Poland: Recalling in Sorrow and Hope

Two years ago, Solidarity was born, and changed a nation

Free trade unions. An end to the Polish government's meddling in daily life. A greater voice in public affairs. Until two years ago last week, these lofty goals were only the dreams of a handful of militant workers and intellectuals. Then, quite unexpectedly, during two momentous weeks in August 1980, everything in Poland changed.

Workers at the Lenin shipyard, in the Baltic seaport of Gdansk, laid down their tools on Aug. 14 and refused to leave. As news of the strike spread, an unemployed electrician named Lech Walesa climbed over the shipyard's iron-bar fence and into history. Under his leadership, the workers demanded higher wages, an earlier retirement age, better food supplies and, in a daring political challenge to the regime, the right to organize independent trade unions.

The movement quickly inflamed the Polish spirit. Thousands of ordinary citizens began to mass outside the shipyard's main gates, decorating them with flowers, ribbons, papal portraits and red-and-white banners. And before the year was out, Solidarity had finally become a reality, a free trade union, 10 million members strong and powerful enough to transform the political life of Poland.

Since the imposition of martial law almost nine months ago, Solidarity has once more become the stuff of dreams, its organizational structure crushed and its leader, Walesa, under house arrest. While calling on Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev at his summer retreat on the Black Sea last week, Poland's leader, General Wojciech Jaruzelski, labeled the tattered remnant of the suspended trade union a "counterrevolutionary underground, whose activities are inspired and supported from the outside, mainly from the United States."

In case that message might be lost in any upsurge of nostalgia on the second anniversary of the birth of Solidarity, security police turned Gdansk into an armed camp and quickly dispersed a crowd of 200 young demonstrators. In Warsaw, several hundred Poles braved water cannons to add flowers, greenery and pictures of Walesa and Pope John Paul II to the now famous cross laid out in Victory Square to honor the late Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski. But late last week authorities sealed off the square with a sturdy 6-ft.-high gray wooden fence. Still, as one veteran Western diplomat in Warsaw said of these latest acts of derring-do: "This is what Poles do best. But what does it gain them?"

Despite such displays of support for the suspended trade union, Poland's military leaders have made it clear that any new national accord will have to be on their terms or not at all.

There have been signs that some fac tions in Solidarity have reluctantly begun to take to heart the government's tough talk. A bulletin issued this month by the leadership of an underground Solidarity chapter at the Lenin shipyard at Gdansk called for calm and restraint so that the government would have time to honor its commitment to continue reform. Economic hardships have clearly blunted the enthusiasm of many supporters for a confrontation with the regime.