No Pole, apart from John Paul II and Lech Wałesa, became as well known in Germany in the late twentieth century as the Polish scholar, journalist and statesman Władysław Bartoszewski.

Born exactly 100 years ago and deceased in 2015, the son of a Warsaw bank clerk and a mother from an impoverished landowning family had a troubled life.

In September 1939, shortly after graduating from high school, war broke out in Poland, in Warsaw and in the Warsaw Jewish Quarter, which was close to the family home.

Bartoszewski, who was a paramedic at the time, tried to help everywhere.

He was arrested in an SS raid in 1940 and spent six months in the Auschwitz concentration camp as a political prisoner.

During the war he took part in relief operations for the persecuted Jews,

was active in various resistance groups and in the Polish Home Army.

He became deputy head of the Jewish Council of the London government-in-exile delegation and took part in the Warsaw Uprising.

The persecutions did not stop with the end of the war.

Between 1946 and 1954, Bartoszewski was imprisoned twice by the communists for a total of six years.

The accusation: anti-communist activities and espionage for the West.

After release and rehabilitation, he worked as a journalist and writer and as a visiting professor of Polish contemporary history at the Catholic University of Lublin.

During this period, Bartoszewski became a key figure in the Polish-German conversation.

After becoming a member of the free trade union Solidarność in 1980, he was arrested again under martial law in Poland from December 13, 1981 to April 28, 1982.

After his release, he was a visiting professor of political science at the Universities of Munich, Eichstätt and Augsburg for seven years, after which he was the ambassador of the Republic of Poland in Austria.

In 1995 and again in 2000/2001 he was Polish Foreign Minister.

attempts at understanding

The theme of his life became German-Polish reconciliation.

This is astounding, even bordering on a miracle.

The Polish patriot and resistance fighter, pursued, imprisoned and threatened with death by the Germans, could hardly have been blamed for giving in to the human thirst for revenge.

But the hunted did not become the hunter.

Bartoszewski didn't repress anything.

He researched the crimes of the National Socialists in numerous books and essays.

His writings on the 1943 ghetto uprising, the death ring around Warsaw and the Polish uprising in 1944 have become standard works.

But he remained willing to reconcile throughout his life.

He hoped for the future, for the youth of both peoples.

That alone is unusual and earns him our respect.

It took a long time for Germans and Poles to find a common language again after 1945.

After the German attack in 1939 and the terrible crimes against the Polish people during the war years, after the horror of the flight and expulsion of millions of Germans from their old homeland in the East in the years 1944 to 1947, the rift had become so wide that a return to normality seemed unimaginable.

At first, church circles tried to reach an understanding.

The pacesetters were the Polish bishops, who at the end of the Second Vatican Council offered their German brothers in office reconciliation with the famous sentence: "We forgive and ask for forgiveness." Unfortunately, the German reaction was all too weak.

A wide variety of cultural contacts followed: musicians, monument conservators, theater and film people, scientists,

Writers connected with one another;

young people got to know each other;

Action Reconciliation, Pax Christi, and the Maximilian Kolbe Works developed their activities.

In the 1980s, interest in Germany's eastern neighbor grew.

With bated breath, the Germans followed the struggle of the Polish workers and their allied intellectuals for freedom and social justice, the daring attempt to found a free trade union, Solidarność, in the middle of the monolithic Eastern Bloc.

The haughty figure of strike leader Lech Wałesa made an impression.

The Pope's visits to his homeland caused a stir.

Something had started to move.

And it was the Poles who initiated it.

Today we know that the dissolution of the Soviet empire began with that uprising at the Gdańsk shipyard.

Europe owes much to the daring of Polish workers and intellectuals, and without the support of the Polish Pope, electrician and trade union leader Lech Wałesa would never have dared to challenge a world power at the Gdańsk shipyard.

From 1980 until his death, Bartoszewski influenced and reshaped Polish-German relations in various offices.

Bartoszewski was quite critical of some aspects of German and Polish politics in the post-war years.

In Poland he fought the now ruling national Polish PIS from the start.

In Germany, newly emerging nationalistic tendencies worried him.

But he never doubted, as he put it in his speech in the German Bundestag in 1995, that "a deeply democratized Germany ... had returned to its constructive role in European history and culture".

In 1986 the Stock Exchange Association awarded Władysław Bartoszewski the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade.

I ended my laudatory speech with the words: "Should German-Polish reconciliation succeed,

Władysław Bartoszewski will have been one of its pioneers, its founding fathers.

One calls for role models so often.

He is one.”