For a short while in the late 1970s, Krystyna Chojnowska-Liskiewicz was probably the most famous woman in communist Poland. As the first woman to sail solo around the world, she was feted in the media, paraded at official events and sent on speaking tours to show off her world-beating achievement.
In today’s Poland, however, her name has been all but forgotten – something the author of a new book about her life and journey hopes to change.
“We are a country that is usually very proud of its heroes … So when I first learned about her voyage I thought it was strange I had never heard of her before, and then I asked around and it seemed none of my friends knew her either,” said Paulina Reiter, a journalist whose book The Lonely Ocean has just been published in Poland.
Chojnowska-Liskiewicz left Las Palmas in the Canary Islands in March 1976, and returned there in April 1978, after a journey of more than 30,000 nautical miles. She finished her trip six weeks before the British sailor Naomi James also completed a round-the-world voyage.
Chojnowska-Liskiewicz’s voyage came about after she won a competition by thecommunist Polish authorities to seek a female sailor for a round-the-world voyage, part of the government plans to mark International Women’s Year, which had been declared in 1975 by the UN.
An engineer at the Gdańsk shipyard, Chojnowska-Liskiewicz was an accomplished sailor, but the voyage was the first time she had sailed on the ocean. She travelled in the Mazurek, a boat built by her husband, which was less than 10 metres in length.
While researching the book, Reiter met Chojnowska-Liskiewicz on many occasions before her death in 2021. The former sailor was slow to open up, and even in the 1970s had a reputation for being emotionally cold. But after her death, her husband shared a stack of letters the two had written to each other during her voyage, and Reiter discovered a very different side to the woman who had been so reserved in their interviews.
“You really see that they loved each other a lot, and they were very tender with each other,” said Reiter.
It was also instructive to compare the full letters with the short extracts that had been published in official newspapers in the 1970s, where communist censors omitted all suggestions she might feel any fear or apprehension, lest it make the voyage seem less heroic. In one letter, believing she might die during a difficult stretch of sailing off the coast of Australia, she bade her husband farewell.
Reiter said there was a gendered aspect to the fact that few people have heard of Chojnowska-Liskiewicz in today’s Poland. But there is also another reason, she added, which is her association with the communist regime, and the fact that her voyage from the start had been the authorities’ project.
Even Chojnowska-Liskiewicz’s triumphant homecoming was transformed into a stunt by the Polish authorities, who wanted her to return in time for an important holiday so flew her back to Poland from Paris, took her boat out to sea and then had her sail into the harbour in Gdańsk as though she had just returned from her voyage.
Chojnowska-Liskiewicz found that she had returned to a very different country from the one she left. The first stirrings of the Solidarity movement had begun in the Gdańsk shipyard, and her cooperation with the authorities was seen as a black mark. Her best friend stopped talking to her, and the shipworkers’ union told her she was not welcome to go back to her job at the shipyard.
Yet, the more Reiter researched her subject, the more she found herself admiring Chojnowska-Liskiewicz. In time, she also came to look at some aspects of life in socialist Poland differently.
“Maybe we are ready now to look at this time in a little bit less black and white terms,” said Reiter, noting the situation with gender norms and women’s rights. Viewed from today’s Poland, where the governing party has implemented increasingly strict regulations on abortion and promotes so-called traditional values when it comes to family, Reiter said telling stories of determined and successful Polish women was particularly important.
“For Polish women to read this book and realise that she had more reproductive rights than we do now it’s quite something. She also strongly believed she was part of a very modern country, and I’m not sure that many women in Poland can say that about themselves now,” said Reiter.
