Way of Hope

A Way of Hope: An Autobiography by Lech Walesa, 311 pages

Lech Walesa was an electrician in the Gdansk shipyards who became a leader in the labor struggles around which Solidarity coalesced.  Two years after the publication of the English edition of A Way of Hope, Solidarity would force the collapse of the Communist government in Poland, the first domino in the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and ultimately the USSR itself.  At that time Walesa would become the first democratically elected President of postwar Poland.  Part of the interest this book holds is that it was written in the midst of the struggle, when the outcome was anything but clear.

The book was originally published in a French translation of the Polish manuscript, being banned in the author's native land.  The style is clumsy and awkward, but this only enhances the evident honesty of the book.  Scenes of chaos, such as the riots during the 1970 strike, are remembered as a confused jumble of impressions, not smoothed out into a clear narrative.  Frequently reminiscences from friends and family are interposed, simply dropped right into the middle of a chapter, but these help round out the portrait of the man and his time, often revealing more about the author than the sections he wrote himself. 

The book presents Walesa as a very human figure, entirely fallible and often out of his depth, whose greatest virtue seems to be his sheer mulish stubbornness.  It is difficult to read A Way of Hope without thinking of Havel's greengrocer, the ordinary man who simply refuses to continue to be complicit in a lie.  Indeed, Walesa's status as a worker was self-confessedly part of his success - the workers instinctively distrusted the intellectuals in the movement but accepted him as one of their own, supporting him in spite of the inevitable missteps and setbacks.  The book is clear, too, about his greatest assets - Walesa "was strong because he spoke the language of truth", and, as he said of Bl Jerzy Popielusko, he was determined "to answer evil with virtue."