"We Are Here": Jewish Narratives of Poland's March 1968 Events

Marek Web - Journalist, Warsaw

“March ‘68” didn’t start in March, but in June 1967. The Six-Day War broke out between Israel and the Arabs. Fear and terror. In the newspaper office we were glued to the radio receivers, listening. I was working at “Our Voice,” the Polish-language supplement to the Jewish magazine “Folks-shtime.”

Our guys were winning. Enthusiasm. The first day, the Polish press was very favorable to Israel. The second day was the same. We were listening to the radio, sharing information with each other. A colleague, a writer from another paper, called me to find out what was new, and I told him. And just at the moment when I was hanging up the phone, a runner from the Workers’ Press Cooperative comes in with a special internal bulletin. At the top, across the whole page it said: “Attention, Attention - change the title of the lead article to ‘Israeli Aggression Against Arab Nations’.” By that point we were politically aware enough to understood what that meant. And we knew Moczar.[1] We knew what kind of group he was running.

The frontal attack came on June 19. Gomulka[2] gave his speech at the Congress of Labor Unions. My wife was pregnant and she nearly had a miscarriage. Gomulka said that Poland was threatened by a Fifth Column - the Fifth Column was the Jews. And that every Polish citizen must have only one fatherland.

No, I wasn’t surprised by Gomulka. We already knew who he was. The Gomulka of October ‘56[3] was long gone by then. The euphoria of October ’56 barely lasted a few weeks. Maybe a year. Up until they closed “Po Prostu.”[4] And the fact that he had a Jewish wife? Come on - what does that have to do with anything? We weren’t that naïve.

I’ll tell you a Russian joke. At a factory in the Soviet Union they tell a guy he’s being added to the factory Worker’s Committee. They’re dragging him in kicking and screaming. He says, “Comrades, I’m a tradesman, I do my work - I’m not cut out to be a party activist." And they say, “Comrade, you must join precisely because you are so skilled - the workers respect you.” So he says, “But I come from a bad background - my grandmother on my father’s side was cousins with General Dennikin[5].” And the Worker’s Committee guys say “That’s no problem - it’s been so long, no one remembers General Dennikin, we’re putting you on the Committee.” So he says “But my grandmother on my mother’s side was Jewish!” And they tell him, “Come on now, we're Internationalists, we don’t pay attention to peoples’ background.” “But …” they tell him after a moment, “that thing with your other grandmother and General Dennikin, you’re right - that’s a real problem.”

Do you get the nuance? The nuance is that the same Jews, who used to be treated as good Communists, with “internationalist” respect - suddenly, at the moment when they decided to go after them, were just Jews and no “spirit of internationalism” applied to them anymore.

Gomulka struck first and it went on from there. Suddenly these bums came out of the woodwork and they realized that it wasn’t really about Israel and that they could do a little something on the side. They were overjoyed that after all these years, they were now allowed to do some anti-Semitic score settling. They did it with extreme relish.

I’ve wondered why Gomulka decided on such a general attack. In the past there had been occasions where they went after Israel, but they left the Polish Jews in peace. But this time, the Jewish Social-Cultural Association [hereinafter "Jewish Association" for convenience - ed.], especially its board of directors, immediately became the subject of a frontal attack. They demanded that the board make a statement on the Israel-Arab war. A typical propaganda move - because, as you know, the term “make a statement” meant “denounce” in the language of socialist-realist propaganda. The board members resisted, played for time. In the end, they got an order: they had to make a statement. They had a choice - if they didn’t denounce [Israel], then the whole communist propaganda machine would proclaim them a “bastion of Zionism.” If they did denounce [Israel], maybe they could still preserve something for the Jewish community in Poland. After all, the Jewish Association was made up of Jewish schools, clubs, summer camps, workers’ co-ops. So in the end they put out a statement that they opposed Israeli aggression against the Arab countries. They tried to formulate it in a way, they did verbal gymnastics, to try and tone it down. They printed the statement in “Folks-shtime” in Yiddish and, of course, it was very poorly received around the world. It turned the whole world against the Association. Only Israel took it calmly because they know what was going on.

I was against publishing the statement. I believed it would go down in history as an act of capitulation and I suspected that denouncing the war would not really help the Jewish community because, either way, the Jewish Association would be labeled a “bastion of Zionism.” Which is what happened just a few months later. Of course, from the beginning it was not really about Zionism. It was about Polish Jews and chasing them out of Poland. Only a few people in the leadership of the Association - who ultimately stayed in Poland by the way - believed that somehow their statement would shield the Jewish community from further blows.

In March the bombardment started. In a system governed by arbitrary campaigns, when the First Secretary strikes the first blow, it signals a direction to the party apparatus, which latches onto that direction, gives orders, gives that direction shape in the field, and then the propaganda campaign spreads horizontally. Every institution, every factory, every office has to fall in line. And in the case of the Jewish situation there was another factor that increased the moment - perhaps more than expected: it unleashed a grassroots, organic anti-Semitism.

Now people began getting thrown out of their jobs. First in the Army. The Army was completely purged. There probably was not a single Jew, half-Jew or quarter-Jew left.

You know what surprised me? The strength of this hatred, or even fury. Regardless of who the person was, what they had done in Poland. The Party and the government awakened these demons in the people - awakened them absolutely intentionally. And all of us understood: pack your bags and go.

In our family, there was no discussion whether to leave or to stay. My parents decided to leave immediately. My friends too - almost all of them. There were no illusions or expectations that anything would change for the better, like there were in 1956. You would see an acquaintance on the street and ask: when are you leaving? Where are you going? Have you been to the Dutch embassy? Not yet, but I’m going. The Dutch embassy had taken on the representation of Israeli interests in Poland after Israel and Poland broke off diplomatic relations.

This was not a time for discussions and argument - what was there to argue about? Not about ideology, because ideology was debased. Morality? Morality was already compromised. All you could say was, “The hell with you, I’ll take care of myself.”

On January 31, 1968 our son was born. In the hospital he got a staph infection. That’s a bacteria that kills older people but somehow newborns survive it. It took a couple months before he got over it. My parents left - they went to the United States to prepare things for us. Before that, they never thought of leaving Poland. It was actually the other way around - they had returned to Poland.

Wife and son of Marek Web, pictured after their emigration to the United States

Before the war, my parents lived in Lodz. In early 1940, before there was the Ghetto, when the Germans would grab people off the streets and send them to labor camps, they caught my father. At the camp he saw what was going on and he understood where things were headed. He managed to come back and he told my mother they had to get out immediately. This was in the period when you could still cross the eastern border [to the Soviet Union]. We ended up in Bobruisk, in Belarus. Then we were evacuated to Tashkent. After the Sikorski-Mayski Agreement 6 my father was mobilized into Anders’ Army, and he went from Russia, through Iran to Palestine, where he was demobilized. My mother was still with me in Uzbekistan. After the war, he started looking for us. He didn’t know where we were. He learned from some friends that we had returned to Poland. My mother wanted to go to him, in Palestine, but he wrote and told her not to go anywhere. Then he sent a telegram: “I’m coming.” He came back in 1946. Before the war, he had been involved in leftist circles and what was going on in Poland was appealing to him. Officially, there were promises to rebuild the Polish community, Polish culture, schools, etc.

I don’t know if he made a good choice, returning to Poland. I’m not in a position to judge that. We lived in Poland for 23 years, and they were mostly good years. We settled in Lodz. After the war, Lodz had the largest Jewish community. The Jews felt that it was a relatively safe city. Poland in general was not safe after the war, especially after the Kielce Pogrom. Anyone who didn’t run for the border after that, made their way to Lodz for safety in numbers. That’s also where, about two years later, the first headquarters of the Jewish Committee in Poland was established. That institution, which represented the whole of Polish Jewry, was active until 1949, until it was dissolved. After Lodz, the largest concentration of Jews was in Lower Silesia - Legnica, Dzierzoniow, Bielawa, and then Wroclaw, and then Warsaw.

After she returned from the Soveit Union my mother worked in a wool-spinning cooperative. There was a network of Jewish cooperatives that formed across Poland. My mother worked at a loom spinning wool. My father took on various jobs. Ultimately he became active in Jewish organizations. To the end of his life he worked in the Jewish community. He attained a certain position within the community - he was the Secretary of the Lodz branch of of the Jewish Association, and towards the end he was even a member of the presidium of the whole Association.

My parents were secular Jews. Their faith took the form of so-called Yiddishism, which was in opposition to assimilation. Yiddishism held that Yiddish was the national language of the Jews and focused on the creation of institutions which would use and perpetuate the language. In fact this was an ideology that was shared by the Bund [Jewish socialist party] and the Jewish populists, but the assimilated Jewish communists adopted it as their unwritten law.

These different streams and divisions were very complicated before the war. Internationalism was of course the Bible of Communism, but at different times there were moments when the so-called “Jewish Question” had to be dealt with and the Communists had different approaches to it. For example, in the Soviet Union, or Soviet Russia, different nationalities had the ability to survive. In Ukraine or Bialorus, for example, there was fairly broad autonomy for Jews, especially for the Yiddish language. There were Jewish schools, factories, cooperatives, and collective farms. There were attempts at industrialization. If you look at pictures of the Minsk train station from that time, the name “Minsk” was written in five languages: Belorussian, Russian, Ukrainian, Yiddish and Polish. That period wasn’t long but it did exist. At different levels of the Communist Party there was a special section - the “Yevrayskaya Sekcja” or “Jewish Section.” There was even a special court system in Yiddish. Anyway, that’s all history now.

My mother was from Piotrkow, and my father was from Rawa Mazowiecka. For them Yiddish was their daily language, deeply intertwined with Jewish tradition. But even though they only finished elementary school in Polish, they spoke Polish fluently (especially my mother) and without accents. But their lives were conducted in Yiddish. And at home, of course, we spoke Yiddish.

By the time I returned to Poland with my mother [in 1946] I spoke three languages. Russian was first, because when we came to Tashkent, I was three. The second was Polish, because my mother worked in the local branch of the Union of Polish Patriots and she took me to a daycare that was run by the UPP. And Yiddish was only my third language. I understood it but I didn’t speak it until I started going to Jewish school in Lodz in 1946. I finished elementary and middle school there. At the beginning the school was operated by the Central Committee of Jews in Poland and Yiddish was the language of instruction. For example, we had science textbooks [in Yiddish] that were imported from America. Then the Hebrew schools were shut down and the Yiddish schools - as you know - were nationalized under the direction of the Ministry of Education. After that, in the Jewish schools Yiddish was just one of the subjects, but not the language of instruction. We took the regular exams. On my high school graduation exam, nothing was in Yiddish, even the name of the school - only the school’s seal, which was bi-lingual.

My home was completely non-religious, even though my parents came from very traditional communities. My mother told us how, before the war, she had been in jail, and her father came to visit her. He was a tall, handsome Jew - it was a good-looking family - in a long coat, and she and the other communist women were on a hunger strike and were not accepting visitors. He was really disturbed by that. He couldn’t understand what it was about, he couldn’t even conceive of it. It was a very religious, patriarchal family. My father’s family too. But my parents broke away from that.

However, they still felt a strong need to preserve traditions. And to them Jewish holidays were part of those traditions. They just gave them a secular tone. On Hanukkah, Purim and Pesach there was a holiday spirit. My mother was a terrific cook, a specialist in Jewish cuisine. On every holiday she made particular dishes. And she tore her hair out when, for example, I didn’t like gefilte fish, which the whole world loves.

Pork? Of course not. There was no pork in our home. But you know, I never really missed it. In general I was not a big eater.

Of course, there were fights with other boys. They chased me and threw stones. But overall there weren’t many fights. I lived in the city center and Lodz was a multi-cultural city. I had friends in Baluty [on the outskirts of Lodz] and that’s where the beatings really happened, even to the point of blood.

I graduated from high school in 1956. Thank God it was then, because that was a good year to start college. I studied history at the University of Lodz. That was the first time I found myself in a truly Polish environment. But I still kept in contact with the Jewish Association, still went to the Jewish Association club - in Lodz it was number 13, Wieckowski Street - and I organized camps, trips. After I finished my studies in 1960 I went to Wroclaw to teach history in a Jewish school. I was there for three years and then I moved to Warsaw. The headquarters of the Jewish Association was in Warsaw and there was Yiddish-language magazine published there called “Folks-shtime” or “Voice of the People.” It came out four times per week and it was very boring - unreadable, really. You would find information in it about really marginal issues relating to the Jewish community and initiatives by the Jewish Association. Beginning in 1958 there was a bi-weekly supplement in Polish, “Our Voice.” I worked on “Our Voice” from 1964 until the end. It was targeted towards younger people, who by that point did not understand Yiddish and were moving away from Jewishness. “Our Voice” was supposed to attract and hold on to those younger readers. Which, in the long run, was obviously not going to work. The Polish community in Poland was eroding. There were mass emigrations in the 1940s and in 1956. After that, there were not as many people leaving, but demographics were coming into play. Families were getting older. Jewish schools were dying a natural death. Schools were being closed for lack of students. The first school that closed for that reason was in 1966, I think it was in Walbrzych. Assimilation was happening. There were more and more mixed marriages. The community was not as big as it had been after the war.

Sometimes I think about what would have happened if March ’68 never happened, and the Jewish community in Poland had been allowed to remain and live out its natural end. The Polish state might have had to spend a few million more zloty on us, but it would have also preserved its reputation as a tolerant nation that took all possible steps to allow its Jewish community to flourish. But Gomulka, Moczar, the “partisans” and Red Guards and whoever else - they were itching to get their hooks into their Jewish “comrades.”

People have attempted to explain why they did it many times. There’s documentation. Some people think it was internal party power struggles, a generational conflict, a younger generation that wanted to kick out their elders and take their positions. Others think that it was about a new form of socialism, a conflict about who the People’s Republic of Poland belonged to - more of a philosophical issue. But that theory doesn’t really hold together.

The communist Jews, the ones who were in leadership positions, had already been dealt with in 1956, and then they were systematically - postepyenno, as they say in Russia - removed from office. In 1968 very few were left in official positions. There were not many politically engaged Jews. Who were they supposed to be bothering? They didn’t have any power, they physically couldn’t interfere with anything.

But you know, in the end perhaps it doesn’t matter. Many years later there was a professor who held a fairly important position in the world of science, and she told me that at the Jagiellonian University 70% of the faculty are Frankists [Messianic Jews]. I didn’t argue with her. For what? Even today there are parties in Poland who build their ideology on the idea that Jews, or Frankists, are out there operating in secret.

Were you at the University of Warsaw on March 8, 1968?

No, I didn’t see those skirmishes and no one beat me with a club.

Did you listen to Gomulka’s speech on March 19, 1968?

He went on forever.

Do you remember any meetings that were held to protest the March Events?

Thank God I didn’t take part in them.

Did you see the faces of the people who were rounded up at those meetings?

They showed them on television. I didn’t even want to look at them.

But I did go to see an exhibit about Poles who, at great cost, saved Jews during the Nazi occupation, and about the ungrateful Jews who served the Gestapo. It was set up on the coroner of Marchlewski and Swierczewski streets. It was a “storefront” type exhibit, you could walk in like you would walk into a store, off the street. Inside there was a plaque saying that a million Poles had rescued Jews during the Holocaust. This was 1969 and they were up to a million rescuers.

Honest people, people who really had saved Jews, were used in a dishonest game. They defaced the beautiful acts of the rescuers. Maybe that exhibit still exists somewhere, in some archives, an oversight. It was organized by the Society of Fighters for Freedom and Democracy.7

We emigrated in November 1969. There weren’t too many people at the station with us - most people had already left - just some of my wife’s family, some of her friends from work - she’s a Pole. In our train car - I’m not sure if this was dictated by the railroad or just worked out this way - it was all emigrants, going via Zebrzydowice to Vienna.

Our plans were clear. Vienna. From Vienna to Rome. In Rome, you could get a permit, permission to travel to the United States. In New York I had a job arranged at the YIVO Institute for Yiddish Studies as a historian and expert in Yiddish culture - consistent with my qualifications. And I still work there to this day.

[1] [Mieczyslaw Moczar, Interior Minister in 1968, known for his anti-Semitism].

[2] [Wladyslaw Gomulka, Fist Secretary of the Communist Party]

[3] [The so-called “thaw” that followed Khrushchec’s ‘Secret Speech’ admitting and renouncing certain aspects of Stalinism in 1956. Gomulka rose to prominence in this period and was initially viewed as a potential reformer of the rigid regime installed by his predecessors under Soviet guidance. Although there was a limited period of increased press freedom and other liberalizations, the Party and State under Gomulka quickly reverted to prior practices although the Stalinist system was never fully reestablished]

[4] “Po Prostu” was a short-lived publication that arose in the so-called October Thaw and briefly succeeded in publishing material that would previously have not been allowed by the Communist authorities. It was shuttered by the authorities after a brief period of activity.

[5] [Leader of the White Army that fought against the Soviet Revolution]

6 A 1941 pact between the Polish Government in Exile and the Soviet Union that, among other things, provided for the formation of a Polish Army made up of Poles from territories controlled by the Soviets under General Wladyslaw Anders (subsequently known as “Anders’ Army.”)

[7] A state-sponsored military veterans’ association.