Word: gdansk
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...repression. The beleaguered government of General Wojciech Jaruzelski, pushed to the wall by Walesa's challenging Solidarity union, confronted with total economic collapse, and pressured by the furious Soviets, struck back in the classic Communist fashion. Its minions came for Walesa at 3 a.m. at his apartment in Gdansk, the gray Baltic seaport whose windswept shipyards had given birth to Solidarity in August 1980. They hustled him aboard a flight to Warsaw and then held him in a government guesthouse south of the city. They cut off communications with the outside world and imposed martial law. While the people slept...
...somber tones that seven Poles had been killed and hundreds wounded in a clash between miners, fighting with picks and axes, and troops at a coal mine near Katowice, in southern Poland. In addition, it acknowledged, 160 militiamen and 164 civilians had been injured during continuing disturbances in Gdansk...
...leaders of Solidarity gathered in Gdansk for their final, fateful meeting before the crackdown, TIME Correspondent Gregory H. Wierzynski was with them. He was scheduled to spend the entire next day with Lech Walesa and his family, an interview that never took place. After scouring Gdansk for details of the mass arrests and strikes, Wierzynski drove to Warsaw, into a setting of total censorship. It was five days after the military takeover that Wierzynski was able to make his way to West Berlin, from where he sent his reports. Among them was this personal look at Poland under siege...
Ironically, the day martial law was imposed in Poland and fear, pain and grief descended upon the country, the sun rose with unusual clarity and brilliance, following two bleak weeks of gray skies and snow. In Gdansk, where Polish hopes for freedom had begun and had now terminated overnight, all that could be seen of the roundup of Solidarity's leadership were riot police encircling the union headquarters...
...first to make it through was Sygma Photographer Henri Bureau, 41, who was on assignment for TIME. He had photographed Solidarity's last meeting at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk just before martial law was imposed, then made his way back to Warsaw, taking pictures of troop movements through the window of his car. Leaving all his equipment behind, Bureau stuffed 30 rolls of film in his snow boots and rode an unheated train in subzero weather to Berlin with L'Express Correspondent Jacques Renard. Said Bureau: "The East Germans searched everything. They looked under seats with flashlights...