THE day dawned cold and cloudy in the Baltic seaport of Gdansk—a morning of gloom that matched the city's mood. Gdansk (pop. 370,000) had seethed for days with resentment at the Polish government's sudden announcement of a dramatic rise in food prices, the more infuriating since it came just before Christmas. Now, at the Lenin Shipyards, grumbling workers spontaneously protested the hike by refusing to work. Before long, they decided to emphasize their anger by marching from the yards to Communist Party headquarters two miles away. Thus began a week of rioting and death that surpassed anything Eastern Europe has experienced in years and shook to its foundations the Communist regime of Party Boss Wladyslaw Gomulka.
Along the way, the workmen of Gdansk sang the traditional Communist anthem, the Internationale. Soon the march was swelled by hundreds of housewives, students and other Gdansk citizens, equally incensed by the price increases. By the time the column reached party headquarters, it was 20,000 strong. It was also out of control. In vain, police pleaded with the demonstrators to halt. In reply, the crowd hurled homemade fire bombs at the headquarters building and the nearby Gdansk railroad station. When firemen arrived to douse the flames, they were beaten back. Police opened fire on the demonstrators—only to turn anger into a terrible frenzy. Crying "Gestapo! Gestapo!" the marchers wheeled to attack the police.
Like a Sizzling Fuse. Army tanks arrived to quell the riots, and a curfew was imposed on Gdansk—but it was too late. Within hours, similar popular explosions, equally violent, had broken out in the nearby towns of Gdynia and Sopot. Like a sizzling fuse, resentment over the higher prices and other government policies spread to cities and towns across Poland: Wroclaw, Poznan, Katowice, Slupsk, Lodz, Cracow and Warsaw itself.
Some of the most terrifying demonstrations were in Szczecin, Poland's biggest seaport. A Radio Sweden reporter named Anders Thunberg described the scene outside party headquarters. "Tanks have made repeated attacks on the crowd," he said in a brief telephone call to Stockholm. "The people had to give way in order not to be run over. But a mother and her young daughter did not manage to get away. A tank at high speed crushed both of them. A young soldier stood by, crying and watching." The demonstrators, mainly from the Warski shipyards, burned police cars and rampaged through the headquarters. They scrawled messages on tanks and on walls: "We are workers and not hooligans." "We want more wages." In Warsaw, after workers in the Zeran auto works staged a sympathetic sitdown, truckloads of ORMOs—Poland's blue-overalled, blue-bereted special workers police —rolled into factories to halt or prevent such demonstrations.