by Marci Shore
CAST OF HISTORICAL FIGURES
MORDECHAI (MORDEKHAI) ANIELEWICZ (c. 1920–1943) Zionist youth activist; leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising; committed suicide when the Germans discovered his bunker.
ION ANTONESCU (1882–1946) Romanian marshal; in 1940 established the short-lived National-Legionary State with the fascist Iron Guard; eliminated the Iron Guard in 1941 to become dictator of the pro-German Romanian government; sentenced to death by a communist court after the war.
WŁADYSŁAW BARTOSZEWSKI (b. 1922) Polish historian and politician; during the Second World War active in the Polish Home Army, the anti-German resistance loyal to the Polish government in exile and in Żegota, the Council for Aid to the Jews; imprisoned in Auschwitz by the Germans; spent about seven years in prison in Stalinist Poland; active in Solidarity; after the fall of communism, served as ambassador to Austria, minister of foreign affairs, and senator.
EDVARD BENEŠ (1884–1948) Foreign minister under Czechoslovakia’s founding president Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk (1850–1937) and later president of Czechoslovakia; chose not to resist Germany in September 1938; during the Second World War established a Czechoslovak national committee in exile; returned to Prague as the war ended and reestablished a government; capitulated when faced with the February 1948 communist coup.
ADOLF BERMAN (1906–1978) Younger brother of Jakub Berman; active in the Jewish resistance and in Żegota during the war; in postwar Poland, leader of the Marxist Zionist party Poalei Zion–Left; emigrated to Israel in 1950.
JAKUB BERMAN (1901–1984) Older brother of Adolf Berman; a liaison of the Communist Party of Poland with the intelligentsia during the interwar years; one of a triumvirate of Stalinist dictators in the postwar years, when he oversaw cultural affairs and the security apparatus; expelled from the Polish United Workers’ Party in 1957.
BOLESŁAW BIERUT (1892–1956) Polish communist leader; general secretary of the Polish United Worker’s Party during the interwar years; oversaw Sovietization in postwar Poland; died in Moscow in 1956 shortly following Khrushchev’s “secret speech.”
MARIAN BOGATKO (1906–1940) Bricklayer who became Wanda Wasilewska’s second husband; active in the Polish Socialist Party during the interwar years; killed by the Soviet secret police in Lvov in 1940.
JANINA BRONIEWSKA (1904–1981) Author of children’s literature; journalist in the Soviet Union during the war and a Party activist in the postwar years; the first wife of Władysław Broniewski and the closest friend of Wanda Wasilewska.
WŁADYSŁAW BRONIEWSKI (1897–1962) Polish poet who fought against the Red Army during the Polish-Soviet War; flirted with the Warsaw futurists; a revolutionary writer by the mid- to late 1920s; imprisoned in the Soviet Union, 1940–1941; spent the latter part of the war in Jerusalem after leaving the Soviet Union with the Anders army.
MARTIN BÚTORA (b. 1944) Slovak sociologist; founding member of Public Against Violence, which played a leading role in the Velvet Revolution of 1989; human rights adviser to Václav Havel, 1990–1992; Slovak ambassador to the United States, 1999–2003.
ZORA BÚTOROVÁ (b. 1949) Slovak sociologist; author of studies on attitudes toward minorities, transition to democracy, and gender issues in Slovakia.
NICOLAE CEAUŞESCU (1918–1989) General secretary of the Romanian Communist Party, 1965–1989, whose brutal rule was characterized by dynastic nationalism and a personality cult; executed together with his wife, Elena (1916–1989), in December 1989.
CORNELIU ZELEA CODREANU (1899–1938) Founder of the Romanian fascist movement known as the Iron Guard; imprisoned by King Carol II in 1938; shot to death shortly thereafter, allegedly while trying to escape.
DOINA CORNEA (b. 1939) Romanian French professor and human rights activist; dissident under communist leader Nicolae Ceauşescu’s regime; persecuted by the Securitate (secret police); active in the democratic opposition after the fall of communism.
HENRY DASKO (HENRYK DASZKIEWICZ) (1947–2006) Polish student expelled from his university for taking part in protests against censorship in March 1968; emigrated to Canada, where he became a successful businessman active in Polish-Jewish dialogue and literary circles.
ALEXANDER DUBČEK (1921–1992) General secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia who led the Prague Spring of 1968; expelled from the Party in the aftermath of the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968.
MAREK EDELMAN (c. 1919–2009) Bundist and leading figure in the Jewish Combat Organization; one of a handful of survivors of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising; after the war became a cardiologist in Łódź; active in Solidarity.
KONSTANTY (KOSTEK) GEBERT (AKA DAWID WARSZAWSKI) (b. 1953) Polish Jewish journalist; active in Solidarity; key figure in Poland’s “Jewish revival”; war correspondent in Bosnia during the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s; founding editor of the Polish Jewish monthly Midrasz.
WŁADYSŁAW GOMUŁKA (1905–1982) Polish communist leader; accused of “nationalist deviation,” expelled from the Polish United Workers’ Party in 1949, and arrested in Stalinist Poland; rehabilitated in 1956 to lead a de-Stalinization campaign; as general secretary of the Polish United Workers’ Party, directed the anti-Semitic “anti-Zionist” campaign of March 1968; forced to resign in 1970 following violent clashes between security forces and shipyard workers.
MIKHAIL SERGEEVICH GORBACHEV (b. 1931) General secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 1985–1991; led policies of glasnost (“openness”) and perestroika (“restructuring”); set in motion the end of the cold war.
JAN GROSS (b. 1947) Polish émigré sociologist and historian; imprisoned for his role as a student activist in the 1968 Warsaw University demonstrations; emigrated from Poland following his release from prison; active in supporting Solidarity from abroad.
IRENA GRUDZIŃSKA-GROSS (b. 1946) Polish émigré literary scholar; imprisoned for her role as a student activist in the 1968 Warsaw University demonstrations; emigrated from Poland following her release from prison; active in supporting Solidarity from abroad.
VÁCLAV HAVEL (1936–2011) Czech essayist and absurdist playwright; cofounder of the human rights dissident movement Charter 77; leader of the Velvet Revolution in 1989; first president of postcommunist Czechoslovakia.
MILADA HORÁKOVÁ (1901–1950) Democratic and feminist activist in interwar Czechoslovakia; arrested by the Germans in 1940 and interrogated by the Gestapo; liberated by the U.S. Army late in the war; show-tried by the Czechoslovak communist government on false charges of espionage and executed in 1950.
GUSTAV HUSÁK (1913–1991) Slovak communist imprisoned by Slovakia’s German-allied fascist government during the Second World War; leader of communist Czechoslovakia, 1969–1989; succeeded by Václav Havel.
ION ILIESCU (b. 1930) Romanian politician; joined the Communist Party of Romania in 1953; fell out of favor with Ceauşescu in 1971; leader of the postcommunist Party of Social Democracy in Romania; president of Romania, 1990–1996 and 2000–2004.
BRUNO JASIEŃSKI (1901–1938) Polish futurist poet; emigrated to France in 1925, where he wrote the novel I Burn Paris; emigrated to the Soviet Union after being deported from France in 1929; executed in 1938 during the Great Terror.
IVAN (MAGOR) JIROUS (1944–2011) Czech poet and art historian; artistic director of the underground psychedelic band the Plastic People of the Universe; imprisoned for more than eight years between 1973 and 1989.
JAN KARSKI (1914–2000) Heroic courier of the Polish anti-German underground during the Second World War; arrested and tortured by the Gestapo in 1940; brought news of the Holocaust to the Western Allies; after the war became a professor at Georgetown University.
VÁCLAV KLAUS (b. 1941) Czech economist and politician; served as prime minister of postcommunist Czechoslovakia, and later as president of the Czech Republic; frequently in conflict with Václav Havel; prioritized and oversaw postcommunist economic privatization.
PAVEL KOHOUT (b. 1928) Czech poet, novelist, and playwright; enthusiast of
Stalinism in his youth; reform communist in the 1960s; founding member of Charter 77; prevented from returning to Czechoslovakia from Austria during the last decade of communist rule.
JANUSZ KORCZAK (HENRYK GOLDSZMIT) (c. 1878–1942) Physician, author, and children’s rights activist; orphanage director who refused any attempt to escape from the Warsaw Ghetto and was murdered together with the children in 1942 in Treblinka.
KAREL KOSÍK (1926–2003) Czech philosopher; member of a communist anti-Nazi resistance; young Stalinist in the postwar years; a revisionist Marxist during the 1960s; expelled from the Communist Party and his professorship at Charles University in 1970; returned to the university in 1990.
STANISŁAW (STASZEK) KRAJEWSKI (b. 1950) Polish mathematician, philosopher, and essayist; activist in Solidarity; cofounder of the Jewish Flying University in the late 1970s; leading figure in the Jewish revival and in interfaith dialogue.
MILAN KUNDERA (b. 1929) Stalinist poet in his youth, later a revisionist Marxist; Czech-turned-French essayist and novelist; emigrated to France in the 1970s.
VLADIMIR IL’ICH LENIN (1870–1924) Russian Marxist revolutionary; in 1902 published What Is to Be Done?, which argued for a professional vanguard of revolutionaries who could bring class consciousness to the workers; in 1917 returned to Russia from Swiss exile to lead the Bolshevik Revolution.
ARTUR LONDON (1915–1986) Czech communist; fought in the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War and in the French resistance during the Second World War; co-defendant in the Slánský trial of 1952; sentenced to life imprisonment; released in 1956 and rehabilitated.
ARNOŠT LUSTIG (1926–2011) Czech Jewish novelist and survivor of Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, and Buchenwald; joined the Communist Party after the Second World War: reform communist in the 1960s; left Czechoslovakia following the August 1968 invasion and later became a professor at American University in Washington, D.C.
HEDA MARGOLIUS KOVÁLY (1919–2010) Czech literary translator and survivor of the Łódź Ghetto and Auschwitz; wife of Rudolf Margolius; fled Czechoslovakia after the 1968 invasion and worked as a librarian at Harvard University.
RUDOLF MARGOLIUS (1913–1952) Survivor of the Łódź ghetto, Auschwitz, and Dachau; deputy minister of foreign trade in the Czechoslovak communist government; co-defendant in the Slánský trial; sentenced to death in December 1952.
ALEKSANDER MASIEWICKI (1917–2011) Polish Jew who became a communist in his youth; student of Adolf Berman in the interwar years; deported to a Soviet labor settlement in 1940; returned to Poland in 1945; resigned from the Party during the March 1968 “anti-Zionist” campaign and subsequently emigrated.
VLADIMIR VLADIMIROVICH MAYAKOVSKY (1893–1930) Russian futurist poet and passionate enthusiast of the Bolshevik Revolution; committed suicide in Moscow in 1930.
VLADIMÍR MEČIAR (b. 1942) founder of the postcommunist nationalist party Movement for a Democratic Slovakia; three-time prime minister of Slovakia in the 1990s.
ADAM MICHNIK (b. 1946) Polish dissident and intellectual; leader of the 1968 student protests; activist in Solidarity who spent more than six years in prison; leading figure in the Round Table Talks; founder of the newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza.
STANISŁAW MIKOŁAJCZYK (1901–1966) Leader of the Polish Peasant Party; prime minister of the Polish government in exile in London, 1943–1944; returned to Poland at the end of the Second World War; fled postwar Poland with the onset of Stalinism.
CZESŁAW MIŁOSZ (1911–2004) Polish poet, essayist, and translator; defected in 1951 while serving in the Polish communist regime as cultural attaché in France; became a professor at University of California, Berkeley.
MICHAŁ MIRSKI (1905–1994) Member of the Communist Party of Poland in the 1920s and 1930s; active “on the Jewish street”; editor of both Polish and Yiddish postwar communist publications; left Poland in the wake of the “anti-Zionist” campaign of 1968.
IMRE NAGY (1896–1958) Hungarian communist prime minister during the 1956 Hungarian Revolution; appealed unsuccessfully to the West for help against the Soviet invasion; executed in communist Hungary in 1958; rehabilitated posthumously and reburied with honors in 1989.
JAN PALACH (1948–1969) Czech student who, in protest against the passivity of his country after the Soviet-led invasion of August 1968, set himself on fire on Prague’s Wenceslas Square.
JAN PATOČKA (1907–1977) Czech philosopher who studied with Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger; one of the original three spokespeople for the human rights petition Charter 77; arrested in connection with Charter 77; died in March 1977 after long interrogations.
JÓZEF PIŁSUDSKI (1867–1935) Polish patriot and socialist revolutionary before the existence of a Polish state; organizer of the Polish Legions, which fought against the Russians in the First World War; imprisoned in Germany; arrived in Warsaw in November 1918 as a national hero; took power in a coup in 1926.
SŁAWOMIR SIERAKOWSKI (b. 1979) Public intellectual, essayist, and left-wing social and political activist; founder and editor in chief of the journal Krytyka Polityczna (Political critique); animating force behind the left-wing movement devoted to creating an engagé cultural intelligentsia.
MARTIN M. SIMEČKA (b. 1957) Slovak writer and editor; published in samizdat before 1989; son of the Czechoslovak philosopher communist-turned-dissident Milan Simečka (1930–1990).
ANDRÉ SIMONE (OTTO KATZ) (1895–1952) Foreign editor of the communist daily Rudé Právo in postwar Prague; co-defendant in the Slánský trial who was falsely accused of treason; sentenced to death in December 1952.
H. GORDON SKILLING (1912–2001) Canadian historian of Czechoslovakia; fellow traveler who was sympathetic to communism in his youth; supporter of the Czechoslovak dissidents.
RUDOLF SLÁNSKÝ (1901–1952) General secretary of the Communist Party in postwar Czechoslovakia; played a central role in the communist takeover of Czechoslovakia in February 1948; show-tried in 1952 and sentenced to death.
ANTONI SŁONIMSKI (1895–1976) Poet and author of a famous weekly column during the interwar years; spent the Second World War in England; returned to Warsaw in 1951 and lent his support to the new communist regime; leading anticommunist dissident in the last decade of his life.
ALEKSANDER (ALIK) SMOLAR (b. 1940) Son of Grzegorz Smolar; imprisoned in March 1968 for his role in student protests; subsequently emigrated from Poland; active in supporting Solidarity from abroad; political scientist at Le Centre national de la recherche scientifique in Paris and president of the Stefan Batory Foundation in Warsaw.
GRZEGORZ (HERSH) SMOLAR (1905–1993) Communist revolutionary, author, and editor; served six years in prison in interwar Poland; organized partisan detachments in Belarus during the Second World War; a key figure in the Central Committee of Jews in postwar Poland; emigrated from Poland following the “anti-Zionist” campaign of March 1968.
CORNELIU VADIM-TUDOR (b. 1949) Writer, journalist, and politician; court poet of Nicolae Ceauşescu; leader of the nationalist and xenophobic Greater Romania Party.
WANDA WASILEWSKA (1905–1964) Polish Socialist Party activist and novelist from Krakow; became the Polish Left’s personal connection to Stalin during the war; remained in Kiev after the war with her third husband, the Ukrainian communist playwright Oleksandr Korneichuk (1905–1972).
ALEKSANDER WAT (1900–1967) Futurist poet in the early 1920s; editor of the legendary Marxist newspaper Miesięcznik Literacki, 1929–1931; imprisoned in the Soviet Union during the war and returned to Poland in 1946; spent the latter part of the 1950s and 1960s abroad in Western Europe; committed suicide in Paris in 1967.
OLA WATOWA (1904–1991) Aleksander Wat’s wife from 1927 until his death in 1967; deported to Soviet Kazakhstan during the war; died in France in 1991.
ADAM WAŻYK (1905–1982) Avant-garde poet in his youth; one of the “terroreticians” of socialist realism in the Stalinist era; author of “A Poem for Adults,” which in 1955 inaugurated de-Stalinization in the literary sphere.
SZYMON (SHIMON) ZACHARIASZ (1900–1970) Communist active “on the Jewish street” since his youth; served some seven years in Polish prison between the world wars; leading figure in the Central Committee of Jews in postwar Poland.
YITZHAK (YITSHAK, ICCHAK) ZUCKERMAN (CUKIERMAN) (1915–1981) Polish Zionist youth leader; the Jewish Combat Organization’s liaison with the Polish resistance during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising; emigrated to Palestine in 1947 where he founded Kibbutz Lohame ha-Geta’ot.
SZMUEL (SHMUEL) ZYGIELBOJM (1895–1943) Prominent activist in the Bund, a Yiddishist diaspora nationalist Jewish socialist movement; served as representative to the Polish National Council in London during the Second World War; committed suicide in May 1943, when faced with the news of the suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.