TIME weekly published a list of the 100 most influential women of the last century on 5 March 2020. One of the women honoured was the ‘Mother of Solidarity’, Anna Walentynowicz, who was known as a hero of the fight against communist rule and the mother of Polish independence.
Anna Walentynowicz was born on 15 August 1929 in Volhynia. After 1945, she worked on a farm near Gdańsk. Intending to be fully independent, she took a job in Gdańsk at a bakery in another factory. The hard work made her particularly sensitive to human injustice.
After Walentynowicz started work at the Gdańsk Shipyard, she quickly gained respect among the workforce by speaking out courageously against various abnormalities at the plant. Her actions immediately caused several warning calls from the communist Security Service.
Because of health problems she suffered from in the mid-1960s, she was retrained as an overhead crane worker. At that point, Walentynowicz could retire, but she wanted to remain at work.
The authorities wanted her fired from the shipyard for the first time in 1968 when Walentynowicz wanted to explain an embezzlement of money from a relief fund.
In the end, the shipyard management transferred Walentynowicz to the W-2 department without the right to change her place of employment.
During the workers’ protest in December 1970, she prepared meals for the strikers. In January 1971, she was also one of the delegates to the workers’ meeting with Edward Gierek, the new First Secretary of the PZPR (Polish United Workers Party).
Walentynowicz was systematically persecuted by the Security Service (SB). She was frequently detained for 48 hours, searched and threatened.
On 8 August 1980, five months before her retirement, her employment contract was terminated. The demand for cancelling that decision and reinstating Anna Walentynowicz became the first demand of the strike that started on 14 August at the Gdansk Shipyard.
“Poland’s escape from Soviet rule began with Solidarity, a movement for the rights of workers that Anna Walentynowicz, a welder and crane operator, helped create in 1980. In retaliation for her activism, she was fired that year from the Lenin Shipyard. Her colleagues went on strike to get her job back, sparking a mass resistance that culminated in the Gdansk Agreement, which allowed the first free-trade union in communist Eastern Europe. Within a year, the Solidarity union had nearly 10 million members, with Walentynowicz as one of its leaders. The triumph in Gdansk precipitated the fall of communism, a decade later. It also led generations of Poles to see Walentynowicz as the mother of their independence.,” a Time’s Berlin Office journalist Simon Shuster wrote, explaining the newspaper’s decision to honour Anna Walentynowicz.
After the introduction of martial law in December 1981, she was arrested and kept in a secluded site in Goldap.
In 1989, Walentynowicz was a fierce critic of the Round Table talks, which she regarded as a betrayal and a collaboration between the communists and part of the democratic opposition, orchestrated by SB agents.
She criticised the political changes in Poland after 1989. Walentynowicz publicly accused Lech Wałęsa of collaboration with the secret services of the People’s Republic of Poland on several occasions.
In 2000, she refused to accept the honorary citizenship of Gdansk granted to the signatories of the August Agreements.
In July 2006, the Gdańsk Institute of National Remembrance revealed that Walentynowicz was under surveillance by more than 100 functionaries and secret collaborators of the Security Service.
Anna Walentynowicz died tragically in the crash of the Polish Tu-154M plane in Smolensk on 10 April 2010 on her way to the celebrations of the 70th anniversary of the Katyn massacre.
Source: Dzieje.pl, Time
Photo: @TIME, IPN
Tomasz Modrzejewski
