Politics of the past: the use and abuse of history - Socialists ...

In front of the post office a plaque in the form of a grave stone commemorates
the victims of this first day of the Second World War. A
few meters from the entrance a huge shining steel heroic statue
produced in the heydays of social realism signs the praise of these
patriots.
The shipyards, less than a few hundred meters away from the post
office, tell another story. There an even more enormous monument
asks to be listened to. And it is the name of Lech Wałęsa that is
whispered by the wind blowing through the 40 meter tall steel
crosses erected on Solidarity Square. The monument remembers
the forty four victims of the 1970 strike of Gdansk, Gdynia and
Szczecin, but also the peaceful uprising of 1980, which marked
the starting point of Solidarność, since it was one of the main issues
in the list of demands at the 1980 negotiations between the communist
authorities and the protesting workers that there should be
a memorial erected for the victims of that massacre.
The foot of the monument shows a series of bronze bas-reliefs, one
of these plates quoting a poem by another Polish Nobel prize
winner, Czesław Milosz, that reads:
You, who have wronged a simple man,
Bursting into laughter over his suffering
DO NOT FEEL SAFE – another will be born
Words and deed will all be written down
This first monument, constructed in a communist country during
communist times to commemorate the victims of this same communist
regime makes clear that Stalin’s saying ‘quoted by Wałęsa
himself quite regularly) “fitting communism onto Poland was like
putting a saddle on a cow” turned out to be correct in the end. Even
the strongest oppression, even the killing of people could not stop
the Poles from aiming at freedom, freedom of speech, belief, and
assembly.
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