What was going on when I was born?

The Soviet Union appears to be putting pressure on the Polish leaders to regain control of the situation in Poland by forceful measures - without, this time, any concessions to the Solidarity union. That is the impression gained by Western diplomats from the substance of Soviet press reports and commentaries in the week since the union charged that policemen in Bydgoszcz roughed up union activists while evicting them from an assembly hall. (In Washington, Secretary of Defense Caspar W. Weinberger said that if Moscow's efforts to curb the unrest in Poland culminated in military intervention, the Western powers would retaliate with ''concerted efforts.'' He declined to specify what responses were being considered. Page 5.)

For generations this was a town that Centralians loved. Those who left yearned for their valley and the surrounding hills, where green trees and flowers of summer hid old mining scars, and many returned to its modest but neatly painted homes, its gardens and fresh air. But now part of the town finds living here like existing on some primordial planet where the earth belches noxious gases and where the ground sometimes opens up under the tread of unwary feet. ''It was awful scary,'' said Todd Domboski, 13 years old, describing his escape last month from a 250-foot hole that had opened in his grandmother's yard and almost swallowed him. ''I just grabbed some roots and hung there; the smoke was so thick I couldn't see anything.'' He was rescued by a teen-aged cousin, but his mother, Florence, still tries to keep him calm with medication.

After a bitterly partisan debate, Senate Republicans upstaged the Democrats today by leading a successful move to restore $200 million that President Reagan had proposed cutting from the school lunch program. The funds were made available at the expense of foreign aid. Before the votes, as the Senate debated the Administration's proposed $36.4 billion reduction in the budget submitted by President Carter for the fiscal year 1982, Republicans and Democrats exchanged accusations of cruelty, indifference and exploitation concerning the poor. Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, who has been Excerpts from debate, page 9. leading the Democratic effort to restore funds for social programs, charged the Republicans with ''taking away the crusts of bread from starving children in Africa and Southeast Asia'' in their ''pious'' attempts at fiscal austerity.

Claes Oldenburg's plan for a sculpture on the University of Hartford campus here has apparently rubbed the institution's regents the wrong way. It calls for a 23-foot-long toothbrush in red, white and blue. Although the plan would not have cost the university any money, the regents' executive committee declined to accept it by a vote of 3 to 2, with one abstention. As a result, the university will lose a $25,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and matching contributions totaling $25,000 from private donors that would have paid for the sculpture.

In 1974, John E. Rennie, a former aircraft pilot with a history of mental illness, was questioned by Secret Service agents after he allegedly threatened to kill President Gerald R. Ford. The incident resulted in his involuntary commitment to the Ancora Psychiatric Hospital, a state institution in Hammonton, N.J. Today Mr. Rennie, who is 40 years old, is at the center of a legal battle over medication practices of psychiatrists that some experts say will have to be resolved by the United States Supreme Court. The outcome is expected to have a significant effect on the care of the 220,000 patients in the nation's mental hospitals. An emerging right of mental patients to refuse antipsychotic medication has been recognized so far by Federal courts in Massachusetts and Ohio, by the highest state courts in Colorado and Oklahoma, and, in Mr. Rennie's case, by Judge Stanley S. Brotman of the Federal District Court in Camden, N.J. Judge Brotman imposed far-reaching restrictions, which have been in effect since January 1980, on the medication practices of New Jersey's five state mental hospitals for adults. The state is asking the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, in Philadelphia, to overturn the restrictions, calling them ''complex and highly intrusive, unprecedented and unsound.''

Secretary of State Alexander M. Haig Jr. and his closest aides remain resentful over what they regard as the underhanded way that White House advisers orchestrated Tuesday's appointment of Vice President Bush as the Administration's crisis manager and then provided the material for a number of critical articles in the press about Mr. Haig. ''He's a wounded lion,'' one of Mr. Haig's associates said today, ''and I can't predict what he'll do after his wounds are healed.'' Although Mr. Haig was nonchalant in his comments yesterday about the affair, no one is willing to speculate on how long he will remain in office. President Reagan is not criticized, but there are repeated suggestions at the State Department that Mr. Reagan's senior staff aides are determined, for reasons that seem to puzzle Mr. Haig's advisers, to undermine the Secretary. Haig-Baker Talks Reported As a result of the counterattack by the State Department, the White House adjusted some of its previous comments about the chronology of events that it made public originally, but stuck to its general outline.

Millions of Polish workers held a four-hour nationwide strike today, the largest organized protest since Communism came to Poland 36 years ago. The stoppage that grew out of anger over police violence in Bydgoszcz eight days ago began and ended exactly on schedule and without reports of major incidents. The independent trade union organization Solidarity, which organized the strike, proclaimed it a total success. Six hours after the show of strength by the union, Solidarity leaders and Government officials sat down for three hours of negotiations aimed at averting a general strike set for Tuesday. Protests From Soviet Bloc Today's protest predictably drew a chorus of sharp attacks from the Soviet bloc, underscoring the predicament of Polish leaders faced with stiff and sweeping demands from the union.

Zimbabwe received pledges of $1.5 billion in aid during a five-day conference here, a Government official said today.

The placid surface of everyday life here is a deception.Arab children play laughingly in the brown dust of the crowded refugee camps in this Israeli-occupied strip beside the Mediterranean, where tents gave way long ago to permanent slums of stone and concrete. Amid the poverty, knots of moneychangers cluster outside a downtown bank, passing wads of Egyptian, Jordanian, Israeli and American currency. The oranges and grapefruits are ripening now and people are busy. Trucks heaving with the fruit rumble northeast into Israel proper, going to Jordan and the Arab countries beyond. Unemployment has virtually disappeared, with nearly half of Gaza's labor force holding jobs in Israel.

Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who told Parliament yesterday that there was no proof that a former British counterintelligence chief had been a Soviet spy, said today that she had ordered an investigation into how a British journalist had obtained information that the official was once under suspicion. Government sources said that evidence would be collected with a view to possible prosecution of the journalist, Chapman Pincher, and his informants under the Official Secrets Acts. Britain has no constitutional guarantee of press freedom and the Official Secrets Acts enables the Government to classify almost all its business as official secrets if it wishes. Conviction can lead to long jail terms.

The Reagan Administration, in a concerted diplomatic initiative in the last two weeks, appears to have reassured China's leaders that it wants its ties with Peking to grow and that it will not rashly precipitate a confrontation over Taiwan. Former President Gerald R. Ford, in China this week as an envoy of President Reagan, said today that after extended talks with Chinese leaders he was ''absolutely convinced'' and ''absolutely confident'' that differences between China and the United States could and would be resolved as relations are ''expanded in depth and breadth.'' Chinese Government officials said that Mr. Ford's talks Monday with Deng Xiaoping, China's principal leader, and Prime Minister Zhao Ziyang, and Mr. Reagan's meeting at the White House last week with the Chinese Ambassador to the United States, Chai Zemin, had gone a long way toward erasing apprehensions that began to accumulate here last fall. This was when Mr. Reagan vowed as a Presidential candidate to upgrade unofficial relations with Taiwan in what seemed to be a flouting of the 1979 Chinese-American normalization accords.

President Reagan's hint that the United States might begin to supply arms to the Afghan rebels raises two basic questions: How would the arms be delivered, and to whom? The arms, if the rebels could obtain them, would help them against the expansion and rearmament of the Soviet helicopter formations. But even if Pakistan, the obvious base for an arms delivery program, was willing to allow weapons to pass its frontiers - which could invite Russian retaliation - the difficulties would be serious. In the last four months the Soviet forces have ''seeded'' the mountain tracks leading into Afghanistan with small antipersonnel mines camouflaged to be indistinguishable from lumps of earth or small rocks.