Anna Walentynowicz, a Solidarity activist whose firing started the Gdansk shipyard strike in 1980 and helped spread trade-union activism against the communist regime in Poland, died in the Katyn plane crash in Russia.
Walentynowicz accompanied Polish President Lech Kaczynski and other senior officials on the flight to the Smolensk region, where they were to pay tribute to more than 20,000 Polish military officers massacred by Soviet secret police in the Katyn forest and other parts of Russia 70 years ago.
Walentynowicz, 80, worked in the Gdansk shipyard as a welder and a crane operator. In 1978, she joined an illegal trade union and edited its newspaper.
For her participation in the opposition movement, she was fired on Aug. 7, 1980, five months before her scheduled retirement. Her colleagues started a strike, ultimately led by Lech Walesa, calling on management to put her back to work.
“Anna Walentynowicz is one of the mothers-founders of Solidarity, in a way a godmother of Solidarity,” Gdansk Mayor Pawel Adamowicz said by phone. “She became a catalyst. She embodies the protest against evil.”
Walentynowicz fought for equality, human dignity and truth, Adamowicz said.
She criticized Polish society as it emerged after the communist regime was abolished in 1989, because the change did not bring well-being to everyone, he said.
She declined the flowers that Adamowicz tried to hand her last year for her birthday, said Adamowicz’s spokesman, Antoni Pawlak.
Walesa called an end to the shipyard strike on Aug. 16, 1980, after management agreed to re-employ fired workers and raise wages. Walentynowicz opposed this move, demanding that protests should continue until all workers’ concerns were addressed.
This created a conflict between Walesa and Walentynowicz that communist-era secret services tried to use to discredit Walesa. She opposed helping the secret police damage Walesa, historian Slawomir Cenckiewicz said in an article about Walentynowicz published by Polish daily Rzeczpospolita on Aug. 13.
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