As a citizen of a country with comparably stable governance, it is easy to be ignorant of the sacrifices other people elsewhere in the world have made for freedom. Some experiences I had while in Poland, though, helped me On Monday, 13 June 2011, Tomasz Pisula gave a talk to us entitled “Sharing experiences with strengthening democracy: Solidarity with the East.” Additional talks on this day examined the issues surrounding Roma communities as well as the difficult topic of human trafficking in Poland. The day's theme was defending and promoting human rights beyond national borders. Pisula is Chairman of the Board of Directors of The Freedom and Democracy Foundation, a Warsaw-based nongovernmental organization (NGO) that seeks to share Polish experiences of successful struggle for independence, democracy and human rights with activists in other parts of the world. Pisula’s organization has done work in Belarus, Cuba, The Ukraine, and former Soviet Republics in the Caucasus. He spoke about the international networks of support among anti-Soviet dissidents in the Eastern Bloc during the cold war, as well as the lessons he had learned through carrying out his own organization’s work in the face of intimidation and repression abroad. 
Pisula possessed the honest and direct speaking style of someone whose day-to-day work left him too sick of dissimulation and high-flown rhetoric to engage in it himself. In spite or perhaps because of this, though, his words reminded me of what one of his predecessors in the struggle for freedom, the Czech poet and playwright Vaclav Havel said in a speech to the United States Congress twenty-one years ago. In it, he tells the assembled Americans who had been his allies in the struggle against Soviet Communism that he and his countrymen can offer their allies something in return: namely, their experience and the knowledge that has come from it. He claims that the experience of subjection that he and his fellow Eastern Europeans have suffered has given them:
something positive, a special capacity to look from time to time somewhat further than someone who has not undergone this bitter experience. A person who cannot move and lead a somewhat normal life because he is pinned under a boulder has more time to think about his hopes than someone who is not trapped that way.
Regardless of whether or not this accurately expresses the reality of the Central and Eastern European psyche after the fall of communism, the image of a person who better appreciates life after having experienced it hanging in the balance is certainly a powerful one.
Indeed, it sometimes seems that those who know best what life is worth are those most willing to risk it for something higher. Pisula spoke of doing democratization work in former Soviet Republics in the Caucasus, where he saw soldiers fire live ammunition into crowds of protestors, and police at a demonstration beat a man until his head split open. One cannot help but think that people who willingly put themselves into such situations in order to secure their own freedom understand the value of being free much better than do those of us who simply take it for granted.
Pisula’s stories about ordinary people’s courage in the face of state brutality made me think of the hundreds of students, intellectuals, and trade union activists in Poland who were beaten, imprisoned, and even killed in the decades leading up to free elections in 1991. At the crucial moment, they could not know that their sacrifices, whether small or great, would amount to anything. But they chose to make them anyway, animated by a faith in the rightness of their action. I am awed by the courage and depth of conviction that those who make such sacrifices possess.
My respect for this courage and conviction was further developed by an experience that I had during my time in Poland. Last Saturday some other HIA fellows and I took part in Warsaw’s Equality Parade, a march for LGBTQ rights. Over a thousand people, many of them young, participated in the event. Several trucks decorated with rainbow flags and playing loud disco music rolled with the parade. An extreme right political group had organized a counter-demonstration in opposition to the march. This was my first time seeing such a large, brazen display of hate in a public place, and it contrasted sharply with my experience attending similar LGBTQ events in the United States.
What really made an impression on me, though, were the scores of riot police deployed on the parade grounds. I later learned that several years earlier, a previous march in another Polish city had degenerated into violence, and now municipal governments deploy police to maintain order. Seeing so much massed state power unsettled me more than the than the angry men and women chanting slogans on the other side of the street. I reminded myself that the police were there to keep everyone safe, and I had nothing to worry about. I couldn’t help but think, however, of the previous generations of Poles who had stood up to organized violence to assert their rights. This parade, like Pisula’s talk and so many other experiences that I’ve had while in Poland, have deepened my appreciation for the sacrifices others have made for freedom.
