The Anxious Days of Poznan

In a coffee shop in Poznan one day last week a young girl kissed the hands of an American woman and then told her story. She had been one of hundreds of suspects rounded up by police after the Poznan bread--and freedom--riots a week before (TIME, July 9). They had been herded into an airfield on the outskirts of town and forced to sleep two nights on the floor, had been fed on bread and water. "We are very, very afraid," said another of the Poles in the coffee shop.

"As soon as the foreigners have gone away, something terrible is going to happen to us. The government is terribly angry. Somebody is going to have to pay. It will be us."

"It is sending them to Russia that bothers us most," said another Pole. "Many of those mixed up in the riots were just young people. We saw what happened after the East German riots three years ago. Great carloads of Germans came through here, on their way to Russia. We went down to the tracks to see them. We could not do much. They were hungry. We gave them food. Can't the U.N. do something to keep that from happening to us?"

Confused Response. The problem of Poznan troubled the Communists too. "The basis for the bloody riots was the dissatisfaction of the workers," the Polish party organ Trybuna Ludu admitted. (The Russian charge that it was all stirred up by the Americans was not repeated in Poznan, where the people knew better.) There were signs of a conflict between Party Secretary Edward Ochab (once described by Stalin as "a Communist with some teeth in him"), who was said to be for reprisals, and Premier Jozef Cyrankiewicz, a turncoat Socialist and ex-inmate of Nazi concentration camps (four years in World War II), who was for continuing to ease conditions. Neither apparently disagreed with the notion of making an example of strike leaders: it was the presumably more lenient Cyrankiewicz who talked of chopping off any hands raised against the state.

The confusion among the Communists as to how to respond to Poznan had its counterpart outside the Iron Curtain, where admiration for the brave resisters was tempered by the sad realization that they must pay for their defiance and could not be helped. This very human reaction, which was widely shared, was perverted into something else by some British Laborites, who deplored the Poznan uprising as a check to what they deemed to be the beneficient evolution of Communism. Laborite Richard H. S. Crossman, who flits in and out of the Bevan camp like an overgrown lightning bug, was upset that anyone outside should support those "desperate men who turned a peaceful demonstration into an armed uprising. We should frankly tell the Poles that armed insurrection is the one thing which could force the Russians to reverse their new-look policy." Fortunately, not everyone in the Labor Party was so ready to believe that it was a new-found benevolence in the Kremlin, rather than pressures from the people, that was producing any bettering of conditions.

National Shrine. In Poznan, workers were back on their jobs full shift, and, as part of the appearance of leniency, were given a first installment "tax rebate" of 1,200,000 zlotys ($300,000 by official rates, $15,000 in fact). An anxious quiet settled over the city.

"A good idea of how the workers really feel was seen last Sunday," reported TIME Correspondent Ed Clark. "Street blockades and barriers were down at last, and Sunday strollers were out all over the city. But most of them, many thousands, made a pilgrimage past security-police headquarters, with its smashed windows, its walls pocked by gunfire and blackened by Molotov cocktails, the scene of the longest and bitterest fighting. The crowds walked slowly, taking in everything, saying nothing. There were old men and women, young boys and girls, young couples with babies in carriages and in their arms, all walking with the solemnity of people visiting a national shrine."

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