Word: polishing
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...tensions, the mood inside the Lenin shipyard in Gdansk suddenly brightened. Clad in scruffy trousers and jackets, some of the workers occupying the facility joked with one another and guzzled soft drinks. As the afternoon sun beat down on the Baltic port, 3,000 men gathered to sing the Polish national anthem. Then the gates of the shipyard swung open and the throng poured into the streets, marking the beginning of the end of the worst labor unrest to shake Poland since...
Above all, there were her intense relationships with two Polish men, both dying of cancer. One was with a 40-year-old waiter, whom she met while working as a medical social worker at St. Thomas's Hospital in London. She recalls how he left her (pounds)500 (then worth more than $2,000) in his will, saying "I will be a window in your home." The words are now engraved below a window in St. Christopher's lobby. The other relationship, which her biographer, Shirley du Boulay, calls "unconsummated, unfulfilled, unresolved," was with a refugee in a home...
...Polish workers once again were at the forefront of the challenge to the authority of nervous regimes torn between the risks of change and the dangers of maintaining the status quo. A wave of strikes in Poland that closed down at least 22 enterprises employing more than 110,000 workers amounted to the most serious outbreak of unrest in Eastern Europe since the nationwide strikes eight years ago that gave rise to the now banned trade union Solidarity and ended with the imposition of martial...
...Polish workers were also demanding pay hikes of as much as 100% to compensate for an inflation rate that has now reached 60% annually. With a pound of butter costing half a day's wages and the wait for an apartment in Warsaw calculated at 50 years, one resident of the capital asked, "What are the arguments for not going on strike?" The workers were supported by Poland's Roman Catholic bishops, who criticized the regime in unusually harsh terms and called for the government to honor 1980 agreements to recognize Solidarity...
...Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, the new young activists are markedly different from the generation that manned the rebellious barricades in Prague in 1968 -- and even from the veterans of Solidarity's struggle in 1980. "The young today diverge very strongly from my generation," says Jacek Szymanderski, 43, a Polish historian and formerly a leading figure in Solidarity. "They are more sophisticated politically but less experienced. Their demands are more ambitious, but they are also perhaps more cynical. Most especially, they are deeply aware of human rights." In addition, they are the first generation of protesters to come of age when...