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NEWS & LETTERS, May-June 2010
Anna Walentynowicz
Anna Walentynowicz (1929-2010), central to the 1980 formation of Solidarność (Solidarity) in Poland, died in the plane crash that took the lives of the entire Polish delegation, including the President, on their way to commemorate the 1939 murder of Poles in the Katyn forest.
She had joined the Lenin Shipyards in Gdansk in 1950, where her constant opposition to injustices there earned the respect of her co-workers. In 1968, when the authorities tried to fire her, her co-workers agitated until she was rehired. She participated in the 1970 shipyard strike, and never forgot to honor the strikers murdered at the gates.
In 1978 she was a founder of the Coastal Free Trade Unions. She co-edited Robotnik Wybrzeża (The Coastal Worker) and organized commemorations of the heroes of the 1970 strike. Five months before her retirement, she was fired again. The historic August 1980 strike that launched Solidarność began with a demand to reinstate her.
On Aug. 16, after the authorities signed an agreement with the strike committee that granted all of the strikers' demands, and most workers wanted to settle, it was Walentynowicz, along with Alina Pienkowska and a few others, who advocated welding closed the shipyard gates and continuing the strike in solidarity with workers at other factories who had supported the shipyard workers. This act transformed a local incident into a wave of national solidarity.
After the December 1981 declaration of martial law, Walentynowicz was jailed along with many other Solidarność activists. As soon as she was released, she went back to organizing: hunger strikes, protest meetings, individual protests and appeals to the authorities. In December 1983 she was arrested for attempting to install a plaque near the "Wujek" mine to commemorate miners killed there two years earlier. She went on a hunger strike again in 1985 to protest the arrest of Solidarność leaders.
Anna Walentynowicz personifies the Reason of rank-and-file workers, especially of women. When some from Solidarność took responsibility for running the state, she called that 1989 agreement "a betrayal." She went to her death trying to bring justice to the world.
--Urszula Wislanka
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