Lech Walesa -- winner of the Peace Nobel Prize
The Struggle and the Triumph: An Autobiography by Lech Walesa, with contributions by Arkadiusz Rybicki, edited by Franklin Phillip. Paperback. Reprint. Arcade Pub: January 1994.
Perhaps there are as many versions of history as there are people in the world. Lech Walesa's autobiography definitely gives a very important perspective on recent history of Poland. Born in a family of modest means in a provincial location of Poland, he moved to the seaport city of Gdansk, where he got a job as an electrician at a shipyard. Poland was then ruled by a totalitarian government subservient to the Soviet Union. Walesa became involved in a nascent pro-democracy movement to become its celebrated leader in 1980. He was elected the president of Solidarnosc, a newly founded free trade union of 10 million members. He was also a charismatic leader of a broader non-violent movement for democracy and independence referred to by the same name. The Communists defended their power by martial law, but they were faced with sustained peaceful resistance while their Moscow allies were loosing strength. Against all odds, despite imprisonment of thousands of activists, government-sponsored killing of more than a hundred people and thousands of other acts of governmental persecution, the Poles overcame Communism and made Walesa their first post-Second World War democratically elected president. As it happens in democracies, Walesa was voted out of office at the end of his first term, but Poland is an independent republic today and the story of the Polish blue-collar-worker-turned-president will forever be one of the most important parts of 20th century European history. Click on the title to get this autobiography!
-- Marcin Zmudzki
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