What I remember most vividly about my years in Poland was how happy I was in my work and how smug I often felt, almost heroic. I don't mean I was a real hero, someone who shows great moral courage, makes sacrifices and takes serious risks for the good of society. That lay beyond my capabilities. But still, the experiences of those years were as close as I have ever come to approaching my childhood dreams of valor. Those dreams occurred in New York, but they were Polish dreams, shaped by what I learned of my parents lives in Poland before I was born.

By the time I arrived in Warsaw, I had already spent a decade as a foreign correspondent in Africa and India. I had been to a number of small wars and I had timidly tested my courage by doing my job. In many areas of conflict and struggle I developed sympathies, either for individuals or for movements such as those fighting against apartheid and for democratic rule. But in general I kept my feelings and enthusiasms to myself and largely practiced the geometric journalism in which I was raised. This is a Cartesian methodology that holds that the truth of any issue can be found midway between its polar absurdities. The journalist is supposed to meet and speak with the competing partisans while remaining professionally skeptical, analyzing and picking apart the respective arguments. In fact, as a methodology in pluralistic and democratic societies, this approach can be quite effective. However, in cases where the divisions involve powerful authority and victimized society, where the rivals are the sheriffs who set their dogs on peaceful people and the people who are bitten by the dogs, it has obvious limitations.

I was aware of these shortcomings in Africa and I often found it hard to maintain my professional detachment. I knew I had real sympathies yet I was reluctant to let them show. I told myself it was important to maintain contact with all parties and keep from being expelled. In Poland, such defenses lessened. For one thing I spoke Polish quite well and consequently understand nuances and details more deeply than in my other posts. I had arrived almost a year after martial law and I quickly came to understand the strange tug of war between state and party on the one hand and society on the other. The conflict took on a surreal quality perhaps best reflected by Konwicki's wonderful, Small Apocalypse. Something like a rudimentary social contract was being negotiated. First the authorities gathered bodies by imprisoning thousands. Then they began letting them go, trading prisoners for the hope of gaining social tolerance and some measure of legitimacy. Amnesty was being offered in exchange for hopes of good conduct on the part of a pauperized citizenry. When the government's accumulation of dissident hostages shrank to a final handful, the authorities agreed to exile this oppositionist core sent to the French Riviera. Then in a brilliant but absurdist theatrical moment Adam Michnik wrote an open letter from prison shaming the Minister of Interior for trying to deny a self respecting patriotic Pole his right to sit in prison while demanding justice.