A Guided Tour Through the Museum of Communism

IV THE CAT-KEEPER IN WARSAW

(Letter to the State Prosecutor)

Sir,

I am addressing your office and you personally in connection with case No. PT/2875/2008-09, regarding the defendant whom I, for reasons of my own, will address only as the General here. As you are well aware, in the autumn of 2008 the Institute of National Remembrance, investigating Nazi- and Communist-era crimes, brought in an indictment against a total of nine persons. Now the eighty-six-year-old General, who headed the Military National Salvation Council, created on December 13, 1981, stands accused, among other things, of leading this “criminal organization”—for which he could get up to ten years in prison.

I will abstain from any comment about this institute and its methods in conducting the lustration process—perhaps it is enough to mention that I have heard some humans call it the “Ministry of Truth.” But, on the other hand, I do not go out in the streets of Warsaw very often, and it could be that I am missing some valuable information.

I am appealing to you because I believe it is extremely important to bring the case of the General urgently to an end. I will try to explain why.

Sir, you rightly might ask who am I to take it upon myself to address you at all? Therefore, please allow me first to introduce myself. My name is Gorby. I am a female of feline origin—what you humans call cats. Being born in the house of the General’s daughter, I have been living in the General’s household for almost ten years now. His whole family loves animals; the General himself, unfortunately, favors horses the most. No wonder. He is an officer, after all. Let me explain our relationship: I am considered to be the General’s pussycat, although I take a somewhat different view of this myself. From my standpoint I was nice enough to choose to live in his home, and to allow him and everybody else to believe just the opposite. It is perhaps too banal to say that I picked him up, since it is well known that we cats are free spirits, unlike dogs, of course. But I have to share the house with his dog, Napoleon. This is because Napoleon Bonaparte is the person the General admires the most. Not a good choice of a name, because Napoleon is a big, dumb mongrel. The only certain thing about his lineage is that he evidently belongs to the shallow end of a gene pool. Of course, his favorite activity is playing with a ball! The poor thing shows no sign of intellectual activity whatsoever, and I can tell that he bores the General. Who wouldn’t be bored by throwing about that round object again and again? But I have some use for him; he brings me news and information from the outside world—as my courier, you might say.

I, on the other hand, am never either bored or boring. You are arrogant, I’ve heard Napoleon say about me more than once behind my back, but it is not my intention here to gossip about him. I just want to stress the fact that it was my choice to live with the General. To choose is a very important verb for me. I have no problem with freedom, since I did not live in that allegedly inhuman period of human history called Communism. I have often heard this adjective—by “inhuman” humans mean “animal-like.” Let me take a chance here to express my total disagreement with this use of the word; it should be corrected! Needless to say, we animals rarely exercise your bloody habit of killing each other within the same species. With the exception of fighting dogs, but those gladiators are beyond contempt, I am afraid.

Going back to my relationship with the General, I cannot say that he is my butler, although it is very close to the truth; it would offend him if I were to claim that. The General is very much a person of the old times. By that I mean that he is truly sensitive to class differences, maybe even more so because he was born into a noble family. Noblesse oblige! So, let’s just simplify things and state here that the General is my keeper.

With this introduction, I would like to move to the purpose of my letter and offer you some of my feline reflections.

Let me tell you, Sir, that I have two reasons for submitting this appeal to you. The first one is strictly personal. Right now, the General is in the hospital with a severe case of pneumonia and various other ailments that I don’t want to bother you with. This is not the first time; his age and the stress of this trial are wearing him out. Pneumonia can cause the death of an old and frail person. Considering his poor health throughout his whole life, I am seriously worried that he might not ever make it to hear the sentence when it is given out. Especially because I know that in this country such trials can drag on for years. Indeed quite some time elapsed from the first indictment to the beginning of his trial… I would hereby like, as his friend—indeed his confidant—to submit this appeal for you to take matters into your own hands and bring a quick decision in whatever direction you see fit.

My second reason is of a more general nature, though. I see the young generation of Poles: for them Communism is something that died twenty years ago, before they were even born. It is passé! But although this young generation might not be very knowledgeable or even interested in the events of the past, they should be responsible for how they deal with their past now. Therefore, the trial of the General is a very important example for them.

Speaking of the General, I ask myself if he (and others from his time) should have been put on trial at all—and what is such a trial expected to achieve? To make my point clear, I do think that a fair trial makes it possible for an unjustly accused person to exonerate himself. Yet, I wonder if the General should have been put on trial in a criminal court. Let’s make no mistake here—the General welcomes his trial. “It is important that history doesn’t continue to divide Poles forever,” he has told me often enough. I believe that to try him or not was a major dilemma, because it had to do with the attitude of your society toward the Communist past in general. Seeing that there was no consensus on how to proceed, your office dragged its feet until very recently. After all, life is what happens precisely in between these (or any other) two extremes. Again, as the General himself said: “History and the question of who is right are complicated and cannot be seen in terms of black and white.”

I am sure that you, Sir, with your experience in such matters, would agree with me that truth and justice are brother and sister—but sometimes it is hard to maintain an equilibrium between them without causing even more harm to society. After all, a courtroom should deal not with moral issues, but with individual guilt proved by evidence. The important question in the General’s case is: What values do you want to promote: retaliation or social consensus; further conflict or reconciliation? That is my understanding, although Napoleon claims that this trial has nothing to do with either truth or justice, but only politics. Well, perhaps he overheard somebody saying this; I cannot imagine that he deduced it on his own…

The General is, as they say in the media, a “divisive figure” in Polish society. There is no doubt about the controversy he has been provoking for almost two decades now, long before I was even born. (Please note, Mr. Prosecutor, that I am being very honest with you, to the point of even admitting my age, which a lady cat should never do!) So, the controversy, which everybody knows about by now, is that the General claims he declared martial law in order to save Poland from Soviet invasion. In short, he saved lives in an act of patriotism. For twenty years, the General has been consistently defending his decision: “We were threatened with fratricidal conflict, and we could have inflicted on ourselves incalculable tragedy.”

Today, in spite of this controversy, the General’s public standing is better than the president’s brothers’! For years, opinion polls about whether the Poles believe his justification for martial law have been roughly split down the middle, suggesting that at least one half of Poland’s citizens accept it. They don’t think that it is necessary to put the General on trial. After all, although most Poles did not choose to live under Communism, they just went along and lived under Communism, accepting the military regime as reality. It is not in their interest to go back and wash their own dirty linen. The other half of Poles, however, would like to “purify” society of its Communist remnants. They prefer a fresh start, a sharp division between past and present, between totalitarianism and democracy. For such purists, Poland was divided into Communist supporters and the opposition, with nothing in between. To them, the trial of the General represents an act of revenge. “A traitor is not a victim of circumstances,” they say. But this is a moral statement, and it is not helpful with the trial. I personally would hesitate to belittle the possibility that the General was acting out of patriotism—but I might be prejudiced about him. Because I ask myself, Does the fact that he was a Communist exclude his patriotism? I think not.

“Down with the enemy!” barks Napoleon incongruently when I—out of sheer pity—tell him about the pros and cons of the trial. Sometimes, as an intellectual, I do feel the responsibility of keeping him informed. But what can such a poor creature think when I ask him, Who are them? except that I am showing off.

The truth about the General is that he did indeed proclaim martial law on December 13, 1981. The truth is that, as a consequence, the Solidarity movement was banned, its members were persecuted and jailed, censorship was introduced, freedom suspended, and fifty-six people were killed in the year that followed—that is all true. The General does not dispute any of this. The truth is also that in his political career, he made other wrong decisions that inflicted pain upon the Poles. Even when he was not acting on his own but as a member of the ruling political elite—for example, when dispatching Polish troops to Prague in 1968 as part of the Warsaw Pact invasion. Or when there was the shooting in Gdansk in 1970 in which forty-four protesters were killed. The truth is that he was a political leader who had accumulated too many functions (prime minister, minister of defense, president, head of the Military Council of National Salvation), logically leading him to assume dictatorial power.

I understand all this. Maybe this is the moment to stress again that I am sentimental, that I would like to defend the General. However, while I am on his side in my heart, I try to keep a clear head: I don’t want to defend him from the truth—blind faith is his dog’s defining trait, not mine.

Sir, before I take you any further, you should bear in mind my special position. I have a chance to observe the General from a very privileged perspective, being the one who sits in his lap most often. Napoleon is too big. And, thank God, we don’t keep horses in the house yet, except in pictures. So, he caresses me. He speaks to me. He trusts me, I would say. You see, I am small and elegant, and I try not to be obtrusive. Sometimes I purr, just to make him feel good. Usually I simply sit there quietly in order to watch and listen. Like any “real” psychiatrist would.

He is bony, and to sit in his lap is not very comfortable, to say the least. But boy, is he warm, and that counts for a lot when you are not so young yourself. And he strokes me, which I found out is good for my back. He does it somewhat absentmindedly, because he does it while he reads, and he reads a lot, or listens to the news on the radio—he almost never watches TV—in his small studio on the first floor of the house. I let him do it—I mean, rub me and read at the same time. You can’t take away all the fun from an old man, now can you? It wouldn’t be nice of me. Meanwhile, I ponder subjects of my interest…

My real interest is not politics, it’s psychology. Being, well, a semiprofessional, in human terms, I don’t judge people. You may think that I need to study the psyche of the General because I depend upon his will. Or because I need to know my enemy. I would not go that far; the General is a good cat-keeper. He does not taunt me with bizarre little dangling objects, as other humans do. I get far better treatment than Napoleon, who is extremely jealous of my privileged position, grumbling stupidly that it is not fair. As if life were fair! In return, I listen and try to understand the General. I also try to understand humans as such, with their strengths and weaknesses. I am essentially fond of your kind of primate! I find you as a species interesting, often puzzling, mostly not very intelligent—but worth observing. You perhaps do not fully trust the observations of a feline psychiatrist without adequate formal education? But please consider that I am in a position to closely scrutinize how human beings behave for the simple reason that I do nothing but observe them full-time.

Now, I am well aware that you might harbor a certain suspicion that I am subjective, i.e., prejudiced in favor of my keeper. But let me assure you that my subjective feelings do not stand in the way of my professional findings about the said human being. On the contrary, I treat him like any other patient of mine, like, for example, his wife (a very nice lady, loved by her students!) and his darling only daughter. The pet daughter! Yet, there is no competition between the two of us—she has far too little time and patience for the old man… No, I am certainly able to keep the necessary distance between the object of my study and myself. In fact, the General doesn’t even know that I am writing this letter. I had to do it behind his back, because he would strongly disapprove of it, maybe even scold me. I only worry that Napoleon, in his simplicity, might bark something to him. But he barks pretty incomprehensibly, and the General is a bit deaf, so I am not really nervous about it.

Please allow me to make a digression here. I am afraid that I have to use this opportunity to make you aware of an injustice in your domain. I am convinced that I qualify as a character witness at the General’s trial. I personally volunteered to tell the court that he is a good man. I have sent enough obvious signs of my intention. I also sent a letter to the judge. Believe it or not, the response I received was rejection on the grounds of my species! A judge of the criminal court rejected me as a character witness with these words: “We hereby inform you that, as a rule, our court does not accept witnesses of alien origin.” First and foremost, I am not an “alien.” E.T. is an alien. I am a cat! Disregarding this display of ignorance on the part of the said judge, where does your law make this stipulation? He did not even bother to cite the clause that would forbid me to testify, a grave mistake for someone who is responsible for the law.

I ask you now, Sir, who is really harboring prejudices here, not to use the word discrimination or even racism for the view expressed by the judge? Should I have responded by demonstrating exactly the same kind of prejudice toward your own species and saying that he is only a primate!? I do have my feline pride, you know (although, as I mentioned before, some call it arrogance)! If this judge of yours were a true Polish gentleman in the first place, he would never have allowed himself to offend a lady.

But let us put this distasteful issue aside. After all, I am not the subject of this letter. I feel that it is my duty to tell you more about the General. So, let me tell you now, if I may, about the crucial moment in the General’s life, about the moment of his decision of December 1981.

“Listen, Gorby,” he told me one evening in that agitated mood that sometimes overcomes him. “People should believe me that there was no other way; I did not have a choice in December 1981. It really was a matter of the lesser evil, as is often the case in politics. You, of all creatures, know how rarely I speak about that part of my life… I do not like to remember those moments—you call it suppression, no? Oh, if only you had been there, in Moscow on that December night when the Soviet comrades summoned me to a meeting of the Politburo, for ‘consultations,’ as they called it. I still remember the tense, nervous atmosphere in the room. Leonid Brezhnev was sitting at the head of a long table with his bulldog face and beady eyes. He was already very ill, but no less dangerous for it. And Andropov was breathing down his neck. These comrades looked to me like a pack of dangerous dogs, ready to bite. Not much was said, but from their looks I understood the precarious situation Poland was in, with the Solidarity movement’s demands undermining the entire Communist system. They were afraid that the ‘Polish pestilence’—as one of them put it—would spread if it was not ‘contained.’ That reminded me of 1968, of the moment when we in Poland were forced to send our soldiers against our brothers in Prague. How I regret that today! And how sadly it ended there, how we crushed Dubček and his reforms!

“It should have been clear to me then what was clear to Brezhnev in 1981: that Communism was not a system that could be reformed, and that any such attempt would only bring it down. Gorbachev did not understand that either, unbelievable as it sounds. When, almost two decades later, it was Gorbachev’s turn to try reform—how did it end? With the collapse of almost the entire Communist world. I admire that man for his brave attempt to do the impossible—but I do not understand why he didn’t learn from the failure of the ‘Prague Spring’ and from martial law in Poland? Was he so naïve? Or just a hard-core believer in Communism, like me?

“Anyhow, in 1981 Brezhnev was not naïve at all. He forced me to act, because he knew what we did not. There was no question of the Soviets leaving us in peace to slowly reform our Communism as we saw fit. They did not want another Aleksander Dubček. As Brezhnev-the-bulldog told me in no uncertain terms in his office before the meeting with the others: ‘How long do you intend to tolerate anarchy? Either you take care of your problems, or else we will.’ His words were not open to interpretation, my friend. He did not suggest that, for example, I should resign if I didn’t curb the protests or something as benign as that. It would have been an easy choice; I would have gladly done it. True, he never said what his threat really meant; he never mentioned the words ‘military interventionʹ—in that my opponents are right. The Soviet threat was never spelled out! However, there was not the slightest doubt as to what Brezhnev and all the rest really had in mind.

“You probably wonder if I was afraid. Later people asked me, did I feel physically threatened. I fought in the Second World War, Gorby. I know what fear is. No, this was not the fear of death that one feels in war. All soldiers feel it; it’s only human. But when you are fighting, there is a certain moment when fear turns into indifference. Or, better said, into a reconciliation with one’s destiny, acceptance of the consequences. You cannot fight and be afraid all the time. Therefore, you have to make peace with yourself—perhaps not consciously. I believe it is the survival instinct that makes us acknowledge death in order to live. What a beautiful contradiction, when you think of it!

“I remember I went to the men’s room. There was a mirror there. I looked at myself. I felt calm, just like in 1943 when I was sure I would be killed by the Germans in a battle. So, then and there, in the toilet of the Kremlin palace, I made my decision: Poland would be saved from invasion! I was ready to sacrifice my reputation rather than the lives of my people. Let me make this clear to you: I was well aware of the price I would personally have to pay for such a decision, and, as my mother would say, I was ready to bear my cross. But back then I thought that one day, when the crisis of Communism was over (imagine how trusting I was!), my people would realize that my decision had been necessary in order to save their lives. Back in the conference room I told our Soviet comrades that they need not worry; we Poles would take care of our ‘problems’ ourselves. I could not, of course, repeat the word ‘pestilence.’ Brezhnev stood up, slapped me on my back, and grinned unpleasantly. That was it.”

This is what the General himself confessed to me. Therefore, the problem of this trial, as I see it now, is that it will be his word against those who say that there was no Soviet invasion planned. Indeed, lately even some documents were found in support of this. But who could have known that then?

To all this I could add a few conclusions about his character: The General is a serious person. You rarely see a photo of him smiling, only in family photos perhaps. Usually he is somber, his dark glasses adding to his gloom, showing that he carries a heavy weight on his shoulders. Although he is not without a sense of humor! He is a man of principles, even if these principles are different from yours or mine. As an illustration, I will only tell you that he did not enter the church at the funeral of his mother, an ardent Catholic. No, not even in plain clothes. He waited in front of the church until the service was over. “A Communist army general does not go to church under any circumstances!” he told me later on. Even if you don’t believe this anecdote, I can vouch that for him duty is above all else. This—permit me to say—is not a very catholic value. Besides, he proved to be intelligent and capable of grasping the new situation and adapting to it. A complex personality… Which is precisely my reason for writing this letter, in my capacity as both a specialist in human psychology and his friend. Do I even need to tell you that Napoleon, when I told him about my intention to write this letter, dismissed it sneeringly, calling you “a bloodsucker”? But that is his level, I am afraid.

In spite of his—not my!—low opinion of you, Sir, I would like to trust you. I already said that my name is Gorby, after Gorbachev. I am well aware that you—like many others before you—might be puzzled by my name. The General himself gave it to me, although, considering my female gender, it would have been more appropriate, wouldn’t it, to have named me Raisa, after Gorby’s wife, whom he loved so dearly. It seems like a paradoxical twist that the General (my pet human) should name his pet cat after somebody who dismantled Communism and therefore should be his enemy. But, believe me, he had his reasons. He admired Gorby—almost like Napoleon (the man, not the dog, of course). The mere fact that he named me after Gorby should tell you a lot about the General himself.

The great absurdity of Gorby’s life (not mine!) was that the collapse of Communism was the result of his own attempt to reform it, to perfect it, as he himself said. Isn’t that a sad destiny, to live to see exactly the opposite of what you intended? To have the whole world admire you for something that you did not want to achieve? To see people applaud you for the mistake you made? In hindsight it looks like a comedy, but it is a tragedy! So, they both believed in the possibility of saving Communism, one way or another, and they both ended up losers. Gorby is almost like a character from a comedy of errors. Think about it: The outstanding political change of the twentieth century happened, in fact, by mistake!

Gorby was, no doubt, a believer. The General was a believer, too. “A faith is not acquired by reasoning… Reason may defend an act of faith—but only after the act has been committed, and the man committed to the act,” wrote Arthur Koestler. I think that for the General—as for many other believers—the main problem was the difference between theory and practice: Obviously, for him, in theory Communism looks good. So let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that you are a true Communist (you acquired a faith) who early enough became aware of the “deviations” in practice. You are part of the power structure. You think that you could do better. What do you do? You reach for, shall we say, unethical means in order to achieve your aim. You act brutally in order to save your beloved Poland from the invasion, in accordance with the principle of the end justifying the means. That is, you make a pact with the devil, in this case, Moscow. But—and this is not an excuse, only a clarification—you act as a man of faith. Later on you understand what the consequences of what you have done are and you regret it—only, it is too late. Can you be redeemed? Do you deserve pity? Well, that depends upon the circumstances, I suppose you would say.

In both my feline—that is, subjective—and professional views, the General is perhaps an even more tragic person than Gorbachev. He lost the battle to improve Communism by ruthless means and destroyed his moral credibility, which was not the case with Gorbachev. The General is tragic for another reason, too: because he has admitted publicly that he was defeated. He claims that he believes Communism failed, that he is now a social democrat, and, moreover, that he likes Poland as it is today. Yet, he has never repented for martial law! He has never admitted that his decision to impose it was wrong. On the contrary, he still maintains that it was a necessary measure to save Poland… In other words, the General did not do the single, most important thing that would have saved him from being put on trial: He did not repent for his decision. And that is unforgivable—at least for half of the Polish citizens. He is not to be forgiven for standing up for his belief. He has to pay for his sins!

This attitude, in the time of a moral decay, is, you have to admit, rather brave, I’d say.

Napoleon comments, “Your justice in just a few words: an eye for an eye.” Being a cat, I don’t trust dogs, and I can’t believe in such primitivism on the part of democratic Poland. Please, Sir! I am aware that I sound pathetic now, but the General must be given a chance to redeem himself. In your religion, everyone must be given this chance. You must have considered whether there is something to say in his defense. Correct me if I am wrong, but it was the General who made possible the first free elections that Solidarity won. You could claim that, in a way, he was forced to the roundtable talks in the spring of 1989—or to invite Solidarity to enter the coalition government. He also stepped down from the presidency. The General considers Solidarity’s later triumph to have been made possible by the decisions he made during and after the imposition of martial law.

However, something like a Solidarity-generation complex still runs very deep in this society. I mean that participants in the roundtable negotiations with the General are themselves being treated as traitors. Politics is the art of compromise, and compromise (enabled by the General) brought about the change of power. Yet political compromise, dialogue, and consensus—even if they played a great role in the nineties—are not sufficiently part of this culture. This is not difficult to understand in view of the past: What could you humans learn about compromise when you were living in a totalitarian society? But this complicates the case of the General even more…

I know, Mr. Prosecutor, that justice is needed, but I ask you: What is justice in the case of the General? Going back to where I started: Does he really have to be tried in a criminal court like an ordinary criminal or Mafioso? Are you sure that this trial will satisfy the principle of justice? Some authorities in the field of law, for example, have expressed their doubts that the charges stand. Is the trial going to be useful—or maybe even harmful to the society? The General himself is not opposing a trial, because it gives him yet another chance to say what he considers to be the truth in his own words, since he cares about his role in history and he wants to set the record straight.

Napoleon, predictably, unquestioningly believes every word the General says. He is, you know, very much a soldier type. I, on the other hand, think that my duty as a feline intellectual is to ask the right questions. The main question is, What is the purpose of this trial? Is it to achieve symbolic justice, or is it a case of belated retribution? Is he being tried as a person or as a symbol? Formally he was put on trial for illegally imposing martial law. It is expected to be a ritual of exorcising the evil spirit of Communism and, as such, to help society mentally step out of its past. In that sense, perhaps it would be wise to hold a trial. But if you are honest, you must admit that, so far, this looks like an act of revenge for decades of Communist rule, no more and no less. Vengeance, however, is a bad motive. Your office should not take part in something like that. What would you achieve? Are you sure that you are not looking for a scapegoat, not knowing how to deal with the problematic past?

Besides, it should be taken into consideration that the General has expressed regret for the pain his decision has brought to many of his fellow humans. I do not need to remind you, of all human beings, that only a person with an ethical code could do that. This is no small matter. “I am sorry. I regret mainly the social costs of this dramatically difficult decision and those cases where particular people suffered,” he said. A man needs to be a strong character to be able to say this, you have to give him that!

Now, I am not asking the victims to forgive the General; I merely believe that it is important for a society to be able to demonstrate mercy. Polish society is as tolerant and wise as the mercy it can bestow upon humans like the General. Why am I calling for mercy? Because, in my opinion, it would be important for this society to realize that the General was defeated long ago—and one does not beat a dead horse. In his case, would it not be better to demonstrate some benevolence and let him continue to live in moral condemnation instead? Politically, he has already been a loser for twenty years now. Leave the final sentence to history. In doing so, you would show the compassionate side of the Polish government and society in whose name you act. I remember what Adam Michnik, the dissident imprisoned under the General with whom I tend to agree, once said about the whole affair of the trial: “It’s a subject for historians, writers, priests, moralists, and confessors, not for the courts.”

On the other hand (because there is always the other side to consider in such matters), there is an argument that says: The tribunal in Nuremberg did more to pronounce Nazism than generations of historians…

But there is something else that worries me, too. To prosecute the General in a criminal court is simply an act to humiliate that person. Moreover, by humiliating the General, the Poles would be humiliating themselves, too. They would be spitting on forty-five years of their own past, their own lives—like two people after a bitter divorce. Perhaps that is one of the reasons why so many Poles accept his justification of martial law as a “lesser evil”? The others, those who insist on his trial, however, perhaps believe that all their sins would be redeemed once the sentence was passed—as if the General were Jesus. Does this sound like a metaphor to you? A literary gimmick of mine? Well, I love literature, but this is not the case here. No, in the case of the General, redemption is the cultural matrix we are looking at in this society, Catholic to its core. Redemption of their Communist sins would come in very handy, because it would divest them of their own responsibility. Was the General the only one to blame for martial law? No, there were thousands and hundreds of thousands who aided and abetted military rule for more than a decade. What about them? Not every Pole was a member of the Solidarity movement. Once the General is sentenced, others can wash their hands.

In saying all this, what am I actually proposing for you to do?

First and foremost, I ask you to make your decision quickly, whatever it might be. I am not suggesting you suspend the trial, although clearly I would prefer this solution as the wisest. I think I have presented my arguments for this option, but you may find them inadequate and decide for the trial to go on. If so, please, do it! But order the court to proceed quickly. The General is an old and very frail man. In my opinion, if you don’t speed it up, he has no chance of seeing the end of the trial. It is my worst nightmare that he will die before the trial is over. Of course I would be devastated by his passing; I am his pet after all. But his death would present society with another problem: If you allow it to happen, there won’t be any closure for society—and that is what is expected of his trial, to close the chapter on Communism. You know what happened with the Slobodan Milošević case in the Hague? Not that I compare these two; in my opinion there is no comparison between the General—a tragic believer in Communism who made a pact with the devil in good faith—and an opportunistic manipulator, a thug, and a war criminal. Milošević died way before his trial was over. And because of that, the Serbs were never confronted with their responsibility for the wars in the Balkans. Denial rules in Serbia today; it is as if he and his murderous nationalist politics were never on trial. No truth, no justice, no closure or catharsis… nothing.

For the sake of Poland, I would like you to avoid this happening here! Your responsibility is great and I urge you to be aware of it. Even Napoleon agrees with me on this, although I am not sure that he understands the problem at all.

With this appeal, I salute you in the hope that you will not disregard my letter just because I was fortunate enough to be born a cat, and not a human being.