Poland's ex-foreign minister and Holocaust survivor Bronislaw Geremek has died in a car accident aged 76. Geremek was an icon of the Solidarity movement and one of the main architects of Poland's transition to democracy during the 1980s and 1990s. A founding member of the Solidarnosc trade union, he came to international attention as Lech Walesa's chief negotiator in the 1989 round table talks with General Wojciech Jaruzelski's communist regime. Geremek, an expert on French medieval history, had long been noted as a prominent intellectual.
During the Nazi occupation of Poland, he was brought up by Catholics. His parents perished in the Holocaust. Geremek was a communist party member from 1950 until 1968, when he resigned in protest at the wave of government-sponsored anti-Semitism in Poland and the invasion by troops of the Warsaw Pact countries of Czechoslovakia. He was interned for two and a half years under the martial law proclaimed in December 1981, and dismissed from his teaching post. After the fall of communism Geremek was widely seen as a possible Prime Minister, but he believed that the time was not right for Poland to acquire a Jewish-born head of government and opted, despite his popularity, for a low-profile role as president of the parliamentary foreign affairs committee. Geremek served as Poland's foreign minister when in 1997 a Solidarity-based government was returned to power. He held the post until 2000, overseeing Poland's entry into NATO and preparing the country for its eventual integration into the European Union. Since 2004, Geremek was a member of the European Parliament in Strasbourg and Brussels.
European political leaders praised Geremek's commitment to the continent and both friends and political foes in Poland mourned his loss. "Polish science and politics have lost a great man. Many of us have lost a friend,'' the country's prime minister, Donald Tusk, said. Former Polish president Aleksander Kwasniewski said he was shocked. "This is an enormous loss,'' he said. European Commission president José Manuel Barroso called Geremek a "European of exceptional greatness" and "a Pole of unwavering convictions."
