Word: lech
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...when things began to go wrong, when the tensions started to rise and the future he saw began to recede, the face grew heavy. The familiar walrus mustache sagged and the brown eyes turned weary. Again he held nothing back, and perhaps he could not if he tried. Lech Walesa is a man of emotion, not of logic or analysis. So was the movement, which he all but lost control of in the end, guided more by hope and passion than by rationality. That was the crusade's strength?and its weakness...
...heady days of August 1980, the closed gate of the Lenin Shipyard in the Baltic port city of Gdansk became a symbol of the spirit of Solidarity, the newly formed independent trade union movement. It was here that Lech Walesa, the movement's leader, first made his demands for economic and social reform. Months later, when Solidarity swept the country, a monument was erected at the gate to commemorate both the birth of the union in 1980 and the 45 Poles killed in the food riots of 1970. Last week, shortly after the army and police had broken a strike...
...first to be detained were hundreds of Solidarity activists, and virtually first among the first was Lech Walesa. Police knocked at his door at 3 a.m. Sunday. He refused to allow them in, demanding the presence of Gdansk Party Secretary Tadeusz Fiszbach, a noted liberal for whom Walesa had respect. As soon as Fiszbach arrived, Walesa gave himself up. He was then taken to the airport and flown to Warsaw, where, according to a government spokesman, "he is being treated with all the respect due the head of Solidarity." Out of his own choice or the government...
...population was depressed and weary from the crises that had beset the country in recent months. Poles were also disillusioned by the disunity within Solidarity, traumatized by the newly imposed military rule, anxious over the lingering possibility of Soviet intervention and fearful for the fate of their national hero, Lech Walesa...
...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...