Walentynowicz, Anna (1929—)

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Walentynowicz, Anna (1929—)

Polish worker and labor leader at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk, whose firing in August 1980 triggered a massive strike movement leading directly to the birth of Solidarity . Name variations: (nickname) "Mala" (the little one). Born Anna Lubczyk in 1929 in Wolyn (Volhynia) province, Poland (now Ukraine); orphaned at the age of ten and ended her formal education in the fourth grade; married Kazimierz Walentynowicz (a locksmith), in 1964 (died 1973); children: son, Janusz.

Fired as a worker at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk (August 1980), triggering a massive strike movement that led directly to the birth of the Solidarity union and set in motion a process that by the end of the decade would bring about the end of Communist rule in Poland; despite the crucial role played in the Solidarity movement by Walentynowicz and countless other women, they quickly found themselves marginalized once its male leadership achieved recognition as a legitimate political force; both before and after her retirement (1991), was highly critical of many of her former Solidarity colleagues, particularly Lech Walesa.

The people of Poland have a long tradition of resistance and rebellion dating back to the late 18th century, when their nation lost its independence and was partitioned between its Austrian, Prussian and Russian neighbors. Bloody but failed national uprisings in 1830–31 and again in 1863–64 helped to forge a tradition of massive resistance to the hated foreign occupiers, in both of these instances tsarist Russia. In all of these uprisings, as well as during the difficult decades of national occupation and humiliation that marked Polish history until the restoration of independence in 1918, women played important roles, even participating in armed resistance, as personified in the life and martyr's death of the hero of the 1830–31 revolt, Emilja Plater . Polish women were active in the anti-German resistance during World War II, and fought alongside men both in the Warsaw Ghetto and the general Warsaw uprisings of 1943 and 1944.

After World War II, the situation of women in Poland became more complex, depending on their place in society and their political views. In theory, the Communist government that took control of the country in the years after 1945 brought about their full economic and social emancipation. In practice, the social egalitarianism proclaimed in Marxist-Leninist ideology was often not achieved. Women were not incorporated into the inner policymaking circles of the ruling Polish United Workers' Party (PZPR), and in the workplace, they suffered from significant discriminations, including being rarely offered higher-paying jobs and facing many more obstacles to being promoted than did male workers. Although women constituted one-half of postwar Poland's labor force, they would earn on average only about two-thirds the salary of men.

It was into this complex and frustrating world that a woman of courage, Anna Walentynowicz, appeared to play a role that would change the course of Polish and indeed world history. Anna Lubczyk was born into rural poverty in 1929 in the province of Wolyn (Volhynia). Orphaned at age ten, she was adopted by a farm family who withdrew her from school when she was in fourth grade so that she could work. After the difficult years of World War II, she moved to the Gdansk (formerly Danzig) region, where she worked for awhile as a farm-hand. In November 1950, Anna found employment as a welder in Gdansk's Lenin Shipyard, working in a brigade named after the Polish-born revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg . During this time she became an unmarried mother, giving birth to her only child, a son named Janusz, whom she placed in child care so that she could keep working. Almost from the start of her career, Walentynowicz was aware of the injustices and inequities of her workplace. In 1953, she voiced her complaints that the Lenin Shipyard's women workers were not receiving the same prize money as work incentives that male workers got. As a result of her defiant attitude, she was arrested and interrogated for eight hours, before being released with a warning.

As a young woman from an impoverished background and with only a limited formal education, Walentynowicz was willing to rally behind the government of "People's Poland," which had the unenviable task of rebuilding a shattered nation out of the devastation and rubble of a war that had cost at least six million lives. In 1951, she joined the Polish Youth Union, one of the mass organizations the Communist state relied on to rally popular support for its policies, and traveled to East Berlin to attend a world youth congress. During these years, Anna was "in awe" of the PZPR that ruled Poland, believing she was not worthy of joining it because "only the best and brightest belonged to it, and that excluded me."

Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, Walentynowicz toiled at the Lenin Shipyard as a model worker who believed in the slogans prominently displayed all around her on huge red banners, including ones exhorting workers to "Care For Your Fellow Worker." During those years, she hoped that such slogans based on the idea of individuals willingly sacrificing themselves for the common good would "become reality, not just propaganda." At production meetings, she spoke out in favor of the current Five Year Plan, even demanding more work. At the same time, she also spoke out in favor of just distribution of bonuses, insisting that these go to workers who had in fact been more productive, rather than to those who were deemed loyal and ideologically correct. Amid the hard work and occasional turbulence of her job, Anna also found some stability in her private life during this period when in 1964 she married Kazimierz Walentynowicz, a locksmith who worked at the shipyard (he would die in 1973).

In 1965, health problems compelled Anna Walentynowicz to give up her job as a welder at the Lenin Shipyard, becoming instead a crane operator. Respected for her honesty and outspokenness, she gained a reputation throughout the shipyard for activism on behalf of her fellow workers. As a member of her division's workers' council, as well as of the division commission (which she chaired for a time), Walentynowicz instinctively uncovered shady dealings and outright corruption by management. On one occasion, she discovered that a fund designated for sick leaves and emergency drug prescriptions was being diverted by a corrupt official, who used it to purchase lottery tickets for himself. She was particularly outraged when she learned that this same official had transferred a pregnant woman worker from the production line to his office so that she could spend full time filling out the lottery tickets. On another occasion, after publicly criticizing the local PZPR leader for his ineptitude, Walentynowicz was interrogated by SB (security police) officials who accused her of listening to Radio Free Europe and being a Jehovah's Witness. By 1968, Walentynowicz had gained such a reputation as a "troublemaker," who could neither be intimidated nor bribed into keeping quiet, that she was fired from her job.

During the decades that saw Walentynowicz gain a reputation for integrity and devotion to her work, Poland went through many crises. In 1956, worker uprisings created massive pressure and brought into power a reform-minded government that made significant concessions on both the cultural and economic fronts, but by the late 1960s stagnation and repression had set in once again. In 1968, intellectuals and students demanded democratic reforms, but their cause was weakened when workers did not join them. By December 1970, worsening economic conditions had triggered massive worker demonstrations on the Baltic coast, including in Gdansk. Many workers were killed by the organs of state repression, and most of Poland was plunged into a state of chaos. Not surprisingly, in Gdansk Walentynowicz played a significant role in December 1970, as one of the leaders of a strike that succeeded in shutting down the Lenin Shipyard. In late January 1971, she was a member of the strikers' presidium that met with new PZPR First Secretary Edward Gierek, negotiations that were able to gain solid concessions for Gdansk's shipyard workers. In December 1971, Walentynowicz helped organize the activities that (illegally) commemorated the first anniversary of the bloody events that had taken place in Gdansk and other Baltic cities a year earlier.

By the late 1970s, the reforms initiated by Gierek had largely failed to create economic prosperity or social peace, and once more a new spirit of defiance began to assert itself among Polish workers and intellectuals. In 1970, there had been little cooperation between striking workers and angry intellectuals, a fact that served to benefit the regime as it strove to regain its power in the aftermath of the turmoil. In the mid-1970s, as Gierek's star as a reformer rapidly lost its luster, workers and intellectuals finally began to work together to find effective means to create a united front that could stand up to the regime. In June 1976, Polish workers once again launched massive protests against declining living standards and other social ills. Unlike earlier crises, however, on this occasion workers and intellectuals were able to bridge the gaps that divided them. In September 1976, intellectuals created the Komitet Obrony Robotników (Workers' Defense Committee, or KOR), which was successful in establishing contacts between the intelligentsia and workers, and over the next years developed an extensive network of collaborators and sympathizers throughout Poland.

It was at a KOR session held in Walentynowicz's modest living room in the late 1970s that she first met a militant young worker named Lech Walesa. Born into a poor peasant family as she had been, Walesa had been an electrician at the Lenin Shipyard in December 1970, serving at the time as a member of the strike committee. Fired from his shipyard job in 1976 for speaking out against the Gierek regime, he became a member of the Free Trade Unions (Wolne Zwiazki Zawodowe, or WZZ), and although he was branded a troublemaker from this point forward, and would lose several more jobs, Walesa persisted. From her first encounter with Walesa, Walentynowicz recognized his leadership qualities, but also sensed that since both she and he possessed strong personalities, "I felt that we wouldn't see eye to eye." By December 1978, Walentynowicz too found herself in trouble with the state. Arrested by the security police, she was threatened by them, but while she was in custody they tried to recruit her to work for them by offering "a better job, better apartment, [and] travel abroad." Walentynowicz refused the offer, telling her captors she did not "care about my life because it isn't worth much," and to cease their threats "because I no longer care." Thereupon, the police released her.

In September 1977, the KOR organization had progressed to the point that it was able to print and effectively distribute an illegal biweekly newspaper, Robotnik (The Worker). On the Baltic coast, which included Gdansk, activist workers such as Walentynowicz and Walesa distributed Robotnik, eventually even publishing a local edition for that region. Issue No. 35 of Robotnik, dated December 1, 1979, is crucial in the history of Poland because it published a document entitled the Charter of Workers' Rights that is regarded as a major step toward the Solidarity movement that emerged less than a year later. Signed by 107 intellectuals and workers, including Walentynowicz and Walesa, the Charter dealt with issues of interest to workers, including a minimum living wage, work safety and health concerns, Saturday and Sunday holidays for miners, a 40-hour work week, and promotions being decided only on the basis of merit rather than the individual's beliefs and opinions. By the end of 1979, a frightened regime was resorting to threats and outright violence to crush worker dissent. Lech Walesa and others were arrested and interrogated. The state usually stopped short of killing dissidents, but one militant worker's mutilated body was found in a river. Among those who were physically mistreated during this period was activist Maryla Plonska , who was dragged into a police car by her hair, followed by two days of incarceration.

On December 16, 1979, increasingly angry workers at the Lenin Shipyard reacted to the detention of some of their colleagues with a short warning strike. On December 31, 80 workers at the shipyard began another strike to demand that the management abandon its plan to punish Anna Walentynowicz, whose WZZ activities had grown in recent months, by transferring her to a different department. In April 1980, Walentynowicz was detained and kept under arrest for

two days. On this occasion, she was kicked in the legs, her injuries being serious enough for her to receive a five days' excuse from work from a physician. When she mentioned to a militia member violations of the constitution (described by her as "a splendid document [that] is not observed"), "the officer just laughed." That same spring, she was finally transferred to a new division within the shipyard and put in "quarantine" by the management who barred her from using the canteen. Finding that her defiant attitudes had not changed, on August 9, 1980, the management fired Walentynowicz from her job as a crane operator at the Lenin Shipyard.

Within days after Walentynowicz's dismissal, the workers of the shipyard rose to her defense, and on August 14 they went on strike to protest her firing as well as to press for a number of reforms. Known to many of them simply as "Mala" (the little one), the diminutive crane operator with the fiery temperament was greatly respected as a "woman of iron," unafraid of those with power who exercised that power unjustly. A crowd of a thousand shipyard workers angrily countered the shipyard's PZPR secretary, who attempted to justify Walentynowicz's firing for "disciplinary reasons" by reminding him that she had worked there for three decades, earning three service medals for her labor. On the first day of the strike, Lech Walesa, who had been out of work since his latest firing in January 1980, climbed over the fence and quickly began to play a leading role in the rapidly escalating crisis. Although the immensely popular Walentynowicz was asked by a number of workers to lead the strike committee, she turned it down, noting, "We have equality of the sexes and all that, but the leader has got to be a man." An alarmed government quickly made a number of concessions to the strikers, including the reinstatement of both Walentynowicz and Walesa to their jobs, and a monument to the victims of the 1970 uprising. Some days later, while negotiations between the strikers and the government were proceeding, an exhausted Lech Walesa, now the recognized leader of the strike, suggested that since a number of important concessions had been made to the workers, the time had come to end the strike. Walentynowicz and other militants were shocked and disappointed by this, given the fact that the government had not given in on the issue of release of political prisoners. Thereupon Walentynowicz made a dramatic speech in which she insisted that the jailed activists would not be abandoned. The strike continued. In all, there had been 21 demands made by the strikers, and on August 31, 1980, the government acceded to all of these, including the release of jailed political prisoners. Significantly, neither Walentynowicz nor any other woman was delegated to place her signature on the historic Gdansk accords. Neither were any women present for the signing of the equally significant Szczecin accords.

Anna Walentynowicz's independent stance and indeed defiance of Lech Walesa would cost her dearly in the next years. Almost from the start, their relationship had been tense, not surprising in view of the fact that her extreme frankness sometimes directly challenged Walesa's leadership of what had now become a mass movement—Solidarity (Solidarnosc). By the end of September 1980, an astonishing ten million Polish men and women had joined Solidarity, virtually stripping the state-backed national labor union, the Central Council of Trade Unions (Centralna Rada Zwiazków Zawodowych, or CRZZ), of its membership and legitimacy. From this point on, women would participate less and less in the actual strikes, acting more as "stay-behind" forces at home, giving support to the movement through "their men." By January 1981, when Walentynowicz and Walesa were invited to the Vatican to meet with fellow Pole Pope John Paul II, their always wary relationship had deteriorated badly, and they bickered even in front of the pontiff over who would be first in line to receive his autograph.

In April 1981, still unwilling to kowtow to Walesa, Walentynowicz found herself ousted from the influential Interfactory Founding Committee. Her accelerating erosion of power and influence was echoed by a rapid erosion of women's influence within the Solidarity organization. In 16 out of 41 areas in the elections of July 1981, not a single woman, not even Walentynowicz, was chosen as a delegate to the first National Solidarity Congress. The exclusions continued on the National Commissions of the new union: only 1 woman and 18 men on the Conciliatory Commission, 3 women and 18 men on the Auditing Commission, and 1 woman to 82 men on the National Commission. In total, only 63 women were elected to other Solidarity panels, a mere 7% of all delegates. Reflecting the views of the devout Roman Catholic Lech Walesa and the majority of male Poles, from 1981 on Solidarity projected a conservative position on women's issues, not only by ignoring inequities based on sex, but also by pressing for social policies that would allow women to devote more time to family and child rearing. Within Polish Communist circles after 1980, women's role in public life was also drastically diminished. In 1981, the Ninth Extraordinary Congress of the PZPR dropped the existing quota system for women's representation, the result being that the number of women elected was half that of previous years.

In December 1981, the Polish government cracked down on Solidarity, banning the organization and declaring a state of martial law. Along with Walesa and other leaders, Walentynowicz would be arrested and interned. When tanks broke through the Lenin Shipyard gates that December, she had to be restrained by her friends from standing in their way. When first arrested, Walentynowicz went on a hunger strike to protest prison conditions. Upon her release, she defied a ban by smuggling herself into the shipyard, working there illegally for a day. Perplexed officials sent her to a facility for psychiatric evaluation, but after six weeks they could not agree on a diagnosis and transferred her to prison, where upon arrival she was greeted warmly by prison workers with flowers and kisses. On this occasion, she declared, "We struggle with our hearts, not with violence. Solidarity is a volcano that cannot be capped." After being banned, Solidarity refused to die, simply going underground instead. The organization was kept alive largely through the efforts of innumerable women who, being regarded by the regime as "invisible," were able to undertake activities vital to the organization's continued existence. After the end of the Communist regime in 1989, these women would often be marginalized and their heroism largely forgotten. The record of their contributions has been restored to historical memory in Shana Penn 's pioneering article "The National Secret," published in the Journal of Women's History in 1994.

At her March 1983 trial for her 1981 actions, Walentynowicz pleaded not guilty to charges of attempting to requisition a water cannon from a local fire brigade to enable strikers to repulse security forces (these exploits of hers would later be featured in Andrzej Wajda's film Man of Iron). Walentynowicz was found guilty of having incited a sitdown strike following the proclamation of martial law, but the three-judge court gave her a suspended sentence in view of the delicate state of her health and her reputation as "an excellent worker." She could have been sentenced to a maximum of ten years of imprisonment, but the judges displayed considerable political prudence, acknowledging her value as a symbol of defiance and deciding she might well be less dangerous to the system out of prison than behind bars.

Throughout the 1980s, as the Warsaw regime tried to weaken the illegal Solidarity movement, Walentynowicz continued to agitate on its behalf. With her lectures in church halls throughout Poland, she organized church hunger strikes to protest the government's arrest of young men who had renounced their military service obligations. This initiative resulted in the unleashing of moral energies that led to the conscripts' Freedom and Peace Movement. Increasingly disillusioned by Walesa's leadership of Solidarity, she openly accused him of having cynically and selfishly betrayed the movement's original ideals, and by the mid-1980s Walentynowicz began to agitate for the establishment of a new political party. Because she displayed a lack of political shrewdness or indeed any ability to make compromises, however, the idea died on the vine. In 1987, seeking a respite from life in a nation in permanent crisis, she spent six months in the United States, where among the honors she received was the naming of a housing project in Buffalo, New York, after her.

Anna Walentynowicz remained as critical as ever of those in power when a Solidarity movement led by Lech Walesa came to share power in 1989 with General Wojciech Jaruzelski, who had imposed martial law in 1981. She accused Walesa and his circle of an act of betrayal, becoming even more embittered when Gdansk's shipyard closed as a result of Poland's shock-therapy transition to capitalism in the early 1990s. Walentynowicz retired in 1991 in Gdansk on a modest pension of 1,000 zlotys ($229) a month. When Walesa was elected president of Poland in December 1990, she was not impressed. One night he called to offer her a ministerial post, but her response was blunt indeed: "I said, 'You are disgusting—an illiterate president offering a high position to an illiterate person. What would it mean for the country?.'" Walesa would later deny having made the telephone call. In 1995, as the now highly unpopular Wale-sa fought a losing political battle for the presidency, Walentynowicz herself ran for a seat in the Sejm (Parliament). After receiving only a handful of votes—1,300 in total—she continued her feud with her former ally from the Lenin Shipyard, accusing him in an article of various reprehensible actions ranging from embezzlement to spying. Even as she entered old age, Walentynowicz gave up little of her stubbornly combative spirit, retaining the formidable personality befitting a true "woman of iron."

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