Anna Walentynowicz

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Anna Walentynowicz

Anna Walentynowicz , maiden name Anna Lubczyk (born August 15, 1929 in Równe , Poland , today Ukraine ; † April 10, 2010 near Smolensk ) was a worker at the Lenin shipyard in Danzig and a founding member of the Solidarność union .

Plaque on the house where Anna Walentynowicz lived until her death.

Life

As a worker at the Gdańsk Lenin Shipyard, Walentynowicz was a problem for the authorities most of the time. She was honored for her conscientious welding work, but at the same time she did not want to accept the fact that men were paid better than women if the plan was exceeded. Because of her complaints, she was arrested for the first time in 1953 and interrogated for eight hours. Nevertheless, she managed to become a crane operator, but she was offended again when she complained about the embezzlement of funds by a member of the shipyard management. In the 1960s and 1970s she was active in a banned workers' group and supported the strike movement in 1970 . At the end of 1978 she helped found a free trade union.

Along with Lech Wałęsa , she was one of the best-known founding members of Solidarność during the strikes in August 1980 . She was dismissed without notice by the shipyard management on August 7, 1980. At this point, Walentynowicz was only five months away before she would have reached retirement age. Her dismissal on August 14 led to the strikes that led to the establishment of the first free trade union Solidarność and, at the end of August, to the August Agreement between Solidarność and the communist regime. Walentynowicz and Wałęsa were then reinstated.

In the 1980s, however, the pensioner resigned from the union because she did not agree with the policies of the union leadership around Wałęsa. Likewise, after the political change in 1989, she repeatedly appeared as a critic of the politics of the political parties that had emerged from the union.

On April 10, 2010, Walentynowicz was part of a Polish delegation headed by President Lech Kaczyński , who was to travel to the memorial in Russia on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the Katyn massacre . In a plane crash of the delegation near the Smolensk-Nord military airfield , however, she and other high-ranking representatives of Poland were killed.

On September 24, 2012, it was announced that the remains of Anna Walentynowicz and Teresa Walewska-Przyjałkowska had been swapped. After receiving new documents from the Russian authorities, the military prosecutor ordered the exhumation of both bodies because they suspected possible misidentification by family members. The suspicion was confirmed. The exhumation of Walewska-Przyjałkowska, who was buried in Gdansk instead of Walentynowicz, was accompanied by demonstrations with the participation of PiS MPs and allegations that the government only wanted to cover up further traces of their failure.

Honors

In 2000, Walentynowicz was to be made an honorary citizen of Danzig, but she refused, and she also refused an honorary pension, which the Polish Prime Minister Marek Belka offered her in 2005. She also did not take part in the celebrations for the 25th anniversary of the creation of Solidarność.

In contrast, in 2005 she accepted the American Truman-Reagan Medal of Freedom from President George W. Bush , and on May 3, 2006, Polish President Lech Kaczyński awarded her the Order of the White Eagle , Poland's highest honor.

Own work

Film adaptations

The German director Volker Schlöndorff filmed the protagonist's life story in Danzig with Katharina Thalbach as “Agnieszka” in a German-Polish co-production , against the resistance of the protagonist . Thalbach received the Bavarian Film Prize for this in February 2007 . The film Strajk - Die Heldin von Gdansk ran in German cinemas on March 8, 2007, in Poland it had started shortly before.

In 2002, director Sylke Rene Meyer created the 58-minute long documentary Who is Anna Walentynowicz? with Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR), in which Anna Walentynowicz tells her own life.

References

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Web links

Commons : Anna Walentynowicz  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Marilyn French: The War Against Women. 1992, pp. 59-62.
  2. ↑ Znów spór o Smoleńsk, Gazeta Wyborcza of September 27, 2012
    • Syn i wnuk Anny Walentynowicz: Straciliśmy resztki zaufania do polskich władz, Gazeta Polska from September 19, 2012.
personal data
SURNAME Walentynowicz, Anna
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Lubczyk, Anna (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Polish worker
DATE OF BIRTH August 15, 1929
PLACE OF BIRTH Równe , Poland
DATE OF DEATH April 10, 2010
Place of death Smolensk , Russia