For me personally, that day at the shipyard led to a full-time job at the Washington Post, first as the paper's Warsaw correspondent, then as Paris correspondent, and later as Moscow Bureau Chief. August 1980 was a young freelancer's dream. The Polish authorities extended my visa (only for two days at a time, so I had to commute back and forth between Gdansk and Warsaw, where I spent hours hanging around the police station, begging for visa extensions) and closed the border to any other Post reporter who might be sent to replace me. As a result, I was on the front page of the paper every day for about three weeks, while also sending reports to The Guardian, The Sunday Times, and several other publications. I crawled into bed exhausted every night: it is good that I was young, as I do not think I would have the energy to do that now.

Having used up much of my luck in August 1980, I was not so fortunate in December 1981. Thinking I deserved a holiday after sixteen months of non-stop reporting, I had left Poland the week before, and spent the night of December 12 in a hotel in Salzburg, Austria, dreaming of a ski holiday in the mountains with my girl friend, an American graduate student at the University of Poznan whom I had met at the First Solidarity Congress in Gdansk. At around 3.00 in the morning, my editors called from Washington to say that General Jaruzelski had imposed martial law. We drove back to Poland immediately, only to be held up for hours at the Czechoslovak border, as the guards waited for instructions on whether or not to let us through. It was freezing outside with huge piles of snow on ground, the severest winter I experienced in Poland. Solidarity had called on its supporters to resist martial law, but I knew in my gut that the movement was finished, at least for the time being. Customs officials were picking through my luggage, inspecting every piece of soiled underwear, and trying to read my illegible handwriting.

I did not think things could get much worse than this so I asked my girl friend to marry me, right there in that depressing customs office on the Polish-Czechoslovak border, as armed soldiers prowled about to enforce a curfew. She said "Yes." A short while later, the border guards came back to tell us that our papers were in order and we could enter the country. That was another lesson I learned from Poland: out of despair comes hope.