In December 2009, just months before her death, the ever-fiery Walentynowicz organized a conference in the Polish parliament titled “Poland After 20 Years of 1989–2009,” where she and other old opposition veterans assessed the unfulfilled promises of the post-communist era en.wikipedia.org . To the end, she was voicing the conscience of the revolution, insisting that the Solidarity ethos of caring for the weak should not be discarded in the new Poland. “The 21 demands that we put up in 1980 are still relevant,” she said in 2002. “Nothing was fulfilled. People still have to struggle to be treated with dignity. That's scandalous.” en.wikipedia.org .
Later Years, Tragedy, and Legacy
In her final years, Anna Walentynowicz lived modestly in Gdańsk, the city whose history she had helped change. She had long since made peace with the fact that she would never be a mainstream politician or wealthy figure. Instead, she cherished her role as an elder stateswoman of the workers’ cause, mentoring younger activists and reminding everyone of Solidarity’s true origins at the grassroots. She even reconnected with lost family: in the 2000s, Walentynowicz discovered surviving relatives in her birth region (now independent Ukraine) and rebuilt those family bonds after decades of separation blogs.bl.uk . Though frail in health, she seemed energized by the knowledge that her life had meaning for a new generation. Honors came her way in a steady stream. Streets and squares were named after her in cities like Wrocław, Szczecin, and Lublin en.wikipedia.org . A statue of Walentynowicz was unveiled near Warsaw in 2015 to commemorate her as one of the national heroes who brought down communism en.wikipedia.org . In 2019, the Polish parliament officially declared it the “Year of Anna Walentynowicz,” marking what would have been her 90th birthday with educational programs and exhibits en.wikipedia.org . Such tributes recognized her as, in President Andrzej Duda’s words, “a symbol of the Solidarity movement” and highlighted the distinctive role of a woman in what was often seen as a male-driven revolution en.wikipedia.org .
Fate, however, had one final cruel twist in store. On April 10, 2010, Walentynowicz accepted an invitation to join a Polish state delegation traveling to Smolensk, Russia. The delegation, led by her old ally President Lech Kaczyński, was headed to a ceremony marking the 70th anniversary of the Katyn massacre – the World War II execution of Polish officers by the Soviet NKVD, a long-suppressed tragedy now commemorated in free Poland en.wikipedia.org . It was important to Walentynowicz to be there: Katyn symbolized the injustices inflicted on the Polish nation, and she felt a kinship with those who perished, as someone who had devoted her life to fighting injustice. Tragically, she never made it to the ceremony. The Polish plane, flying in heavy fog, crashed near Smolensk. All 96 people on board were killed, including President Kaczyński, his wife, and a cross-section of Poland’s top civic and military leadership. Anna Walentynowicz, aged 80, was among the victims en.wikipedia.org . The news stunned Poland. In an instant, the country lost one of its founding freedom fighters alongside its head of state.
Amid the national mourning that followed, Poles reflected on Walentynowicz’s extraordinary journey – from a peasant girl born in the volatile borderlands of Volhynia, to a shipyard laborer who sparked a revolution, to an elderly dissident who never wavered in holding the powerful to account. Lech Wałęsa, her old adversary, publicly acknowledged the tragedy and shock of her passing theguardian.com theguardian.com . In death, Walentynowicz received the respect that had sometimes eluded her in life. Thousands attended memorial masses in her honor. She was posthumously awarded the Order of Polonia Restituta.