Poland’s underground newspaper
Witness History
BBC
4.5 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 18 May 2026
⏱️ 10 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In 1981, Poland's communist regime imposed martial law and the dissident Solidarity movement was suppressed.
In response, Helena Luczywo helped set up an underground newspaper called Mazovia Weekly to communicate uncensored information to the population.
Despite police raids and arrests, the newspaper played a significant role in the fall of communism in Poland.
Helena tells Ben Henderson about the years she edited the newspaper while on the run.
Eye-witness accounts brought to life by archive. Witness History is for those fascinated by and curious about the past. We take you to the events that have shaped our world through the eyes of the people who were there.
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(Photo: Protest against martial law, 1982. Credit: Bettmann via Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts. |
| 0:10.7 | Hello and welcome to witness history from the BBC World Service with me, Ben Henderson. |
| 0:16.3 | We're the podcast that takes you back to the biggest moments in living memory by interviewing someone who was there. |
| 0:22.0 | Episodes are just nine minutes long and come out every weekday, so hit subscribe and you'll never miss out. |
| 0:28.0 | In this episode, we're going back to Poland in the 1980s, when an illegal newspaper, run by women, published dissident news under the nose of the country's authoritarian regime. |
| 0:38.9 | They couldn't believe their eyes when they realised that it was mostly women. |
| 0:45.6 | They just couldn't believe it. |
| 0:47.6 | This is Helena Wuchivo. |
| 0:49.7 | She was editor of the newspaper, which was called Mozovia Weekly. |
| 0:55.6 | Since the 1940s, Poland had been an undemocratic communist state, with close ties to the Soviet |
| 1:01.7 | Union. In 1980, massive strikes erupted in the Polish city of Gurdansk, and workers |
| 1:07.7 | banded together to form Poland's first independent trade union called Solidarity, |
| 1:12.6 | which campaigned for workers' rights and social and political freedoms. |
| 1:16.4 | In response, the authorities imposed martial law in December 1981. |
| 1:22.3 | In Poland, it's more than 20 hours since the military took over, a move, they said, to prevent civil war. |
| 1:29.0 | Martial law involved rounding up thousands of solidarity supporters, shooting demonstrators, |
| 1:34.9 | and mass censorship. The night it was imposed, Helena was at the Solidarity Office in Warsaw, |
| 1:40.5 | Poland's capital. Everybody said that there was something strange, that they got information that there were |
| 1:47.9 | tanks in the roads, and then they started to switch off all the telephones and faxes and so on. |
| 1:59.3 | And we looked out of the window, |
| 2:01.8 | and we saw that there were quite big number of police troops, |
| 2:08.3 | fully armed. |
... |
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