Politics took my husband away from me, says Danuta Walesa

The former First Lady, currently publicizing her new autobiography, which arrived in shops in Poland this week, told a TV programme yesterday that politics is full of “insincerity, smears and attacks,” adding that these days she likes it “even less.”

When asked why she has waited all these years before writing her autobiography, the now 62-year old Mrs Walesa said, “there comes a time when you have to disclose things, and that is why I have done so,” noting with a smile that although the book is a “frank” account of the time her husband was leading the Solidarity trade union, she had “not revealed all her secrets.”

The autobiography reveals that she felt abandoned during the 1980s and was left to bring up eight children by herself. “I was a mother, a teacher, a cook, a cleaning lady, a nurse, I had no time to do anything else,” she complains in the book.

Quizzed yesterday on her husband's attitude to her memoirs she confessed that he knew of her plans, but that he “never quite believed that I would actually do it.”

Walesa himself told the Polish Press Agency last week that he had not yet read the memoir, but he probably would do so as “there are a couple of things that I would like to understand that I hadn't paid attention to before.”

In her autobiography, Danuta Walesa writes that her husband has never spontaneously bought her flowers: “men are not very bright in some matters,” she said yesterday.

She described her husband as “a loner” who is “introverted and difficult to get to know.”

However, at the close of the book, she affirms that she was “grateful for what fate had landed on her,” a life that she “could not have imagined in my wildest dreams.”

Marzenia i Tajemnice (Dreams and Secrets),was released yesterday by Krakow-based publishers Wydawnictwo Literackie. (nh/pg)