You have been for us a teacher and master of life, a dear friend, a sweet smiling gentleman, a symbol and exemple of life, You brought Europe back home. To all of us, in many countries, and in many families and personal destinies too. In the deepest of our hearth we mourn and miss You, we feel close to Your family, to all our Polish friends and to the brave Polish nation, in this sad moment of enormous loss for Europe and the world which Your death is. Sadness and remembrance will not fade away, will never disappear. What disappeared thanks of Your courage was something else: the Iron Curtain, the Neostalinist dictatorships, and the Berlin Wall of shame. So, Your courage, as motor of the Polish democratic revolution, also made it possible that in autumn 1989 we both - then respectively a young east German lady fleeing through suddenly open borders from GDR Neostalinism towards FRG territory, and an Italian reporter travelling through Czeslaw Milosz's '"other Europe"- met and created a couple, and then a family . Because by the way You, dear Bronek, as father, brain and soul of the polish democratic and non-violent revolution, you made the crumbling down of the Walls (Mury, like in Kaczmarski's song) possible. Here we are now, Annett and Andrea, happy in Berlin without walls, growing up three wonderful European German kids. Without Your courage and engagement, millions of europeans would not be free today, would not be the owners of their own life. Not even our three marvelous children, who now grow up as happy teenagers - in a way, children of the revolution which You initiated - in this free, united, multicultural city a few kms away from free Poland, going to school or to the boy-scouts with Polish friends too, would have had the opportunity of such a free life without your life-long freedom fight . For our kids, last but not least, You were, are and will always be a hero. They heard the news, last Sunday, and sadly asked 'why?', but they already knew who you have been.
Annett Flechsig, Andrea Tarquini also on behalf of Lucas, Luisa and Selina
