I mean,
I don't know if people remember back then, but it was a really bad time.
You never knew whether or
not you were in trouble with the government.
There was no transparency.
You know, the police would show up, they'd take you away.
They'd ask to speak with you and
then people would just disappear in the middle of the night.
You know, it was really oppressive.
It was a really scary time in Poland.
And so a lot of people had the idea, they're like you've got to spread
information, you've got to spread messages.
That's a really good way of undermining authoritarian regimes.
Just let people know about what's going on in
other countries where it is freer like in Canada and the United States.
And one of those things was they ran a radio station.
It was actually a really popular medium at the time.
And they would broadcast messages of freedom and
liberty over the airwaves across Poland.
But the trouble is that the government, they cracked down on these radio stations.
They were threatened by the free spread of these kinds of ideas.
And so in order to spread that message, people had to hide the receivers and
the transponders and whatever you need to sort of broadcast the signal.
My family was involved.
They were a bit naive about the whole thing.
My mom used to hand out pamphlets from under me when I was in a pram,
she would walk around and hand out these solidarity pamphlets.
Which is crazy if you think about it, it's such a huge risk.
But anyways, they were doing that, college friends approached and
said can we put a radio transponder somewhere in your house?
And my dad was like, of course, I'll show you where.
And they were like, no, no, no.
That's not how it works.
You give us a copy of a key to your home.
And then maybe we'll hide a transponder or receiver or
whatever it is in your home, but we might not and you'll never know.
The two people who ran Radio Free Poland, they were busy doing this for a number of
months and even years, but you could never tell whether or not anybody was listening.
>> They didn't know how many people were listening to it, right?
Because it was no such device at that time to check it out and everything.
>> So, one day they decided, they're feeling like this is a hopeless cause.
You know, there's no way that, communism is here forever.
That's what they thought, and there's nothing they can do.
So one day they sat down and they came up with this idea.
What they would do, they would ask the people of Warsaw,
those within earshot, by earshot I mean of the radio,
to blink their lights if they were listening to Radio Free Poland.
One day they said listen, people.
If you are listening to our radio station so certain day,
you start blinking the lights in the window, on and off, on and off.
All night, in all all of Warsaw, the lights just flickered all night long.
The entire Warsaw was like blinking, boom, boom, boom, boom.
And that's how we knew that almost everybody was listening to it.
That radio station and that was basically it.
People yearn and they want a kind of freedom.
And there's also a sense of unfairness when some people are allowed to
do whatever they want, but then, why can't I?
And so people were involved in trying to expand that freedom further,
and they did all kinds of things.