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Polish activist Jacek Kuroń (1934-2004) helped to transform the political landscape of Poland. He was expelled from the communist party, arrested and incarcerated. He was also instrumental in setting up Workers' Defence Committee (KOR) and became a Minister of Labour and Social Policy. [Listeners: Jacek Petrycki, Marcel Łoziński; date recorded: 1987]
TRANSCRIPT: But when there is someone who is very enthusiastic about this, they'll do it. And there was such a range of wonderful people there, so 'Robotnik' began to appear. It began to appear and it was distributed to various worker's centres and I began to arrange worker's groups. I remember when Steve Uhanson visited us - he was a very famous Swedish social democrat - he'd been brought there by Mrs Maria Borowska - and I showed him... we showed him the first four issues of 'Robotnik' and they talked about our programme of action, I was ashamed myself because the publications were so small, such poor quality, fuzzy, inept, childish - it had been made on a child's duplicating machine. He said he'd listened to what we had to say and he liked what he'd heard and the enthusiasm he'd seen in us but would anything come of this? On his first visit, he didn't really believe this would work. Then there were the 'Robotnik' discussion groups. It came as a complete shock to me how different each group of workers was. In Grudziądz there was the only group that had joined KOR in an organised way; we could only dream about groups like that. They organised themselves to help because they'd been kicked out of the local paintworks and enamel factory... people had been kicked out of there and so they had organised themselves to help these people and had gone to the Party Committee to create a fuss. The committee had told them that they were KOR, and that's how they found out that there was such a thing as KOR. So they asked some secretary what KOR was, and she read them out some names. They got hold of an encyclopedia, an encyclopaedia, the Shorter Encyclopaedia. They found the name Andrzejewski in the Shorter Encyclopaedia. They went to see Andrzejewski who sent them to Zieja who sent them to me and to Jan Józef. And that's how we made contact with this organised group that had been sent to us by the Party organisation.
