Anna Walentynowicz

Anna Walentynowicz was a Polish trade unionist and co-founder of Solidarity, the first recognised independent trade union in the Eastern Bloc. She worked at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk from 1950, first as a welder and later as a crane operator. Her firing in August 1980 ignited the strike at the shipyard, which set off a wave of strikes across Poland; the Interfactory Strike Committee based there became Solidarity, and by September more than one million workers were on strike. Called by some the mother of independent Poland, she was awarded the Order of the White Eagle in 2006 and was killed in the 2010 Polish Air Force Tu-154 crash near Smolensk.