An Interview with Lech Walesa

He was exhausted. The pressures on him and the union were becoming unbearable; martial law, not yet imposed, was only days away. He had been awakened at 4 a.m. by a Solidarity delegation from the city of Radom, which warned him it was going to call a general strike that would affect an important armaments factory. Walesa was furious to find such a strike was being considered, and the men had argued for hours. At breakfast, he made peace with the delegation, which agreed to put off the strike. “lam absolutely finished and run down,” he said later. “I have more problems than the hairs on my head.” Then, in his last major interview before the military takeover, Lech Walesa talked to TIME Correspondent Richard Hornik about his work, his hopes and discouragements, and the forces that drive and sustain him. It was an extraordinarily personal and revealing conversation that went on for 90 minutes. Excerpts:

Q. Outwardly you seem to be a religious man. Is that true?

A. Religion is my private affair, and therefore I don’t believe, for example, in holding Mass at Solidarity meetings. Of course, I think that the church should do things for the spirit of man. But Solidarity should see to the body. Solidarity has to do it honestly, justly, and the church has to do the same for the spirit. So, many slogans coming from the church agree with ours, and we can use them, but of course all of us cannot be dressed as priests. Somebody has to be in the factory, somebody must commit sins, and somebody must give money to the courts.

Q. And that is your role?

A. Sure. Privately I’m a sinning believer. As any other man, I have my faults and my weaknesses. But I am a believer, and I practice my religion. And I fall down, and I come up again.

Q. Have the experiences of the past eleven years had an impact on your private religion?

A. Of course. I would not make it through this struggle if I were not a believer. I had more than one very comfortable proposition [offered to me by the government]. I did not accept them because I preferred to struggle for my cause.

Of course, I do go to church quite often. There I gather my spirits together, and there I think: yeah, there were great men in Poland once, but today there aren’t any. I’m a little guy, though some people think that I am great. But nobody will tell me I was a swine in my day. Nobody will ever spit at my children. Therefore I will persevere. And the church helps me in this. Without it, I would drop on my face and die, because I am very tired. I think every man needs at least half an hour per week in church to look at what’s back there—ruins and things burned out. Can I make a U-turn? Is there still enough time to retreat? A man needs this moment of stopping and paying some attention to himself.

Q. But isn’t that more like meditation than a spiritual experience?

A. No, my philosophy is based on something else. I think that if I got a bicycle from my father, I should give a car to my son. In order to pass the exam of life, you have to give at least what you got from your parents, more or less in every sphere of life, or at least in the most basic ones: spiritual things and those for the body. I got faith from my parents, and I’m feeding faith, and I try to multiply in a maximum way what I have got. So instead of just making the sign of the cross, I say the Lord’s Prayer.

Q. But your religion also has political benefits as a way of linking your mass movement with an even bigger one.

A. Yeah, but not only that. My faith gave me something else. Believers tell me that I was helped by spiritual powers and disbelievers tell me that I had other people to lean on. When things got tragic or critical, I would say, “Mother Mary, I’m losing, now what are you going to do about it?” Then I would take some time for myself. And I would say, “What will be, will be. O.K., it’s your thing. How will you solve this?”

I could lean back because right behind me I knew there was another leader [the Virgin], and I would rely on that leader, and I would have a chance to relax for a while longer and I could think. The question is: Did the Virgin really help me or did I just have time to relax and pass the baton on to someone else? You choose your thing. I don’t know what it was.

Q. You have had no time off for a couple of years. You’ve been under great psychological and physical pressure…

A. No, no. I’m not scared. I always have Mother Mary behind me.

Q. Not scared, under pressure.

A. No, I’m not under pressure, because I’ve got my other leader. Secondly, I know there was the Grunwald battle [when the Poles and Lithuanians freed their lands in 1410 by defeating the Germans]. And I know there was also a 1939, when the Germans came again. I know that I exist and that people will come after me. I know another thing: I know that I will lose today, and tomorrow will be a victory. I know that I will succeed today and fail tomorrow. I know that Christ as man was crucified, but as God, he won.

Q. I have heard you tell crowds that Poles had something more than Americans, or the French or Italians or Germans—an internal spiritual content that is destroyed by material goods. Is there a danger that if you succeed in material terms, you will lose the spiritual content?

A. No, for thousands of years we have always been treated as a game—both as the board and the pawns. In 1939 and before that, we only had one pair of shoes, or we didn’t even have that, but we had something that we still have, pride, something within us. Today we have cars, and we still have the internal thing. I have thought about this. Where does it come from? I think that the geographical position helps and the experience from the past centuries. We were always the cheated ones, everybody was against us, so our instincts are more acute.

Think about the past 36 years [since Poland was made Communist]. We were ordered to love somebody else. We were ordered to be atheists, and we were taught atheism, and look what happened. Almost the whole nation is religious. We learned good things in a bad school. Look at the American example. You were free to choose whatever you want, and I am not convinced which of us is happier. There will always be a glow within us, and it suddenly might catch fire. This is traditional; it has been conveyed across centuries. There will always be this spark.

Q. What are the talents you have for swaying people?

A. I have none, and this is the problem. The trouble is that when I was an electrician, I tried to be the best electrician. If I were a militiaman, I would try to be the best one. If I were the cook, I would like to be the best cook. And if I grab hold of something, I do it with conviction. Then when I get kicked out, or I quit, I don’t even look back at it.

When I leave Solidarity—or get kicked out—I promise that for two years I will avoid the street where I sweated so much. I will not even look to see if the building is still there, I am so fed up with it. But first I will do everything to ensure that the machinery will keep on revolving and that it will win because I am where I am now. I do my best wherever I can. When I am at home, I try to be a good husband, a good lover, a good father. And I do everything to do my best because this is my conviction. This is my duty, I don’t know if it’s my philosophy, but this is the way it should be.

Q. So what you really convey is this commitment?

A. Yes, I am here and I must do everything, and this is something subconscious. Perhaps because I was down in the gutter for 20 years, I can hear the people’s voice and I know when I have screwed up something. I know when I have to improve something because I am not conceited, and I know what people like, and I know what they don’t like.

Q. Do you intuitively know what the people at the lower level want?

A. I have always had this intuition.

Q. Your job and doing the best you can mean that you cannot be the best family man. You rarely see your family, and when you do, you are exhausted.

A. I told my wife that the maximum that I can stand this thing is four years, but I don’t think I’ll even last four years. I don’t like it, and I don’t want it, because I don’t want to waste my health and my life. My wife knows it, and she knows that pretty soon it will be completely different.

Q. I asked your wife if she ever dreamed of having a normal life. She said every day. Do you have the same dream?

A. What do you call normal? Today I’m O.K. I have no money, and this is normal. For you, you have to have $1,000 to feel normal. I am happy with $1,000, and for you it’s not much. It’s all relative. It is different for everybody. And the same here. What is normal for me? There are some people who strive for this armchair I am sitting in right now. I don’t want it. For them it will be normal when they take my place. For me, it will be normal to go out fishing, it will be normal to drive a car. You have to be happy with what you have got. And you have to give everything you’ve got to your life; you have to remember that you have only one life not two.

I will do this thing. And I will run away, and what I will do next I don’t know. Perhaps I will just pick up rocks. I don’t know, but I will not suffer. Or I can be a charwoman somewhere. Why not? People need charwomen.

Q. But don’t you enjoy the excitement and the stimulation of your job?

A. No, I hate it. What do I have? People take off their hats to me, they clap their hands, but tomorrow they might throw stones at me. This is not fun for me. I understand life in different terms. I think that beauty is everywhere, and everything is needed. What would happen if there were no people to clean up? Worms would eat us. There is beauty too in cleaning up.

How many charwomen are buried in graveyards? How many generals? I once watched a cemetery being liquidated, and they were raking bones out. I looked at one of the big femurs and then at a little bone and said, “Man, this must have been a President and this must have been some poor bastard.” The whole problem now is that you don’t even know who the guy was, so why give a damn?

You have to be happy and enjoy life but that does not mean you have to fool around and get drunk all the time. O.K., I will get drunk once, and then I will have a hangover, so I will say, “Ah, come on, I am not going to do that again.” Or you might love three or four women at the same time, but is that good? No. This is the way you have to censor yourself and make choices that bring you the most happiness. You can always find things to be happy about. I try to be satisfied with everything, and I have reached the conclusion that leadership is not the source of satisfaction. You lose too much of your health and have too much of only superficial happiness because even if you make 1,000 people happy, you will always hurt one person. And I do not want it. I tasted it. I take it as a great honor. And now I want to step down, peacefully, to look at it, to relax, take it easy, to enjoy fishing with my children, nature, to wear loose and warm boots. Let others have a go at it. I will stick to my philosophy.

Q. When do you think you would be able to do that?

A. We are at the summit now. Either in a short period of time or two more years. But it is independent of me. If I were the boss then I would go fishing today, because the weather is O.K. But first I have to be deprived of the responsibility and have to do some things to guarantee that it will go on winning so that people would not spit at me, because my intentions were good. I suggest you burn all newspapers and interviews—I was not here. But it is impossible. Hell, that would be the best thing.

Q. What is the Poland that you dream about?

A. Simply a better Poland than today.

Throughout history it has been improved 1,000 times, it has been destroyed 1,000 times. We will never reach the point that we will be so satisfied that we cannot improve it. There are no perfect solutions, and there will be no perfect solutions because that would be the end of humanity. There will be falls and rises—here and in your country. We will just build something that somebody will come in and damage.

I suggest that you take a good look at an anthill. I look at ants very often. Man, look at the millions of ants there. They have streets, they have traffic signs. They carry out the dead. And there are very few collisions. And I look at them and wonder if somebody above is watching us the same way. He might say, “Well, they’ve got their little cars, they’ve got money which changes hands all the time. Why not take a stick and stir the ants a bit?”

So say you take a box of ants and move them from one anthill to another. Look-what will happen. The inhabitants will then have their own slogans and will do away with the newcomers. The other ants will bring their destroyed hill back to its original shape, or even improve on it.

Man tends to look up and tries to figure out what is happening up above and at the same time he cannot even figure out the ants. I wish I could figure out ants. I suggest let’s deal with ants. If we get the chance to understand them, this world would run on a different basis. Without understanding ants, I don’t think we can understand other things.