Riot in Warsaw

For four nights last week the heart of Warsaw echoed to the whomp and hiss of exploding tear-gas bombs, the thud of rubber truncheons on human flesh and the taunting cries of "Gestapo, Gestapo," that came from the throats of thousands of rioting Polish university students. It was the most serious civil disturbance since the bloody Poznan rebellion of last year.

The riots started when 2,000 students met at the big student hostelry on downtown Narutowicza Square to protest the action of Wladyslaw Gomulka's press-control office in banning the country's boldest and best-known crusading student weekly, Po Prostu (Plain Speaking). Po Prostu had zealously supported Gomulka in his stand against Nikita Khrushchev and the rest of Poland's Soviet overlords last year, but since then had lent its own voice to the rising crescendo of intellectual discontent with the slow pace of Gomulka's democratization.

But Gomulka has shown himself increasingly jumpy over press criticism, and the students found the square thick with steel-helmeted police. The police and militia did not wait for speeches or explanations. They ordered the students to disperse, then waded in with rubber truncheons swinging, viciously clubbed many students who refused to leave.

Badge of Honor. The police's brutality aroused many who had been only mildly concerned over the fate of Po Prostu, and the next night a larger throng gathered in Narutowicza Square. The students flaunted their bandages as badges of honor. In the shadow of the Church of Swietego Jakuba the rioters played a kind of reckless Warsaw pingpong with the police, picking up their tear-gas bombs and hurling them back into their ranks.

On the third night, the size of the crowds and their temper increased. Police officials called out the Mobile Guard, 1,000 strong. To their salvos of tear-gas bombs the police and security troops added concussion grenades. Still the crowds grew, arming themselves with paving stones and bricks from the piles of rubble left from World War II destruction.

Away from the riot-torn areas, most of Warsaw remained calm. Tram cars continued on their routes, mothers pushed babies in prams, and tourist and sporting craft plied the brown waters of the Vistula River. Anger was directed chiefly against police tactics. Asked if any police had been treated, a hospital nurse replied unsmilingly: "We haven't had the pleasure."

"Free Speech!" Most Poles seemed to regard the riots as a strictly student affair. Biggest unknown was whether the students' protests would be taken up by Poland's well-organized and politically conscious factory workers, who had been in the forefront of the Poznan rebellion. If they were, Gomulka would find himself in serious trouble. So far, most major factory-workers units refused to sign petitions calling on the students to desist.

Gomulka announced that the ban on Po Prostu would remain, and called a meeting of all Warsaw editors to demand greater conformity. The students retaliated by hanging a large banner from their largest hostel bearing a two-word demand: "Free Speech!"

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