Anna Walentynowicz (1929-2010)

Anna was born on 15 August 1929 in the eastern territories of the Second Polish Republic (now Ukraine), in Sienne (now Sadowe) in Volhynia, to a Ukrainian peasant family of Pryśka and Nazar Lubczyk. The family were members of the Shtundist Protestant minority and practiced a restrictive faith.[1] Anna hid her Ukrainian roots throughout her years in communist Poland, and her complicated fate, which is not a typical biography, is perhaps symbolic of the complexity of Polish-Ukrainian relations in the 20th century.

After the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939, the multi-ethnic Volhynia (where Ukrainians, Poles, Jews and Germans lived) became part of Stalin’s spoils as a result of the division of the lands of the Second Polish Republic between the Third Reich and the USSR. Two years later, when Hitler went to war with his former ally and occupied the region, bloody ethnic cleansing began: first the German-led extermination of the Jews and then, in 1943, the slaughter of the Polish inhabitants of Volhynia’s villages by units of the Ukrainian National Union (OUN). As a twelve-year-old, Anna was sent to serve in a manor house of a Polish family, and did not return to her Ukrainian family home when the purges began, but fled the Sienne region with her masters, the Teleśnickis, eventually making her way to central Poland.[2] It was probably the echoes of these events that led Walentynowicz, first as a girl living in Poland and later as an adult woman, to erase her Ukrainian family from her biography almost forever.

[1] See more: D. Karaś, M. Sterlingow, Walentynowicz. Anna szuka raju [Anna searches for paradise], Kraków 2020, pp. 6-30.

[2] I. Hałagida, Nieznane dzieciństwo Anny Walentynowicz [Unknown childhood of Anna Walentynowicz], Pamięć.pl 7.8 (2016): 47-50.

Like many children from villages before the war, she only completed four years of primary school. From the age of twelve to twenty, she was a servant to the Teleśnicki family, who moved to central Poland and eventually settled permanently in Gdańsk. After the war, Anna Lubczyk felt more and more humiliated by working hard for nothing more than board and lodging. She became determined to learn a trade and become independent at the same time as the Stalinist system was being introduced in Poland. In 1949, twenty-year-old Anna believed that the future belonged to her. She shared the fate of many girls and young women who believed in the visions of universal progress that communist propaganda targeted at the young people who were moving in great numbers from the countryside to Polish cities.

Walentynowicz never denied that in the 1950s she believed deeply in the state’s promises of social justice and advancement of the masses. For her, it was the only real chance of improving her social status. Her life is an excellent example of the path of a self-made (wo)man.[1] In 1950 she became a welder in a shipyard, a job that was considered masculine and very difficult, and of which she was justifiably proud. That same year she became involved in the leading communist youth organisation, the Union of Polish Youth.[2] As an exemplary worker and activist in the youth movement, Anna Lubczyk was sent to participate in the international Third World Rally of Young Peace Fighters in Berlin (August 1951). This was her first, albeit strictly controlled, visit outside the borders of isolated communist Poland. After her return from Berlin, she became involved in the labor rivalry movement. Local newspapers praised her as an exemplary “hero of labor”, able to achieve 270 per cent of the norm. She was active in trade unions, where she chaired the Women’s Committee from 1957. Finally, in 1966, after fifteen years as a welder, she was transferred to a position of an overhead crane operator because of her poor health (she had been diagnosed with cancer).

She gave birth to a son in 1952. Her situation as a single mother in post-war Poland was extremely difficult, not only financially, and Anna broke off contact with the child’s father, refusing to turn to him for help. Due to the widespread housing problems of the time, she had to live with her friends and later even in the Mother and Baby Home in Gdańsk. She got married twelve years later, in 1964. Her husband was a friend from the shipyard, locksmith Kazimierz Walentynowicz. They lived together for eight years. She became a widow in the autumn of 1971.

[1] A. Muller, “The Mother of Solidarity”: Anna Walentynowicz’s Quest in Life.” Rocznik Antropologii Historii 7 (2014): 73. http://rah.pth.net.pl/uploads/2014_2_Płeć/Muller.pdf, p. 55.

[2] S. Cenckiewicz, Anna Solidarność. Życie i działalność Anny Walentynowicz na tle epoki 1929-2010) [Life and work of Anna Walentynowicz in the epoch 1929-2010], Warsaw 2010, pp. 41-42.

In December 1970, Anna Walentynowicz was an eyewitness to the bloody events on the Polish Coast that led to the downfall of the First Secretary of the Polish United Workers’ Party, Władysław Gomułka. This protest, which was a turning point for Polish workers’ opposition, began as a result of a drastic increase in food prices and ended with the deaths of forty workers killed by police and army bullets. At the time, Walentynowicz was still playing a role stereotypically ascribed to women: cooking meals for the protesters. But a few weeks later, in January 1971, as a result of the events of December, when her fellow shipyard workers were killed, she organised another protest, and on 25 January she took part in talks with the new Communist authorities as a delegate elected by the crew.

What she saw on the streets of Gdańsk in December 1970 cemented her critical attitude to the state, which she felt had long since betrayed workers’ ideals. In her view, a key demand to be made of those in power was that a monument be erected at the gates of the shipyard to commemorate the tragedy. Collections for the construction of the monument and the wreaths laid on successive anniversaries of December 1970 soon attracted the attention of the security service, the political police of the Polish People’s Republic.

In June 1978 Anna joined the ranks of organised opposition. She became involved in Poland’s second independent workers’ organisation, the Free Trade Unions of the Coast (WZZ Wybrzeża), founded on 29 April that year by Andrzej Gwiazda, Krzysztof Wyszkowski and Antoni Sokołowski.[1] There she met other female activists: Joanna Gwiazda, Maryla Płońska and Alina Pienkowska. She let WZZ hold meetings in her flat in the Gdańsk-Wrzeszcz district, at 49/9 Grunwaldzka Street.[2]  Her political involvement inevitably affected her situation as a shipyard worker. The management tried to deprive her of her influence on the crew by transferring her (“delegating”) to new tasks in remote areas of the yard, such as the Berlin hall (as far away from the people and the main gate of the yard as possible). She received written and verbal reprimands for being disruptive, and financial penalties which were deducted from her wages. She was threatened with violence.

“The Gdańsk shipyard continues to wage war against a crane operator. The management cannot accept that a simple female worker has her own opinion, dignity and courage,” commented the editors of the underground magazine Robotnik Wybrzeża. “The managers are spreading a rumor that she is mentally ill. … The war continues. Who or what is Anna Walentynowicz a threat to?”[3]

[1] The Free Trade Unions of the Coast were set up based on the model of the Free Trade Unions of Silesia, which were founded in February 1978.

[2] S. Cenckiewicz, A. Chmielecki, Anna Walentynowicz 1929–2010, Warsaw 2017, p. 21.

[3] Quoted in: D. Karaś, M. Sterlingow, Walentynowicz, op. cit., p. 222.

In the end, on 7 August 1980, as workers across the country began to protest in the wake of another political and economic crisis, Anna Walentynowicz was dismissed from the shipyard on disciplinary grounds.[1] The activists of WZZ Wybrzeże, led by Bogdan Borusewicz, saw this as a political opportunity to launch a mass protest. On 14 August 1980, a strike began at the shipyard that was to be decisive in the history of the Solidarity movement, and started with the demand for the reinstatement of Anna Walentynowicz. A leaflet that was printed illegally in 8,000 copies recalled the biography of the exemplary worker who had been awarded the Bronze, Silver and Gold Crosses of Merit, who had worked for independent trade unions, and who had been illegally dismissed from the shipyard after 30 years’ service, five years before her retirement: “If we cannot stand up to this, there will be no one to speak out against an increase in norms, violations of health and safety or mandatory overtime. It is therefore in our own interest to defend such people. That is why we are calling on you to speak out in defence of the crane worker Anna Walentynowicz. If you do not, many of you may find yourselves in a similar situation.”[2]

Under pressure from the strikers, led by Lech Wałęsa as chairman of the strike committee, the management backed down and Anna was reinstated two days later. On 14 August, Walentynowicz addressed a crowd of striking shipyard workers for the first time and also took part in negotiations with the shipyard management. On 16 August, the management finally agreed to wage rises, the construction of the December 1970 memorial and the reinstatement of dismissed workers.

Officially the strike was over, but the protests had already spread throughout the Tri-City, and representatives of the striking factories, many of them much smaller than the shipyard, called on the shipyard workers to support their demands. According to the official, largely mythologized narrative of August 1980, the Solidarity strike was saved by women: Anna Walentynowicz, Alina Pienkowska and Ewa Ossowska. They spoke to the shipyard workers at Gate 3, who were leaving the factory tired of the strike, and appealed to their consciences to support other factories. In practice, however, this was of little use. In fact, only a few hundred strikers remained in the shipyard on 16 August, but this in no way diminishes the role that Free Trade Unions women activists, including Anna Walentynowicz, played in August 1980. Although most shipyard workers went home that night, an Inter-Factory Strike Committee (MKS) was set up under the leadership of Lech Wałęsa. Walentynowicz represented the Gdansk Shipyard on the Presidium. She was also among those negotiating with the Church and party authorities to organize the first mass for the shipyard strikers.

[1].: Anna Walentynowicz, [in:] Encyklopedia Solidarności [Encyclopedia of Solidarity]. https://encysol.pl/es/encyklopedia/biogramy/19299,Walentynowicz-Anna.html [access on 27.07.2023]

[2] “Do pracowników Stoczni Gdańskiej” (“To the workers of the Gdańsk Shipyard”) leaflet, from the archives of Bogdan Borusewicz, quoted in: D. Karaś, M. Sterlingow, Walentynowicz, op. cit., p. 235.

Walentynowicz then co-wrote the strikers’ ground-breaking 21 demands, which opened with the call for setting up trade unions independent of the authorities. Finally, on 31 August, she was one of the signatories of the August Agreements, which paved the way for the establishment of the Independent Self-Governing Trade Union “Solidarity” (NSZZ “Solidarność”), an unprecedented event in the history of the Eastern Bloc countries. She also immediately became involved in organizing the new trade unions. Until 3 April 1981 she was a member of the Presidium of the Gdańsk Shipyard Founding Committee and a member of the Presidium of the Gdańsk Inter-Factory Founding Committee, where she was responsible for finances and the intervention department.

At the same time, Walentynowicz came into conflict with Lech Wałęsa. She thought he did not have the qualities that would make him a trustworthy leader of the rapidly expanding national union. He would push her away from meetings that, in his view, required “political instinct.” We can see here the influence of stereotypical gender perceptions that would later influence the scarce presence of women in Solidarity’s top leadership. In addition, some trade union leaders perceived Walentynowicz as too radical and prone to political recklessness, whether she was talking to a police officer, a fellow trade unionist, a foreign journalist or a priest. She was notorious for making often unsubstantiated accusations of collaboration with the secret police, which may have been partly due to her sense of being threatened (up to a hundred secret police officers were said to have been involved in keeping tabs on Walentynowicz, and her apartment was constantly bugged and surveilled by the Security Forces). She was also a staunch opponent of any concessions to the Polish United Workers’ Party and General Jaruzelski, who was in power at the time. In the spring of 1981, Walentynowicz was quickly losing her position at the Solidarity. She was also denied a seat at the organisation’s September congress.

After martial law was declared on 18 December 1981, she was interned, first in the Bydgoszcz-Fordon Detention Centre and then in Gołdap, where she remained until July 1982. After her release, she was soon sent to a detention center and then to a prison in Grudziądz. She was tried in March 1983 and sentenced to one year and three months’ imprisonment, conditionally suspended for three years, for her involvement in organizing a strike in December 1981. She was arrested again on 16 December 1983 for attempting to commemorate the massacre of miners at the Wujek mine. She spent the next four months in custody. In February 1985, she led a hunger strike in a Kraków parish following the murder of Fr. Jerzy Popiełuszko.

She also continued to criticize the Solidarity leadership gathered around Lech Wałęsa. This criticism became particularly significant in the second half of the 1980s, when the union’s conciliatory policy crystallized, which led to the Round Table Talks, i.e. talks between the opposition and the communist authorities on the possibility of a peaceful transformation of the system. Her personal conflict with Lech Wałęsa affected not only Walentynowicz’s biography, but also – to some extent – the history of Poland’s post-1989 transformation. Anna Walentynowicz was strongly opposed to the agreement from the spring of 1989 and to most of the post-Solidarity governments. Her return to the mainstream history of Solidarity in Poland occurred after her death, in 2015, when the Law and Justice government came to power in Poland.[1] Anna Walentynowicz died in the crash of a Polish government Tu-154M plane in Smolensk, Russia, on 10 April 2010, during a flight to commemorate the anniversary of the Katyń massacre.

[1] Far from being the result of a gender turn in the Solidarity narrative, this was an attempt to deconstruct previous historiography by stripping Lech Wałęsa of his heroic status.