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Overview
One August day in 1980, Lech Walesa pushed his way past the Polish police, climbed over a twelve-foot wall, and jumped onto a bulldozer, calling to Polish shipyard workers to continue their strike for higher wages and other demands. Walesa’s fiery speech inspired the workers and kept the strike alive. His call to action that day ultimately brought about important changes in Poland and established his leadership of the movement that became known as Solidarity.
Lech Walesa: The Road to Democracy chronicles Walesa’s dramatic role as the leader of his country’s democratic future and its transformation from a communist regime to a democratic government. The son of a farmer and an electrician by trade, Walesa overcame police oppression and imprisonment to lead Solidarity and win the Nobel Prize. In 1990, Lech Walesa became Poland’s first democratically elected noncommunist president.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780307775863 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Random House Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 12/29/2010 |
| Series: | Great Lives |
| Sold by: | Random House |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 140 |
| Sales rank: | 914,935 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
Read an Excerpt
1
A Strike at the Lenin Shipyard
AS DARKNESS BEGAN to fall on July 31, 1980, bringing the long summer evening to an end, a 36-year-old man named Lech Walesa returned to his home in the city of Gdansk, Poland. It was an apartment on Wrzosy Street in a neighborhood called Stogi, a working-class district hemmed in by factories on one side and a shipping canal on the other. Crowded tenement buildings lined the streets. Next to them were small plots of sandy soil where people grew vegetables. Some had even built ramshackle sheds to house a few chickens or a pig. All in all, Stogi spoke of hard work and hard times. It was a neighborhood, Walesa reflected later, full of people “just waiting for things to improve.”
Returning home that evening, however, Lech Walesa may have been wondering whether things would ever get better. Although he was a skilled electrician, he was out of work. He had been fired from three jobs in four years because of his political activities. Walesa was an “oppositionist”—someone who spoke and acted against Poland’s ruling Communist party. Over the years, he had witnessed the failure of countless government programs that were supposed to improve people’s standard of living. Prices went up while basic items like milk, matches, and sugar grew scarce on store shelves. Sometimes, the police and the army killed workers who protested against unfair working conditions and low wages. Now, Lech Walesa was one of many Poles in Gdansk and elsewhere who spent their afternoons passing out oppositionist leaflets and newspapers that criticized government policies. He had been arrested more than once for this and had grown used to being held in jail for up to 48 hours at a time.
Walesa arrived at the apartment, where he lived with his wife and their five children. It consisted of two small rooms and a tiny kitchen. Several of the children slept in the smaller room, which was only five feet wide. The larger room contained a sofa, a cot, a table, and a sewing machine. Like most working-class Poles, Walesa had waited for years for a better apartment, but Poland was in the grip of a severe housing shortage and the Walesas could afford nothing better on their tight budget.
The little apartment was about to become even more crowded. Walesa’s wife, Danuta, was pregnant with their sixth child and close to giving birth. That night, not long after Walesa’s return, Danuta went into labor. At almost the same moment there came a loud knocking on the door.
“Open the door, Walesa!” a voice cried. “You are under arrest.”
Panic and confusion followed this announcement. Danuta and the children started to cry. Walesa opened the door. Outside stood a commander of the local militia, or military police, with several deputies. They had orders to arrest Walesa for distributing leaflets about the Free Trades Unions (WZZ in Polish), a workers’ movement that the government had branded illegal. The arrest in itself was not too frightening. It had happened before. But this one could not have happened at a worse time.
Walesa tried to explain to the militia commander that Danuta was in no condition to be left alone with five children. She had to be taken to the hospital, and then someone would be needed to watch the children. The commander simply ordered his men, “Take him away!”
Terrified and in pain, Danuta screamed at them again and again, begging them not to take her husband away. Her cries echoed down the halls of the apartment building. Torn between obedience to their commander and sympathy for the Walesas’ plight, the deputies hesitated.
“Take him away!” the commander barked again. He repeated the order several times. Still the deputies seemed unable to move, and still Danuta cried out in pain and fear. Finally, Walesa tried to bring the situation under control. He agreed to go with the militia quietly if they gave him a chance to calm Danuta. The commander agreed, and Walesa tried to soothe his wife. The Walesas decided that Danuta would ask a neighbor to stay with her until Lech returned from the militia station. Then he left, hoping to be home soon.
The militia held Walesa for 48 hours. By the time he got home, Danuta had been taken to the hospital. She had given birth to their daughter Anna seven hours before Walesa got out of jail.
When he learned this, Walesa was filled with regret. He had been unable to help his wife, and he had missed the birth of his child. “It was a decisive moment for me,” he wrote later, “and I swore that from now on I wouldn’t let anything intimidate me.” Just two weeks later, he had a chance to act upon his newfound resolve.
On the morning of August 14, Walesa rode a streetcar from Stogi to another part of the Gdansk waterfront. During the 35-minute ride, he had plenty of time to think about what he was doing. It was very likely that before the end of the day he would be under arrest once again. He saw an automobile slowly following the streetcar and recognized it as an unmarked car belonging to the Security Bureau (SB), the government’s secret police. He was being followed. Surely the SB was well aware that he was on his way to the Lenin Shipyard, where the WZZ had called a workers’ strike earlier that morning.
Just about the only way that Polish workers could get the attention of the government was to go on strike—lay down their tools and walk away from their jobs until their demands were met. Such strikes some times got results—food prices would be lowered, workers’ wages would be raised. But these victories were only temporary, for prices always rose again and working conditions seemed to get worse and worse. Furthermore, some of the strikes ended in violent confrontations between the workers and the army or militia. Walesa had seen fellow workers shot down in front of him. Yet he was preparing to join a new strike, because he wanted to be counted among the shipyard workers who were speaking out against the Communist government.
The Lenin Shipyard, one of Poland’s biggest shipbuilding operations, was familiar territory to Walesa. He had worked there until 1976, when he had been fired for criticizing the government. He knew many of the workers who were milling around inside the walls of the yard, and he shared their grievances. One concerned food prices, a perpetual problem for Poland’s working people. On July 1, the government—which controlled the distribution of food and set all prices—had announced a sharp increase in the price of meat.
Meat was already so costly that many families could afford to eat it only a couple of times a week. Now they would be lucky to eat meat once a week, and some people would be unable to afford it at all. The population was outraged by this price increase. People became even angrier when they heard rumors that Poland was sending meat to the Soviet Union, where the 1980 Summer Olympic Games were being held in Moscow. They were furious that food produced in their country could be sent away to feed athletes from all around the world, instead of being used to feed people at home.
This and other economic and political problems created a feeling of unrest among the general population. But the shipyard workers also had another, more specific reason to strike. Just a few days earlier, the managers of the yard had fired an employee named Anna Walentynowicz. She was a 51-year-old widow who had worked at the yard for 30 years, first as a welder and then as the operator of a crane. Walentynowicz knew everyone at the yard, and people liked her. She was especially popular with the younger workers, the boys and young men who were far from their homes and families. She gave them motherly advice and they called her Pani Ania (“Mrs. Ania”). The other shipyard employees knew that Walentynowicz was a good, careful worker. She had been fired because she was an oppositionist, a member of the WZZ.
The WZZ prepared leaflets that gave the facts about Walentynowicz’s dismissal. “We are calling on you to defend Anna Walentynowicz!” they read. “If we fail many of you will soon find yourselves in the same position.”
Early on August 14, three 20-year-old supporters of the WZZ passed these leaflets out on streetcars and at train stations along routes leading to the shipyard. By the time the workers arrived at the yard, most of them had received one, or seen the posters that the three young men carried.
At the sprawling Lenin Shipyard, WZZ supporters held aloft banners and posters and began a march through the various sections of the huge operation. As they marched, they called out to their fellow workers to join them. Spurred by the WZZ members among them, some workers decided to rally around Walentynowicz. They laid down their blowtorches and hammers and joined the march. Soon the strikers had assembled near the main gate of the yard. They called out their demands: a pay raise, a promise that they would not be punished for striking, and a monument to honor workers who had been shot by the militia in an earlier strike. They also demanded that the yard managers give jobs back to Walentynowicz and other employees who had been dismissed for political reasons.
Walesa reached the shipyard at this point and quickly understood the situation. Outside the yard, security guards were checking the passes of everyone who went through the gates. Inside the yard, the strikers were milling about, listening to a man who was standing on a bulldozer. Walesa recognized the speaker as Klemens Gniech, the current director of the shipyard. Gniech was a persuasive speaker who was popular with the workers. Walesa feared that Gniech might talk the strikers into ending their protest before it really got under way. Walesa felt a sense of urgency, it was time for him to get in there and speak up.
But he had no pass to get into the shipyard. It had been taken away from him years before when he was fired. So he ran to the rear of the yard and climbed over the 12-foot wall. At that moment, Gniech was promising the strikers that he would discuss all their demands—after they returned to work. He urged them to end the strike peacefully and go back to their jobs. The strikers were uncertain. They knew, of course, that promises from the yard management were not always kept, but at the same time many of them were afraid they might lose their jobs—or worse, be attacked by the militia—if they stayed on strike. The crowd muttered, wavered, and then began to break up. It seemed that the momentum of the strike was lost.
Just then a short, stocky mem with a bushy brown mustache jumped up onto the bulldozer right behind Gniech. It was Walesa. He tapped Gniech on the shoulder and said, “Remember me? I worked here for ten years, and I still feel I’m a shipyard worker.” Many of the workers knew Walesa and cheered when he turned to speak to them. With passion ringing in his voice, he called for the strike to continue. The cheering grew even louder. Then Walesa cried out that the workers would not move from where they stood until their demands were met. The workers, their excitement on the rise again, backed him up with loud cries of agreement.
Walesa’s speech from the bulldozer reached out to the hearts and minds of his listeners. “When Lech made his speeches,” his friend and associate Mieczyslaw Wachowski later recalled, “it was as if he was riding the crest of a wave rolling in from the crowd, riding it like a surfer. He was able to express what each of us felt deep inside. This was what cemented the crowd together in his favor. At last here was someone who expressed the thoughts of the man in the street!”
On that morning of August 14,1980, Walesa’s words fired the enthusiasm of the Lenin Shipyard workers, giving them renewed strength and a sense of commitment. The strike was on.
But Walesa’s call to action accomplished more than he or anyone else ever dreamed possible. It was heard not just in the city of Gdansk, but throughout Poland and around the world. Ultimately, it brought about tremendous changes in Polish society. It launched Lech Walesa into a new and historic role as the leader of a movement called Solidarity. It helped pave the way for democracy in Poland. And eventually, it made Lech Walesa the president of his country.