Poland

By Wayne Svoboda

"The impression was of an absence of solidarity between social groups here in Gdansk, even at home, in the same building and stairway, an overwhelming solitude, fear and uncertainty. And despite everything, the feeling revolt was necessary." Thus Lech Walesa, Nobel Peace Prize laureate and leader of the now banned Solidarity trade union movement, describes his political awakening a decade before Solidarity was born. Walesa's 604-page autobiography, A Path of Hope, published last week in France, contains no new or explosive disclosures, but it eloquently and simply portrays brave citizens pitted against a political tyranny. Without ever explicitly saying so, Walesa's story lays waste Communism's historic claim that it represents the interests of workers. Noted the French newspaper Le Figaro: "It is thrilling. Page after page Walesa creates himself before our eyes."

Walesa begins by recounting how his family struggled to survive on its farm in eastern Poland after his father was sent to a concentration camp by the Germans during World War II. Only two months after his release in 1945, Walesa's father died. At 24, the young rural mechanic, one of seven children, grew bored with his job and moved to the Baltic port of Gdansk, where he became a shipyard electrician. He describes himself as a typical peasant worker, "not really belonging to the city, nor the countryside, a wage earner in appearance only, profoundly attached to his farm." Such men and women were pragmatic, practicing Catholics with little interest in the abstract Communist orthodoxy of Poland's Soviet-backed rulers. Their main concern was poverty. Shipyard conditions were harsh. Once, Walesa writes, 22 workers were burned alive while welding a ship whose fuel tanks had been filled early to save time. When police shot and killed at least 45 workers during a 1970 shipyard strike, Walesa fully realized the isolation of Polish workers. "We were outside the West's field of interest," he observes. In 1973, after Walesa had married, his mother and stepfather left for the U.S. "The beautiful life only glowed for an instant," writes Walesa. "They returned in lead-lined coffins. America changed nothing."

Rather than escape, Walesa tried to come to grips with Poland. The book charts Solidarity's rise, beginning with the watershed 1980 Gdansk strike he led. "I compare Polish society after August 1980 to a beggar who lives in a + corner of a lovely house which he does not own, and then suddenly he finds that he has owned it all along." The joy was short-lived. Solidarity was suspended after martial law was declared in December 1981 and outlawed one year later.

The book ends with Walesa's explanation of the private outrage but public silence of many ordinary Poles after the murder by police of Activist Priest Jerzy Popieluszko in 1984. "This death should not go unanswered," writes Walesa. "But our response will be a coolly reasoned one, imposed on us by our conditions and the peaceful means that we have chosen." Yet his overall tone is optimistic. "Sometimes I feel that I already belong to a period of the kind incarnated in our national anthem, Poland Is Not Dead Yet!"

Walesa spent a year writing the book, which has sparked a heated publishing dispute. The manuscript was smuggled from Poland to the French publisher Editions Fayard after the New York City-based firm of Holt, Rinehart & Winston, which had initiated the project, asked for extensive revisions. The book, explained a Holt editor, lacked the "authentic voice" of Walesa. That did not stop Fayard, which translated the text into French and secreted it back to Walesa and his aides for approval. So far, Warsaw officials have not commented on the book, which is certain to burn up Poland's underground publishing network in coming weeks.

With reporting by William Dowell/Paris