Biography

Anna Walentynowicz was born on August 15, 1929 in Równe, Wolynskie, Poland [now Rivne, Ukraine]. She was an actress, known for Man of Iron (1981), Workers '80 (1981) and Narodziny Solidarnosci (1981). She was married to Kazimierz Walentynowicz. She died on April 10, 2010 in Smolensk, Smolensk Oblast, Russia.

She died on 10 April 2010 in a plane crash at Smolensk-North airport in Russia. Walentynowicz and many Polish officials (96 people in total), including president of Poland Lech Kaczynski and his wife Maria, were on their way to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Katyn massacre.

Worked with Lech Walesa in the early 1980s to agitate against communist rule, but later turned against him for personal and ideological reasons.

She was known as "the grandmother of Solidarity".

She was orphaned during WWII, and started working as a maid when she was 10.

In 1980, she was a welder and crane operator at a Gdansk shipyard. She was fired just a few months before she was scheduled to retire, leading to strikes at the shipyard and elsewhere in Poland. This led to the founding of the Solidarity movement.

I was the drop that caused the cup of bitterness to overflow.