The Freshman - Julian Berengaut — "We Are Here": Jewish Narratives of Poland's March 1968 Events

Julian Berengaut - Student, Warsaw

My sister asked me if I would sign a petition to Parliament about Dziady. I was a first year student at Warsaw University in the political economy department.

I couldn’t say no to her. Halina was three years older than me. I was afraid to say no. I decided that I would sign, but illegibly. She brought the petition home and I saw that below her very clear signature there was a space left open for mine. The whole plan fell apart. It would be stupid to scrawl out something illegible. I signed. And then on March 19, when Gomulka[1] was yelling that 5,000 people had signed the petition, I was proud of myself. I don’t know if my parents knew about our signatures. Halina was very independent, she didn’t have to explain anything to them. She was in her third year of chemistry at the University. She became friends with Anka Dodziuk, and through her she met the “Commandos.”[2] I think she got the petition from Anka.

On March 8 I went to the University for a protest meeting. Out of curiosity, to take a look. Lots of noise, running around, the exhilaration of freedom and feeling that you were part of a group. The police came in and the young people began to call them names, chanting “Ges-ta-po!” And suddenly I remember that in this crowd, which was my crowd, I started to feel somewhat foreign. I couldn’t shout “Gestapo.” The thugs from the ORMO[3] were worthy of disdain but something about that chant bothered me. I felt that of course they weren’t really the Gestapo and that, by calling them Gestapo, we were insulting the memory of the people who really did have to deal with the Gestapo. I was running from their batons and the whole time this is what I was thinking.

I went home and said there was an occupation strike at the University and that I was going. I had to tell them. I couldn’t just not come home without warning them. My father took me aside and tried to convince me not to go. He talked about the consequences. That the government would not fulfill the students’ demands and that it would punish the rebels. “The strike will be paid for,” he said, “by people with last names like yours.”

He didn’t use the word “Jew.” In our home, no one used the word “Jew.” And no one talked about what happened to our family during the war. My father is from Kolomyja. I didn’t know much about it. Other than that his mother died in Otynia, a small town outside Kolomyja. In 1941 the Germans drove the Jews from Kolomyja there and killed them. My mother’s large family most likely died in Treblinka. My mother’s father was a rabbi in Kalwaria Gora.

My father tried to convince me not to go to the strike.

Helenka Datner, my friend from school, also tried to convince me. She was worried that it was risky - for us personally, and also for the cause that the students were fighting for. Perhaps I didn’t understand where she was coming from. After all, I was a Pole. Like my friends. There was only one time in my life that I had thought about going to the Jewish Social-Cultural Association club. It was towards the end of middle school, and I had met some kids who said they were Jews and they went to this Jewish club. At home, I said I wanted to go and my father had a terrible fit, he said I wasn’t allowed to go and he prohibited me from any contact with the Jewish Association. In the middle of this tantrum my mother came in and calmly said that she didn’t see anything wrong with going to the Jewish Association. My father fell silent and furiously stormed out of the house, slamming the door. I didn’t go to the club.

The strike was good. We sat in the departmental buildings. The students from the political economy department were striking alongside the students from education and psychology. Probably because the dean’s office was in our building and we were afraid the police would organize some kind of provocation. An “unknown actor” would break into the building and steal something and then they would blame the students.

It was like being at scouting camp. Happy. We were singing songs, making food. People from the Powisle side of Warsaw were tossing us packages of sausages over the fence. We were singing “At midnight the drunken militiamen turned out / They didn't say anything, they just beat us on the snout.”

Apparently I was the leader in our group. Zyta Gilowska[4] mentioned that in an interview once. She was very impressed that as morning was coming, I got everyone to do push-ups so that we wouldn’t get bored and fall asleep.

But I never thought for a minute about what was going to happen next.

Because a few days later, Wojtek Staszko woke me up. He was a close friend of mine going back to our days in high school - he was a law student. He ran over to my house, came into my room and announced that they were shutting down the economics department.

You know what I thought at that moment? I remember it perfectly. I thought “Ah, see, they’re afraid of us!” I was that stupid.

Aside from economics, they shut down philosophy and sociology as well as the third year of mathematics and physics. It was a smart move. Not to expel the students who were involved in the protests, which would have provoked another protest on their part. Instead, just shut down the most rebellious departments, then do an investigation of all the students, and announce a new list of “accepted” students that would be missing a few, or a few dozen, names.

In my year they re-accepted all of the students except for Janka Fisher and me. The key was obvious. Janka Fisher and I were - as far as I know - the only students of with a “known background.”[5] You could accuse me of some political involvement but Janka Fisher didn’t sign any petitions, wasn’t at the protest or at the strike, because she was sick in the hospital. Maybe it was something to do with her father?

Janka’s father was a journalist who worked as an editor of “Music and News,” a very popular program. He was a great guy, he really impressed me. On June 6, 1967,[6] after Cardinal Wyszynski gave a speech that was very sympathetic to Israel, he went to the Cardinal’s headquarters on Miodowa Street and gave him flowers and a letter thanking him for his kind words. He got a response from the Cardinal that began, “Dear Sir - Polish Catholics support the independence of Israel. We pray for it to our mutual Father ….” There were rumors that he had documentation that he was crazy. That he had checked himself into a very good hospital in Tworki, been examined, and received very good papers saying that he was abnormal. He could say what he wanted to say. And he did. Once his boss came to him with order: write a commentary that the American hydrogen bomb is a threat to peace, but the Soviet bomb preserves the peace. And he responded: Go fuck yourself, Sir. I don’t know if that’s true. I wasn’t going to ask the man, my friend’s father, if he had “crazy papers.”

Janka and I decided that we were going to appeal our expulsion and demand to be readmitted. I started going over to the Fishers’. And Mr. Fisher gave me and Janka advice about what we should write in our appeals. He didn’t think they would work. At a certain point he suggested that perhaps we should sprinkle some chemicals on our appeal letters so that the authorities, who were going to wipe their asses with them, would get some kind of serious disease at least.

Classes started up again in the economics department. Today I think, in retrospect, that it was a key moment, both for the students who were allowed back in and those who were excluded. Before that, we - the students - were all together. We all wanted something and we were all fighting for something. After that, “we” started to mean “we, the expelled.” And for them, “we, the students.” And we didn’t make a big deal about our presence, realizing that we could cause them a lot of problems. My group of friends, which up to that point was very “mixed,” became almost exclusively “Jewish.”

My appeal was granted. I went back to school. I went to an economics study group, and Dr. Grabowski stopped me at the door, asking what I was doing there. I told him I had received permission to resume my studies. He asked me to show it to him and I did. Then he let me into the classroom. He did this in front of the whole class. My classmates stood up and watched. Do you know how I felt?

In June, toward the end of the school year, I started collecting signatures from my instructors showing that I had completed the semester. Marmulowski - from physical education - didn’t want to sign my papers, which would have meant only conditional completion of the school year. He said I had missed a lot of classes. I said that I had missed them because I was removed from the list of enrolled students. He said that, to him, that was not an excuse. At first I was so confused that I thought this hero was trying to tell me that he didn’t view my expulsion as legitimate and that he would have happily welcomed me into his class. But that wasn’t the case. He firmly refused to sign my papers. Later, when I had to show people in the West my document showing that I only “conditionally” completed the year, no one could understand it.

They threw my mother out of her job. She was the deputy director of the Warsaw branch of the Universal Education Society. She was involved in adult education. That had been her passion since the pre-war years. She worked twelve hour days. Aside from her there were two editors from the publishing house “Kziazka i Wiedza” in the leadership of the Education Society. She had always spoken fondly of them, but when they got their orders, they did what was expected of them. She was crushed. My father hadn’t worked since 1959, he was on disability.

In August I went to Zakopane[7] with my girlfriend, Ania Gren. We stayed in a youth hostel. That night there was a wild goodbye party for a group of Hungarians who were leaving first thing the next morning for Budapest. A few hours after they left they came back to the hostel. The border was closed. Czechoslovakia had been invaded by the Warsaw Pact forces. Ania and I didn’t even need to discuss it - the situation in Poland was going to get worse and we needed to get back to Warsaw.

My mother was sick.

My father read all the papers, searching in the details for nuances that might indicate divisions among the Party leadership. My mother would read and get sicker. Sicker and sicker. In the newspapers they established a tradition of reminding people of their former last names. Do you remember how that went? They would write “Kowalski vel (or alias) Kiszensztajn” or “Wodnicki alias Wasserman.” My father told me that my mother was doing worse and worse, that she was starting to be afraid. I understood that my parents were starting to think about emigrating.

Halina declared: emigrate or don’t emigrate, but I’m not going anywhere. After a year, she emigrated.

We put in our papers. I got permission. My mother got permission. My father was denied permission. In the early 1950’s, he had served in some sort of merchant marine unit in Gdynia, and they said that in order for him to emigrate the Soviets had to give their approval, and they didn’t want to.

So my mother decided to stay. She didn’t want to leave my father. I only saw her three times after that: once in Romania and twice in West Germany.

I left by myself. November 11, 1968. Gdansk Station, friends on the platform with mementos. A used collection of poems by Galczynski that I still have to this day.

I traveled to Israel via Vienna.

I remember three incidents from before I left.

I had to get a signature from the military office at the University that I didn’t owe them anything. Like my uniform, gas mask, boots, belt. I got the signature along with a bitter remark: “Good luck with Dayan.”[8]

A kid came to see me - I had gone to middle school with him. He had heard we were leaving and wanted to know if we would sign our apartment over to his family because they had a smaller one.

And there was a third thing. I got a call from a girl that had gone to middle school with me, and who had later moved back to Bialystok with her family. She was calling from Bialystok. In those days, to make an inter-city call you had to place an order with the switchboard operator and, after a few hours of waiting, you would be connected. She told me that my emigration was a tragedy, that she couldn’t come to terms with it. And that she was calling because she needed to tell me that, so I would know and remember.

And to this day I remember.

[1] Leader of the PZPR (United Polish Worker’s Party).

[2] The “Commandos” was a name applied to a group of politically active students at Warsaw University who were prominent in the 1968 events. Among them were Adam Michnik, Henryk Szlajfer, Jan Gross, Teresa Bogucka, Irena Grudzinska and others. A number of the “Commandos” were of Jewish or part-Jewish heritage. They received some of the most severe prison sentences in the aftermath of March '68.

[3] The "Volunteer Reserve Militia", armed with rubber batons, was a volunteer quasi-militia which was notorious for overzealous "crowd control" activities, often involving unprovided attacks and swarm-beatings with clubs, including storming the University of Warsaw to end the student strike on March 8, 1968.

[4] A contemporary of Berengaut's at the University of Warsaw, she went on to obtain a doctorate in economics and became active in post-Communist politics, including as Finance Minister in the conservative Law and Justice government of Prime Minister Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz.

[5] Communist-era euphemism for “Jewish background.”

[6] The first day of the Six Days’ War.

[7] A tourist town in the mountains of southern Poland.

[8] A reference to Moshe Dayan, at the time the head of the Israel Defense Forces and one of the most famous Israeli leaders in the 1967 war.