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Underground press in '70 s and '80s in Poland

Freedom disease

The printed pages were then delivered to couple of apartments, whose owners cut, glued and bounded the books in parts of 500. Books distribution magazines were located really underground - in cellars belonged to the people who were giving in the keys and did not ask distributors too many questions. Bookstores in bags and backpacks were walking through universities, factories, offices - where were the people you could trust.

It was obvious that such an operation - and besides Chojecki's "NOWA" publishing house there were couple of others, too - could not went unnoticed by police and secret police. They were trying first of all to locate printing houses, the springs of "freedom disease". But Polish tradition of solidarity against the authorities was deeply rooted in our history: communist regime was by far not the first one Poles used to fight with in the last century. Division for "us" - the people and "them" - the power was imprinted in our minds. The neighbors of our nurse, who provided her flat for "CDN" Thursdays' meetings were not deaf and blind; they had to realize that we were not beloved cousins visiting her so often, especially when she was at work. For all these years, though, nobody reported this activity to the police. The same was the case in thousands of other places underground books and papers were prepared, printed and distributed. Solidarity was present even before we name it.



Sometimes printers were so easygoing that the machines had to be transferred away. "Once they put into the oven about ten thousand wrongly printed sheets of paper" recalls Tadeusz Klimczak, the owner of Warsaw's townhouse at Dziennikarska (Journalists) street, one of the best printing places of "NOWA" in late '70s. It was winter night and the next morning on white snow in all neighborhood gardens half burned black pages were spread off like dots of printer's ink. "We had police general living nearby and the machines had to be taken away immediately, before they start to search for them" says Klimczak.

It was obvious that people from NOWA would join the strike in Gdansk shipyard, the birthplace of Solidarity. Konrad Bielinski and Ewa Milewicz were there the day after it all started to pick up the printing machine delivered illegally from Sweden. They visited the shipyard, took 21 demands to Warsaw together with their machine and soon were back in Gdansk with basic underground printing stuff. To their surprise it proved to be useless. "When we forced the door to the shipyards print shop, there we two modern offset machines there, completely unknown to me, self-made printer, originally a mathematician" says Konrad Bielinski. Fortunately, the cleaning lady explained them everything and for two weeks they wrote, edit and print there the striker's bulletin, named "Solidarity", giving the origin for the name of the whole union.

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