Solidarity hero's bio gets Japanese translation

The book’s author Slawomir Cenckiewicz told the daily Rzeczpospolita that most Japanese people, if they are aware at all, tend to know of two only Poles, Lech Walesa and film director Andrzej Wajda.

Wajda has strong links with Japan and runs a Japanese cultural centre in Krakow.

Walentynowicz was a cult figure of the Solidarity movement in the 1980s.

She was fired firing in August 1980 from her job at the Lenin shipyard in Gdansk, which sparked workers coming out on strike and the subsequent birth of the Solidarity trade union at the shipyard.

"It’s a great honour for me to offer my version of Anna Walentynowicz (1929-2010) directly to Japanese readers. I think the hero of the book would be very happy with it,” Cenckiewicz writes in the introduction to the Japanese version.

Cenckiewicz writes in the book about contacts between Solidarity with trade union movements in the Far East.

"She [Walentynowicz] once told me about her contacts with Japanese union activists who in 1980-81 visited the Solidarity headquarters in Gdansk. She said also that a visit to Japan had been planned for 1981."

Walentynowicz died in the Smolensk plane crash in April 2010.

It is often said that Andrzej Wajda’s movies Man of Marble and Man of Iron were loosely based on her life, from socialist hero to dissident.(jh)