By John Darnton

I arrived in Warsaw with my wife, Nina, and our two young daughters in August, 1979, and we left exactly three years later, in August, 1982. There was a remarkable, three-way symmetry to our time in Poland. It's almost as if we lived in three different countries and now, as I think back over our time there, I realize that we actually did live in three countries.
First was the Poland of so-called normal Communism and Edward Gierek, the hatchet-faced miner who presided over the people's sinking economic fortunes with a kind of stoic denial. The country was like an old, once glorious manor house; viewed from the outside, to all intents and purposes, it was still standing and looked sturdy enough, but inside, in the basement, the foundation was rotting.

Then came the Poland of Solidarnosz and Lech Walesa, the electrician with a Pancho Villa mustache, who was a natural activist, up from the streets, if not a great strategist or geopolitical leader. For 16 unbelievable months, while the world watched and held its breath, all that energy and inspiration poured out of the building, breaking open windows, smashing down walls, drawing up new blueprints, a cacophony of hammering and sawing and yelling. And finally, of course, came the Poland of martial law and General Jaruszelski, with his stiff back and tinted glasses, when the hopes and dreams of so many came to an inglorious end one snowy December night. Many of the people in the building were locked up and the windows were boarded over and the fence around it was padlocked. Three years, three separate countries. And a 360-degree voyage that seemed to circle the globe and ended back where it began, a journey from oppression to liberation and back to oppression. Except of course that, as we now know, it didn't really end there.