Mgr. Marian Siedlaczek

“I had the honor to take part in that large mass for one-million people. The meadow where this large demonstration took place was located right under the windows of our student residence halls. It is a special location in Krakow, and there is this huge meadow. In June 1979, immediately before the defence of my thesis or immediately after it. I watched everything and I took part in it, too, of course. (What was the atmosphere there?) It was a celebration as if we had won the war. It was a kind of an eruption, explosion. Nobody was afraid of anything. Everyone was smiling and friendly. The population of Krakow at that time was perhaps seven hundred thousand people, but a million people gathered there. All entry roads where the Pope rode with his convoy were decorated with flowers. People had tears in their eyes. It was something unimaginable. I have never experienced something like that before or after.”

“I was fortunate that I met a group of people there who were intensely involved in the student protest movement and who established the Independent Association of Students in cooperation with KOR. They were my friends and one of them, Stašek Pyjas, was killed by the security police. He was a friend of mine who got me involved in all this. It began by a petition against the repressions against the workers who got fired from their jobs after the mass strikes in 1976. Right in 1976, when I progressed into the next grade of my studies, large petitions were being organized and Stašek was distributing the papers among the students. We began to meet more often and discuss the things and so on. It went on through the whole autumn, winter, and then in spring the situation escalated so much that the security police could no longer bear it and they murdered him. Obviously, they blamed it on his falling down from the stairs, but this case still has not been completely solved even today. A series of strange suicides followed. Witnesses were disappearing. One student (Stanisław Pietraszko – auth.’s note), the last witness who saw him alive, drowned in a lake, although he never swam, and suicides were happening among the secret police members as well. That was strange.”