In the centre of Warsaw, on 8 March 1968, a protest rally involving several thousand students took place in the courtyard of the local university. Its brutal pacification by the forces of law and order of the Polish People’s Republic controlled by Soviet Union gave rise to the events of March 1968. The protest spread to other Polish cities. One of its consequences was an intensified anti-Semitic campaign unleashed by the communist authorities, ending with the emigration of thousands of Polish Jews. State anti-Semitism had already made itself clear a year earlier when the communist leader of the country Władyslaw Gomułka stated in a public speech that Jews living in Poland were acting to its detriment.

In the 1960s, political ferment was growing in communist Poland. It was the aftermath of the increasingly repressive policy of the authorities towards Polish society. Initially, nothing heralded these unfavourable changes – it seemed that the First Secretary of the Polish United Workers’ Party (PZPR), Władysław Gomułka (1905-1982), who came to power in 1956, was aiming to liberalise political and social life. Among other things, he softened the attitude of the PRL authorities towards the Catholic Church, as evidenced by the release of the Primate of Poland, Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński from prison. He also led to the release of detainees for political reasons. However, this period, called by the poet Tadeusz Różewicz “a little stabilisation”, did not last long. 

Censorship was soon strengthened, the political police, the Security Service (SB), began to play a key role again. In reaction to communist cultural policy, in March 1964, a group of Polish writers and intellectuals expressed their opposition to the growing censorship – which became known as Letter 34. Its contents were circulated among the public and transmitted abroad. The authorities responded by repressing the signatories of the Letter by banning their publications. 

The fight against the Catholic Church also flared up anew, as manifested, for example, by the commencement of comprehensive surveillance of all clergy by security officers. In addition, from 1966, the authorities began competing with representatives of the Catholic Church over the celebration of the 1000-year anniversary of Poland’s baptism, which proved inconvenient for the communists. For they wanted to celebrate only the millennium of Polish statehood. 

At this time, key changes were taking place within the apparatus of power itself.  An informal group was formed around the then Deputy Minister of the Interior Mieczysław Moczar, referred to as “partisans” because of their involvement in the communist resistance movement during World War II. They acted to withdraw the Soviet authorities’ support for Gomułka. In their speeches, the ‘Partisans’ used communist rhetoric with strong anti-intellectual and nationalist overtones, including demanding the removal of people of Jewish origin from key state positions. At the same time, anti-Semitic slogans were also raised by Gomułka himself, which took on particular significance after the communist authorities of Poland broke off diplomatic relations with Israel in the footsteps of the Soviet Union in reaction to the so-called ‘Six-Day War’. Those moves meant that an open factional struggle within the Communist Party had begun, and its victims were to be Jewish people.

The spark that led to the events of March 1968 was the outbreak of student protests over a theatrical performance of “Dziady” by Adam Mickiewicz, an eminent Polish national bard who wrote during the Romantic period. 

The premiere of “Dziady” took place on Saturday 25 November 1967 on the stage of the National Theatre in Warsaw. The play was directed by Kazimierz Dejmek, then director of this cultural institution. The staging itself was part of the celebrations of the 50th anniversary of the October Revolution of 1917, thanks to which the communists gained power in Russia. The performance was extremely popular and was enthusiastically received by many spectators. The audience reacted vividly to the anti-Tsarist themes that appeared in the play, demonstrating in various ways their anti-Russian and, by implication, anti-communist attitudes. This did not please the PRL authorities.   

In response to the spontaneous behaviour of the audience, the communist authorities, limited the number of performances to one per week. Despite this, Dejmek was summoned to an interview by the Communist Party authorities on 21 December 1967.  Wincenty Kraśko, who at the time headed the Cultural Department of the PZPR, appeared before the director on the party’s behalf. He declared that the performance was “anti-Russian, anti-Soviet and religious”, and Władysław Gomułka himself was to describe it as “a knife stabbed in the back of Polish-Soviet friendship”. 

In mid-January 1968, the Ministry of Culture and Art notified the directors of the National Theatre that Dziady was only allowed to be played until the end of the month. Crowds, mostly students from Warsaw’s universities, gathered at the last performance on 30 January 1968. During it, shouts of “Independence without censorship”, “We want Dziady”, and the director’s name were chanted from the audience. After the performance, a procession was formed and marched to the Adam Mickiewicz monument on Krakowskie Przedmieście in Warsaw. There, security forces intervened, detaining more than 30 people. The protesters also prepared a petition demanding the reintroduction of “Dziady”. They were soon supported in this demand by artists gathered in the Warsaw branch of the Polish Writers’ Union. 

At the beginning of March, the situation escalated with the expulsion of two students, Adam Michnik and Henryk Szlajfer, from the University of Warsaw for their participation in the 30 January protest and for informing foreign journalists about it. In response, the student community organised a protest rally at the university on 8 March, attended by several thousand people. The protesters again demanded the re-staging of Dziady, the reinstatement of students expelled from the university and an end to the repression of the participants in the 30 January 1968 march. 

Police units appeared in the vicinity of the university and began brutal pacification and detentions. The next day a solidarity protest began at the Warsaw University of Technology. Student strikes also broke out in other academic centres in Poland (Kraków, Lublin, Wrocław, Poznań and others). Everywhere they were brutally suppressed by the security forces. The authorities began repressing the detainees. Throughout the country, several thousand students were expelled from universities and several hundred were sentenced in court.

The communist authorities began to organise staged rallies of support that condemned the student protests. Władysław Gomułka, speaking on 19 March 1968, stressed the inadmissibility of anti-Soviet speeches during the performance of Dziady, and also sharply criticised the student protests, emphasising the Jewish origin of their initiators, which strengthened anti-Semitic attitudes in the ranks of the Communist Party. 

One of the consequences of this communist campaign was a wave of emigration of the Jewish population from Poland, involving some 15,000 people. They included representatives of the scientific and cultural communities, journalists, as well as some 200 former civilian and military security officers responsible for political repression during the Stalinist period, including former communist military judge Stefan Michnik – Adam’s half-brother.