The weekend saw Law and Justice celebrations on the occasion of Antoni Macierewicz’s seventieth birthday. One of the guests was Law and Justice president Jarosław Kaczyński. The PiS leader praised Macierewicz and said he is a man who believed in Poland from his youngest years. “Antoni from the very beginning decided to serve his homeland. And in a different way than many imagined.”
Amongst Macierewicz’s accomplishments, Kaczyński highlighted his activity in the Workers’ Defense Committee (KOR), which he co-founded. KOR was an organization meant to help the prisoners and their families of the June 1976 anti-communist protests. “It was an act of extraordinary bravery,” Kaczyński said.
Kaczyński also praised Macierewicz’s work on the Smoleńsk plane catastrophe of April 2010, in which Polish President Lech Kaczyński and ninety-five other Polish officials died. Kaczyński criticized Civic Platform politicians who wanted the Smoleńsk issue to be forgotten. “It wasn’t forgotten and is remembered to this day, thanks to Antoni,” he added.
Kaczyński also referred to Antoni Macierewicz’s Catholic values and commended him on combining the best of the political traditions of the Second Polish Republic.
On a final note, Kaczyński added that Macierewicz is in excellent physical condition. As proof he showed a video of Macierewicz doing a backflip into a swimming pool. In his younger years, Macierewicz trained in diving.
Antoni Macierewicz was born on the 3rd of August, 1948 in Warsaw. He was a member of anti-communist opposition and a cofounder of KOR. He was also a member of “Solidarity” and co-created the strike committee of the Gdańsk Shipyards in 1981 when Martial Law was introduced by general Wojciech Jaruzelski. He was then imprisoned for several months, escaped from prison and went into hiding for several years.
After the fall of communism, he was the interior minister between 1991 and 1992, vice minister of national defense from 2006 to 2007 and minister of national defense between 2015 and 2018.
He oversaw the first parliamentary attempt to reveal communist secret agents in 1992. Then, in 2006 he liquidated post-communist military intelligence (WSI) and created new intelligence and counterintelligence agencies.
