The Student Strike in March 1968: on the 4th March 1968, the Minister of National Education announced the decision of expelling Adam Michnik and Henryk Szlajfer from the University of Warsaw. A few weeks later, the students told the French press correspondent about the youth-demonstration, which was broken by militia forces on the 1st February, against the prohibition of staging “Halloween” (Polish: “Dziady”, a 19th-century highly anti-Russian Romantic drama) in the National Theatre.

On the 8th March 1968, the students called a mass meeting on the yard of the University of Warsaw. They prepared a resolution in which they wanted to restore student laws to Michnik and Szlajfer, as well as to discontinue the penal proceedings against the participants of the 1st February demonstration. During the mass meeting the militia forces together with the so called active members of labour, intruded upon the yard of the University and started to hit the students with truncheons, at the same time dispersing the mass meeting. The next day, the Solidarity mass meeting at the Warsaw University of Technology was also attacked by the militia.

In the following days, such mass meetings were called in a few large academic centers. Approximately 1,600 of arrested students of both sexes were expelled from the Universities, 350 were arrested and many male students were conscribed. Lecturers from the University of Warsaw and other universities in Poland, who sympathized with the students, were laid off.