Farewell Staszek

We have helped our friend Staszek Sikorski to start his last journey. I hope that we will be as kind to his memory as the earth is to his remains. I hope this for two reasons.

Primarily, because in our culture, we believe there should be nothing but good spoken of the dead. It is unjust to pour more bitterness into the cup that was the earthly portion of the departed. Staszek had bitterness enough to swallow. A lesser man would have become introverted and vengeful. But Staszek was not a lesser man. He was open, warm, and generous.

And in addition, because we will no longer hear his unique voice in our discussions. No matter how much some of us differed from his opinions, he always made his point clearly, and defended himself most articulately. Let us not take advantage of his silence to have the last word.

I believe that Staszek's uniqueness lay in three aspects of his person.

• For firstly, he was witty without being trivial. Endowed with an exceptionally keen intelligence, he spoke with authority.
• For secondly, he did not allow himself to be crushed by the burden of his wartime experiences nor by our general Polish history. He lived his life as would any normal man of superior wit. That is, he looked for and found a way of life that suited him and his nearest. He used the power of his reason to accept or reject convention. In his personal life he embodied perfectly the existentialist principle that man is free.
• For thirdly, he was confident enough within himself to ask radical questions. Not to question is born of fear and timidity. He enjoyed a vigorous dialectic firmly rooted in humanism.

I will never be able to see Staszek through the eyes of his contemporaries. For some, I know, he touched raw nerves and questioned what they considered should be beyond dispute. His arguments were controversial, and not everybody understood them. To us, the younger generation, he towered head and shoulders above the rest. He was the living proof that we could be everything we wanted to be and still be Polish. I cherish his memory and mourn him not so much as a friend (I didn't know him well enough for that) but as one of the heroes of my youth.

Jerzy Kirakowski London 3rd September, 1990.