Word: silesian
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Meantime, government riot police stood ready to open a mine in the Silesian town of Jastrzebie in order to permit safety crews to combat an underground fire and relieve accumulations of methane gas. After vowing to keep the troops from entering, several hundred militant strikers backed down...
Brilliant sunshine gave way to rain later in the day when the Pope reached Katowice, a steel-producing city in the Upper Silesian coal-mining region. The heavy downpour did little to dampen the spirit of the crowd of 1.2 million that was waiting for John Paul under a forest of umbrellas in a vacant airfield outside the city. When the Silesians spotted the Pope stepping from the papal helicopter, they let loose with a boisterous chorus of Sto Lat (May You Live a Hundred Years), all but drowning out a brass band of black-suited miners...
...Pope's visit. Some of them had arrived more than 24 hours early in order to greet the Pontiff. The crowd included delegations from Gdansk, Poznan, Radom, Lublin and other Polish cities. There were uniformed boy scouts, nurses in white tunics, peasant women in brightly colored scarves, and Silesian miners in black uniforms and tall hats topped with black feathers. Farmers from Lowicz, 50 miles southwest of Warsaw, were dressed in their native costume: straw hats with blue ribbons, elaborately embroidered red jackets and black felt pants...
...show of summary justice, civilian courts promptly sentenced 101 youths involved in the Gdansk riots to jail terms ranging from one to three months. In the Silesian military zone, meanwhile, eleven miners charged with organizing strikes at the Ziemowit coal mine in December received harsh sentences of three to seven years. In the northern town of Slupsk, six Solidarity members were given one-to 4½-year sentences for continuing their union activities...
...most of the demonstrations that took place after Jaruzelski imposed martial law. In Gdansk they burst into the Lenin shipyards to end a sit-in by the workers who had launched the independent Solidarity trade union in August 1980. When coal miners in the Wujek pit near the Silesian city of Katowice resisted martial law, it was the members of ZOMO who opened fire. The government admits that eight miners were killed in the incident. ZOMO forces reportedly attacked even doctors and nurses who had arrived to take wounded miners to the hospital. When the goon squads indiscriminately swung their...