Word: gdansk
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When Pope John Paul II last visited his native Poland, in 1983, he made only veiled references to Solidarity, the outlawed independent labor movement. The martial law that had abruptly ended Poland's democratic experiment was still in effect, and he was not even permitted to visit Gdansk, the Baltic shipbuilding city that gave birth to Solidarity. But last week, on his third visit as Pope to his homeland, John Paul more than made up for lost time. Speaking in Gdansk from a giant outdoor altar built in the stylized form of a wooden sailing vessel, the Pontiff not only...
...previous evening John Paul had held a poignant reunion in Gdansk with Lech Walesa, the electrician who gained worldwide fame as Solidarity's founder. Now a "private citizen" in the government's eyes, an obviously elated Walesa called his 35-minute session with the Pope "great" and said, "We were in a place we know, and we could just be ourselves." At Warsaw's insistence, the meeting was kept off John Paul's official agenda...
...prayed silently for five minutes over a mound of the victims' commingled bones and ashes, tears welled in his eyes. Throughout the trip, the Pope was surrounded by legions of militia and other security personnel, whose intimidating numbers may have kept down attendance at some events. In Gdansk riot police clashed briefly with some 10,000 worshipers marching toward a Solidarity worker's monument...
...father was sent to a concentration camp by the Germans during World War II. Only two months after his release in 1945, Walesa's father died. At 24, the young rural mechanic, one of seven children, grew bored with his job and moved to the Baltic port of Gdansk, where he became a shipyard electrician. He describes himself as a typical peasant worker, "not really belonging to the city, nor the countryside, a wage earner in appearance only, profoundly attached to his farm." Such men and women were pragmatic, practicing Catholics with little interest in the abstract Communist orthodoxy...
Rather than escape, Walesa tried to come to grips with Poland. The book charts Solidarity's rise, beginning with the watershed 1980 Gdansk strike he led. "I compare Polish society after August 1980 to a beggar who lives in a + corner of a lovely house which he does not own, and then suddenly he finds that he has owned it all along." The joy was short-lived. Solidarity was suspended after martial law was declared in December 1981 and outlawed one year later...