Monument to the Fallen Shipyard Workers of 1970

The Monument to the Fallen Shipyard Workers of 1970 stands on Plac Solidarnosci in front of the former Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk, Poland. It commemorates the workers killed when the security forces opened fire on protesting shipyard workers in December 1970, after the government announced sharp food price increases. Several dozen people died across the Baltic coast in Gdansk, Gdynia and elsewhere, and the events were suppressed from public memory for ten years. Demand for a monument was among the key points of the Gdansk Agreement of August 1980, and the monument was unveiled on 16 December 1980, the tenth anniversary of the shooting. It is regarded as the first monument to victims of communist repression erected in a Soviet bloc country. The design, by Bogdan Pietruszka, Robert Pietruszka, Jacek Krenz and Wieslaw Szyslak with engineer Jozef Kowalczuk, consists of three steel crosses about 42 metres high, each carrying an anchor, with bas-relief scenes at the base showing the workers' lives and the struggle. The base bears lines from a poem by Czeslaw Milosz that speaks to those who injure a simple man. The tall steel construction, produced in the shipyard by its own workers, resonates with the industrial setting. The monument is outdoors and open at all times, with no tickets or guided route required. It is kept as a place of commemoration and wreaths are laid on anniversaries each December. The monument stands next to the European Solidarity Centre and the shipyard gate, so it is naturally visited in combination with the Centre exhibition. It remains in good preservation as a public monument and is an essential stop for anyone interested in the history of modern Poland.