I entered the former Solidarity stronghold of St. Brygida’s Church just as Mass was starting, and immediately noticed the music: it wasn’t just an organ or a choir but an entire brass band that was playing up in the loft. The church was packed and I found a space to stand in the back with the other latecomers. It was Friday evening, the 31st of August, and we were there to commemorate the 27th anniversary of the Gdansk Agreement, when, among other concessions, striking shipyard workers had won the right to form the first independent trade union in the Soviet bloc: Solidarity.
A double row of union members carrying banners progressed down the aisle along with a bishop, several priests and altar servers. I was struck by the union members’ dress: while some of them wore navy blue uniforms like the band members, others simply wore clean blue coveralls or smocks and a white hardhat with the word “Solidarnosc” written in crimson letters on the side. In the pews there were more uniforms, as well as many older people wearing their faded Sunday best.
During Mass I watched the grizzled, tough looking men that held the banners in the aisle (there were a few women and younger members too) and thought about how many of them had been in the gray industrial scenes I vaguely remembered from television footage and news photos I’d seen as a child, when the Cold War was still in effect, and sometimes, before falling asleep at night, I would wonder if the world would be destroyed in a nuclear war. Listening to the emotional tone of the bishop’s homily and the music from the band, I choked up: I was in the presence of heroes, the men and women who had struck the blow that created the first crack in the communist bloc; the ones who had done so much to create the new world order, the new Europe, and the new Poland of today.
After Mass, the new Poland was in evidence as I followed the march from the church to the Plac Solidarnosc (Solidarity Square): while the union band played, we passed by kids handing out promotional flyers in front of shiny new boutiques and malls, while young Polish men and women dressed in the latest fashions walked by on their way to night out on the town.
At the Plac Solidarnosc, the shipyard cranes loomed in the background like the legs of an enormous arachnid. I have never seen them moving: the shipyards have not been able to keep up in the free market economy, even though they have been subsidized by the government, and the workforce is down to less than a fifth of what it was during their heyday. Now that Poland has entered the European Union, the Polish government has been told that the yards must be privatized. Lech Walesa, former Solidarity leader and later president of Poland, likened it to “liquidating your mother”.
The speeches at the square sounded more like political harangues than commemorations – the union has a political arm, although it is now a marginal player in Polish politics. The crowd was thin, the applause was tepid, I was hungry, and it was getting cold and dark, so I decided to leave. The last thing I saw, as the band heralded another speaker’s approach to the podium, was a group of Polish kids off to one side: one of them, wearing fashionably distressed jeans and an expensive sweater, was aping the Solidarity members, marching in time with the music while his friends pointed and laughed. Then – like others have done, in other ways – I turned away and left the union there behind me.