"Making History": My Intellectual Journey into the Hidden Polish Past

from the time i entered warsaw university as a freshman, my academic trajectory was rather unusual. As far back as I can recall thinking about it in school, I knew that at the university I would study physics. Mathematics came easily to me (but, as I was soon painfully to discover, not beyond the high school level), and I chose physics as a field of study because I thought it was also about the world. Somewhere in my mind the idea lingered that physics would serve as a good bridge to philosophy. A sympathetic commentator can appreciate in this jumbled reasoning an embedded Comtean understanding of the hierarchy of human sciences. But it spoke mostly of confusion, showing that I didn't know what to do. The important thing was that it made my parents happy.

Under "real socialism," a child who chose a career relatively immune from political supervision by the state was a real gift to his or her parents. This was especially so in my case, given that my family's tradition on both sides was to pursue law—a really politically tainted field in the People's Republic of Poland.

I never entertained the thought of studying law myself (though after two years I switched from physics to sociology), but I still managed to have an early brush with the law, which was also in keeping with family tradition. My maternal grandfather was kicked out of the university for his patriotic activities before the First World War. He got, as it was then called, a wilczy bilet—a "wolf's ticket"—from the tzarist authorities, and had to finish his law studies in Odessa since he was banned from enrolling at any institution of higher learning in the Kingdom of Poland.

I got in trouble with the police while still in high school. It was not, however, what you may think. It was Adam Michnik. Even as a child, Adam was a bad influence on his friends. For one, being a precocious child and an avid reader since early youth, particularly curious about Polish history and communism, Adam stole books from his friends' parents' libraries. And so I, of course, became an accomplice. But it was not theft for which the police hauled us to interrogation.

We were the original baby boomers, the postwar generation born between 1945 and 1947. In Eastern Europe, significantly, this made us also the first twentieth-century cohort that did not directly experience the full force of totalitarianism. Nazi occupation of the region was over before we were born. And given that communist regimes mellowed within two or three years after Stalin's death in March 1953, Stalinist brutalities didn't directly affect us either, because we were too young. When Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin's crimes and the cult of personality in his famous secret speech at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956, we were still in elementary school.

My friends, for the most part, came from a leftist secular milieu with a tradition of political engagement. Our parents before the war were either Communist or Socialist party members or sympathizers, and to their quasi-universal chagrin we, their children, also fell for the ethos of speaking and acting on behalf of worthy causes. Our sense of security springing from the lucky coincidence of being born after the war and a belief that the ideals and practice of socialism could be harmonized into "a socialism with human face" (to use a well-turned phrase popularized later during the Czechoslovak "Prague Spring") gave us the impetus to establish, while still in high school, a discussion club.

I know this sounds silly, but activity on behalf of freedom of speech—and this is what we were up to: speaking our minds—under authoritarian regimes that deny it to their citizens consists, primarily, of acts of speech. In time we made ourselves enough of a nuisance for the regime—which was engaged in suppressing demands for liberalization originating simultaneously in various arenas of Polish intelligentsia and the Catholic...