Word: niezabitowska
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...crusading reporter for Poland's opposition Solidarity Weekly in the 1980s, Malgorzata Niezabitowska was among the most prominent voices of the revolution. She wrote exposés about illegal demonstrations and military crackdowns. With her husband, photographer Tomasz Tomaszewski, she chronicled the darkest days of martial law, smuggling her diaries (written under a pseudonym) and photos of tanks in the streets out of the country to a world hungry for news of Poland's awakening dissent. Later, in 1989, she was appointed spokeswoman for the government of Tadeusz Mazowiecki, Poland's first democratically elected Prime Minister. Niezabitowska's charisma...
...alternative was prison. She admits she rambled on about her work and her personal life, but says she recounted only what she thought were "things that they already knew." In the end, she says, Grzelak suggested she collaborate. She said "No." Grzelak invited her back the next day, but Niezabitowska said she was not about to change her mind. "That was the last meeting I had with them," she insists. A few weeks later, outside a grocery store, she ran into Grzelak, who greeted her with a smile and another invitation to talk. "Leave me alone," she said. Niezabitowska...
Some in Warsaw say Niezabitowska owes her position to her stunning looks and the new government's shrewd sense of public relations, but she shrugs off both the criticism and her lack of experience. "I think I'm one of the Prime Minister's closest advisers," she says. "I discuss all the issues with him, try to convince him of my ideas, keep him informed about what is happening in the country. That is influence...
Influence, but not necessarily power. Like Niezabitowska, 40, East Germany's Sylvia Schultz is, at 34, a woman who chose to wield her influence through the man she served. In her case it was East Germany's last Prime Minister, Lothar de Maiziere. She was his chief of staff, the aide who ran the P.M.'s office, advised him on every issue and traveled at his side wherever he went...
Also like Niezabitowska, Schultz came by her position through propinquity: her husband, older by 12 years, used to play music with De Maiziere and afterward chat about politics. Unable to complete her studies in history or get a job because of her antigovernment political views, Schultz eventually went to work in De Maiziere's law office. In that free-thinking environment, she developed her own liberal ideas, "thinking about what the future could be." But when East Germans who shared her secret dreams took to the streets Schultz "made a decision to stay in the back...