GDANSK, Poland -- A beaming Lech Walesa listened by radio as his wife accepted his 1983 Nobel peace prize Saturday, then lifted a champagne toast to 'victory and the ideals of Solidarity.' President Reagan sent his personal congratulations.
'Bravo, Danuta,' Walesa said of his wife's performance at the ceremony in Oslo, Norway, where she was presented with a gold medal and a check for $190,000, which Walesa said he will donate to a fund for independent Polish farmers.
'I've fallen in love with her all over again,' he said.
The founder of the now-banned trade union, who listened to the broadcast in a church in his hometown of Gdansk, said he hoped the prize could be used to help ease East-West tensions and called again for the lifting of sanctions against Poland.
Later, the top American diplomat in Poland visited Walesa to bring the Nobel winner personal congratulations from President Reagan.
'I think everybody in the United States congratulates him, and I said so,' U.S. Charge d'Affaires John R. Davis commented as he left a 30-minute private meeting with Walesa.
'I repeated to him the president's warm congratulations and respect and admiration.'
Davis and his wife attended a special mass for Walesa and a prolonged ovation rang out through the crowded church when Davis' name was announced.
That ovation was exceeded only by that given Walesa. After the service, the congregation of about 5,000 refused to leave, pressing forward to shout greetings to Walesa and singing 'sto lat -- may # tou live 100 years,' a traditional polish refrain.
Polish television aired a brief report on the Nobel prize ceremony in Oslo, saying that Mrs. Walesa accepted the award 'because Lech Walesa ... was afraid to go abroad.'
Walesa listened to the awards ceremony on a Polish-language broadcast by Radio Free Europe as Danuta accepted the prize in his name and read his prepared acceptance speech.
Walesa did not attend the ceremony because he feared he would not be allowed to return and out of respect for his jailed fellow unionists.
Danuta, 38, flew to Oslo with the couple's 13-year-old son Bogdan. Their other six children stayed with friends in Gdansk.
About 75 people, most of them reporters or photographers, applauded Walesa as the award was announced. A delegation of workers popped a bottle of champagne to salute him.
Raising his glass high, Walesa said: 'This is for victory and the ideals of Solidarity.'
The 40-year-old shipyard worker followed the text Mrs. Walesa read on his behalf, tracing the speech line by line with his finger as she spoke.
'With deep sorrow I think of those who paid with their lives for the loyalty to Solidarity, of those who are behind prison bars and who are victims of repressions,' the brief statement said.
In the speech, Walesa quoted the 1905 Nobel laureate in literature, Henryk Sienkiewic, a writer who lived in the land that was to become Poland but at the time was divided between Russia, Austria and Germany.
Describing his occupied native country, Sienkiewic said: 'She was pronounced dead -- yet here is proof that she lives on...'
'Today nobody claims that Poland is dead. But the words have acquired a new meaning,' Walesa said, in an implied reference to Solidarity.
Walesa asked again for the lifting of trade restrictions imposed on Poland by the United States and its allies in retaliation for martial law. He said they were 'a great gesture' that have accomplished symbolic value.
He said he had no ready prescriptions for solving U.S.-Soviet differences about nuclear weapons but would try to work for greater trust on both sides.
'We should think about how to gain (international) guarantees that the accords already signed will be observed, and then look to what comes next,' he said.
Police outside St. Brigida's church, where Walesa listened to the speech, searched reporters' cars as they left the area, apparently in the belief that some leading members of the Solidarity underground might have tried to share the occasion with Walesa.
