Sunday, August 26th, 2007:
This morning I went to Mass at Saint Brygidy’s church, a block away from the building where I’m renting a room. The famous Gdansk shipyards are close by, and the church was a stronghold of the Solidarity movement back in the communist days — Lech Walesa regularly went to Mass there. The church has plain walls, made of brick; the inside is unfinished, with high, vaulted arches overhead.
After Mass I looked around the niches along the sides of the church: one has a memorial to a martyred Solidarity priest with red and white banners overhead: “God, Honor, Homeland”; another has some sort of reliquary made out of gold and amber; next to it there is a memorial to the thousands of victims of the Katyn massacre: black roses and barbed wire made out of wrought iron.
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Ten minutes walk to the north, the memorial to the dockworkers slain during a protest in 1970 is similarly grim: three gigantic crosses made out of distressed concrete and aluminum, rising eight stories above a mound of concrete fragments that have been mortared together again. An enormous anchor is nailed to the top of each cross. Around the base of the crosses and on a wall nearby there are black metal plaques showing scenes, names and ages: the oldest victim was 61, the youngest was 15. After a millennium of invasions and occupations by everyone from Genghis Khan to Hitler and Stalin, it’s a strong, dark brew of politics, religion and national identity here in Poland.