Wałbrzych Solidarity

On 4 September 2016 we opened an exhibition commemorating the activity of the Wałbrzych “Solidarity”. The display, consisting primarily of private memorabilia of “S” activists, commemorates Wałbrzych's forgotten contribution to the shape of the entire, nearly 10-million-strong social movement of the early 1980s in Poland. In December 2017, thanks to a grant from the Minister of Culture and National Heritage and the Gmina Wałbrzych, we enriched the exhibition with further exhibits, display cases, a room styled on the era with an original duplicator for printed matter, and an audiovisual layer with recordings of memories of former miners, employees of Wałbrzych plants and activists of the emerging Solidarity. The most important element of this modernisation remains the film “Solidarni z Wałbrzycha”, directed by Ewa Dobrołowicz, with music by Michał Zygmunt, which can be watched both during individual visits and as part of educational classes.

The choice of venue for the exhibition on mining and Wałbrzych Solidarity is not accidental: the Thorez mine was one of the most important cradles of Solidarity. It was here, on 27 August 1980, that miners working the afternoon shift in the “Chwalibóg” shaft of the Thorez Coal Mine in Wałbrzych began a strike. It was the first mine in the country and the first plant in the Wałbrzych voivodeship to stop work and support the shipyard workers striking in Szczecin and Gdańsk. The following day, miners from the “Julia” shaft of the Thorez mine began a strike, and from that moment the place where PW Stara Kopalnia operates today became the key centre of the 1980 strike in the Wałbrzych land. Over time, workers from other mines and plants, not only from Wałbrzych but from the whole Wałbrzych voivodeship, joined the striking miners of the Thorez mine. On 28 August an Inter-Plant Strike Committee was established on the mine grounds. Among the witnesses of those events are some who claim that the start of strikes in Wałbrzych sustained the strike in Gdańsk (when information about Wałbrzych reached the shipyard workers).

On 2 September the then authorities signed an agreement with the Inter-Plant Strike Committee in Wałbrzych. It was the third in order, after Szczecin and Gdańsk, agreement in Poland. Only the following day was an agreement signed in Jastrzębie Zdrój.

Once again the Thorez mine witnessed historic events in December 1981. Just after the imposition of martial law, as a gesture of protest, a large group of workers and activists locked themselves in the chain changing room at the mine. On news of their strike, a team from the “Chwalibóg” shaft made its way through the underground workings. The strike was ultimately suppressed by force on 15 December, the day before the events at the “Wujek” mine in Katowice.

The Thorez mine in Wałbrzych is in everyday perception seen only as a monument of architecture and mining. Meanwhile its walls also remember the struggle of miners for a better tomorrow, both in social and living matters, and for values that over time became the foundation of our Polish democracy. What did they fight for? What did they want to change? What did the strike at the Wałbrzych mines look like? What were the agreements? A 33-minute film and longer testimonies of witnesses available within the exhibition will answer all these questions, while the exhibition of documents, letters and printed matter from the era, enriched with substantive commentary, completes the picture.