Grzegorz (Gregory) Pawlik remembers Sunday, December 13, 1981 in Lodz Poland when the military announced martial law. Poland came under Soviet influence and became a communist state known as the Polish People’s Republic. The Communist Party ruled for more than four decades, controlling the economy, media, and much of public life.

Pawlik grew up in a housing development in Lodz, where the government built hundreds of concrete apartment buildings in the 1970s to house factory workers.

His family lived in Building 333, Apartment 118.

“Every apartment was pretty much the same as the rest,” he said.

Visiting friends meant seeing the same sofas, tables, and inexpensive wall decorations. Families watched the same television programs and received the same version of the news.

Consumer goods were scarce and often poorly made. When available, toilet paper was coarse and dark gray. People repeatedly repaired appliances, while buildings deteriorated under industrial pollution and neglect.

For Pawlik, the decay reflected a broader systemic problem.

Because nearly everything belonged to the state, people felt little responsibility for maintaining it, he said. Workers did the minimum required, with little incentive to improve.

“There was no motivation to work hard or work well because we didn’t like the state; besides, no matter how we worked, we were always going to be poor, and unless we knew someone in the Party or the management, there was no hope for any advancement,” he said.

Like Ayn Rand saw in Russia. Despite government propaganda, American movies gave Polish viewers glimpses of another way of life.

“[The movies] showed families living in houses attached to a garage, driving expensive cars, shopping in stores full of all sorts of products or flying airplanes,” Pawlik said. “We knew what it was like to live in a capitalist country.”

That opening ended on Dec. 13, 1981, when the government imposed martial law, arrested hundreds of Solidarity activists, and outlawed the organization. The government introduced curfews, monitored telephone calls, and canceled public performances.

“If you ask any Pole who lived at that time, he or she will tell you where they were that day and how they heard the news of the communists imposing Martial Law,” Pawlik said.

“That day the communist government forever lost the remaining traces of sympathy of the Polish people.”

In 1989, the government agreed to competitive elections following negotiations with Solidarity. The opposition won a landslide victory on June 4. On the same day, thousands of miles away, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) conducted a violent crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.

Victor who witheld his surname out of fear of reprisal against him or his family. Victor believes many young Americans who display communist flags at demonstrations do not understand the ideology’s consequences.

“In some circumstances, young people simply want to treat communism as a fashion accessory,” he said. “But they have no idea how dangerous this ideology is.”

If he could, Greg Pawlik said, he would take young Americans attracted to communism back to the Polish People’s Republic for a day.

He would show them polluted rivers, crumbling buildings, and parents with little hope for their children’s futures. He would take them to a concert where they censored songs simply for containing words such as “freedom,” “solidarity,” or “God.”

He would also show them what happened when a student asked an uncomfortable question in history class—two weeks later, the child’s father returned home having lost his engineering job.

“The first lesson is that regaining freedom is much harder than retaining it,” Pawlik said.

After World War II, young Polish resistance fighters continued fighting Soviet domination for years. He said many were inspired by accounts of the American Revolution. Those who survived endured Stalinist repression, and subsequent generations lived under an oppressive system until people finally found the courage to resist.

“All it takes to end this strange trend to follow the crowd is one person with some guts who dares to question his or her peers,” he said.

Pawlik listened from the audience. The students’ speeches gave him some hope that younger Americans were willing to learn about the past.

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“Let’s have our eyes wide open and pray that America will never lose its freedoms and become a third world country,” he said

 

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