CONTINUES
In a previous issue of INPRECOR (No. 60, October 21) we published a series of documents on the movement of solidarity with the victims of repression after the outbreak last June of workers strikes and demanstrations against a government-decreed increase in prices. We stressed the importance of the creation of the Committee to Defend the Workers Victimized by Repression, which had been established to aid the repressed workers and their families (both legally and financially). This committee called for collective solidarity of all the Polish workers, asking that they organize in their work places to aid the victims of repression wherever they were found. The committee demanded the right to work, the right to strike, and freedom of expression, assembly, and demonstration. We further emphasized the courage of the intellectuals who had pressed for the formation of this committee. Since then, two of these intellectuals have been fired from their jobs. They are Chojewski, removed from the Institute for Atomic Research, and Macierewicz, deprived of his position as professor of history at Warsaw University. But the repression mounted by the authorities has not prevented solidarity from continuing and broadening. By the end of October 360,000 zlotys had been collected and distributed to the families of the victims, a figure equivalent to 100 months' wages according to the "official" average (clearly higher than the real average wage). The committee has also published two new communiqués. Concurrently, the second issue of an "Information Bulletin: News of Public Life, " a samizdat publication of the Polish opposition, has appeared. This publication describes itself this way: "The aim of this bulletin is to break the state monopoly on information imposed by censorship. ... The distribution of the bulletin constitutes active defense of the rights of the citizen; in fact, it amounts to the very utilization of these rights . ... If you destroy this bulletin you are shutting yourself up as well as others; don't forget that. " This bulletin, the second issue of which appeared in October, is a collective instrument of the antibureaucratic struggle and is being widely distributed "under cover" in Poland.
WORKERS An illegal inquiry Among other things, the bulletin has published excerpts of the second communiqué of the committee to defend the workers. Below are some excerpts from the second issue of the Information Bulletin. « On October 10, 1976, the committee to defend the workers published its second communiqué. In Ursus, according to the testimony of 144 people, 60 people have been sentenced by lower courts to prison terms ranging up to three months in prison. Higher courts have sentenced 21 people, 16 of them getting suspended sentences. Recently, 8 workers suspected of having cut the railroad lines were released, but the prosecution of the ir case continues. Probably three people remain in prison awaiting trial, among them Marek Mjewski, who is in the prison hospital with a double fracture of the jaw. In Ursus a total of 205, 600 zlotys in aid has been distributed to 89 families. In Radom we now know of 114 cases of people suffering repression. Seventy-three sentences handed down, 44 of more than 2 years, 8 between 3 months and 2 years, and 21 of less than 3 months in prison. Of these 73 people, only one says he was not beaten. We know of four deaths, which includes two people killed while building barricades; there are four other reports of death, but unconfirmed. We have distributed 72, 300 zlotys in aid in Radom.. REPRESSION OF COMMITTEE MEMBERS On October 4, 1976, the fourth militia commissariat in Poznan was the scene of an interrogation of Stanislaw Baranczak, a member of the committee, who was summoned as "accused in Affair No. 248/76. " He was informed that he was accused of having taken part in the organization of an "illegal inquiry" in Poznan. The functionaries who interrogated him insisted on the criminal character of the affair and on the allegation that the funds collected "have not been received by those people to whom they were sent. " S. Baranczak
POLAND refused to furnish explanations and would not sign the transcript of the interrogation .... ARTICLE 114 OF THE MINOR CRIMINAL CODE Particularly scandalous abuses of power on the part of security organs in Warsaw have been reported. On the night of October 8, 1976, a group of persons wearing militia insignia kidnapped a student, Andrzej Zdziarski (who had signed the letter of the students), on Hoza Street and took him to the forest of Beniaminow, where he was abandoned. During the trip they threatened to have him disappear. He was searched and the militiamen took copies of the appeal and the first communiqué of the committee to defend the workers from him. The following day some persons, this time claiming to be counterespionage agents, took Zdziarski's friend Crazyna Kowalczyk, from Warsaw to the Pod Debami motel in Swider Maly. She was threatened with being laid off, but it was promised that she would be helped to enter the university if she cooperated. (There is a special examination to enter the university in Poland -INPRECOR.) RAISING THE TROOPS During the days preceding the price increases in June, "mobile reserve companies" were organized in military camps throughout the country. The following facts testify to the exceptional character of the recruitment action:
1. With very rare exceptions, the draft notices were sent three days before the date of departure, which is contrary to the present recruitment practices.
2. People who should have been excused under the law (people who were ill, invalids, retirees, etc.) were drafted anyway.
3. Those who were supposed to be drafted were cited as illegal workers leaders, guilty of negative political activity, criminals, etc. The information we have entitles us to say that the aim of this recruitment was to isolate those persons who in the view of the authorities could have interfered with the application of the price increases. The reservists did not receive any arms. Training activities amounted to simple but useless labor having nothing to do with "improving military qualification." ....» The police 'help out' On the question of the repressive methods used by the Polish bureaucracy, the second communiqué of the committee to defend the workers affirms: "Recently, members of the security forces have joined in 'assistance' actions . ... On September 25, passing themselves off as employees of a census and statistics service, they visited the families of the Ursus workers, whose trial was scheduled to start two days later. They told the families not to go to the trial and not to make contact with 'suspicious looking people' who work for Radio Free Europe. In exchange they promised that the accused would be released and that 30 their homes would be protected! We know of examples of individuals who, also passing themselves off as employees of the census bureau, promised to help the defendants find work again provided that they and their families ceased all contact with the committee to defend the workers and that they did not show up again at their old work places. It appears that there were some attempts to forcibly confiscate the wages of some of them. Concurrently, several persons, members of the committee among them, have received telephone calls during which anonymous callers asked to 'get in contact' with them or offered them very large sums of money. Consequently, we urge the greatest caution and recommend that you send money only to people in whom you have full confidence. The committee can be responsible only for sums whose origin, amount, and destination are known." Layoffs The support role of the committee to defend the workers in Ursus and Radom has proved to be decisive. Not only does it represent a direct linkup between the workers and intellectuals for the first time in decades, but it has also generated a reaction among the workers themselves. At the beginning of November the workers of Ursus sent a letter to party secretary Gierek asking that all workers laid off after the strike of June 25 be rehired. The second communiqué of the committee said in this regard: "Increasingly often we have been told in the work places of Ursus that the number of those laid off is 238, while the figure of 1,000, which had been given us previously, appears much more likely. " The Ursus factory normally has 5,000 workers. Given the extremely harsh measures of repression - the layoffs, the beatings, the prison sentences - the courage of the 900 Ursus workers who have signed the following letter is evident. It shows that their combativity has not been broken: "To the Supreme Authorities of the People's Republic of Poland. "We, the Ursus workers, ask that all those laid off in the wake of the strike and demonstration of June 25, 1976, be rehired. "We consider this indispensable, because of the difficult situation of the country, the tension that reigns in the factory, and the difficulties in carrying out the production plan due to the lack of qualified personnel. "We ask that they be allowed to go to work again in the same conditions as before, with all the rights devolving from the continuity of employment, and that they receive wages for the time during which they have been without work. "We are convinced that it is only when the workers are rehired that we, along with all Poles, will be able to deal with the difficult economic situation in which our fatherland finds itself."