Polish freedom icon Anna Walentynowicz dies age 80 in plane crash with Polish president

Polish freedom icon Anna Walentynowicz dead at 80

WARSAW, Poland — Anna Walentynowicz, a union activist whose 1980 dismissal from a Gdansk shipyard touched off strikes that led to the founding of the Solidarity movement and the eventual toppling of Polish communism, died in the plane crash that devastated the country’s elite. She was 80.

Walentynowicz was an anti-communist dissident who worked with Solidarity founder Lech Walesa in the early 1980s to agitate against repressive communist rule. She was close to President Lech Kaczynski, also killed in the Saturday crash. Many others aboard the plane were also their ideological brethren.

Walentynowicz was the most famous Solidarity activist aboard, an iconic figure more closely associated with the 1980 strikes than anyone save Walesa. She had sometimes been referred to as the Rosa Parks of Poland — a nod to the American woman who was the public face of the American civil rights movement.

A 51-year-old widow and crane operator in 1980, Walentynowicz was only five months away from retirement when her shipyard bosses fired her for producing and distributing a newspaper critical of the regime. She had handed some copies directly to her bosses.

Her fellow workers were outraged at the injustice of her firing and agitated to have her reinstated, resistance that led to strikes and sit-ins at the Gdansk shipyard and in factories across the country.

Walesa, who had also been fired for his opposition activism, jumped the walls of the shipyard and returned to his workplace to lead the massive strikes also fed by anger over hikes in food prices.

“I was the drop that caused the cup of bitterness to overflow,” she once said, according to the weekly magazine Przekroj.

That protest, which lasted 18 days, resulted in a historic agreement with the communist authorities which gave birth to Eastern Europe’s first independent workers’ movement. Both Walesa and Walentynowicz were allowed to return to work.

“Anna had been at the center of the events that birthed Solidarity, and along with Lech Walesa she virtually personified the 1980 strikes in the public eye,” writes author Shana Penn in “Solidarity’s Secret: The Women Who Defeated Communism in Poland.”

But it didn’t take long for Walentynowicz and the other female activists to be sidelined by Walesa and the other male organizers.

“They ignored her in the next phase,” Penn said in a telephone interview Tuesday. “But she didn’t go out quietly. She always insisted on (reminding the public) that she played an important role and that she still had something to say.”

She appeared as herself in “Man of Iron,” director Andrzej Wajda’s acclaimed 1981 film about the birth of Solidarity, and also served as the inspiration for “Strike,” a 2006 fictionalized version of her story made by German director Volker Schloendorff.

Walentynowicz, though the godmother of one of Walesa’s eight children, eventually turned against him for personal and idelogical reasons. She felt he took too much credit for himself in the eventually victorious struggle and that he made too many compromises with the communists.

Kaczynski also turned against Walesa, and the two carried out a very public rivalry.

After Saturday’s tragedy Walesa noted that he hadn’t spoken to Kaczynski in five years and expressed remorse that he had not reconciled with his one-time allies before their deaths.

“I have to ask God for forgiveness because I made some mistakes and I don’t have a clear conscience,” Walesa said in televised remarks Sunday.

Walentynowicz was born August 13, 1929, and was 10 years old when Nazi Germany and then the Soviet Union invaded and occupied the country. Her father was killed in the war and she herself fell victim to a Nazi decree that prevented Poles from continuing their education after the fourth grade — part of an effort by the Nazis to enslave Poles.

She was initially attracted to communism and belonged to the party but eventually became disillusioned with their “lies and manipulation of the workers,” Penn said. “She wasn’t afraid to expose hypocrites.”

When Walentynowicz began her activism at the shipyard she was already widowed and had survived a near-fatal bout of cancer. Her unlikely survival from the illness left her with a sense that she had survived to carry out something worthwhile.

“It took someone like her unafraid of authority to tackle the Communist authorities of the day,” said Victor Ashe, a former U.S. ambassador to Poland who said he was honored to have the silver-haired Walentynowicz as a guest as his Warsaw residence on a number of occasions. “She was an amazing person who continued to express her views actively and directly.”

No funeral arrangements have yet been made for Walentynowicz or many of the others killed in the crash. Many of the bodies are still being identified in Russia and most have not yet returned to Poland.