The Conscience of Poland: A Q&A With Adam Michnik

David Samuels

(Photo illustration by Tablet; main photo: Corbis/Reuters)

A conversation with the former dissident and public intellectual, about the ‘Polish mentality,’ anti-Semitism, and ‘wearing Jewish glasses’

As a freshman in high school, I had two heroes, both of whom were condemned to isolation cells for speaking out against stultifying regimes of oppression. It was absurd and woefully self-indulgent for me to draw parallels between my adolescent rebellions against private-school administrators on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and Adam Michnik’s unbending confrontation with the Communist Party in Poland or Anatoli Sharansky’s refusal to be broken by eight years of imprisonment in Siberia. I even knew it was absurd. But I did it anyway, because 14 is an absurd age. I believed that the cause of human freedom anywhere was the cause of human freedom everywhere.

Of the two, Michnik’s fate was the more precious to me. I cut out a black-and-white photograph of him from the inside pages of a magazine that I found in our high-school library and taped it to the door of my locker–not on the inside, but on the outside, in open violation of school policy. Luckily, no one in my high-school administration seemed to have any idea who Michnik was, or else the message of defiance that I intended would surely have been noticed by the authorities. I read everything I could find about Michnik, which wasn’t much, and was happy when the Polish authorities released him from prison for an afternoon so he could attend his father’s funeral, where he flashed a victory sign to the assembled mourners and secret policemen that was duly reported in a single paragraph of a longer article in the New York Times.

When Michnik was released from prison for the last time, during my freshman year of college, I felt a weird sense of personal triumph. I knew that I had done nothing meaningful to help the great cause of human freedom that he championed, but I had not been wrong to believe in my hero, who had stood up to the Polish Communist party and the Soviet Union and unmasked their lies. No matter what they did to him, he refused to give up an inch of the precious real estate inside his own head. He knew what was true, and what was ugly and false, and no one could force him to say otherwise. In the end, Solidarity triumphed, and the ashes of the Communist system blew away like a bad dream.

If the historic triumph of the dissidents and refusniks can appear in retrospect like every authority-hating adolescent’s fantasy version of Disney on Ice, it is also a powerful lesson in how history works, at least sometimes. The refusal of Michnik, Sharansky, and hundreds of other brave individuals to bow to a hopeless imbalance of power became a fulcrum that encouraged a small but dedicated corps of activists and believers to keep pushing against the weight of state power and learned hopelessness until inch by inch, the prison doors swung open. Even at this distance, it’s a ridiculous story, unscientific in the extreme, a fairy tale—and, like most good fairy tales, a necessary antidote to the more common wisdom that injustice will always win in the end. Hundreds of millions of people owe their personal freedom to a handful of men and women who turned their hearts and minds into countries that the bureaucrats and secret police could never occupy.

The fact that some of the heroes of the great anti-Communist refusal turned out to be leaden ideologues or petty political schemers and scroungers is, in the greater scheme of things, a forgivable offense, or at least a predictable one. In that context, it is worth recording that the post-Soviet Michnik proved himself again to be a conscience-driven man with a historian’s understanding of the dialectics of change. He refused to toe Lech Walesa’s party line, and he refused to be part of a self-congratulatory and often self-interested campaign of personal and political vengeance against the apparatchiks who had jailed him, some of whom had talents that could be useful to Poland. Instead, he became a distinguished essayist and editor-in-chief of Poland’s second-largest newspaper, the Gazeta Wyborcza—and would now be a member of his country’s new multi-millionaire elite if he had not given up his shares in his newspaper’s parent company, Agora, in order to safeguard the paper’s editorial integrity.

Read more: The Conscience of Poland: A Q&A With Adam Michnik