I shouldn’t have worried, when on a later trip I met one of the most prominent women of Solidarity, Alina Pienkowska (known for rallying the 1980 strikers and being a leader in the Solidarity Movement) – her hair frizzed out around her head as wide as it was long, and no one held it against her. But another story Joanna told me about herself and Alina was the night that the communist arrested all the Solidarity leaders after they had attended an important meeting and dinner. Joanna and Alina were rounded up by the Zomo, along with Grazina Kuron (married to Jacek Kuron iwho s considered a founding father of the Solidarity Movement as head of the Intelligentsia – which gave credibility and importance to the movement), and many other women.
Joanna always laughed about that night because when the Zomo knocked on her door, they told her that Poland had been an invaded. She asked them who had invaded Poland, and they couldn't give her a straight answer, because it was the Poles themselves -- General Jaruzelski -- who had declared Martial Law, and had invaded his own (unarmed) citizens!
The story Joanna told about herself is that after she had spent a great deal of time in prison, without the luxury of being able to wash her hair all that time, she spent every day of the rest of her life in Poland worrying about if her hair was washed just in case she was arrested again (and she was – many times). Women worry about things like this. It’s awful to have dirty hair while your stuck in a hell-hole. I just had messy hair – but we think of these stupid things at the most bizarre times.
The story about Alina is fairly humorous. On that same night, the Zomo rounded up all the women and threw them in a “paddy” wagon and drove around for hours to confuse the women as to where they were exactly. Since they had all eaten quite a lot at the dinner, they were beginning to feel the pressure to relieve themselves. So Alina asked the guard if they could please go to the bathroom. The guard mostly just ignored her request – but she became more and more insistent. Finally the wagon pulled over at the edge of a forest, and the guards told them they could go over to the field and remedy their discomfort.
But Alina thought about it, and remembering Katyn Forest (where the Russians executed about 22,000 Polish officers, policemen and civilians), decided that she did not want to die in such an undignified manner, while squatting to pee.
The story about Grazina was heart-wrenchingly heroic. Once, while Grazina was in prison, she acquired a virulent form of Tuberculosis. The communist decided to use this to their advantage. They needed to get her husband, Jacek Kuron out of the country in order to utterly defeat Solidarity, so they made her an offer: they offered to send her to a sanitarium in either Sweden or France to recover, if she would take her husband with her.
Grazina was not stupid. She knew what the dull-witted commies were up to. She knew that with her husband out of Poland, Solidarity would fail. So she stalled in answering their offer in order to buy enough time to get a message to her husband that the commies would be coming to him to tell him that she had TB, and that her only hope was to leave the country, and he should go with her. Her message to him was that it was just another communist lie; she was not ill; and they were using her to get him out of the country; and he should not, under any circumstances, fall for it.
Sure enough, when Grazina refused their offer they went to Jacek and told him that her only hope to live was for him to take her out of the country for treatment. Armed with Grazina’s assurances, he also refused. Grazina died a few months later, to Jacek’s great sorrow. But he knew what she had done, and that she had given her life for the cause of her country.
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