Adam Gryniewicz - Industrial Engineer, Warsaw
They told us there was going to be a rally. I worked in the tractor factory in Ursus.[1]
It would have been hard not to go. After we were released to go to the rally, a guy went through all the rooms and made sure that they were empty. You could have snuck out between the factory buildings - they didn’t take attendance. But I don’t think that anyone was hiding. People were happy to go to the rally. They were glad they didn’t have to work.
Adam Gryniewicz on his wedding day.
I had been working in Ursus for three years, fulfilling my work mandate.[2] I had a year left. I graduated from the Warsaw Polytechnic, the department of industrial machinery and vehicles. I was an engineer.
I wanted to study geography, but my mother, a very wise woman, told me: “A Jew should have a practical profession, because he never knows where he will be working.” My father died when I was eighteen.
In the large factory assembly room there was a podium for speeches and there were flags and banners with slogans hanging. I recognized the slogans from television. They hadn’t come up with anything new. It wasn’t the first rally in Poland; every day on television they showed clips of rallies from all around the country, from factories all over. There were a lot of slogans about Zionists, and how everyone supported the First Secretary [of the Communist Party], Comrade Wieslaw.[3] I remember: “Down with Zionists,” “Zionists Go to Dayan[4],” “The Youth is With the Party, and the Party is With the Youth.”
I don’t know how many people were at the rally. In Ursus there were 12 -14,000 workers - it was a big factory. So there had to have been a few thousand.
It took almost an hour to gather everyone together in the hall, the rally was almost an hour, then another hour to leave the hall. Altogether, three hours of doing nothing.
The people standing in the front rows held up banners. No one gave me one. I stayed in the back rows. No one paid attention to the back rows.
What did you think?
Nothing. What was I supposed to think? That it has to be this way. That’s how it was all over Poland and every factory had to go through it. You know it was all organized from the top down. Anyway, I didn’t take that rally personally, it didn’t have any impact on my future.
For most people, including the people I worked with, that rally was totally meaningless. They had to go, so they went. And they stood there.
And they had no reaction?
Like they say, they went to “hear” - they “heard,” because there were loudspeakers. Did they “listen” - I’m not sure. The sounds were reaching them, but the words - no one took them seriously. It wasn’t their problem. To them, it was problem for the guys at the top who were fighting each other. But it was also my problem. Apparently there were only two Jews who worked in Ursus. One was me - a totally anonymous guy - the other was the director of the cultural center.[5] Unfortunately for him, a less anonymous guy. Since every factory had to show its commitment to the fight against - in this case Zionist - deviance, he was the only person in Ursus who really fit the bill because he had a leadership position. I didn’t know him - I didn’t go to the cultural center. They fired him for Zionist activity in the cultural center in Ursus. The factor newsletter wrote about it.
There were two speeches and that was it. One was by the head of the factory Party organization, and the other was someone from the regional Party committee. Then applause. The applause was mostly from the people in the front rows.
Of all the people there, I was maybe the only one who was a target - not of the speeches themselves, but definitely a target of the attacks in the media. I was a member of the Association of Jewish Cultural Organizations and I was on the board of the Babel[6] club.
I already knew I was a Zionist - that wasn’t a new discovery for me.
The first time I heard of Zionists was around 1953, in connection with the “Doctors’ Plot” in Russia.[7] Later, my political imagination was sufficiently roused by my parents and friends that I could read between the lines. So I understood that it was hard to officially conduct an anti-Semitic campaign, because you would have to use words that were contrary to the official, “Internationalist” Party line, so you had to take some kind of ersatz approach.
In 1968, the post-War baby boomers were becoming adults. There were a large number of children born in 1947, ’48, ’49. Now those children were about twenty years old, starting their studies, and they had to find a way to get them out of Poland. To me that was obvious.
Of course, throwing Jews out of Poland was a cyclical phenomenon. It happened more or less every ten years. The 1940s[8]. Then 1956.[9] And it had nothing to do with Israel. Because however important Israel’s role was on the international stage in 1967, the supposed ties between the [Polish] Jewish community and Israel were false. The campaign that was unleashed had nothing to do with Israel.
That year, I went abroad. I applied for the first time for a passport to Belgium, and I got it. I wanted to visit my relatives. Before I left, I got a visit from a friendly gentleman from the Ministry of Internal Affairs who very gently suggested that he hoped that when I came back, I would tell them what the Jewish community in Belgium thought about Poland. I told him that would be very hard since I didn’t know Yiddish or French. But I would try. What’s it to me?
People were talking about it. I was in Belgium for two months, in August and September. Obviously, Jews in Belgium didn’t like “the Fifth Column.”[10] They couldn’t swallow that, but they really weren’t interested at all in the student protests. I was in Belgium for the invasion of Czechoslovakia too.[11] Every day I watched disturbing reports on television about the exodus of Czechs to Austria and I heard about the events. After two months, I returned to Poland by train. Starting in Poznan, Polish passengers started boarding my train car, talking about Czechoslovakia. And all of them, to a man, were saying the same things: “We really showed those Czechs,” “We really pounded them.” And my world was turned upside down. I thought: “This is really how people think in Poland, while in Warsaw - surrounded by my friends - I’m leaving in some kind of open-air museum exhibit, made up, not real.” I need to go to a more realistic world.
That was the moment. Getting off the train in Warsaw, my mind was already made up.
Irena Arasimowicz-Gryniewicz, Adam's wife.
My sister greeted me with the fact that she had decided to emigrate from Poland, and asked whether I had any kind of arguments why she shouldn’t. I didn’t. In Warsaw everyone was talking about emigration.
My sister left a month later, I think it was November. It’s a good thing my father didn’t live to see that. Around that time, my mother went to the neighborhood Party committee to hand in her Party credentials. They told her, “Comrade, that’s not possible.” They wanted to throw her out of the Party. But she told them she wouldn’t let them throw her out. She wrote to her friend in a very veiled way that “I resigned from the sports club, because I’m too old for gymnastics.” I felt sorry for her.
She was a communist almost since she was a child. Her friends were communists. When she was 18, she was imprisoned. She believed in that ideology. She never held any official positions, she was just a rank-and-file member of the Communist Youth, and later a rank-and-file member of the Communist Party of Poland, then of the Polish Workers’ Party, and the Polish United Workers’ Party.[12] For her, [her resignation] was definitely a difficult moment.
I can see that for you, it still is.
I was sad that my mother, at almost sixty years old, was being told that basically her whole time in the Party had been a waste. I was sad for her, because I already knew that.
Did you tell her?
No. I couldn’t do it. I didn’t have the heart to do it.
I was sad that everything she had believed in her whole life had turned out to be a fantasy. That she had sacrificed her youth for that fantasy, years of imprisonment, suffering. And at the end of that road, she had to find out that her life was pointless. That she had devoted her energy to something that was worthless. To me that seems like the worst thing a person can go through. To end their life without faith. With proof that everything in which they believed was false.
It was sad for me that she learned this in such a brutal way.
It still is, I can see.
My mother had a friend who she spent time with in prison. They were both around twenty years old then. After she got out of prison, her friend went to Palestine. And my mother stayed in Poland - she was in the Party, she fled to Russia, and later she returned to Poland. They met again in Israel, in the 70s. My mother’s friend was proud of her kibbutz. She was proud of every blade of grass that grew there, because the kibbutz was built in the desert, on the edge of the Negev - it’s called Mishmar haNegev. And my mother showed her pictures of her children living abroad, whom she was also probably proud of. But her children were not in the place where she had built her life. What she thought was our place. Because she had been informed that it was not our place.
What did she tell you?
When I emigrated? Nothing in particular. She said she hoped it would work out for me.
She stayed in Poland. She worked for a Jewish newspaper until she retired. She was sick. She went to visit my sister in Israel. Some people helped her with that. She wanted to stay, but she thought that she shouldn’t take advantage of the situation. So she returned to Poland, though she was seriously ill, so that she could officially emigrate. She got permission. By that point, she couldn’t go alone, so I went to her and and I took her at the last minute, so she could die in Israel. She’s buried in Jerusalem.
But do you know what makes me sad? Over ten thousand Jews emigrated from Poland at that time and, aside from people who had official or social ties to them, no one else noticed. Like we were never here.
[1] A heavily industrial area in the far west of Warsaw.
[2] In the communist era, the State had the ability to issue a “work mandate” to an individual worker directing him or her to work in a particular place for a period of time. This was a means to ensure that positions were filled. For example, the state-owned agricultural enterprises (Panstwowe Gospodarstwa Rolnicze or PGR) were often staffed with workers who were mandated to work there.
[3] The First Secretary of the Communist Party (and de facto ruler of Poland) was Wladyslaw Gomulka. His alias from pre-war underground Communist activities was “Wieslaw” and he was referred to as “Comrade Wieslaw” in official propaganda that sought to portray the affection of the Polish people for their leader.
[4] A reference to the Israeli general Moshe Dayan.
[5] A cultural center, or house of culture, was a government-sponsored cultural center that would provide social and cultural activities to residents and workers in a particular location.
[6] A local Jewish cultural club in Warsaw, which was liquidated after the March 1968 events.
[7] The “Doctor’s Plot” was a fictitious plot by Jewish doctors in the Soviet Union to kill Jozef Stalin, which then was used as a pretext for anti-Semitic purges.
[8] In addition to the Holocaust perpetrated by the Germans during World War II, the immediate aftermath of the War saw additional anti-Semitic incidents in Poland, most notably the 1946 Kielce Pogrom. The Kielce Pogrom was started by false rumors that members of the Jewish community in Kielce had abducted a Catholic boy (it was later discovered that he had simply run away after he returned unharmed). These rumors ignited a series of events that led to large-scale riots, property destruction and several dozen deaths. As a result of this incident and others many Jews who had survived the War emigrated from Poland.
[9] In 1956, there was a brief political “thaw” after the selection of the seemingly more liberal Gomulka as First Secretary during the October 1956 PZPR plenary session. There was a brief period of liberalization in Poland, followed swiftly by a tightening of government control within months. Jewish officials who had prominent roles in the Party during the Stalinist era were a convenient target for the new regime to demonstrate its commitment to “De-Stalinization.”
[10] In a famous speech, Wladyslaw Gomulka had claimed that a “Fifth Column” of Zionists was working to undermine Poland from within.
[11] In August 1968, Warsaw Pact forces - composed largely of Polish Army units - invaded Czechoslovakia in order to forcibly end a series of liberalizing reforms associated with the “Prague Spring,” which the Soviets viewed as a potential counterrevolution.
[12] In the pre-war period, the primary Communist organization in Poland was the KPP (Communist Party of Poland), which was rivals with PPS (Polish Socialist Party). After Poland was brought under the control of the Soviet Union, there were several reorganizations and permutations through which the Socialist Party was marginalized and them merged into the Communist-controlled PZPR (Polish United Workers’ Party). People who were members of the Party since the KPP days, when membership was illegal and punishable by jail time in Poland, made up the core of the post-war Party apparatus until 1956 and the era of de-Stalinization.