Wiktor Drukier - Student, Warsaw
Helena Luczywo[1] dropped by my place just after March 8 - she was my neighbor - with a packet of 200-300 flyers. She asked if I would pass them out around Ursus.[2]
I was a student in the mechanical-technological division of the Warsaw Polytechnic and I was doing a half-year practicum in the metallurgical works in Ursus, outside Warsaw.
I agreed to do it. The flyers were homemade somehow, probably by Witek, Helena’s future husband. They even looked pretty good. I think they were on white paper, with a short text in a military-style font that said “We, workers, support the just demands of the students and stand in solidarity with them.” I really wanted that to be true.
Wiktor Drukier.
First thing in the morning, at half-past five, I showed up in Ursus. The factory was still empty; the workers started work at six. I came up with a plan - instead of passing the flyers out on the factory grounds, I would put them in the workers’ locker room. It worked. No one noticed me. I was very proud of myself. One of the flyers, I learned 23 years later, ended up in the hands of Zbyszek Bujak.[3] Some old tradesman saved it and, almost like it was a relic, he gave it to Zbyszek when he started working in Ursus in the mid-1970s.
There were a few dozen students doing practicums in Ursus. We were a living example of how the student-worker alliance should look. I learned the socialist approach to work - in other words, how to work so that you don’t have to do any work. My friend Mietek Grudzinski - another one of the students of a “suspect background” - had finished technical school earlier, so he landed with the higher-ups in the project office. After I finished my general education I was sent to the front lines. I worked as a “grunt” on the machines. As far as the tradesmen were concerned, though, I was a “student/intellectual” and I never pulled my weight. I mostly dozed off in the grease room.
On March 11 we burned newspapers. We bought up all the copies of “Trybuna Ludu”[4] and “Warsaw Life”[5] from the nearby newsstands. In these papers they described the students protesting on the University of Warsaw grounds as young snots and hooligans. We burned them on the plaza in front of the management offices. The workers stood around and watched. I didn’t see any expressions of sympathy or opposition from their side.
In Ursus in general, only a few people in management followed the Party line. The rest were okay.
Management gave us a reprimand and decided to discipline us. They banned us from meeting in groups larger than three people. And they told the guards not to let us leave the factory during working hours. There were confrontations at the gates. The guards would ask: “Where you going?” We’d respond gruffly, in worker-speak: “Dean’s office.” The guards would ask: “Why you going?” We’d say: “To get asymptotes, for the hyperbola.” “Why you going together?” “’Cause there’s two,” we explained.
After two or three days, a group of sad-looking men from a certain agency showed up at Ursus. They wanted to find the troublemakers who were smuggling flyers with enemy propaganda on the grounds of a socialist workplace. My face went a little pale. They called in almost all the students for questioning. They took our fingerprints and warned us that they would find the culprits behind the flyers. They called me in too. And…to this day I don’t know how it happened - but they didn’t catch me. Either my fingers were too caked in paint or grease or their techniques for taking fingerprints and comparing them to the flyers was imprecise.
As a punishment, some of the students were barred from participating in the famous rally in support of “Comrade Wieslaw”[6] that was held at Ursus.[7] But once again I managed. I was there, I saw, and I heard.
[1] A University of Warsaw student who was active in the 1968 student strike. She was active in opposition activities during the Communist era in Poland and was one of the founding editors of Gazeta Wyborcza, Poland’s leading newspaper.
[2] A neighborhood in the far western portion of Warsaw; from 1952-77 it was an independent town town before being incorporated into Warsaw. It was the site of major industrial workers’ strikes in 1976.
[3] Zbigniew (Zbyszek) Bujak was an electrician and foreman in the Ursus tractor factory. He was a leader in the 1980 strikes and became the Chairman on the Warsaw branch of the Solidarity trade union.
[4] “Voice of the People” - the official, government-sanctioned newspaper published in Poland.
[5] Another government-sanctioned paper published in the Communist era.
[6] “Comrade Wieslaw” was the alias of Wladyslaw Gomulka, First Secretary of the ruling PZPR, during his time in the communist underground. After he came to power, it was promoted as a term of affection towards the Communist leader.
[7] The March 19, 1968 speech delivered by Gomulka to Party activists in Ursus, in which he blamed the ongoing student unrest on Zionists disloyal to the Polish state. Some accounts maintain that Gomulka personally rejected anti-Semitism but felt that he had been maneuvered into a position by anti-Semitic elements within the Party that required him to use similar language in order to maintain his authority. The March 19 speech is often viewed as a turning point in the events that led to the mass emigration of Polish Jews in the ensuing months, as the full propaganda power of the State, embodied in Gomulka, was now against them.