Lech Wałęsa's Wall, Gdansk

By 1980 the Polish economy had been in severe crisis for five years. When the government drastically increased food prices again, the public mood in the country started boiling over with resentment about the poor living and working conditions.

Growing tensions resulted in eruption in the early hours of 14 August 1980 when Anna Walentynowicz, a 51-year-old crane driver at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk, was fired for her political stance. In a swift response to what they saw as unjust, the other shipyard workers went out on strike demanding both her reinstatement and pay rise.

The man who led the opposition movement was Lech Wałęsa, a former electrician at the shipyard who had previously been sacked by management, too, and for the same reason.

Towards 11 o’clock in the morning that same day, amid the events threatening to jeopardize planned protests and to endanger his activist colleagues, Wałęsa, locked outside the shipyard, climbed over the wall in order to assume leadership of the strike and to prevent further escalation.

This scaling of the wall became legendary and turned it into a symbol of the idea of freedom in Poland. The section of wall on Robotnicza Street over which Wałęsa had climbed into the closed shipyard was cut out and placed on display next to a section of the Berlin Wall between the shipyards and railway station, where it proudly stood until being destroyed by a car crashing into it. Currently rebuilt, the wall fragment stands outside of the Solidarity headquarters, a short walk from the shipyard gates.