The Geremek Case

To the Editors:

Your readers may be interested in the following letter sent to General Jaruzelski, with copies to the Polish Academy of Sciences and the Embassy of Poland in Washington, DC.

Natalie Z. Davis

We the undersigned members of the Princeton community of historians learn with dismay and disbelief of the arrest of Professor Bronislaw Geremek in Warsaw on May 17, 1983.

Professor Geremek is charged with organization of illegal meetings, spreading of false information and disturbing the public order.

We know and admire Bronislaw Geremek not only for his superb writing on the artisanal class, the poor and the marginal in the late Middle Ages and early modern times, but also for his steady and courageous battle for civil and human rights in fulfillment of the letter and spirit of Poland’s constitution.

Convinced that the exercise of civil and political rights, especially that of information, is both the birthright and solemn duty of any intellectual, we demand in the spirit of the Helsinki Agreement and of détente the immediate release of Professor Bronislaw Geremek.

Arthur A. Link, Cyril E. Black, Natalie Z. Davis, Arno J. Mayer, Theodore K. Rabb, Carl E. Schorske, Lawrence Stone, and twenty-one other historians