A former shipyard worker whose 1980 firing triggered the labor protest that spawned Poland's Solidarity movement was awarded $23,000 on Tuesday for her imprisonment more than two decades ago.
A regional court in the central Poland city of Torun ruled Tuesday that Anna Walentynowicz's 1983 incarceration ruined her health and caused her substantial financial losses.
"I'm very pleased," Walentynowicz, who did not attend the court proceedings, said by telephone from her home in the city of Gdansk.
Walentynowicz, 75, said she has often found it difficult to buy expensive medicine that she requires with her regular pension of $433 a month.
Walentynowicz, an activist in the illegal free-union movement, was dismissed from her job as a crane operator at Gdansk's Lenin shipyard in August 1980 - prompting employees to stop work in protest.
Lech Walesa, then a union organizer who also had been dismissed, took charge of the strike. In two dramatic weeks, the workers won guarantees for the first independent union in the Soviet bloc and broad social political concessions.
In December 1981, Poland's communist government imposed martial law and outlawed Solidarity, the union movement under Walesa that was pushing for economic reforms and democracy.
Walentynowicz spent seven months in prison after being sentenced to a year and three months for organizing an anti-government demonstration.
She was among thousands of Solidarity activists who were imprisoned before martial law was lifted in July 1983.
Walesa was elected president of Poland in 1990 following the collapse of the communist government.
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