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If the government's modest concessions were aimed at getting negotiations started between the country's military rulers and Walesa, they did not appear to be succeeding. Walesa was still in custody in the Warsaw area. He was said to be in good health, to have access to newspapers, television and radio, and to have been visited by his wife and children, as well as by Bishop Dabrowski. One Solidarity supporter said Walesa had gone on a hunger strike, but there was no proof of this claim. Walesa has refused to issue an appeal for cooperation with the regime while so many of his colleagues are detained. He was prepared to negotiate only if the Polish Primate, Archbishop Jozef Glemp, was also present. But so far, at least, the government has shown no inclination to revive the three-way discussions that had seemed so promising only a few weeks ago.
In his Thursday night speech, Jaruzelski stoutly denied the rumors that large numbers of people had been killed in clashes between strikers and police. "I state with all resolution that reports alleging hundreds of fatalities and thousands of people arrested, held in the frost, beaten up and tortured are a lie." Jaruzelski had good reason to be on the defensive. The rumors had flourished during an almost total news blackout that he himself had imposed. But more than that, they reflected the unrest that persisted in widely scattered parts of the country.
The government still insisted that only seven people had been killed; some foreign observers in Warsaw thought the real number was considerably higher. Similarly, the estimates of people placed under detention ranged from 5,000 to 50,000 or more. Many were reportedly being held in large camps in the Mazurian lake district in northeast Poland, near the Soviet border. Others were detained in an enclosed arena built for Nazi rallies in the 1930s in the former German city of Wroclaw. Some Solidarity activists and intellectuals from the Warsaw area were first imprisoned in subfreezing cells at a camp in Bialolesa but were later moved to somewhat better quarters. A few were said to have been transferred to Czechoslovakia in order to ease the pressure on Poland's overcrowded jails.
In Silesia, along the Baltic coast and elsewhere, the skirmishes continued. In Gdansk, an unknown number of shipyard workers were said to be holed up in a building filled with highly explosive acetylene tanks. A visitor to the Baltic port city reported seeing hundreds of tear-gas canisters abandoned in the streets. In Silesia, where one mine shaft had reportedly been blown up by striking workers the week before, some 1,300 miners were still occupying another mine and were threatening to blow it up if security forces tried to break up their sit-in. The government's apparent strategy was to allow the miners to stay underground until they came out of their own accord because they were famished, cold or ill. A stalemate prevailed throughout the land. Solidarity's call for a general strike had not succeeded, but neither had the government's drive to break the strikes and sit-ins at factories and mines around the country.