ABSTRACT
M y most abiding memory of August 1980 is not of the moustached figure of Lech Walesa jumping on to the Gdansk shipyard gates. It is of the diminutive frame of a white-haired old lady, hunched over a typewriter, puffing away on a cigarette, as she types up an underground information bulletin edited by her son, the dissident Janek Litynski. Completely absorbed, she was oblivious to the comings and goings of the mighty men and women of the press, who unceremoniously poured into the tiny flat in Warsaw's Wyzwolenia Street, looking for news of strikes and arrests. Looking back now in 1994 I realize that Regina Litynska is a key to an understanding of why what could have been just another round of strikes became the Polish Revolution.
