Word: shipyard
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...revival of Polish Independence Day seem to reflect a desire by the beleaguered government of Premier Wojciech Jaruzelski to seek more popular backing by displaying an independence, if only symbolic, from the Soviet Union. The government did not even object last week when the Solidarity trade union named a shipyard in Gdansk after Pilsudski. The irony was palpable: Solidarity had been founded in another shipyard not far away, one that was named for Vladimir Lenin, the father of the Soviet state and a bitter enemy of Jozef Pilsudski...
Faces and clothes mark the workers in Gdansk's Lenin Shipyard as strikers and as individuals; the diversity is only skin deep, though superficialities are important: There is something much more essential here. Three things unite these men and women, and the 12 million more who have joined Solidarity since the heady days of August 1980: religious conviction, nationalism, and a sense of their own worth and dignity as workers...
...bolstering courage to the point where men will take risks like these. Catholic Mass becomes political in two senses in this movie: Walesa's repeated demands for free worship are important, surely, but even more important are the actual fact of the church services themselves, carried on inside the shipyard when the cause is human dignity, the words of the Our Father or the repeated Hail Marys must take on new, hopeful meanings...
...living. And then dignity is won in a moment, in that brief flash when you demand what is right and you are not thrown in jail, shot in the back, consigned to an asylum. For the Polish workers, their first demands were quite simple--the rehiring of one shipyard employee, and wage increases. But then solidarity--and from it Solidarity--worked its invigorating power, and soon there was an air of quiet confidence and a long, long list of demands...
...harassment of Solidarity union members. Workers wearing red-and-white armbands clustered at factory gates, shop fronts and mine entrances under a cold fall drizzle. In the Baltic port city of Gdansk, where Solidarity was born 14 months ago, hundreds of men and women gathered at the Lenin Shipyard and draped its gate with flowers. In heavily industrialized Silesia, brawny metalworkers stood idle in the shadow of towering steel-mill chimneys. In Warsaw, flag-draped buses and tramways came to a halt, snarling traffic for blocks around...