That July was the last time I saw my doctoral advisor Jerzy Jedlicki, a Holocaust survivor who was interned in a camp in communist Poland. I am a historian of Eastern Europe who has written about Nazism and Stalinism and who was educated by people who experienced and were repressed by communism. It was a long, strange journey for those words. I had a dreamy sense that the words were familiar: a protester, I realized, was reading aloud from a Polish translation of my book “On Tyranny: Lessons From the Twentieth Century,” which had been published a few months earlier. Now in the dark, we walked hand in hand through the trees toward a voice I heard projected by microphone. The route was long, and I had just about given up when a bicycle taxi appeared and gave us a ride, for free, to the edge of the woods around the palace. A protest march was underway in defense of an independent judiciary, so we joined it.Īs the march proceeded down a long boulevard toward the presidential palace, I put my daughter, then 5, on my shoulders. It was July 20, 2017, and my family had just arrived in Warsaw. It was one of those uncanny nights when everything blurs and then clarifies.
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