Periodically, Lundagård has reported diligently about students’ situation in countries outside of Sweden as well. In 1988, Påhl Ruin, a member of staff, set out on a journey to Warsaw, to report on students being part of the Polish union movement Solidarity. The journey was the start of Påhl Ruin’s professional career as a foreign news correspondent, but also a chance for the students of Lund to read about a struggle for freedom that seldom received coverage.
When I was part of the editorial staff of Lundagård by the end of the 1980s, the Cold War was raging in Europe. The war also reached Lund through its close contacts with Poland. The free union movement Solidarity had an exile office a stone’s throw away from AF-Borgen.
We were a group of people who went to Warsaw in 1988, among other things to act as couriers for Polish students who were active in the union movement. I remember how we were driven in twists and turns and how, at last, we were passed into a run-down flat and a stuffy room where the blinds were drawn.
We spoke about their struggle and received a pile of flyers which we were able to smuggle through customs, back to Lund. A beautiful memory from a time long past.
Our visit in Poland coincided with a large demonstration outside the St. Stanislaw church, where the priest Popieluszko, who had been killed by the regime, was buried. I was writing a piece for Lundagård and let my camera sweep over the crowd – to suddenly see two members of the police force pointing straight at me. Brusquely, I am pulled from the site and put in a police van.
“Destroy the film, now!” they ordered me. Still today, I regret my cowardly behaviour through obeying his order. In a drawer, I find a copy of Lundagård No. 7 from 1988, all covered in dust, in which I quote “Josef” in the offices of Solidarity in Warsaw (he wanted to remain anonymous):
“You shouldn’t have let them take the film, you should’ve shouted Solidarność, right in their faces”.
Very well, at least I did something to draw attention to their struggle for liberty. I have been living in Vilnius for a few years now, and I often have a bad conscience when I think about the Balts’ fight for liberty – which we did not raise a finger to support, not until the Soviet Union was about to collapse.
Recently, I met a Lithuanian woman of 60 years or so who told me about a trip she made to the Black Sea in the 1980s. There, she met a group of Swedes who wondered where she was from. “Oh, I am from Lithuania, your neighbour on the other side of the Baltic Sea,” she said cheerfully. Whereupon one of the Swedes remarked, smirking, that she must have got her seas mixed up. “On the other side of the Baltic is the Soviet Union”.
We Swedes not only failed to protest against the Soviet occupation of the Baltic countries, apparently, it also happened that we denied that any of these states had ever been in existence. That is a disgrace.
Påhl Ruin
Foreign News Correspondent
Member of Lundagård’s Editorial Staff 1988-89
