My Solidarity Memories from Gdańsk

Abstract

Like most members of my generation, I grew up with vivid memories of the brutal suppression of workers' protests in Gdansk in December 1970. At that time, the communist authorities ordered the army and the police to open fire on the protesters. About 45 people were killed - most of them secretly buried by the security forces - and about 1200 were injured. It was an entirely avoidable national tragedy and the source of national trauma, leading to the formation of organised opposition and the creation of an underground free trade union movement in Poland. I witnessed this tragedy - the most important formative experience for my generation - while serving in the Polish Navy. During a purge of Polish universities in May 1969, I was conscripted to the navy for two years from the post of medical registrar, while finishing my PhD in the Nephrology Department, Medical School of Gdansk, under a prominent medical scholar, Professor Jakub Penson, who was himself suspended from the position of Vice-Chancellor. Nevertheless, when I was conscripted, Penson found for me through his friends in the army a position in a small navy garrison on the Westerplatte Peninsula in Gdansk and helped me to finish my doctorate while I was serving in the navy. On Westerplatte, I was in charge of a clinic and a small hospital. Some of my patients were university students conscripted for three years' military service as punishment for activity in democratic opposition. I also had under my care soldier-conscripts from Catholic seminaries who were forced to take three years of military service in the Navy Artillery. They were subject to intense 're-education', which was shorthand for brainwashing, involving lectures and parties with local prostitutes, all aimed at 'ideological conversion' of the young clerics. On 15 December 1970, when the clashes between the police and the protesters started in Gdansk, I was on duty at the Nowy Port Garrison, charged with attending the injured policemen. Fighting in the city was very intense, and there were more than 400 injured policemen brought in for emergency treatment. Almost all of them were under the influence of alcohol and drugs given to them by officers before their deployment. While putting them in plaster (to immobilise them temporarily), I could not stop thinking about the carnage they might have inflicted on the protesters. Two days later, army helicopters fired at the workers arriving by trains at Gdynia Shipyard and more people were killed. The navy was not involved in the clashes, and it was a great relief when, after a few more days and a change in communist leadership, there was a political 'thaw'. But there was also a growing concern about the 're-educated' soldiers. When a few warships entered Westerplatte and I had an opportunity to chat with navy crews, I discovered that they were thoroughly brainwashed. Political officers convinced the soldiers that the protests were provoked by German 'revanchists', and that the police and the army defended the 'Polish Gdansk'. Ten years later, I was a university lecturer and director of the Nuclear Medicine Department at the Medical School of Gdansk, busy completing my habilitation (advanced research degree). I had a new boss, a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, who was reorganising the Medical School on the Soviet model. In spite of political pressures, we had at the university a small but active group of oppositional critics, mostly young doctors and students, who called themselves 'Young Poland'. They were unofficially allied with underground free trade unions that formed in the late 1970s. When protest started to spread again in spring 1 980, this was a sign of forthcoming upheavals. Indeed, the spring wave of strikes was followed in July- August by a new wave that spread to the Gdansk Shipyard. This time there were no street marches like those that had triggered violence 10 years earlier - only strikes in the factories. …