Bronislaw GeremekWHEN HISTORIANS come to write the recent history of Poland, the academic and politician Bronislaw Geremek will play a leading role.
The 76-year-old Warsaw native, who died last weekend in a car crash, was one of the country's most influential public figures and a respected moral authority. He played a leading role in Poland's democratic opposition and helped steer the country towards democracy.
In public, he was a bearded, tweed-loving, pipe-smoking historian; at the negotiating table, his diplomatic skills once prompted an admiring colleague to remark: "When Geremek stands on a staircase, you don't know if he's ascending or descending."
As a politician and foreign minister in the 1990s, he completed Poland's accession to Nato and steered the country towards EU membership.
His biography ensured that, in his final role as an MEP, he embodied like few others in Brussels the ideal of the European intellectual, tirelessly pushing the legitimacy of the European project.
"I am among those who believe in the power of ideas and European institutions," he said in what would be his final speech to the European Parliament this month.
It was his final battle that brought Geremek international attention: his stand against the "moral revolution" of twin brothers Lech and Jaroslaw Kaczynski to root out communist collaborators from Polish public life.
Geremek refused to sign a declaration that he had never collaborated with the secret police, as required under the Kaczynski vetting law. Instead he attacked the whole business as a politically motivated witch-hunt and described the vetting authorities as "an Orwellian-style ministry of truth".
A month after this public protest by one of Poland's most respected public figures, the constitutional court in Warsaw struck down the vetting law, ending the Kaczynski campaign.
Geremek was born into a Jewish family in 1932. He lost his parents to the Holocaust and only narrowly survived himself after he was smuggled out of the Warsaw ghetto in 1943, weeks before its liquidation.
The 11-year-old Geremek spent the years until 1945 hidden with a Polish family in the countryside.
After the war, he immersed himself in academic studies, developing a fascination with the medieval period that would eventually serve as the basis for many of his 10 books.
He graduated from Warsaw University in 1954 and like many young intellectuals of his generation, he joined the Communist party, "seduced", he said later, "by the socialist ideal" it espoused in the ruins of post-war Poland.
He broke with the party in 1968, disillusioned after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and a virulent anti-Semitic campaign at home, with police violently dispersing protests which the authorities claimed were organised by "Zionist" agitators.
While many members of Poland's decimated post-war Jewish community emigrated in the face of the campaign, Geremek decided to stay. "If I have a problem with my country, I stay and change it," he said later.
As a consequence, he became involved in Poland's burgeoning democratic movement, giving private lectures to Poles in "flying universities", a communist Poland equivalent of Ireland's hedge schools.
In 1980, at the invitation of Lech Walesa, he drove to the Lenin shipyard in Gdansk, birthplace of the Solidarity movement, with a statement from prominent intellectuals in support of the striking workers.
Despite occasional clashes between the intellectual Geremek and Walesa, who was prone to anti-intellectual outbursts, the two respected each other's abilities and, together, they mapped out a plan of action to transform the strike in Gdansk into a plan for regime change in Warsaw.
Geremek's growing stature ensured that, like Walesa, he was interned after martial law was imposed in 1981. However he remained on the path he had chosen and in 1987, joined a civic commission that eventually led to the round-table talks and a negotiated transition to democracy, months before the Berlin Wall fell.
Later, Walesa credited Geremek's diplomatic skill for keeping up the momentum of the negotiations without scaring the authorities away from the table - until it was too late for them to pull out.
Geremek remained modest about his role, describing himself more as an aide to a "reawakening society". "All that was needed for the destruction of communism," he later said, "was to break down the barrier of fear and passivity."
Geremek thrived in the post-transition reality that left many of his intellectual peers struggling, serving as Solidarity's parliamentary leader after its 1989 election victory.
He later established the market-oriented "Freedom Union" which, despite a struggle to attract voters, entered government as the junior partner in 1997 and led Poland into Nato two years later.
For 30 years, his academic career was linked to the historical institute of Poland's Academy of Sciences. Five years at the Sorbonne from 1960 made him a life-long Francophile and contributed to one of his best-known works, a study of peasant life in medieval Paris. He was the recipient of every major European award, including the Charlemagne Award of Aachen and the French Légion d'Honneur.
Geremek never wavered from the pragmatic approach he adopted during the round-table negotiations, that Poland was best served by a compromise between ex-communists and former anti-communists.
That infuriated the more absolutist national conservative Kaczynski twins, who viewed the round table as a lazy compromise that had tainted the post-communist republic. At the time of his death, he was working on English and Polish editions of his book Visions of Europe. In one of his final interviews, he declared: "After creating Europe, we must now create Europeans."
Geremek's wife Hanna died in 2004 and he is survived by his two sons.
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Bronislaw Geremek: born March 6th, 1932; died July 13th, 2008