WARSAW, Poland (AP) — Anna Walentynowicz, a union activist whose 1980 dismissal from a Gdansk shipyard touched off strikes that led to the founding of the Solidarity movement and the eventual toppling of Polish communism, died in the plane crash that devastated the country's elite. She was 80.
Walentynowicz was an anti-communist dissident who worked with Solidarity founder Lech Walesa in the early 1980s to agitate against repressive communist rule. She worked with future president President Lech Kaczynski, also killed in the Saturday crash. Many others aboard the plane were also their ideological brethren.
Walentynowicz was the most famous Solidarity activist aboard, an iconic figure more closely associated with the 1980 strikes than anyone save Walesa. She had sometimes been referred to as the Rosa Parks of Poland — a nod to the American woman who was the public face of the American civil rights movement.
A 51-year-old widow and crane operator in 1980, Walentynowicz was only five months away from retirement when her shipyard bosses fired her for producing and distributing a newspaper critical of the regime. She handed some copies directly to her bosses.
Her fellow workers were outraged at the injustice of her firing and agitated to have her reinstated, resistance that led to strikes and sit-ins at the Gdansk shipyard and in factories across the country.
Walesa, who had also been fired for his opposition activism, jumped the walls of the shipyard and returned to his workplace to lead massive strikes.
That protest, which lasted 18 days, resulted in a historic agreement with the communist authorities which gave birth to Eastern Europe’s first independent workers’ movement. Both Walesa and Walentynowicz were allowed to return to work.
"Anna had been at the center of the events that birthed Solidarity, and along with Lech Walesa she virtually personified the 1980 strikes in the public eye," writes author Shana Penn in "Solidarity’s Secret: The Women Who Defeated Communism in Poland."
But it didn’t take long for Walentynowicz and the other female activists to be sidelined by Walesa and the other male organizers.
Walentynowicz and Walesa later turned against each other for personal and ideological reasons. She was part of a group that included Andrzej Gwiazda, another prominent opposition leader, who criticized Walesa for making too many compromises with the communists.
Walesa also suffered a falling out with Kaczynski in past years and after Saturday’s tragedy expressed remorse that he had not reconciled with his one-time allies before their deaths.
"I have to ask God for forgiveness because I made some mistakes and I don’t have a clear conscience," Walesa said in televised remarks Sunday.
Walentynowicz was born August 13, 1929, and was 10 years old when Nazi Germany and then the Soviet Union invaded and occupied the country. Her father was killed in the war and she herself fell victim to a Nazi decree that prevented Poles from continuing their education after the fourth grade — part of an effort by the Nazis to enslave Poles.
When she began her activism at the shipyard she was already widowed and had survived a near-fatal bout of cancer. Her unlikely survival from the illness left her with a sense that she had survived to carry out something worthwhile.
"It took someone like her unafraid of authority to tackle the Communist authorities of the day," said Victor Ashe, a former U.S. ambassador to Poland who said he was honored to have the silver-haired Walentynowicz as a guest as his residence on a number of occasions. "She was an amazing person who continued to express her views actively and directly."
No funeral arrangements have yet been made for Walentynowicz or many of the others killed in the crash. Many of the bodies are still being identified in Russia and most have not yet returned to Poland.
