Unfortunately, it turned out that the ending of 'Man of Iron' was prophetic,
and we didn't have to wait any longer
than 13 December 1981
for General Jaruzelski, who was head of the government
and head of state at that time, to impose martial law.
This came as a huge surprise to us
because we thought, in fact, I don't know what we were counting on,
how this could unravel because the Party was in complete reverse.
Everything that was being created in the cinema like, for example, 'The Interrogation'
was an inconceivable attack on the Party itself, on the system,
on the way the country was being governed.
The response came with the complete paralysis of everything
and it was amazing how this 10 million strong union, Solidarność,
put up no resistance to martial law
imposed with the help of tanks and troops in the streets of all the major cities
and throughout the whole country simultaneously.
Two things fascinated me.
The first, that Poles - there are Poles and then there are other, different Poles.
Firstly, Poles like to talk, they can't keep a single secret.
You should never count on there being a group
whose members would co-operate
on something in silence.
No underground movement was ever successful because everything was always broadcast.
Whereas here, suddenly, it turns out that
thousands of people knew about it, knew when it was going to happen,
a large number also knew when it would happen and amazingly,
none of the rest of us knew that this was being prepared.
Those were different Poles, perhaps they were brought up somewhere else, were better organised.
This amazed me the most that I had never presumed
but had always thought that the opposition and the authorities
had the same characteristics, positive, negative, whatever you want to call them, but basically the same.
This amazed me and secondly,
it turned out that there was no response.
It's true that all the leaders were arrested that night
and put in prison or in camps
that had been prepared earlier, which was also interesting.
But the others could have asked for them
whereas everything fell silent. Why?
I think there was one thing we didn't take into consideration and that was the fact that all the telephones links were cut.
And that was quite enough to paralyse
that enormous union because no one knew what had happened.
By the time we realised what was going on, it was too late.
It's true that in Warsaw, we were in a better situation.
That same day, my wife, Krystyna Zachwatowicz,
together with a few other women from our circle
began to prepare parcels for the prisoners.
Shortly after that, a committee was formed in the church on Piwna Street.
It was following an old tradition.
It's amazing how those people knew what to do,
that this is how it always is in Poland, if the men go to prison, the women make parcels for them
doing everything to help those men, that's their natural duty.
And that's what happened without any planning or preparation.
A small group of us, including Krzysztof Penderecki,
went to the First Secretary to ask about our friends.
A Congress of Culture was being held but it had been interrupted.
We arrived there only to be told that everyone had been arrested.
So we went to the Central Committee to talk with the First Secretary.
Amazingly, they let us in in spite of martial law. That's when we discovered
that the First Secretary no longer had any authority,
that the Central Committee had been abandonned, the building, the various departments,
while power had been transferred elsewhere.
It had been transferred to where General Jaruzelski, who had created martial law,
was governing the whole country.
Right then, we weren't bothered about films,
what concerned us was what had happened and what would happen next.