Wojtek Makowski coordinates the Letter Writing Marathon for Amnesty International in Poland. He has been involved in the event since it first began in 2001.

It was back in October 2001 when my friends from Amnesty International’s Warsaw group came up with this challenge: let us write letters, based on the recently issued Urgent Actions, for 24 hours, in every city in Poland we have groups in.

We agreed to do it around the Human Rights Day, from midday on Saturday until midday on Sunday. Around the country, we wrote 2,000 letters. From the first time it was an international event, as some groups from abroad joined in too.

The late hours of the Marathon, after midnight and then on the Sunday at dawn, are the moments of my Amnesty experience I will remember forever.

I can call anyone in the section and be sure that they are not sleeping. We are spread around the country, yet we feel together so intensely.

People who happen to be away from their groups on the Marathon weekend report that they experience a feeling of lacking. Even if they are on other continents, they write on their own.
Two years ago, after midnight, I collected a letter on behalf of Bu Dongwei from a man whose face I recognized, but whose name I was unable to recall.

I looked at the envelope – it was Seweryn Blumsztajn, one of the prominent dissidents of Communist Poland, and as a consequence an Amnesty prisoner of conscience, now exercising his freedom of speech as a newspaper editor.

He wrote somehow bluntly to the Chinese authorities: “It is none of your business how Mr Bu Dongwei prays”. The incident came up to my mind as I read Bu Dongwei’s note on this blog.
The Marathon has developed quite a tradition. Every six hours, we count the number of letters around the country.

Everyone’s eyes turn to the computers for a moment, as people type in their results and the figure goes up. It reached 78,843 last year.

The names of the places that come up first can be astonishing. In Zabłudów, a small town in Eastern Poland, they lock themselves in the basement of the city hall and write an amount of letters twice the twice the town’s population. Warsaw will probably never beat them.

This year the date of the Marathon falls on the eve of the introduction of Martial Law in Poland in 1981, which left hundreds of prisoners of conscience.

Therefore, we have chosen a very special place for the Marathon’s headquarters. It will be called Stalin’s Lodge in one of the theatres in the Palace of Culture – a huge buiding from the 1950s, which is supposed to be a gift from Joseph Stalin to Poland. It was the place from which the leaders of the former regime used to see the plays. Now, we will do a symbolic takeover.

Please join in, anywhere you are.