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Every One of You Is Walesa
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14122 |
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BOOK WORLD
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1 / 1988 |
5,383 Words |
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Jozef Ruszar
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The American version of Lech Walesa's autobiography, A Way of Hope, is now available, along with the French version, which has been selling well in Europe--more is covered in the six hundred-page French edition than in the three hundred-page American. But reading either version, one is struck by certain omissions. This is an honest book, not self-serving in any way: Walesa is open about his mistakes, his process of learning, his indebtedness--his qualities as a leader are also visible here. Yet certain facets of the opposition movement in Poland cannot be glimpsed through this book that are central to understanding it. Because Walesa's autobiography chronicles the events of his personal life, it naturally concentrates on the events in which he was most involved.
After reading A Way of Hope, one might be left with a rather simplified impression that the exploitation of Polish workers led to a workers' revolt that grew stronger and stronger until it became Solidarity. Walesa mentions the influence of the Catholic Church on his life and alludes briefly to various groups such as KOR, the Worker's Defense Committee, that were sympathetic to the workers' needs. However, an understanding of the variety of groups that made solidarity possible cannot be developed from Walesa's book, although he certainly acknowledges that every group in the society (as distinct from the government) contributed to the movement.
Solidarity was, as the book points out, more than a trade union movement; it was the full-fledged national liberation movement of a people rising to fight for democracy and their own identity. In this paper, I am going to discuss aspects of Polish life in the 1970s and 1980s that form a background to Walesa's life story. I want to weave together the role of various groups in the formation of Solidarity in a more deliberate way than has been done in Walesa's autobiography, this will make their contributions and the development of bonds between them more visible. I am not going to discuss the workers' role in proportion to its enormous significance, however, since it is covered at length by Walesa.
The workers: Solidarity versus atomization
Even though Solidarity created a kind of "trade union of the Polish nation" it was in its capacity as a social movement--a movement that set itself the goal of making citizens of the people--that it meant the most to the workers. This is not because they were the strongest social group or because they felt that it was they who had created the union: It was because they were the most disintegrated social group in Poland. Their life was so atomized that in 1976, when the young people from the Workers' Defense Committee tried to find the workers who had been dismissed for protesting the government price hikes, they had to go to court, where the workers were being tried, in order to meet them. Their fellow workers, even those in the same brigade, often did not know their addresses or their last names (workers were usually called by their nicknames).
In this situation, each person stood alone against the enormous power of the police state. Walesa talks about how important it was for him to have been able to make trustworthy friends in the Gdansk shipyards who could guarantee him a minimum level of security (financial and psychological). Walesa was one of the lucky few who had this
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