Obituary: Anna Walentynowicz

ANNA Walentynowicz was a labour leader whose sacking as a crane operator at the Lenin shipyard in Gdansk in 1980 touched off the strike that led to the founding of Solidarity and the unravelling of Communism in Poland.

She was in her early 50s when she came to prominence, and was known as "the grandmother of Solidarity" and the "conscience of the movement".

A welder, then a crane operator, she was a fiercely determined organiser whom her bosses considered a troublemaker. At a time when political opposition to the Communist government was sprouting throughout Poland, her dismissal on 7 August, 1980, ostensibly for participation in anti-government activity, prompted a strike at the shipyard. She was sacked only five months before her scheduled retirement.

A memorable moment in the strike came when workers meeting with management refused to keep talking unless Walentynowicz were present. The shipyard director sent his car to pick her up. When she arrived, workers showered her with cheers and flowers.

After strikes erupted elsewhere in Poland, the government reinstated Walentynowicz, as well as Lech Walesa, the Solidarity leader, who had also been fired but returned to help lead the Gdansk strikers.

The authorities also agreed, with only slight modifications, to worker demands for guarantees of free speech, pay rises and official recognition of the Solidarity union. Within two years, the union would have ten million members. "If we didn't press them to the wall before, we would not have got anything," Walentynowicz said of Solidarity's threat of a general strike to win concessions.

One of her provocations was publishing an illegal newspaper, copies of which she not only distributed to workers but also personally handed to her bosses. Each December, she was arrested for collecting money for flowers in memory of workers who had been shot in 1970 by police as they protested over food shortages.

Walentynowicz was orphaned during the Second World War and had to go to work as a maid at the age of ten. In 1950, she was hired at the Gdansk shipyards and trained as a welder. Because of her small size, she worked in the airless hulls of ships. She later learned to operate a massive crane.

She also joined the Communist Party, but soon began to question Communism. She said she had been shocked to be told at a meeting of young Communists in East Berlin that party members should lie if convenient.

Walentynowicz was further radicalised by the 1970 massacre of workers, which set off civil disturbances that brought down the government of Wladyslaw Gomulka. Yet the reforms promised by the government that replaced Gomulka's "turned out to be another lie", she said.

In May 1978, she helped set up independent labour unions to oppose state-sponsored ones. She also became associated with the Committee for Social Self- Defence, which emerged after increases in food prices set off riots in July 1976.

In his book Breaking the Barrier: The Rise of Solidarity in Poland (1991), Lawrence Goodwyn wrote that Walentynowicz enraged Gdansk supervisors in the summer of 1978 when, in her underground newspaper, she reported on their spending on luxuries. She was quoted as saying that she felt free to take political risks because she was a widow and because her son was in the military.

When the authorities fired Walentynowicz, they said she had stolen candle stubs from a nearby graveyard to make new candles to mark the anniversary of the 1970 killings.

Solidarity went on to surge in popularity, and in December 1981 the government responded by imposing martial law. But in 1989, Solidarity triumphed in parliamentary elections, ending Communist rule.

Walentynowicz was among the victims of the plane crash last Saturday that killed dozens, including the Polish president.