Magda Konieczna

Poles' fight for freedom lives on

appeared in The Record August 27, 2005

They were tough men, standing up to largely unknown dangers, asserting their rights and fighting for the freedom of their country.

But the striking shipyard workers who changed the course of Polish history 25 years ago still needed to eat.

"It was very rainy and cold, and people were very sick," said Wiktoria Karkuszewska, a Polish-born Kitchener woman.

Karkuszewska has vivid memories of the workers' movement that became Solidarity. She was part of it.

During the August 1980 strike, Karkuszewska drove every day to the shipyard from her home in the northern Polish city of Gdansk, bringing cold cuts, sausages, bread and fruit to the hungry workers.

A giant bucket of honey from her uncle came in handy.

"I would buy 10 litres of milk every morning and boil it with a kilogram of honey, some butter and garlic," said Karkuszewska, then in her 40s.

The workers, who stayed round the clock at the yard, would be lined up with their mugs when she arrived with the honey-and-milk mixture. Her visits were announced over the public address system.

"That's how I was helping them get better," Karkuszewska said in an interview in Polish.

On Wednesday, she and Poles around the world will mark the 25th anniversary of the turbulent formation of Solidarity.

The success of Solidarity, a trade union federation, reached across the political landscape of eastern Europe.

The strikes that gave birth to Solidarity started in mid-August at the Gdansk shipyards, initially as a protest against the high cost of food.

The unrest quickly spread across the region and country, and the workers' demands grew to include freedom of speech and the right to form independent trade unions. An estimated 150,000 Poles nationwide, from a range of trades and professions, were involved.

The protest against the communist government lasted two weeks. On Aug. 31, the government signed an agreement with the shipyard workers that gave Poles freedom of speech and the right to strike and organize for the first time since the Second World War.

Solidarity had 10 million members at its height in the early 1980s. The government, alarmed at Solidarity's numbers, banned the union in 1982. Its fight for political freedom continued underground for almost eight years until independent unions became legal again.

But Solidarity's actions 25 years ago did much to shake the Soviet Union and communism's hold on Eastern Europe and also helped precipitate the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

* * *

Boleslaw Czernewcan, a Kitchener resident since 1991, was behind the Gdansk shipyard gates when Karkuszewska was in front of them.

He was a bus driver in his hometown of Wroclaw, about 400 kilometres away, when the strike started. Czernewcan went to Gdansk as part of a delegation to show his town's support for the shipyard workers.

Such a journey was no small task. The previous delegation sent from Wroclaw had been arrested.

At his own workplace, fear was palpable. Strikers there grabbed cameras and destroyed the film of international journalists, afraid they were government agents.

"I don't believe anyone who says that it was possible not to be afraid, especially when you had a family," Czernewcan said in Polish. "People feared bloodshed. They had vivid memories of the (Second World) War."

Although many people were on strike, getting involved took a great deal of courage, said Eva Plach, a professor of Polish history at Wilfrid Laurier University.

Polish workers were killed during strikes in 1970, she said, and earlier attempts at reform in Czechoslovakia had brought Soviet tanks rolling into that country in 1968.

"So what were the Soviets going to do in response to these strikes?" Plach said of the events in 1980. "Were they going to roll in with tanks? Were they equipped to do so? Did they think it important enough to do so?

"Nobody knew."

"It was really dangerous. People were being arrested. People were disappearing. People were having a tough time. You made things economically tough for your own family if you got involved and got put in prison."

* * *

Czernewcan was lucky. His delegation arrived in Gdansk almost without incident on Aug. 30, the day before the signing of the agreement that created Solidarity.

And Poland itself was lucky. Soviet tanks did not arrive and Poles were able to join free trade unions for almost 16 months.

Getting involved in a swelling opposition movement was emotional, Czernewcan recalled. In Wroclaw, an older woman presented him with an armband decorated with Poland's red-and-white flag.

"She could have been my grandmother," he said. "I got the armband from her, and she did the sign of the cross. When I talk about it today, I get goosebumps."

In Gdansk, he got to meet strike leaders -- another emotional experience after the fear-tinged disruption at his Wroclaw workplace, where he knew authorities could arrest him and his co-workers at whim.

"I realized I was talking to people who were playing out the 'to be or not to be' of the whole country," Czernewcan said.

"The decisions that they worked out, I already knew they could change the course of history."

The highlight for him was meeting strike leader Lech Walesa, who went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983 and to become president of Poland in 1990.

"Meeting a person who was already a legend made the emotions flow," Czernewcan said.

"When you shook hands with Lech, you knew it was the hand of a worker, not a bureaucrat."

* * *

Workers in Poland and other eastern European countries had organized protests against communist governments before. But the strikes that August were more successful, Plach said, because this time, people had had enough.

"By the 1980s, fewer and fewer people are committed to the system, especially in Soviet bloc countries like Poland," she said.

"There was an ideological bankruptcy in the entire system. People were willing to take the risk and say: 'We're not going to take this anymore.' "

The system had already started to crumble around the edges, Plach said. And Poles were more strongly united than ever before.

The election of Pope John Paul II from Poland was a direct affront to the anti-religious communist party. Poles joined that rebellion in the millions by coming out to see John Paul when he visited Poland in 1979.

"You couldn't go out and have an anti-communist rally of millions," Plach said. "But you could have a Polish pope rally of millions and say a similar thing without having the authorities clamp down."

* * *

The buckets of hot milk she delivered to strikers were just the beginning of Karkuszewska's involvement in the Polish underground. For years, she worried about retaliation by authorities.

Solidarity's national commission met twice at her house after the union was declared illegal.

Her home was a place for underground members to meet, to leave each other messages, and to print flyers and banned books on a crank-operated press.

Any of these activities could have led to her arrest, but she kept her fear to herself.

"I was very afraid, but I prayed a lot," Karkuszewska said. "When the underground met at my house, they didn't know where they were being sent, and I didn't know who would be coming. I was never at their meetings. I cooked and made beds. Sometimes I brought them tea.

"It was five or six days spent in terrible fear. If the whole committee were arrested, it would mean many years of prison for me, and for them even more," she said.

"Someone had to do it -- if not me, then someone else. We had to work to overthrow the system."

Karkuszewska was confident, even in those days, that their efforts would drive communism out of Poland.

"Of course we believed the system would fall. Ten million people formed a union and the Soviets didn't come, so we knew there had to be a change.

"And there was."

Czernewcan echoes some of Karkuszewska's sentiments.

"I just knew that something had to be done," he said. "History shows that totalitarian systems never change on their own."

* * *

Both Czernewcan and Karkuszewska have impressive collections of mementos from those days.

At Czernewcan's Wroclaw workplace, students experienced in the art of dissent arrived on the second day of the strike. They built a press by stretching fabric over a wooden frame, arranging type on it and using a roller to print copies. This was how the movement in Wroclaw advertised its activities and called for support.

Today, Czernewcan keeps some of those flyers in a binder, along with his collection of clippings, photos and underground stamps that were sold to support the Solidarity movement.

"You never thought then to save those things." he said. "Everything was more instinctive than planned out."

Like Czernewcan, Karkuszewska has a few small souvenirs, but wishes she had more.

"In the underground, you can't keep mementos. It's dangerous."

Even so, Karkuszewska has enough to dedicate part of a bedroom wall to Solidarity.

Her framed photos include one of Walesa and one of herself receiving communion from the pope. She also still has a signed note of thanks from organizers of an underground meeting that took place in her home.

As well, Karkuszewska has a collection of underground books that were printed by the thousands on a crank-operated press at her house. The paper for the books was stolen, so the pages are of many different colours.

Members of the underground would sneak the books out, 10 or 20 at a time, to sell.

"Those books were in secret circulation," she said. "They moved quietly from friend to friend."

* * *

Czernewcan said his part in the events of August 1980 was minor when compared with the contributions of others.

"I'm not a hero," he said. "I was one of millions.

"People lost their lives and their families. Lives were torn apart. What I did was a drop in the sea.

"Most of all, I felt for my wife. She was sitting on a barrel of gunpowder waiting to explode."

Karkuszewska moved to Kitchener to join her children when Solidarity's struggle to topple the communist government was over.

This month she will visit Gdansk, to mark the events of 1980.

She looks back on her experience with a certain sense of sentimentality.

"It seems to me that it was yesterday. I can't reconcile myself with the fact that it was so long ago."

But more than 15 years after the Berlin Wall came down and political freedom returned to Poland, the battle is not over, she said. Decades of communism left a deep mark on the country.

"We need another 60 years," Karkuszewska said. "I hope before I close my eyes, I'll see real democracy in Poland.

"I live every day, every hour in Poland, even though I love being here, in this country that gave me food and work. What happened in Poland in those years made Europe turn upside down."