Lech Walesa, former Polish president, to visit New York in support of Occupy Wall Street
Lech Walesa, former Polish president, to visit New York in support of
Occupy Wall Street.
Lech Walesa led shipyard workers in the general strike at the Gdansk Shipyard in communist Poland in 1980, that became the independent, non-communist, self-governing trade union, Solidarity, which in turn became a nonviolent movement for workers’ rights and social change. Its existence put into play several key components that made possible the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union.
The women shipyard workers, led by Anna Waletynowicz, fought for worker rights and social justice issues against the Communist Polish government, the so-called ‘workers’ party, for the years prior to being joined by the general strike at Gdansk in 1980. Waletynowicz suffered extreme persecution for her courageous actions, among them, editing and distributing an underground newspaper and openly defying superiors’ orders again and again. The Polish director Andrzej Wajda’s films, Man of Marble, then Man of Iron, were based on her life. She died in the plane crash last year that also took the lives of the President of Poland, Lech Kaczynski, his wife, the First Lady of Poland, Maria Kaczynska, and other important members of the Polish government. They were traveling for a 70th anniversary commemoration at the site of the 1940 Katyn massacre of 22,000 Polish POW officers and citizens ordered by the Soviet government . ~ yours truly, df
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