The View from Headquarters

From their balconies and windows high in Warsaw's party headquarters, top-rank Communist officials stared grimly down on Jerusalem Avenue. There, in the March slush, a mob of 10,000 students from Warsaw's two largest universities converged on the grey building, howling slogans, pelting police with bricks and smashing windows with rock-centered snowballs. Across Poland last week, the regime of Wladyslaw Gomulka gazed in alarm upon similar scenes in what became the country's most menacing riots in eleven years.

The protests were originally ignited by the government's closing of Dziady, an anti-Czarist drama by Adam Mickiewicz (TIME, March 8), but they soon broadened into general dissatisfaction with Gomulka's Soviet-style rule. Spreading from Warsaw, unrest and demonstrations broke out in eight other cities. Students who had started by chanting "Dziady!" were soon crying "Gestapo!" at police and cheering the generalized thaw in Czechoslovakia.

Not Alone. Carloads of students quickly brought word of Warsaw's defiance to other university cities. At the country's oldest seat of higher learning, Cracow's 14th century Jagellonian University, some 10,000 students surged through Old Market Square carrying placards that promised "Warsaw is not alone." Shouting down professors who called for calm, they cut classes and jostled with police the next day. In Lublin, at the Communist bloc's only Roman Catholic university, several students were arrested after clashing with police. Elsewhere, bitter but nonviolent protest flared--in Poznan, Wroclaw and Szczecin in the west, in Gdansk on the Baltic and in Lodz, near Warsaw.

In the eight hours that it took to quell the capital's most violent riot, which spread from party headquarters throughout downtown, the collegiate ranks were bolstered by thousands of high school students and some adults--a sign that the calcified Gomulka regime is scarcely more popular off campus than on. As they sacked a movie theater and moved in little knots through Warsaw's side streets, the students began shouting: "Czechoslovakia, Czechoslovakia!" and "All Poland is waiting for Dubcek."--Czechoslovakia's new Communist Party chief.

Fathers & Sons. If the government felt disposed to redress any grievances, there was no sign of it in Warsaw. Police turned a water-gun truck and tear-gas launchers on the mob, waded into its midst with rubber truncheons and hustled some 300 off to police headquarters. At least six students accused of being ringleaders got jail sentences of four to six months. To prevent a spread of violence to factories, the government transported busloads of workers to antiprotest rallies.

On the pretext of blaming "Zionist elements" for whipping up the unrest, Gomulka's regime intensified a campaign of anti-Semitism that began last summer, when Poland's highly placed Jewish minority balked at siding with the Arabs against Israel. Since then, the Jews' life has been increasingly uncomfortable. Last week the regime conspicuously made public the names of Jewish students arrested during the riots and decided, moreover, to visit the sins of the sons upon the fathers. It fired at least three top officials for their sons' complicity in the riots. In a nation that has often before rallied to antiSemitism, Gomulka's strategy seemed an ominous warning to Poland's 30,000 Jews--all that is left of a community of 2,800,000 destroyed by the Nazis.

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