Fall of the Berlin Wall: Voices from Transition

The following article originally appeared in the Fall 2009 Open Society News.

Helena Luczywo is a recently retired deputy editor-in-chief at Gazeta Wyborcza.

Before

I had been involved in the democratic opposition since I was a student in the 1960s. Poland was freer than the other Soviet bloc countries. Yet, there was much fear and doublespeak. The questions people faced were how to make sense of life, how to do something useful and not to lose dignity and decency in a system based on deception.

In the 1980s, after the imposition of martial law, we were completely immersed in our underground tasks: looking for new apartments where we could live, work, and hide Solidarity leaders, collecting information, and editing, publishing, and distributing our Solidarity weekly.

An article in Rolling Stone magazine I read a long time ago described communist Poland like a U.S. post office: gray, boring, people reduced to humble supplicants waiting in endless lines. There was something to this. Even though life in Poland was never boring for me, there was little color and there were constant shortages of everything. My brother said to me once about some goods sent from abroad: "This smells of the West!"

After

Life is much better now. There is more freedom, democracy, and economic growth. Life also seems to have more color. The country is independent, has had several consecutive governments that have peacefully passed power after losing elections, the judiciary is on its own, the market operates, the media is free, and civil rights are largely respected. For me, the accession of Poland and other Central European countries to NATO and the EU was kind of a second miracle after the revolution of 1989. It is the great accomplishment of my generation, and I'm glad to have contributed to it. I'm glad for smaller things as well. If I go to Italy, no one checks my ID any longer at the airport.

The worst change has been the mass unemployment that came with the market. Many factory workers, our colleagues who were the strength of Solidarity and largely contributed to our freedom, lost their jobs. I keep thinking: "Could we have done something to avoid this?" Then there was the first presidential election in 1990, when anti-Semitism and primitive populist demagoguery were used to smear the campaign of Tadeusz Mazowiecki, a noncommunist Catholic intellectual who lost in the first round. Finally, the war in Yugoslavia.

Recent victories for democracy are one source of hope for me: in 2007, young people in Poland-either kids or just born in 1989!-voted to end the nationalist Law and Justice Party's control of parliament. In the United States, there is Barack Obama's story; in Ukraine, the Orange Revolution. Democracy is fragile-easily endangered by the Putins and Berlusconis of this world-we need some evidence to prove it still works.