As Mark Noll observed in the last issue of BOOKS &CULTURE, we have "not yet caught up to the Christian significance of what went on and has been going on in Albania, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, the former East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and the former Yugoslavia" in the years leading up to the breakup of the Soviet Bloc and the often disheartening aftermath. Noll's assessment indeed reveals a careful historian's habit of understatement. It would not be tabloidish to go further and say that in the places where such matters are discussed, the role of the church in these great events has been systematically ignored and distorted.

No single event was more influential in the transformation of East-Central Europe than the flourishing of the Polish labor movement, Solidarity. Adam Michnik was at the heart of that struggle, for which he was imprisoned by Poland's military regime. While his work is hardly unknown in the West, scholars routinely downplay Michnik's Christianity, which is in fact fundamental to his outlook.

In Letters from Prison and Other Essays (1986) and The Church and the Left (1992), Michnik's distinctive political vision is laid out. Because the telling is dense with particulars, many Americans have not bothered to digest it. That is a great loss. Now more than ever, American political discourse needs reinvigoration, and the publication of Michnik's new collection, Letters from Freedom, couldn't be more timely.

Michnik, it is important to add, is not your standard-order political theorist. At a conference last year, he ruffled the mostly impeccably liberal, Buddhist, agnostic academic audience by referring repeatedly to the Communists as a "gang" and by frequently invoking the Holy Trinity. Nor is he a saintly man; his comments about women are not only "pre-feminist" but also "pre-Christian." Nonetheless, his is a voice very much worth our attention.

What follows is an excerpt from just one piece in a rich collection of essays and conversations. Michnik's interlocutor here is the journalist and provocateur Daniel Cohn-Bendit, who is currently a member of the European Parliament, representing the Green Party. Born in France in 1945 to Jewish parents who had fled Hitler's terror in the early 1930s, Cohn-Bendit grew up in France and Germany. His active participation in the French student uprisings of the sixties led to his expulsion from France; today he resides in Germany.

Daniel Cohn-Bendit: Adam, when you talk about yourself, you always remind us that you are a Pole. I find that strange because it would never occur to me to attach such great importance to my nationality.

Adam Michnik: If you lived in a Germany where reading Thomas Mann, Goethe, Schiller, Heine, Hegel, and Kant was forbidden, you would feel German to an extent that you can't even imagine. I identify with the Polish people just as I identify with all that is weak, oppressed, and humiliated. If Poland were a superpower, I would probably be cosmopolitan or a gypsy. But Poland is oppressed and humiliated, and the Polish people live in misery; which is why I am in solidarity with these people and this language. For better, for worse. And the fact that some people in Poland consider me Jewish rather than Polish further strengthens my national conviction.

Can you tell me how you managed to politicize yourself in the Poland you've just described?
My biography is not a typical Polish biography.

That doesn't matter.
I come from a Jewish family that Polonized itself through communism, a sort of Red assimilation. So I had a particular sense of nationality, one that had little relation to present-day national symbols. For example, in Polish families, young boys generally go to church; as for me, I was brought up outside any religious tradition. There is usually a family tradition, based on either the Polish wars of independence or on the Home Army (AK), but none of that existed in our family. My father was a known, active member of the Communist party. He spent eight years in jail, and after the war he did not want to play any political role. His entire intellectual formation rested in Marxism and communism. Even when defending extreme anti-Communist or anti-Soviet positions, his language was the Marxist language he had learned from the party.

How did the break occur? And when?
Paradoxically, I belonged during the sixties to a small circle that didn't fear the Communists. I felt that Communist Poland was my Poland. So what should I be scared of? I believed then that a Communist was someone whose mission was to denounce injustice. So I did. Normal Polish families didn't raise their children that way: rather, children were taught that they lived under Soviet occupation, and that any ill-considered statement could be overheard by a spy, so one must be careful. Polish children were scared because they knew that their fear was justified. But I didn't know that, so I was brave, and I dared to speak. In school, for example, I got up and asked, "If a Communist must tell the truth, why not tell the truth about what happened in Katyn?" The professor's reaction was unbelievable! All hell broke loose—everyone was scared, and I got thrown out of class.

How old were you?
Thirteen, fourteen. I've had two shocks in my life. First, when a friend of my father's, a party member, returned to Poland after spending 20 years in a camp. That's when I suddenly realized that good Communists were sent to Siberia, which I just couldn't understand. The second shock came when my cousin married a man who had spent 10 years in Siberia for having served with the Home Army. Then my sky was on fire. That's the title of a famous Polish book by Jan Parandowski, about a young man's crisis of conscience. In the same way, my sky was on fire. And since then I have continued to think that it makes sense to believe, it is better to believe in God and the Holy Trinity, because I will never be so deceived by them as I was by the Communist god.

Oh! Oh!
I talk about God and I say: believe in God, not in the Church.

I haven't met him yet.
Has God ever deceived you? But how often have the Communists?

His believers have often deceived me.
I didn't say that you should believe in those who believe in God but that you should believe in God.

At the time a friend who worked for the journal Po Prostu took me to the Krzywe Kolo, an intellectuals' club in Warsaw that had managed to keep going after 1956 (it was closed in 1962, so I still had six months ahead of me). It was an extraordinary experience, because Warsaw's most influential intellectuals, like Leszek Kolakowski, Wlodzimierz Brus, Stanislaw Ossowski, and Tadeusz Kotarbinski, were there. I was only 15, still a schoolboy.

It was thanks to this club that I met a man who played a decisive role in my life and to whom I still owe a huge debt, one of Poland's most wonderful men, Jan Jozef Lipski.

A few years later, the party organizations and the police remembered the club, which they called "the Revisionists' Kindergarten," and wondered why it hadn't been forbidden.

I was believed to have privileged relations with the Central Committee of the party and to be linked to certain factions, which wasn't true at all. I was simply lucky, because imbeciles are always lucky.

What did you do at the club? What were your topics of discussion?
We had one thing in common: we were very smart and even more naive. But this naivete was also our strength. It's what made us so brave.

We considered ourselves Communists, so the idea that something could happen to us in a Communist country never even occurred to us. That wasn't very smart, knowing what happened to my father's friend and my brother-in-law. I should have known what communism represented.

I remember the American invasion of the Bay of Pigs. I went to a demonstration at the university and yelled anti-American slogans without any encouragement. I was very proud when I got home and told my father that I had participated in a political demonstration. He turned white as a sheet and asked me, "Who took you?" "Kuron." And my father said, "Tell him that you are certainly a little jerk but that he's an imbecile. With his generous ideas he should be protesting in front of the Soviet embassy against the Hungarian invasion." That was my father's communism. Mine, on the other hand, made me say, "You'll see. When the time comes, Kuron will go and demonstrate before the Soviet embassy." In the end, we were both right.

In our club, "the Revisionists' Kindergarten," which we baptized the Club for Contradiction Searchers, we discussed everything that was forbidden.

Can you give some examples?
Freedom in the system of the dictatorship of the proletariat; the Soviet intervention in Hungary; September 17, 1939; will there be a second proletarian revolution in Poland?

Leszek Kolakowski told me at the time, "Adam, calm down, you can't have a second revolution in a country that hasn't recovered from the first," but he couldn't convince me.

We also discussed the reasons for the dissolution of the Polish Communist party, the big Moscow trials, Trotskyism, closed and open Marxism, and so on. Stefan Kisielewski said then that all of Marxism belonged behind a locked door; I thought he was kidding. Everything progressed marvelously for six months, and then it turned out that freedom had its limits, even in the dictatorship of the proletariat. The Warsaw Socialist Youth Federation asked us to completely revise our program. We refused: Shouldn't a Communist act in accord with his conscience? … but since they were the real Communists, they acted in accord with their own conscience and dissolved our club.

It was 1964. I passed my baccalaureate. But first there was the famous Letter of the 34: thirty-four personalities, intellectuals, writers, scientists, who sent the prime minister an open letter protesting censorship. The letter caused a sensation. Gomulka's reaction was quite violent; he acted as if NATO troops were invading Poland! He began by punishing certain people and forbade the publication of their names in the papers. There were university professors among them. In response, the students organized a demonstration in support of their professors; this was the first demonstration I saw in my life.

Did you just watch, or did you participate?
I participated, of course, even though I wasn't a student there yet. Prof. Bronislaw Baczko, who is now a philosophy professor in Geneva, stopped me in the university courtyard. He knew me from the days of the Club for Contradiction Searchers, and he also knew my father. He caught me by the ear and took me out of the demonstration. "You have to worry about your baccalaureate now," he said. "Then you can get into politics. Which is probably what you'll do, since all cretins get into politics. I'm the best proof of that."

I met a friend, Karol Modzelewski, at the History Institute. We decided to meet again three days later. Karol warned me, "I'm not sure it's good for you to come to my house and be seen in my company." I didn't understand what he meant—who would see me?

I liked being seen with Karol, mostly because I was a snob. He was well liked at the university; students appreciated him, women admired him. Unconsciously, I wanted some of it to rub off on me. But he didn't let me come to his house and suggested that we meet at the university library instead, three days later. So three days later I went to the library: I waited for a half-hour, an hour, two hours, and finally, furious, I went to his house, where his mother told me he had been arrested. Kuron and others were arrested at the same time. It was an epiphany for me:

I realized that I belonged with this type of people, despite some differences. And that's how I became a particularly zealous disciple of Modzelewski and Kuron. I never completely identified with their program, but I felt very close to them. They were freed after 48 hours and began working on their Open Letter. We were quite close at the time. They sent their letter to the party in 1965. They left a copy with me so that it could be disseminated to the entire world. The copy was hidden outside of my apartment so that the police wouldn't find it.

I was very shocked the first time the police visited me, when I was 18. I thought my arrest would last 48 hours, but it lasted two months.

The Open Letter affair had enormous repercussions. Kuron was already quite well known for his activities with the scouts; Modzelewski was a reknowned historian; and at barely 19, I became famous. Everyone was talking about me, and it became a leitmotif: be famous, make a career, as long as the Communists will keep arresting me. In other words, I owe the Communists everything—I'm not sure what I would have done if they hadn't been there.

The next three years, from March 1965 to March 1968, were very important for me: I had a name at the university now.

Were those three years from 1965 to 1968 the most interesting or intense years of your life?
I think that the most important period was the Solidarity period. I wouldn't have missed it for anything in the world. The 16 months in prison were worth it. But those three years (1965-68) were interesting because a few friends and I managed to function as a legal opposition group within a system that didn't admit the existence of a legal opposition. It's thanks to the university that we were able to exist as such. The situation there was quite complex because many professors had liberal opinions—both neutral professors and some that were party members. Those who saw us as real Communists saw us as imbeciles, of course. For many of them, communism itself was the scourge, and we were coming along and proposing a better version of it: we were clearly insane! But their honor and dignity incited them to defend us. Because we, the protesters, were nonetheless their students, the legitimation of their conformity. We represented their entrance into history. We justified their existence. That's why many of them protected us, albeit reluctantly.

The Young Communists organized evening discussions within the university, on themes like "Fifty Years of the Soviet Union's Pacifist External Policy." We would meet beforehand and organize a seminar during which we thoroughly studied the topic and distributed the tasks: Janek, you'll talk about the Hungarian intervention; Jozek, you'll talk about Katyn; Stefan, you'll talk about Finland; and you, you'll talk about the Moscow trials or Yugoslavia. The big official meeting took place in the university's Maximum Auditorium, and Walery Namiotkiewicz, Gomulka's secretary, attended. We would come and sit all around the room. He made a speech reminding us that the Soviet Union had been fighting for peace for 50 years. Then my friend Jozek got up and asked, "Is this peace a room with a kitchen?" And Namiotkiewicz answered, "This is a provocation. You are not qualified to discuss this subject." So I got up and yelled, "Yes, we are! Yes we are! You have to listen!" He answered, "Contradiction does not scare the party!" And I continued, "That remains to be seen!" An uproar ensued: Janek spoke about Hungary, Jozek about Finland, Stefan about Yugoslavia, and, at the end, I quoted Fidel Castro.

Have you no shame?
Yes, actually I am ashamed of it. But haven't you ever done anything that you're ashamed of? Am I to tell you only the photogenic facts, or the truth? … So I quoted Fidel Castro, who said that the peaceful coexistence Moscow fought for consisted in keeping the bombs from falling on Moscow or Washington. But they could fall on Vietnam. How do you feel, as members of the Communist party, knowing that bombs fall on Vietnam every day? You don't do anything, and you don't want to do anything!

Walery Namiotkiewicz couldn't tell if I was pro- or anti-Soviet. In his place, I wouldn't have known either! Another time it was Mieczyslaw Rakowski—a liberal, now minister of foreign affairs—who participated in our meeting. We asked him if he thought of Marxism as a critical theory, and he answered, "Yes, of course." Does a Marxist believe in God? "No, never." Is Gomulka a human being or a god? "A human being, naturally." As a man, then, could he be as infallible as God? "No, that isn't possible." So then why hadn't he, Rakowski, ever found a fault to criticize in Gomulka? … And so on.

It was an anti-authoritarian revolution.
Obviously.

During the great Solidarity period, did you believe that this collective opposition could one day be legalized? Did you believe in a political solution?
No, I didn't believe in anything. I'm going to tell you a joke. There's a Jew, Moses, who goes to the synagogue every Friday. He kneels …

Jews don't kneel.
You know Jews, I know funny stories. … So he was going to the synagogue to pray, and he said, "My God, how cruel you are. I still have not won a million at lotto. My wife Rebecca won't have the money to buy a new dress. My daughter Sarah won't have money for a new bicycle. And my son David won't have money for a new car." And he would leave. Coming back the next Friday he says, "My God, how cruel you are. I still haven't won a million at lotto. And my wife Rebecca, my daughter Sarah, my son David!" The fifth time he was still saying, "My God, how cruel you are. I still have not won a million at lotto. And my wife Rebecca, and my daughter Sarah, and my son David!" And the synagogue roof splits open and he hears a voice, "Moses, give me a chance, and at least buy a lotto ticket!"

I didn't believe, but I bought a ticket. I wanted to give God a chance, so I didn't want to be guilty of not having bought the ticket. But God is just: since I had bought the ticket, there was Solidarity.

This conversation is excerpted from Letters from Freedom: Post-Cold War Realities and Perspectives (Univ. of California Press), by Adam Michnik, edited by Irina Grudzinska Gross and translated by Jane Cave. Copyright 1998 The Regents of the University of California. Used with permission.

Copyright © 1999 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail bceditor@BooksAndCulture.com.