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There wasn't a cloud in the sky on the day I met Lech Walesa in Gdansk earlier this year. A gentle breeze stirred. I extended my hand to the slayer of communism. He reciprocated humbly, I thought, without eye contact. Stocky and gray-haired, Walesa greeted me in a traditional Polish way:
"Quickly, quickly, let's get this over with," he said. "I don't have much time."
I had been warned. Taxi drivers, retirees, priests, doctors, an owner of a Christian radio station—most of them former Solidarity members—all got red in the face when I told them I was going to interview Lech Walesa. "He squandered his opportunity!" most of them said, as if they'd had a chance to rehearse before I crossed paths with them in various Polish cities. The ensuing litanies accused Walesa of making deals with the communists, not to mention megalomania, greed, pride, verbal gaffes, and stupidity.
But, before I met with Walesa, I was too Americanized to take my unscientific survey of Polish public opinion at face value. The one exception was the Walesaisms, Poland's equivalent to Bushisms. Walesa has always been known in Poland for his entertaining malapropisms and other miscues—such as when he exclaimed "I am pro, and even con!" or when he talked about "positive and negative pluses." As to the more serious indictments, I attributed them to jealousy and a complaining spirit, Poland's lingering inheritance from communism. Is it Walesa's fault that he banked a hefty sum for his Nobel prize? Is it his fault that he's received 30 (and counting) honorary doctorates from institutions ranging from Harvard through St. Ambrose University in Davenport, Iowa, to Pontificia Universidad Catolica Madre Y Maestra in the Dominican Republic? Surely he deserved them all for freeing Poland from communism.
Another, more powerful, reason why I didn't want to see Walesa's darker side had to do with my family's history. On June 28, 1956, my grandfather built his own glass ceiling by joining the first big anti-communist demonstration in Poland, on the streets of Poznan. The citizens' militia (police in communist times) killed many protesters, including two of grandpa's friends. Following the strike, grandpa was reprimanded and a communist crony began to shadow him. His pay, benefits, and promotion opportunities were lowered. Years later, other family members and relatives joined Solidarity. My father, a regional head of Solidarity, was among those who voted for the spirited electrician from a Gdansk shipyard to become the head of the union.
I left Poland in the early '90s, just in time for my idealized view of Walesa and Solidarity to remain intact. My ignorance of Walesa's current status in Poland resembled that of the American public.
During the Cold War and shortly after the Soviet Union's collapse, when Walesa became Poland's first democratically elected president in 1990, the American media devoted an enormous amount of coverage to Eastern Europe. It was easy. Even those who didn't believe the Soviet Union was an evil empire had a clear framework for disagreement. The rise of Solidarity was a tidy, morally unambiguous story, whose actors belonged to two camps: bad (communists) and good (anti-communists).
The story was so neat and thrilling—genuinely so—that it's surprising that Hollywood hasn't made a movie about Walesa yet, with DeNiro cast as the protagonist. The script is already written. It could come straight from a Time magazine profile: "Sacked from his job" for his involvement with opposition groups, the "fly, feisty, mustachioed electrician," son of peasant farmers, climbs over the fence of the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk to join the occupation strike in August of 1980. He soon becomes the leader of the strike and then head of Solidarity, scaring the hell out of the bad guys.
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