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The church too gained from the new liberalizations. Just three weeks after the Gdansk accords were signed, the voice of Bishop Jerzy Modzelewski, who was preaching from the pulpit of Warsaw's Church of the Holy Cross, echoed across the country. It was another first: the beginning of regular Sunday radio broadcasts of the Mass, something the church had been seeking in vain for decades. Other concessions followed. Priests and nuns, for example, were allowed to do pastoral work in hospitals and other state institutions.
Previously banned authors were published again, including Nobel-prizewinning Poet Czeslaw Milosz, a prominent defector of the '50s who returned to Poland for a triumphant visit last June. Adam Mickiewicz's Dziady, a 19th century play with anti-Russian overtones, was shown on television. State employed actors elected a new director of the national Polish theater, Kazimierz Dejmek, who had been ousted from the troupe during the 1968 purges. Political films like Workers 80, a documentary on the Lenin shipyard strike, and Andrzej Wajda's Man of Iron, a fictionalized version of the Gdansk events (in which Walesa played a walk-on part), cleared the censors and played to packed houses in Poland.
A liberal new passport law led to an unprecedented freedom of movement. Lech Walesa, the Communist regime's most prominent critic, traveled almost as freely as a Western jet-setter. In January he made an emotional trip to Rome to see Pope John Paul II. Falling to his knees, Walesa kissed the papal ring and then briefly resisted the Pope's efforts to pull him to his feet. The union leader then had a rare private meeting with the Pope, which lasted for half an hour. Later, in his public remarks, John Paul II warmly supported Solidarity. "I wish to assure you," he told Walesa, "that during your difficulties I have been with you in a special way, above all through prayer." He declared that the right to form free associations was "one of the fundamental human rights." But the Polish Pope also cautioned Walesa to follow a moderate course.
Thousands of less illustrious Polish travelers also crossed the borders unimpeded, although many failed to return: some 33,000 Poles fled to Austria and became official refugees during the year, a dramatic reflection of Poland's economic and political uncertainties.
One of the most striking cultural changes was the frank treatment of the Polish past. Solidarity persuaded the regime to throw out thousands of schoolbooks that twisted and falsified Polish history. The memory of Marshal Jozef Pilsudski, Poland's popular anti-Soviet mili tary leader between the world wars, was rehabilitated and recognized even by the Warsaw government. Near the Lenin shipyard, three 138-ft. towers, crested by symbolically crucified anchors, were erected to commemorate the strikers killed by government troops