Strategic Europe. More > Here, in this apartment in a Warsaw suburb, Åuczywo introduced me to so many special people. One of them was Jan LityÅski. This feisty, funny, and warm intellectual was—like his dissident friends—indefatigable. In the late 1970s, with Jacek Kuron, he founded the Workers’ Defense Committee. This was, in some ways, the precursor to the independent Solidarity trade union movement, which was established in August 1980 in GdaÅsk. Poland’s dissidents paid a very heavy price for activities aimed at challenging the communist regime’s monopoly. In March 1968, during student protests at Warsaw University, LityÅski, then twenty-two years old, and many others were expelled. He was given a two-year jail sentence. At the same time, the regime unleashed a vicious anti-Semitic campaign, forcing many intellectuals to emigrate to Paris, London, or Stockholm.