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[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1436-E1437]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
CELEBRATING POLAND'S HISTORIC DEMOCRATIC BREAKTHROUGH
______
HON. CHRISTOPHER H. SMITH
of new jersey
in the house of representatives
Wednesday, November 13, 2019
Mr. SMITH of New Jersey. Madam Speaker, today we continue celebrating
Poland's historic democratic breakthrough 30 years ago that led to its
matriculation from dictatorship to democracy.
Today, we honor the bravery, tenacity, discipline and innate goodness
of Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Lech Walesa and Solidarity.
Some time ago, I read Lech Walesa's powerful and riveting
autobiography, ``A Way of Hope.'' Filled with insight and brutally
honest, the book walks the reader through a series of volatile events--
personal and public--that have literally transformed the world.
In the book, we get a glimpse into Lech Walesa's deep faith--and the
role his beloved mother, and her Catholic beliefs had on him;
``Neighbors came to our house to say the rosary,'' he tells us in the
book. The book is filled with remembrances of family--and his love for
his wife.
On leadership he tells us: ``I've never wished or prepared for a
leadership role: paradoxically, it's because I never really wanted it,
absorbed as I was by quite different concerns, different problems which
needed solving, that I found myself out in front, leading the others--
`leading the flock,' I call it with a smile.''
He tells us of the strike of 1970. ``All we wanted was to free our
fellow workers, we wanted no violence.'' And that his worst fears were
realized: ``Poles had fired against Poles.''
In the chapter ``The Strike and the August Agreement'' he tells us
how the movement had matured:
``Until then I had been talking, bluffing, playing `on
credit.' Although we pretended to be holding all the high
cards, our opponents knew our game inside out, they'd been
playing against us for years! But what they didn't know was
the nature of our very last card: the determination that had
been maturing for ten years now, since the death of three of
our colleagues right in front of the second entrance to the
shipyard.''
When His Holiness Pope John Paul II made his historic trip to his
homeland in 1979, he counseled his flock and his country men and women,
``Be Not Afraid.'' But Lech Walesa gave us additional insight into how
Solidarity and Pope John Paul II were ``inextricably bound together''
and how it almost ended in 1981:
``It was in Japan that we heard of the dramatic attempt on
the Pope's life. The news broke in the middle of the night
May 13-14, 1981. We were in my hotel room in Nagasaki,
discussing the events of the day, and our visit the next day
to the museum set up in memory of the victims of the atomic
bomb. The first news flash was terrifying: the Pope was dead!
The next news flash retracted it: no, the Pope was still
alive, he was fighting for his life. I was overcome by a
feeling of immense loneliness; the whole world seemed to have
turned upside down; with our lodestar gone, some of us were
wandering in a wilderness without hope. The tragedy of the
Polish Pope was also the tragedy of Poland and of Solidarity:
they were inextricably bound together; this was just the
beginning. Then the news changed, became less alarming; there
was still hope.''
In his chapter ``Martial Law,'' Lech Walesa tells us how they decided
that if the militia invaded the shipyard during the night, they decided
on passive resistance: ``Our greatest strength is precisely our
weakness--our living bodies and empty hands confronting tanks and
nightsticks.''
His wife Danuta writes in the book how she was discouraged when he
was locked up during marital law but ``he seemed rather pleasant, . . .
we had to be dignified about it all, become even in a place like this,
we still had the upper hand; we not they were making history.''
By 1989, Solidarity leaders sat across the table from General
Jaruzelski, the same General who had imposed martial law in 1981. And
they negotiated what had seemed to most of the world impossible: the
peaceful transition from communism to free and fair elections. In
August of 1989, less than a decade after the Gdansk shipyard strikes
that gave birth to Solidarity, Poland would elect its first non-
communist Prime Minister since the communist takeover.
Then Lech Walesa himself became President.
Lech Walesa tells us in the book that in his school years ``history
was my weak point.''
Studying history does not matter when you are the one who makes
history by bringing freedom, respect for human rights, and enduring
democracy not only to your own country, but many other nations as well.
[[Page E1437]]
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