1. Perburuhan - Biografi

Indeks : Index ; In response to the French edition of Lech Walesa's vivid autobiography and narrative history of Solidarity, Le Figaro noted: "It's thrilling-page after page. Walesa creates himself before our eyes." Even more extraordinnary is the opportunity readers are offered to witness a great social revolution as it unfolds and in the words of its leader-rather like overhearing Danton or Robespierre during the tumultuos days of the Frech Revolution. Walesa begins by recounting how his family struggled to survive on a small farm ini Popowo, southest of the Baltic port city of Gdansk, after Nazis had sent his fatherto a concentratin camp. Two months after his release in 1945, his father was dead. Two decades later, the twenty-four-year-old rural mechanic eith the golden hands, one of seven children, moved to Gdansk, where he became a shipyard electrician. Conditions were harsh; two years before the historic 1970 Gdansk strike in which fifty co-workers were gunned down by the militia, a score of welders rushing to complete work on a ship were burned alive while working on a hull whose burned alive while working on a hull whose fuel tanks had been filled to save time. The impression in the north and through-out luckless Poland (in which invasions and partitions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were repeated in the twentieth) was of an absence of citizen solidarity, even within the hallways and the stairways of the building workers shared. Walesa describes "an overwhelming solitude, fear, and uncertainty together with the certain knowledge that Europe and the West had abandoned Poland" even after the people's claim for legitimacy was circulated during the Walesa-led 1980 strike and Gdansk Accords.Five hundred days of legalized Solidarity followed-the social revolution that formed an alliance between co-workers, peasants, and intellectuals and soon claimed support from seventy percent of the Polish people. Walesa demontrates that the movement's opposition to state tyranny was based upon social justice, human rights, and the building of an alternative society. The movement's activities were carried on largely undergrounf after December 13, 1981, when martial law was declared. A way of hope captures, in Walesa's plain and muscular prose, the leading personalities on both sides of solidarity's enduring struggle to offer an authoritative and dramatic memoir by the man who has written a historic and lasting chapter in contemporary world history.