Word: gdansk
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Many residents of Gdansk and other cities the Pope would not visit came to Warsaw to see him. Jammed ten deep along the route of John Paul's motorcade, they raised homemade signs naming the cities from which they had come. Like the heroine of a Delacroix painting, one robust woman boldly thrust a banner reading GDANSK WELCOMES YOU toward a column of police as the procession filed past. The crowd roared its approval...
...supposed to return home in August 1982 for the celebration at Czestochowa but the military crackdown intervened and Jaruzelski postponed the trip. When the government finally invited the Pope, he asked Jaruzelski to grant a general amnesty. The authorities adamantly refused. Warsaw also balked at including the cities of Gdansk and Lublin in the papal itinerary, fearing that supporters of the banned union, which was particularly strong in those two cities, might use the Pope's visit to stage demonstrations. The Vatican, for its part, would not give the government advance copies of the Pope's speeches except...
...fathers flashed the victory sign. If the procession, at times, had the air of a carnival, there were also moments of solemnity as the marchers joined in a chorus of O God, Who Has Protected Poland, a nationalist hymn sung by the shipyard workers who went on strike in Gdansk in August...
...Pope's 1979 visit, jammed Warsaw's Tenth Anniversary soccer stadium for an open-air Mass on the second day of the Pope's visit. Some of them had arrived more than 24 hours early in order to greet the Pontiff. The crowd included delegations from Gdansk, Poznan, Radom, Lublin and other Polish cities. There were uniformed boy scouts, nurses in white tunics, peasant women in brightly colored scarves, and Silesian miners in black uniforms and tall hats topped with black feathers. Farmers from Lowicz, 50 miles southwest of Warsaw, were dressed in their native costume: straw...
...crowd caught sight of the Pope arriving in his bulletproof car, hundreds of thousands of hands shot into the air in a V-for-victory sign. Red-and-white banners bearing the words SOLIDARITY and GDANSK sprouted from the stands and above the crowd outside the stadium amid hundreds of national flags and papal banners. A delegation from the Ursus Tractor Factory, once a hotbed of union activity, made its presence known with a sign reading URSUS WORKERS GREET THE POPE WITH SOLIDARITY. Another poster proclaimed: GOD, HONOR, HOMELAND, WE PRAY FOR THE PRISONERS. Security guards spread throughout the stadium...