In Memory of Bronisław Geremek

The sudden death a few weeks ago of Bronislaw Geremek, a leader of Poland's anti-communist resistance and later its foreign minister, represents a loss for what is best in Polish national identity. As a Jew and a patriot who fought tirelessly for Polish democracy, he upheld the paramount importance of honesty about the nation’s history.

Warsaw – When a friend dies unexpectedly, we recall his face, his smile, the conversations forever unfinished. Today I can see Bronisław Geremek, who died in a car crash a few weeks ago, in jail in Białołęka and hear his hoarse shouts from behind the bars of the prison on Rakowiecka Street. I see and hear Bronek in Castel Gandolfo, addressing Pope John Paul II.

I see him also during underground meetings of “Solidarity” and during the 1989 Round Table negotiations; I see him in our parliament declaring the end of the Polish People’s Republic, and on CNN announcing that Poland had joined NATO. And I remember dozens of private conversations, discussions, and arguments conducted over almost 40 years.

Bronisław Geremek was one of us, to quote the words of Joseph Conrad, a writer whom Geremek admired. He was an activist in the democratic opposition and in Solidarity, who fought for Polish independence and human freedom, and who paid a high price for it. He was one who wanted to remain true to the tradition of the January Uprising and the Legions of Józef Piłsudski, to the tradition of the insurgents of the Warsaw ghetto and Warsaw Uprising, to the values of the Polish October and the student revolt of 1968, to the values of KOR (Workers’ Defense Committee) and of “Solidarity.”

Geremek knew that exclusion and enslavement destroy human dignity, and degrade our humanity. He knew that dictatorships lead to moral shabbiness. He valued freedom, authentic knowledge, independent thought, the courage of nonconformity, the spirit of resistance, the beauty of Polish romanticism, disinterested behavior, and human dignity. He reacted to moral shabbiness with revulsion, but also with fear. He saw it as a source of disposable masses, a human reservoir for totalitarian movements.

He was both idealist and pragmatist. As a child, Geremek witnessed the degradation of those enslaved in the Warsaw ghetto. Miraculously saved from the Holocaust, he spent the rest of his life dreaming of a Poland where people lived in dignity and respected the dignity of others.

Geremek fought for this Poland. He believed that everyone can change for the better, and that we must nurse the spirit of dialogue, tolerance, and the ability to forgive and to reconcile. He wanted a democratic Poland in a strong and democratic Europe. Now that he is gone, we see how much he accomplished.

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Geremek knew that a feeling of national identity and pride is priceless, and that in Poland, condemned to struggle for independence, they are necessary virtues. But he also knew that in the interwar period, the concept of “Polishness” was used as a tool of aggressive nationalism.

For Geremek, Polishness denoted neither a biological community nor a blood lineage. What was important was the nation’s history, whether that history was mythologized or de-mythologized, apologetic or critical. In relation to the past, he used to say, we make a choice of traditions, and with its help we express our views and options.

Although events like the Stalinist terror were outside the Polish tradition as he conceived it, Geremek knew that a communal identity demands consciousness of the entirety of its history, all its good, all its evil. We must remember that acts which we now reject were also possible within our community, as we work to make what was once possible impossible.

Bronek was proud of Poland’s stubborn will to freedom, its achievements, the democratic transformation which, thanks to the compromise reached at the Round Table negotiations, allowed for a bloodless end to dictatorship.  He was proud of Poland’s membership in NATO and the European Union, of Polish economic successes.

But he also worried. A year ago, together with Lech Wałęsa and Tadeusz Mazowiecki, he warned: “A state that we treated as a common good is being treated as a trophy to be seized by the rulers. Freedom and independence, to which we tried to point the way, are not accompanied by a sense of solidarity, especially towards those who are weaker and poorer. Insults and squabbles fill our political stage and ruin the citizens’ trust in the government. Institutions which should protect the law are becoming tools in the hands of the rulers, and we are witnessing serious accusations that they are being abused.”  This declaration was accompanied by a dramatic appeal to “cleanse Polish politics of dirt, fury, and hatred.” 

Geremek’s essay about Marc Bloch, the French historian and anti-Nazi resistance fighter, is among his greatest intellectual and moral accomplishments. In writing about Bloch, Geremek described himself, particularly when he recalled Bloch’s self-definition as being part of “liberal, disinterested, and humanely progressive traditions of thought.”

And he was describing himself as well when he cited Bloch: “Attached to my country, fed with her spiritual heritage and its history, unable to imagine any other country where I could breathe freely, I loved and served it with all my strength. I am a Jew. I see this as a reason neither for pride nor for shame. I appeal to my ancestry only in one single case: when I encounter an anti-Semite. Nevertheless, I would like to leave just this one honest testimony: I am dying, just as I lived, as a good Frenchman.”

Geremek had two messages about anti-Semitism. The first, directed inside Poland, was that we have to fight anti-Semitism and all its manifestations, even when marginal. The second, directed to western public opinion, was that we should not play with outmoded stereotypes.

Bronisław Geremek died with a clear conscience and clean hands. His lived Conrad’s credo: “I shall be faithful,” and also “To follow the dream, and again to follow the dream.” Bronek, you were faithful.

https://prosyn.org/sOK67t8