Word: walesa
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...Walesa (pronounced Va.h-wen-sah) was an unemployed electrician. Today, as leader of the Communist world's only independent labor union, he is one of the most powerful men in Poland, a folk hero not only to millions of his countrymen but to much of the world. His achievement all but defies description; in effect, he single-handed rallied his fellow workers to stand up against the will and the might of the Soviet Union. Walesa looks ill-suited for such eminence...
...Walesa, 37, was born during the Nazi occupation in the village of Popow, between Warsaw and Gdansk, and attended a state vocational school in nearby Lipno. After his father died, Lech's mother married her brother-in-law, Stanislaw Walesa; she was later killed in an auto accident while visiting the U.S. The stepfather, a lumberman, now lives in Jersey City...
...Walesa became a strike leader at the Lenin Shipyard during the 1970 food price riots. Fired for his attempts at labor organizing in 1976, he found work in a machine repair shop and helped found the underground Baltic Free Trade Unions Movement. He was sent as a delegate to the official union elections in 1979, but was outraged to find the local party secretary controlling the vote. "Why have I come here, to elect or to applaud?" he demanded. The answer: an unceremonious sacking...
...Walesa's fortunes changed astonishingly when he scaled the gate of Lenin Shipyard last Aug. 14 to seize the helm of an angry strike movement. He became the workers' natural choice to head the independent union that emerged from that historic confrontation. Looking back over his long struggles, he remarks: "They have been tough years, tough on my wife and children. But I couldn't give...
...Walesa is a devout Roman Catholic who rarely misses morning Mass. A wood-and-silver crucifix is prominently displayed wherever he speaks. On his left lapel he always wears a badge depicting the Black Madonna of Czestochowa, the revered symbol of Polish nationalism. He wrote a widely reproduced prayer that begins, "Virgin Mary, I come to you in the total modesty of my heart...