Polish Paper Prints Rare Account of ’81 Shooting of 9 Miners
An official Polish newspaper Saturday published a rare account of the police shooting of nine miners in 1981, the bloodiest confrontation during a crackdown that suppressed the Solidarity trade movement.
The killings near the southern city of Katowice have become a symbol of the brutality of the effort to suppress the Soviet Bloc’s only independent trade movement.
“In order that wounds could cure completely, it is necessary to expose them . . . ,” said the article in the weekly Odrodzenie, or Rebirth.
The battle began when miners went on strike to protest authorities’ attempts to quash Solidarity.
The article quotes witnesses who described how police entered the Wujek mine in a tank and armored personnel carriers and attacked the miners with tear gas, water cannons and grenades.
“We saw the tank enter the mine’s ground, breaking the barricade we had erected,” the article quoted Kazimierz Rembilas, a former mine employee, as saying. “Then shots were fired. In the noise and chaos one could not see who was shooting and from which direction. There was a moment of shock. I heard cries: ‘They are killed.’ Even then I could not believe they were shooting at us.”
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