Location: at the intersection of Swietokrzyska, Tamka and Kopernika streets
4 segments
The ‘Memorial of Gratitude for the Fall of the Berlin Wall’, the Solidarnosc Memorial, was inaugurated in 2021 in the centre of Warsaw. Four segments of the Berlin Wall or parts of segments are intersected by the Solidarnosc lettering.
At the inauguration, which was also attended by the President of Belarus, Svetlana Tikhanouska, the Mayor of Warsaw, Rafał Trzaskowski, emphasised that solidarity proves to be one of the most important values in difficult times: ‘Without it, we would not have been able to get through the past months, this extremely difficult time of the pandemic. Proximity, support, empathy, action on behalf of others – in other words, human solidarity – are invaluable today. Equally invaluable was the mass movement of the 1980s that ushered in the great democratic changes in Central and Eastern Europe.’
These mass movements and democratic changes initially included the labour protest at the Lenin shipyard in Danzig and the resulting founding of the Solidarnosc workers’ trade union under Lech Walesa, the future Polish president and Nobel Peace Prize winner.
The initiator of this Berlin Wall memorial was Jerzy Janiszewski, the creator of the Solidarnosc logo and lettering. One side of the memorial shows the characteristic graffiti by Thierry Noir. On the other side of the memorial are two quotes: ‘No weapon in the armoury of the world is as powerful as the will and civil courage of free men and women’, from Ronald Reagan, US President and from Pope John Paul II: ‘Solidarity was born. That was a milestone in the history of our country, but also in the history of Europe’.
Photo above and background:
@ StreetView