An important piece of information about those young years is that I was a Boy Scout of the 1st Warsaw Boy Scout Troop, called the Black No. 1 [Czarna Jedynka]. This had kind of a cult following and was significant, it originated 3 subsequent members of the Workers’ Defense Committee (KOR) [The Workers’ Defense Committee was an anti-communist underground civil society organization in the 1970s, formed to provide assistance to laborers and others persecuted by the government. Many of Solidarity’s leaders were also active in KOR.].
My apologies – it was four, not three. So out of 35 members of the Workers’ Defense Committee, four had been Boy Scouts in a single vintage class of the Black No.1. So these were Piotr Naimski, Antoni Macierewicz, Wojciech Onyszkiewicz and myself. Piotr Naimski, and Wojciech Onyszkiewicz were both in my platoon. Macierewicz joined us later. Actually it was already after we graduated from school. He was not really part of the Black No. 1, he later was part of a circle of camp counselors, older boys, college students, who were attached to the Black No. 1.
So the Black No. 1 was a significant place. And even to this day there are good things going on there. Well, this was a game, really. Together with the aforementioned Piotr Naimski, Wojciech Onyszkiewicz and Antoni Macierewicz – but of course there were many more of us, it was the Black No. 1 you know – we went out on June 24, 1966, which is an important date because there was a High Holy Mass in St. John´s Cathedral in Warsaw, celebrated by the Primate of Poland, Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski.
This was the climactic point for the celebrations of the so-called Millennium – the thousandth anniversary of the Baptism of Poland, held in the Warsaw Cathedral on June 24, 1966. [The conversion to Christianity of the Polish King Mieszko I in 966 is regarded in Poland as the conversion of the country to Christianity and called the Baptism of Poland.] So the Primate called on those assembled to make sure that there were no demonstrations of any kind, but we were 16, 17 years old, we were not about to go out there without causing some kind of a disturbance. So we lined up in a regulation file and blocked off the mouth of this small street, Świętojańska Street, which opens up on Castle Square, right outside the cathedral.
There was a throng of people there – tens of thousands of people, maybe fifty thousand, assembled in Castle Square and outside the cathedral, so we wanted to cause some tension in the crowd and then at a certain moment we started to shout some anti-state slogans. And so we led the crowd to the so-called White House – the headquarters of the Central Committee of the Party, because that was about the only thing that occurred to us to do. So the humorous element of this whole situation was that the Security Service had been unable to get wind of us in any way because, for all intents and purposes, we were children.
So in light of that they were completely unprepared, they had no notion that anyone could do something like that. So we ourselves were dumbfounded, because we had expected to be broken up after 100 or 200 meters of marching. So this was a kind of a game really. But they did not break us up. So when we were already approaching the White House and they were still not reacting, then we were getting pretty nervous about what to do next. So we reached St. Alexander´s church right near the Parliament building and there we simply made our separate ways. But by that time they started to catch us one by one from the head of the column. But then they let us go really quickly.
The reason I told you about this was because the only significance of this is that when people feel free or a person feels free, he or she gets joy just out of the act of contradicting authority. If we had been allowed to walk on the street pavement, you know the act of stepping off the sidewalk onto that pavement is always a moment of incredible joy of taking possession of something that belongs to you – the street is ours. It is simply that.
And I remember that at the very moment that we are taking possession of the pavement, that the cars have to stop for us, we’re yelling something, we’re singing something and these were not any anti-regime songs by any means, they were just songs, without any significance. But the important thing is that when the person feels free they experience joy in taking that freedom. And this was shown time and time again in the life of our group.
Andrzej Celinski was born on February 26, 1950, in Warsaw, Poland. Celinski graduated from the University of Warsaw with a degree in social sciences. After graduation, he became actively involved in several opposition movements including the Workers’ Defense Committee and Solidarity.
Celinski began organizing protests against Poland’s communist regime at an early age. As a teenager in 1966, he rallied thousands of people gathered for a High Holy Mass at Saint John’s Cathedral for a peaceful, anti-government march to the Communist Party headquarters in Warsaw. Celinski joined the 1968 and 1970 protests that were suppressed by the government.
Following the 1980 Lenin Shipyard strike in Gdansk, Celinski was tapped as an expert advisor to the Founding Committee of Solidarity, the first independent trade union in the communist bloc. Soon after, the members of the committee recognized his ability for organization and appointed him the secretary of the board of the Founding Committee. In this position, Celinski was tasked with structuring and organizing the body’s meetings. When authorities declared martial law and officially banned Solidarity in December 1981, Celinski was arrested for his activism and spent a year in prison.
After the fall of communism in Poland, Celinski was elected as a senator from Solidarity and served from 1989 to 1993. Celinski was then elected to parliament where he served for over a decade, including a stint as minister of culture from 2001 to 2002 in Prime Minister Leszek Miller’sgovernment.
Twitter: https://twitter.com/AndrzejCeliski1
Poland is a central European country bordered by the Baltic Sea, Belarus, Ukraine, Germany, Russia, Lithuania, Slovakia and the Czech Republic. Poland has a population of 38 million people; nearly 90 percent are Roman Catholic.
Poles struggled against foreign dominance from the 14th century and the modern Polish state is less than one hundred years old. Polish borders expanded and contracted through a series of partitions in the 18th century. After a brief period of independence and parliamentary democracy from 1918 to 1939, World War II brought occupation by Nazi Germany and the near annihilation of the Jewish population. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Poland’s Jewish population went from over 3 million in 1933 to 45,000 in 1950.
After the war, Poland became a Soviet satellite state and a communist system was imposed. Farms were collectivized, basic freedoms curtailed, and a culture of fear developed under a Stalinist regime. The 1960s brought greater prosperity and some liberalization. Labor protests in the early 1970s tested the communist government’s resolve and prompted modest reforms.
In 1978, Polish Archbishop and Cardinal Karol Wojtyla became Pope John Paul II, the first non-Italian to hold the position since the 16th century. The pope’s triumphant return to Poland in 1979 saw massive outpourings of public support, shaking the foundations of the government and inspiring the opposition to press for peaceful change.
In 1980, shipbuilders in the seaport city of Gdansk united to confront the government. Their calls for greater political liberties and improved working conditions developed into the Solidarity movement. Solidarity’s leader, Lech Walesa, became the movement’s voice. Protests and unrest spread throughout the country and the communists replaced their leadership. General Wojciech Jaruzelski became prime minister and declared martial law on December 13, 1981. Solidarity was outlawed and Walesa and other Solidarity leaders were imprisoned.
While martial law was lifted in 1983, Poland continued to stagnate. Mikhail Gorbachev’s elevation to leadership of the Soviet Communist Party in 1985 brought new pressures for reform in Poland. A failing economy and continued repression incited workers to a new wave of strikes in 1988. A desperate regime agreed to legalize Solidarity and conduct semi-free elections. In the 1989 parliamentary elections, Solidarity won 99 of the 100 Senate seats and 160 of the 161 lower house seats they were allowed to contest. Tadeusz Mazowiecki, a Solidarity leader, became Poland’s first non-communist prime minister in over four decades. In 1990, Lech Walesa was elected president with 74 percent of the vote. While Solidarity splintered as Poland democratized, a coalition government of anti-communist parties won fully free parliamentary elections in 1991.
Poland transitioned to a market economy and applied for integration into western institutions. Economic dislocation returned the former communists, now social democrats, to power in 1993. Free elections and peaceful transitions in the following decades solidified Poland’s multi-party democratic system. Reforms eventually led to a more robust economy and Poland joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1999 and the European Union in 2004.
In Freedom House’s Freedom in the World 2013, Poland earned the status “Free,” (as it has since 1990) receiving the best possible rankings in the categories Political Rights and Civil Liberties.
See all Poland videos