Ghostly Call for Defiance

Speaking on tape, a banned Solidarity leader urges resistance

Officially, the ceremony marked the anniversary of the 1944 Warsaw uprising, in which 245,000 Poles died trying to drive the Nazi occupiers out of their capital. But the Poles who filed through the neat, birch-lined paths of Warsaw's Powazki Cemetery last week also had a message for their present rulers. Gathered at the base of a ten-foot-high monument to the Home Army, the non-Communist resistance group that organized the 1944 revolt, about 1,000 supporters of the suspended Solidarity union sang hymns, raised their hands in V-for-victory signs and called for the liberation of Lech Walesa, the union leader who remains under detention in southeast Poland.

Suddenly a young man shinnied up the sandstone column. Just below the royal Polish eagle that crowns the monument, he placed a camouflaged box containing a tape recorder. From its speaker emerged the voice of Zbigniew Bujak, 27, one of the union's most active underground leaders. Declared Bujak: "We will continue our struggle for freedom and the independence of our motherland." It was a pointed reminder that the people had not abandoned their demands for greater freedom, despite the recent liberation of some 1,200 detainees and a vague promise from Party Boss General Wojciech Jaruzelski that martial law might be lifted by the end of the year.

There were other such reminders on that anniversary day. In the early morning hours, the authorities moved into Warsaw's Victory Square and, for the fifth time since May, swept away the 40-ft. flower cross that serves as a popular memorial to the late Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski. By the time official military ceremonies began at noon at the adjacent Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, Warsaw residents had already begun to rebuild their cross. While government delegations laid wreaths to the solemn beat of drums, several hundred people gathered around the new cross, praying, flashing V signs and singing their own modified version of the national anthem. It includes such defiant lines as "Lead us Walesa, from the coast to Silesia/ Push on to victory, Polish Solidarity." The police removed the cross the next three days in a row.

Two days after the rally in the cemetery, a commentator in the party daily Trybuna Ludu recommended that Solidarity be declared a "closed chapter" and called for new unions organized at the factory level that would be similar to and as powerless as those in effect before Solidarity's birth in August 1980.

There were signs last week of more active resistance in the future by Solidarity. A series of appeals, signed by Bujak and four other underground Solidarity leaders on July 28, began to circulate around the country. One set forth a twelve-point program for a resistance movement aimed at freeing the remaining detainees, lifting martial law and reestablishing Solidarity. Another called for making the union "exceptionally visible" between Aug. 16 and 31, the second anniversary of the strikes that culminated in Solidarity's founding.

Whether or not the Polish people dare respond to that call with widespread demonstrations, knowing that their jobs may be at stake, they have already made it clear that they are resigned neither to martial law nor to the permanent end of the democratic "renewal" that swept their nation for 16 months.

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