Martial law surprised everyone
even though many people anticipated that the communists
wouldn't stand back passively or semi-passively for long, but still it caught people by surprise,
they were shocked, and initially,
it was the shock of fear.
Personally, it was a very difficult experience because of what I've already mentioned here,
those 400 people from the several thousand strong workforce at Ursus once the strike was being broken.
There were tanks in the streets, troops in the streets
and all of this left people feeling afraid.
Although not everyone was frightened. Where people managed to resist,
they resisted in various ways either by going on strike or by taking to the streets,
these mass street demonstrations were numerous,
and that's when they ran the risk of being beaten around the head
with a ZOMO truncheon which could cause concussion,
or the blow could fall on a less vulnerable part of the body like an arm or a back,
but death from gunshots was also likely,
as happened in the Wujek coalmine
and during the demonstrations in Lublin.
In fact, at that time there wasn't a single major demonstration
after which somebody didn't end up in the cemetery.
As far as I can remember, at that time whenever the underground press
published lists of the casualties of martial law,
lists of people who had lost their lives
including those who had been shot as well as those who'd been beaten to death
or had died at the hands of unknown assailants
where the circumstances left little doubt as to who these assailants were
and why those people had been killed,
well, from what I remember, the list ran to well over a hundred names.
This was spread out over several years
although most of the deaths occurred in the first year.
So it wasn't really... it wasn't particularly gentle.
Of course, even more people could have died, that could have happened, too,
if the police and army had been instructed
to be more ruthless and cruel.
Despite this, the number of people who did end up in the cemeteries made up nearly a whole company,
so it's still a significant number.
It was hardest to keep a tally when we were dealing with murders committed by unknown assailants
where no one tried to find them and everything was done to obstruct the search for them.
For example, the dismissal of the case of the murder of Bartosz
was simply a legal scandal.
The fact that the assassination of Father Popiełuszko
wasn't handled in the same way
is, well, thanks to circumstances
which made it impossible to hush things up.
But these kinds of terrorist activities, like the murder of Grześ Przemyk,
ended in a terrible judicial scandal
which had nothing to do with justice in any shape or form,
not to mention the circumstances in which it happened about which much could be said
as a propaganda trial where there were the kind of legal scandals
a person living in a civilised, western European country couldn't even imagine.