In Europe
calm and white. The farms were asleep, the village chimneys were smoking, snow drifted beside the tracks.
Gdansk is smaller and more intimate than you would expect. It is the perfect city for strikes, uprisings and revolutions. The cranes at the shipyards, the church steeples, the hotel apartment for the foreign press, the inner city with its Dutch Renaissance houses, all are within fifteen minutes’ walk of each other. How many revolutions have failed because the movement was too diffused, too fragmented? Here it is the very opposite, here you can literally shout freedom from the housetops and everyone will hear.
It was in this forest of churches and cranes that it all started, the tiny fissures that ultimately brought about the earthquake of 1989. An enormous strike in 1970, bloodily beaten down, put an end to Gomulka's old brand of communism. In 1976, an assistance committee for the families of those who had been arrested formed the basis for Solidarity, an opposition movement – openly supported by the Polish-born Pope – which soon had approximately ten million members. A strike in 1980 at more than 300 locations led to freedom for the trade unions, and to Mass being read on the radio each Sunday.
The December 1981 coup by General Wojciech Jaruzelski turned back the clock for a time, a state of emergency was declared, but it was too late: the influence of the church and trade unions on broad sections ofthe population could no longer be undone. In addition, the country's economic problems had become more than the regime could handle. A round-table conference in January 1989 – by which time the country's annual inflation had risen to 600 per cent – finally brought free elections and freedom of speech. Gdansk was the place where it all began, and that was no coincidence, for it was here that all of communism's weak spots overlapped: religion, nationalism, rebellious industrial workers, the obstinacy of an old German Hanseatic port, a clear organisation and a wind that always came blowing in from overseas.
Former dockworker Kazimierz Rozkwitalski drives me around the town. That is where the synagogue used to be. Burned down on the Kristallnacht in 1938, it is now a car park. This seaside bunker still bears the bullet holes from September 1939, the first shots fired in the Second World War. Look, the Gestapo used to have its headquarters over there, they started murdering intellectuals here right after the occupation began. Here we have the town hall, bombed to rubble in 1945, but can you really tell it wasn't built in the Middle Ages?
Kazimierz is a wonderful storyteller, and his German is excellent. Where did he learn it? He lets the name roll from his tongue. ‘
Inge Zimmermann, hundertachtzig Procent Nazi!
’ Between 1939–45 she hammered the German language into his youthful skull, and there it remains. He shows me the former Lenin dockyard, now Stocznia Gdańska SA. An enormous monument of stainless steel, anchors and crosses makes sure no one overlooks the fact that this is historic ground. Here was where the electrician Walşesa delivered his first speeches, here began the decline of an empire. One tattered banner is still hanging.
Why, after all the other failures, was it in Poland that the revolt against the communist
nomenklatura
finally succeeded? ‘After the Soviet Union, Poland was by far the biggest communist country in Europe,’ Kazimierz reminds me. ‘It had two or three times as many inhabitants as the other Eastern European countries.’ In addition, there was the all-powerful church. And the outspoken Polish patriotism. Plus a weak communist tradition. ‘The regime always left loopholes. For us, the common workers, the 1970s under Edward Gierek were perhaps the best years of all, it was never as good again after that. We always had work and food, we were allowedto go on holiday, some of us already owned cars, the schools and hospitals were well organised. That's more than you can say these days.’
January 1990: the Polish Communist Party disbands itself. September 1993: the last Soviet troops leave Poland. August 1996: Gdansk's Lenin dockyard goes bankrupt. And now? We walk through the slush, the dockyard is a city in itself. ‘
Tot
,’ Kazimierz murmers, ‘
tot
’, just the way he learned it from Fraulein Zimmermann. ‘Fifteen years ago this place was full of ships and stevedores. There were still 30,000 people working in the harbour then. Today there are only 3,000. Of
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