Krystyna Krauze

"I was in the Independent Students' Association and asked him, 'How much longer are you staying in Poland?' He said, 'I don't know, I have a visa until such and such a day.' I knew the singer Antonina Krzysztoń who performed with his repertoier and made Kryl famous in Poland was not in that concert. I said, we have a great club in Gdansk, so come and play with Antonina. And really, I don't know how I managed to organize it. I called Gdansk and said, 'Hey, we need the biggest hall,' and my friends arranged it. It was an amazing concert, then we went to my friend's apartment and we sang the songs long into the night and even the cops came because we were disturbing the peace. The next day I went with Kryl to the Oliwa Cathedral because he sang the song 'In the Name of Humanity', or some people call it 'The Organ in Oliwa', and that's the song about the events we were talking about, when my sister was born, in December 1970 when the government shot the workers. He just fell apart there, a grown man, and he broke down. Here I was with a sensitive man who was crying, and he was forty-five at the time."

"My mom had jaundice, worked at an academic hospital and was pregnant. On the 16th of December 1970, the 'wypadki grudniowe' burst out in our country, taking the lives of dozens of people, and a state of emergency was declared. I was three and a half years old and I remember the moment my mother went into labour. The telephones didn't work and it was impossible to get an ambulance. There was a Dutch woman living next door, Marion, the wife of a yachtsman friend, and Marion put my mother in the car and took her to the hospital, yelling at the patrols in Dutch or English. They managed to get her to the hospital, but unfortunately the hospital was next to the shipyard and there was shooting going on in the shipyard, so they were bringing wounded policemen into the delivery room and treating them. Because my mother was very sick of jaundice, they started to save her. She gave birth, but my sister was thrown into a garbage pail because she wasn't breathing. When mom woke up from the anesthesia, luckily she had nurses around who were her students. She asked what's wrong with the baby. They told her she wasn't alive. She said, 'I want to see the body!' Because she was a doctor, they started looking in the bucket and they took it out, and the baby just screamed. My sister is the only child who was born in the hospital in Gdansk on 16 December 1970. Of course she is traumatized by the birth, I guess it has affected her life. She had a damaged leg. Even such a small child was a victim of the regime. I hated the regime from the beginning for that."