Word: walesa
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...impression was of an absence of solidarity between social groups here in Gdansk, even at home, in the same building and stairway, an overwhelming solitude, fear and uncertainty. And despite everything, the feeling revolt was necessary." Thus Lech Walesa, Nobel Peace Prize laureate and leader of the now banned Solidarity trade union movement, describes his political awakening a decade before Solidarity was born. Walesa's 604-page autobiography, A Path of Hope, published last week in France, contains no new or explosive disclosures, but it eloquently and simply portrays brave citizens pitted against a political tyranny. Without ever explicitly saying...
...Walesa begins by recounting how his family struggled to survive on its farm in eastern Poland after his father was sent to a concentration camp by the Germans during World War II. Only two months after his release in 1945, Walesa's father died. At 24, the young rural mechanic, one of seven children, grew bored with his job and moved to the Baltic port of Gdansk, where he became a shipyard electrician. He describes himself as a typical peasant worker, "not really belonging to the city, nor the countryside, a wage earner in appearance only, profoundly attached...
Rather than escape, Walesa tried to come to grips with Poland. The book charts Solidarity's rise, beginning with the watershed 1980 Gdansk strike he led. "I compare Polish society after August 1980 to a beggar who lives in a + corner of a lovely house which he does not own, and then suddenly he finds that he has owned it all along." The joy was short-lived. Solidarity was suspended after martial law was declared in December 1981 and outlawed one year later...
...great losers in all this are Lech Walesa and the other Solidarnosc leaders. They are out of jail, but--without strong support from the Church--they have fallen into oblivion. In 1983, Virginio Levi, Director of the Vatican daily, L'Osservatore Romano, was fired for writing an editorial saying what the Church would not admit: that Walesa and Solidarnosc had been sacrificed...
...propose ways of cooperating with the regime in improving the economy and advancing political freedoms. Government Spokesman Jerzy Urban denounced the organization as "yet another illegal body." In the new era of openness, Warsaw clearly does not intend to share power with anyone, particularly if his name is Walesa...