Interviews with Andrzej Gwiazda and Joanna Duda-Gwiazda

ANDRZEJ GWIAZDA: I was born on April 14, 1935. My parents had lived in the eastern sections of Poland and in 1940, in April 1940, we were deported. I mean, my father had fought on the front, you know, but myself with my mother and grandmother we were deported on April 13, to Siberia [an extensive geographical region in what was then the Soviet Union, constituting almost all of North Asia]. It seems that among those who were deported, the majority was the intelligentsia. But that was not a hard and fast rule – people were deported street by street [also]. And we spent six years there, we returned to Poland on June 11, 1946. And in Poland, well, I went to school, in 1948 we moved to Gdansk. And I live in Gdansk to this day.

JOANNA DUDA-GWIAZDA: I was born in the town of Krzemieniec – today this is Ukraine and at that time it was still Poland before the war [World War II]. I was born four years after Andrzej [Gwiazda], so in 1939. The Bolsheviks [Russian Communists] weren’t able to deport us to Siberia, because we managed to beat them to the punch, and smuggled ourselves across the border into the German-occupied zone [Poland was divided between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union through the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939]. After numerous wartime adventures, we settled in the town of Nowy Sącz [Poland].

Afterwards, I went away to study in Gdansk because I wanted to be a shipbuilder. And so I became one. I graduated with a specialty in maritime machinery and power plants from the Technical University of Gdansk. And I worked very successfully and with great satisfaction in my chosen profession, up to my retirement, which I took in the year 2000. Shipbuilding in Poland was truly a leading industry, and as for myself, I suppose that the Poles are talented in that direction because this is something that requires both precision, as well as somewhat of a holistic view. Our ships were both beautiful and well-made. And, for instance, practically every year they would claim the prize of Miss Kiel Canal – meaning the most beautiful ship passing through that canal that year [Kiel Canal is located in the German state of Schlewwig-Holstein and links the North and Baltic Seas].

There were really two centers for that – you had Gdansk and Szczecin [Poland]. There was good training, the Polytechnic Institute was very good. And on that basis the fishing industry also developed. By that I mean we built fishing trawlers, processing ships, base ships. Lots and lots of people found employment in these plants, which cooperated with the shipbuilders.

Andrzej Gwiazda, born in 1935 in Pinczow, Poland, and his wife, Joanna Duda-Gwiazda, born in 1939 in Krzemieniec, Poland, were prominent anticommunist opposition leaders in the 1970s and 1980s.

Andrzej studied electronics at Gdansk University of Technology and graduated in 1966. Joanna Duda graduated from the Gdansk University of Technology in 1963 with a degree in engineering and shipbuilding.

After marrying in 1961, Andrzej and Joanna became more active in opposition movements. Andrzej participated in the student protests against the Polish government in 1968; he also took part in the December 1970 demonstrations that were sparked by sudden increases in food prices. In 1976, the Gwiazdas wrote a letter to the Polish Parliament expressing their support for the Workers’ Defense Committee, an anticommunist underground civil society organization in the 1970s, formed to provide assistance to laborers and others persecuted by the government. Soon after, the Gwiazdas were officially banned from leaving Poland and were placed under surveillance.

In 1978, Andrzej helped to found the Free Trade Unions of the Coast and began publishing and delivering its bulletin, Worker of the Coast. Joanna worked as the bulletin’s editor. Andrzej was a member of the Presiding Committee of the Strike at Gdansk’s Lenin Shipyard in August 1980, a workers strike that attracted nationwide, popular support and forced the communists to the negotiating table. Joanna also participated in the Lenin Shipyard strike and, along with her husband, co-authored the 21 demands issued by the Inter-Enterprise Strike Committee to the communist authorities advocating for the establishment of an independent trade union and other workers’ rights. The government accepted these demands in what became known as the Gdansk Agreement.

In 1980, Andrzej became the Vice President of the Founding Committee of Solidarity, and served as the Vice President of Solidarity, the first independent labor union in the communist world that transformed into a nationwide freedom movement. Joanna was a member of the Regional Board of Solidarity in Gdansk until December 1981, when the Gwiazdas were imprisoned after the government declared martial law in an effort to crackdown on political opposition. Joanna was released in July 1982 and Andrzej was held in prison until May 1985.

While the Gwiazdas opposed the Round Table Talks that led to semi-free elections in 1989, believing that Solidarity shouldn’t meet the demands of a weakening Communist Party, they remained active in their opposition to communism until its collapse. They have since retired to Gdansk.