In 1982, Dodd, Mead & Co. (NY) published the first U.S. book on the Polish Solidarity Movement and its charismatic leader, Lech Walesa.
It was titled Strike for Freedom!—a collaboration between Polish radio journalist Rafal Brzeski and myself. (Rafal’s byline did not appear as he was concerned about possible retribution from General Wojciech Jaruzelski’s military government after the general took power and declared martial law to suppress the Solidarity Movement.)
At Rafal’s invitation, I had flown to Warsaw in the summer of 1981 and enjoyed a front row seat of the drama playing out—a pivotal point in modern history that would ultimately lead to the end of the Soviet empire and freedom for Eastern Europe.
Concerned that Solidarity was a big city movement engineered by Poland’s intelligentsia, I insisted on driving out to the boonies to test the affect Solidarity was having on people in rural towns and villages.
Rafal, of course, obliged, and off we raced in his tiny yellow Fiat-ski—”a box on wheels,” I called it—to Wysokie Mazowieckie, the ancestral village of my paternal grandparents, from which they emigrated to the USA in 1913.
Later, I wrote about that experience in Strike for Freedom!
Here is that passage:
Solidarity’s social impact can perhaps be best examined by assessing the change it affected on the small Polish town.
Wysokie Mazowieckie, the birth place of the author’s paternal grandparents, lies eighty miles northeast of Warsaw, not far from the Soviet border. It is a sleepy agricultural community with a population of approximately fifty-five hundred.
Like everywhere else in Poland, Wysokie was plagued with drastic shortages when the author visited the town in July 1981. Its sole restaurant had no food, only tea. More than 75 percent of its business was conducted through bartering, a system popularly known as “friends-connections.”
Wysokie’s farmers grow their crops without fertilizer, pesticides, cement, steel, wood, or machinery. In 1980 they were in a crisis situation. Their wheat harvest was catastrophic; their potato harvest down by 75 percent, and they produced only one-half their normal quota of sugar beets. Despite their excellent soil, agricultural factories were never built in Wysokie. Polish patriots fought Soviet soldiers in the forests around Wysokie until 1951, and consequently, Wysokie and its neighboring towns have been refused state funds ever since. Theirs is a punished area.
But almost incredibly, morale in Wysokie was strong in early summer 1981. Its Solidarity branch had been formed in October 1980. It had a nine-member Executive Committee and half of Wysokie’s population had joined.
Before then, the local Party administration had run everything in Wysokie. Corruption was widespread among the privileged Party elite. The union openly challenged that system. If someone was unfairly dismissed from their job, as was a hospital nurse who refused to permit a Party bigwig to cut into a line for treatment, Solidarity intervened.
Explained an official of Wysokie’s church, himself a union member: “The Party governs the stomach [it controls jobs and wages]; the Church governs the soul; Solidarity tries to minimize the Party’s governance of the stomach.”
The union’s most active campaign in Wysokie was to combat alcoholism, one of Poland’s foremost social problems. In June 1981, the local Solidarity executive demanded that authorities shut down a notorious tavern known as Szatan (Devil’s Bar). By August, Szatan had been converted to a milk bar.
The union’s executive demanded that the ground floor and basement of the local Party building be transformed into a kindergarten. The Party acquiesced with barely a whimper, fearful of a strike.
Another union project was the resurrection of an important monument in Wysokie’s main square. Erected originally in 1928 to commemorate ten years of Polish independence, the monument had been torn down and buried in the town square during the Stalin era. Inspired by the new freedom Solidarity assured them, Wysokie’s citizens had become intent on “digging up the history of Poland.”
What I did not write in my book:
There were no records of my ancestors to be found in Wysokie.
The parish priest, who kept the town records, went silent when I told him (through Rafal, translating) that my father’s grandparents were of Jewish heritage.
It was an awkward moment.
For not only had Wysokie gotten rid of its Jews (all trained to Auschwitz) but, after stealing their property and possessions, Wysokie destroyed any and all traces that they ever existed.
Sometimes, as a journalist, you learn more than you bargained for.