Kornel Morawiecki
Kornel Andrzej Morawiecki was a Polish physicist, politician, and founder of the dissident movement Fighting Solidarity. He was a true giant in the fight against communism.
As the Polish Prime Minister’s office writes:
Morawiecki was born in 1941 in Warsaw. During the communist era, he was a physicist and university teacher. He distinguished himself by his fight against the communist system in Poland. He was active in the democratic opposition, being the founder and chairman of the Fighting Solidarity organisation.
In 1968, he took part in student strikes protesting against the entry of Warsaw Pact troops into Czechoslovakia and the suppression of workers’ protests by the Communist authorities in December 1970.
From the late 1970s, he co-edited the underground Biuletyn Dolnośląski. In 1981, Kornel Morawiecki was a delegate at the first congress of the Solidarity Trade Union in Gdańsk. After the delegalisation of “Solidarity” by the communist authorities in 1982, he founded Fighting Solidarity. In its manifesto, the organisation advocated the uncompromising recovery of the independence of Poland.
In 1988 he was awarded the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta by the President of the Republic of Poland in Exile, Kazimierz Sabbat.
As Senior Speaker in 2015, he opened the 8th term of the Polish Sejm. In recognition of his outstanding achievements in public and state activity, in 2019, he was awarded the Order of the White Eagle by President Andrzej Duda.
Speaking on Kornel Morawiecki, his son and former Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki remarked, “My father always looked for the good and the truth, and his public activity was in line with these values…The history of Poland is the history of freedom. My father, [when] asked what to do, would say, ‘Do whatever will make communism collapse.'”
