Anna Walentynowicz

Anna Lubczyk was born in a village in Volhynia, in what is now Ukraine, and was orphaned during the war, working as a farm servant for a family that treated her badly. She made her way to Gdańsk and in 1950 got a job as a welder in the Lenin Shipyard, later switching to crane driving. She was a model worker, decorated for exceeding her quotas, until she discovered that a manager had been stealing from a fund collected for workers' benefits and reported it. From then on she was marked as a troublemaker.

In 1978 she was one of the founders of the Free Trade Unions of the Coast, a tiny illegal group that included Lech Wałęsa. She distributed its underground newsletter at the shipyard gates and was repeatedly detained. On 7 August 1980 she was sacked, five months before she was due to retire. A week later the shipyard workers struck, and their first demand was her reinstatement. The strike spread along the coast and across the country, and the Gdańsk Agreement of 31 August created Solidarity, the first independent trade union in the Soviet bloc.

She was interned when martial law was declared in December 1981 and jailed again later. She never became comfortable with Wałęsa's leadership, and after 1989 she accused him openly of having cooperated with the secret police in the 1970s, a charge that made her a marginal and awkward figure in the movement she had helped to start.

She died in April 2010 in the plane crash near Smolensk that killed the Polish president and dozens of others on their way to commemorate the Katyn massacre.