in Poland. By 1968 each knew the other had a student movement. They also knew that the United States had a student movement. They had no trouble, even through the Polish press, learning about Martin Luther King and sit-ins in the South and American student movements that used demonstrations to protest the Vietnam War. The leading official Polish newspaper, Trybuna Ludu, the People’s Tribune,contained little news on Poland in 1968, though a great deal on the Vietnam War and the Middle East, which was mostly about how Israel had taken a lot of land and did not plan to give it back. They also reported extensively on the civil rights and antiwar movements in the United States. The sit-ins and marches that began to characterize American campuses were reported in the official communist press. But as 1968 began, few Polish students imagined using such methods in Poland.
Ironically, in the happy barracks foreign press was not suppressed. A Pole could go to a library and read Le Monde or the British Guardian. But these papers were accessible only to the few who could read French or English, including many students. Otherwise Poles had to wait for the broadcast on Radio Free Europe.
Students, tourists, even businessmen when traveling abroad would stop off at Radio Free Europe in Vienna and give information. But many refused to work with Radio Free Europe, for this cold war generation had grown up with the capitalists as the enemy, rehearsing for defense in the event of an American nuclear attack in scarce and overcrowded schools, a shortage blamed on the high cost of the fallout shelters each school had to contain.
Leading dissident Jacek Kuroń said, “I knew that Radio Free Europe was done by the CIA. I didn’t know for sure, but I thought so. But it was the only means I had. I would have preferred to use a more neutral media but there was no other.” But despite his negative feelings about them, the Radio Free Europe staff admired and trusted him. Nowak said of Kuroń, “He is one of the most noble human beings I have met in my life.”
An alternative to Radio Free Europe was Kultura, a Polish-language newspaper written by a group of Poles who lived together in Paris. Kultura could get five thousand copies into circulation in Poland, which was often too few, too slowly.
Kuroń said, “My greatest concern was getting information to the Polish people. Who was beaten, who was arrested. I was a central information point and had to distribute the information.” He gestured toward a white phone in his small, dark Warsaw apartment. “Through this phone I used to telephone Radio Free Europe several times a day to give them information because it was broadcast back to Poland immediately. One time I was telling them about seven people in prison, and two political police walked into the apartment and told me to come with them. ‘Who is it you are arresting?’ I asked.
“ ‘We are arresting you, Jacek Kuroń.’ ”
Kuroń was holding the phone with Radio Free Europe still on the line, and the arrest was recorded and broadcast instantly.
Radio Free Europe broadcasted in Poland from 5:00 A.M. to midnight, seven days a week. Broadcasts were by native-speaking Poles. There was music, sports, and news every hour on the hour. The station claimed strict objectivity without editorializing, though few believed this. Few cared. The station was listened to with the expectation that it was a Western point of view. But it was full of information on Poland that came from inside Poland.
The Polish government jammed the station, but this served as a guide. If a Pole turned on the station and heard that familiar engine roar in the background, it meant this was important programming. The words could still be deciphered. “Jamming was our ally,” said Jan Nowak. “It made people curious about what they were hiding.”
One day in 1964, an average-size, blond, fairly typical-looking young Pole stopped by Radio Free Europe in Vienna on his way back to Poland from Paris. He was only eighteen years old, a young disciple of two older, well-known dissidents: Kuroń and Karol Modzelewski. The young man talked with enthusiasm about a vision of a socialism that was both democratic and humane. Four years later, in 1968, Alexander Dubek would call this “communism with a human face.”
Nowak recalled the young man, whose name was Adam Michnik: “He was boyish in appearance but had astounding intellectual maturity for his years.” Michnik was born in 1946, a post-Holocaust Jew from Lwov, which is now in the Ukraine but at the time of his birth was still in Poland. Before the war, when such a world still existed, his father’s family were impoverished, traditional shtetl Jews. His mother came from an assimilated Cracow family. Both parents were communists, and his father had been arrested for Party activities before the war. But Adam grew up in a communist world, with Rosa Luxemburg and Leon Trotsky, he says, by coincidence both Jews, for heroes.
“The only way I know I am Jewish is anti-Semites call me a Jew,” said Michnik, which is to say that he never thought very much about being Jewish until 1968.
In 1965 he was a history student at the University of Warsaw, one of about fifty young students who gathered around Kuroń and Modzelewski, a twenty-seven-year old researcher in the History Department and a Communist Party member. They were all communists. Michnik said of Kuroń and Modzelewski, “They were the heroes, the leaders.”
Jacek Kuroń, like Michnik, was from Lwov, but he had been born before the war. In 1965 he was already thirty-one. His mother had a law degree and was married when she became pregnant with Jacek. She often complained bitterly that “she was made for better things.” Kuroń’s father was a mechanical engineer and a leader in the Polish Socialist Party. But he disliked the Soviets, and his contact with them made him increasingly anticommunist. In 1949, when Jacek decided to join the Communist Party at the age of fifteen, his father vehemently opposed his decision.
Originally, Kuroń and Modzelewski’s discussion groups were government sponsored. Communist youth had an opportunity to meet with Party officials and ask questions in small groups of close-knit friends. But by the 1960s the questioning was sometimes so harsh that the Party officials simply wouldn’t answer. In response to a Modzelewski speech to younger students, the government closed down the Union of Socialist Youth—ZMS—his discussion group at the University of Warsaw. Banned from the university, the ZMS continued to meet in private apartments, with about fifty students attending.
After many long conversations, Kuroń and Modzelewski concluded that the system in power in Poland was not the one Marx had written about. It was not Marxism but used the name, used many labels to confuse and delude people. In 1965 they decided to write and distribute photocopies of an anonymous open letter calling the ruling system a fraud without justice and freedom. The two young men left their words unsigned because they did not want to experience Polish prison. But somehow the political police had been told of their activities and burst into the apartment where they were photocopying. The police simply confiscated the original and warned them that if they distributed any of the copies, they would face a prison sentence.
Had there been no further retribution, they might have heeded the warning. But Kuroń’s wife lost her job as an assistant professor, and both Kuroń and Modzelewski experienced continual harassment. After several months, they decided that they had no choice but to bring their protest into the open, start an open debate, and go to prison for it.
Kuroń and Modzelewski signed their open letter and next to their signatures stated that they expected to receive three years in prison for this act. “We were exactly right,” Kuroń recalled.
They distributed only twenty copies, but they also got a copy to Jerzy Giedroyc, who published Kultura in Paris and saw to it that more than five thousand copies were distributed in his publication. The letter was translated into Czech and then into most European languages. It was read in Spanish in Cuba and in Chinese in the People’s Republic. Students in Paris and London and Berlin read it.
At age nineteen, Adam Michnik was sent to prison for the first time, with his reluctant heroes, Kuroń and Modzelewski.
By January 1968 the dissident movement had become a major force among students at the University of Warsaw. But it had little impact, was not even known beyond that lovely gated campus. Modzelewski had said that they were cordoned in and had to break out. He always warned that when they did, the government would attack.
That opportunity to break out came with a production of a play called Dziady by early-nineteenth-century poet Adam Mickiewicz, unquestionably the most revered writer in the Polish language. Not a prolific writer, Mickiewicz’s unmatched reputation rests largely on an epic poem of rural Lithuanian life, Pan Tadeusz, and the play, Dziady. Among the first priorities of rebuilding the old center of Warsaw after the war had been the reconstruction of the gardened plaza built in 1898 to mark the centennial of Mickiewicz’s birth. High in the center of a rose garden among the weeping willows stands the poet reproduced in bronze. To stage Dziady in Warsaw was no more controversial than a production of Hamlet in London or Molière in Paris.
Under communism, just as in previous regimes, studying this play was an essential part of a child’s education. Dziady, sometimes translated into English as Forefathers’ Eve, begins with the ritual summoning of the dziady, deceased ancestors. The hero, Gustav, dies in prison and returns to earth in the form of a revolutionary named Konrad. Throughout the play the rebellious antiauthoritarian message is unmistakable, as is the Polish nationalist message, since much of the play is about the struggle of Polish political prisoners at the hands of the Rus-sian oppressor. But there were also demons, a priest, and angels. This is an extremely complicated piece of theater, difficult to stage and consequently the great challenge of Polish directors.
1968 was a great directorial moment for theater, a moment in which traditions were challenged, while the stage remained one of the important sources of social commentary. In New York, Julian Beck and his wife, Judith Malina, tried to break down the last barriers of traditional staging with their Living Theater. In their Upper West Side Manhattan living room they had begun directing works by difficult moderns, including García Lorca, Bertolt Brecht, Gertrude Stein, and the contemporary New York absurdist writer and social critic, Paul Goodman. They moved into theaters and lofts, where instead of selling tickets they collected contributions, and eventually traveled to Paris, Berlin, and Venice, living as a free-form commune with much fame and very little money. Julian built spectacularly original sets from scraps, and he directed occasionally, though it was more often Judith, the daughter of a German Hasidic rabbi and an aspiring actress who gave readings of German classic poetry, who was the director, especially of plays in verse. Increasingly political, the two boasted of having broken the barrier between politics and art. By 1968, their theater was a strong antiwar force and performances usually ended with not only applause but cries of “Stop the war!” and “Empty the jails!” and “Change the world!” The plays increasingly made contact with the audience. Sometimes actors served the audience food, and in one production an abstract painting was created in the course of the performance and then auctioned off to the audience. Theater of Chance determined lines by throws of the dice. Kenneth Brown’s The Brig, about brutality in a Marine Corps prison, allowed actors to improvise their abuse of the prisoner.
Peter Brook’s inventive direction of Marat/Sade was also influencing theater around the world. In New York Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead opened in January, viewing Shakespeare’s Hamlet from the perspective of its two least important characters. At the same time Joseph Papp mounted a production of Hamlet in a modern setting starring Martin Sheen. Clive Barnes wrote in The New York Times, “An aimless Hamlet for Philistines who wish to be confirmed in their opinion that the Bard is for the birds.” Richard Watts, Jr., in the New York Postcalled it “lunatic burlesque, at times satirically amusing, at others seemingly pointless.” All of which may have been true, but still, Papp was celebrated for his boldness at a time when boldness was admired above almost all else. In April his production of Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical, largely about the hippie life with very little story, was moved to Broadway directed by Tom O’Horgan, who sent actors panhandling and distributing flowers in the audience. Barnes, in a very positive and enthusiastic review, warned the public, “At one point—in what is later affectionately referred to as ‘the nude scene’—a number of men and women (I should have counted) are seen totally nude and full, as it were, face.” On the nudism in Hair, Paris Match pointed out that there were also those who objected to the naked back of Marat being visible from the bathtub in Brook’s production.
In Dubek’s Czechoslovakia, once-underground playwrights such as Václav Havel and Pavel Kohout were becoming international stars combining the Czech Kafkaesque tradition of absurdist wit and a dangerous, Beck-like fusion of art and politics. Communist bureaucracy was a favorite target. Papp’s Public Theater presented a production of Havel’s The Memorandum starring Olympia Dukakis, in which office workers struggle with a made-up language.
So it was not surprising, with avant-garde theater flowering everywhere, especially in neighboring Czechoslovakia, that the Polish National Theater’s production of the Polish classic would try something different. The play, with its political side but also a religious side rooted in Slavic Christian mysticism, was often presented in precommunist Poland as a religious and mystical piece. Under communism it was generally seen as political. Instead of choosing between a political play and a religious one, director Kazimierz Dejmek used both to create a complex production steeped in early Christian ritual but at the same time very much about the struggle for Polish freedom. Gustav/Konrad was played by Gustaw Holoubek, one of Poland’s most respected actors, who made the role one of inner struggle and uncertainty.
Like an old, well-known melodrama in which everyone knows the lines of the hero and villain, Dziady has always had its familiar moments certain to provoke applause. Most of these lines are nationalist in tone, such as, “We Poles have sold our souls for a couple of silver rubles,” and the Russian officer’s words, “It’s no wonder they hate us so: For full one hundred years, they’ve seen from Moscow into Poland flow such a sewage-laden stream.” These moments were part of the Polish experience of going to Dziady. The play was anticzar, which was perfectly acceptable Soviet thinking. It was not anticommunist. It said nothing about communists or Soviets, which it predates. In fact, the way it was taught and usually produced under communism was to emphasize the political messages. Far from an anti-Soviet symbol, the play had been originally mounted the previous fall as part of celebrations for the fiftieth anniversary of the October Revolution that brought the Communists to power in Russia.
It was the attention paid to Christian religious belief in this production that disturbed the government, since communism rejects religion. Still, no one regarded this as an important departure from orthodoxy. Trybuna Ludu gave the production a negative but not particularly impassioned critique, simply stating that it was a mistake to think that mysticism played as big a role in the drama as politics. For the play to work, the critic argued, Mickiewicz has to be seen as a predominantly political writer. But the production was a popular success, playing to packed and enthusiastic houses and extended for months. Adam Michnik went. “I thought it was a fantastic production. Really stirring,” he said.
Then the government did a strangely unwise thing: It closed down the revered national play at the National Theater. Worse, it gave a closing date, January 30, and leaked it to the public two weeks in advance so that everyone knew that January 30 would be the last performance by order of the police. Poles were used to censorship, but it was never announced in advance. The government almost seemed to be inviting a demonstration. Was it looking for an excuse for repression? Was this General Moczar plotting again? Historians still argue about this. Amid all the plot and counterplot theories, the possibility is often raised that the government just acted stupidly. Michnik remembered, “The decision to close the play was proof that the government was stupid and did not understand Poles. Mickiewicz is our Whitman, our Victor Hugo. . . . It was an outburst of communist barbarism to attack Mic-kiewicz.”
The night of January 30, after the final curtain, three hundred students from the University of Warsaw and the National Theater School demonstrated in front of the nearby National Theater, marching only a few hundred yards to the statue of Adam Mickiewicz. They did not see this as a particularly defiant act. They were just communist youth reminding their parents of the ideals of communism. Michnik said, “We decided to lay flowers on the poet’s monument.” Michnik himself, known to the authorities as “a troublemaker,” did not march.
“We thought a Czech-style evolution was possible,” said Michnik. The students did not fear a violent response. “Since 1949 there had never been a police act against students in Poland,” Michnik reasoned with perhaps too much logic. There among the willows, in front of the rose garden with Mickiewicz frozen in bronze in midrecital, his right hand touching his chest, three hundred students were beaten with clubs by truckloads of “workers” who arrived at the protest ostensibly to talk to students but clubbed them instead. Thirty-five students were arrested.
Not surprisingly, there was no press coverage of the incident. Michnik and a fellow student dissident, Henryk Szlajfer, spoke with a Le Monde correspondent whom Michnik characterized as “an extremely dangerous man. Very reactionary and mostly interested in promoting himself.” But the two young communists had few options if they wanted the Polish people to know what had happened. From Le Monde the story would be picked up by Radio Free Europe in Vienna and broadcast throughout Poland. But the two were seen talking to the correspondent by the secret police, and when the article ran in Le Monde, Michnik and Szlajfer were expelled from the university.
All of this connected expediently with the “anti-Zionist campaign.” Michnik, Szlajfer, and numerous students who had demonstrated were Jewish. This is not surprising considering the university dissidents were from good communist families, who had taught their children they had an obligation to fight for a more just society.
But this was not the government’s explanation for Jews in the student movement. The government, which had been removing Jews from their jobs throughout the bureaucracy, accusing them of Zionist plots, now said that the so-called student movement had been infiltrated by Zionists. The arrested students were interrogated. If they were not Jewish, they were asked, “You are a Pole. Why are you always with the Jews?” Non-Jews were asked to give them the names of Jewish leaders.
When interrogating a Jew, the police would begin, “You are Jew?”
Often the student would answer, “No, I am a Pole.”
“No, you are a Jew.”
It was a very old dialogue in Poland.