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Creativity. Ideation. Vision. Do not to stick to the status quo. Find inspiration from different processes. Seek out alternative routes. Take a chance on new thinking. These were constantly recurring themes at the International Conference on the 50th Anniversary of the Helsinki Final Act. One speaker, referring to current geopolitical trends, summed up a clear consensus:

“Yes, invest in defence. But also invest in ideas.” ¹

The conference, hosted by the European Network for Remembrance and Solidarity between June 10-13th 2025, in Helsinki, marked the 50th anniversary of the agreement signed by 35 political leaders from Europe, the USSR, North America and Canada, which developed a framework for détente in Europe that became a key milestone in ending the Cold War. Almost all sessions of the conference referred to today’s geopolitical turmoil, with participants urging leaders to reignite the ‘Spirit of Helsinki’ and use the Final Act as inspiration.

The Keynote Speaker, Michael Cotey Morgan ², underlined that creating a Helsinki-like process today may seem unlikely, if not impossible. But it also looked impossible just a few years before the Final Act was signed in 1975. His point was that no matter how bleak the environment, or how constrained the space for diplomacy, events can change quickly. That’s why it is crucial to create what he called “visions of the future” – and to do so in advance of opportunities arising. His point prompted a simple question from the audience:

“How?”

Are there tangible ways to create visions? Are there tools? How did the Helsinki Final Act participants shape visions of the future? Cotey Morgan explained how the “process of imagining” was “messy, boring and lengthy.” It involved meeting after meeting after meeting, stacks of paper and a never-ending stream of documents and proposals. At its heart was “a collision of a plurality of ideas” and importantly, a willingness to tolerate a clash of ideas.

The arguments in fact generated and refined ideas. Cotey Morgan underlined that the imagining process – at least among Western actors – was successful exactly because it was painful, and boring. Conversely, the creative of process of Warsaw Pact countries was a more cautionary tale because there was unchallenged direction from the top rather than any collaborative, or argumentative, back-and-forth. Other speakers agreed with Cotey Morgan’s advice, reiterating the need for plurality of voices and pointing out that creating visions need not wait for specific moments as we are “always in some sort of new beginning” ³ and “action-oriented people will never have all of the information available.” ⁴ It was advice which sparked memories of another of Europe’s late 20th Century success stories – the peace process in Northern Ireland.

If a case study is ever needed to answer the ‘How?’ of vision creation, Northern Ireland is ideal. In 1975, as the Helsinki Final Act was signed, Northern Ireland was gripped by violent sectarian conflict. Combatants continued killing while politicians could not even sit in the same room. But, as we know now, just over two decades later Northern Ireland transitioned from a sad stalemate to a comprehensive peace deal – the 1998 Good Friday Agreement – and an ongoing process of peacebuilding. It was creativity, ideation and vision that set Northern Ireland on its way. In hindsight, there was a tangible visioning ‘process’ from which insights can still be offered.

Northern Ireland demonstrates that visioning is a process of honest internal discussions within various parties, to identify end-states that are plausible, probable and preferred. The aim is to articulate a desired future, including steps and goals to achieve it. It sounds so simple that it cannot possibly influence such a strategic change as ending a conflict. But the internal discussion in Northern Ireland started to shift mindsets. It made key actors consider their situation and why they were in it. It led to new questions being asked about old problems, including the nature and validity of the struggle. Parties started to imagine the kind of peace they wanted to create and what the public would accept. It started a process of transformation within their own community long before they engaged 'the other'.

By doing this, leaders ascertained what issues their own people would accept movement on once negotiations began. This helped the public feel engaged and reduced feelings of neglect. It prepared everyone for inevitable compromises. In hindsight, visioning was early preparation for negotiations, even if those doing it may not have recognised this at the time.

As these conversations evolved and developed, they were written down in so-called ‘visionary documents’. Some were succinct descriptions of a particular party’s views and needs. Others were comprehensive and included steps for creating peace ⁵. Some documents were secret but many were published. This enabled other actors to read them, and rival views were digested with vigour. Some wrote responses, published counter-papers or held their own debates. That sparked conferences, seminars and studies on similar topics. A new atmosphere of discussion emerged. Some of the follow-on initiatives were spontaneous, like internal discussions and roundtables. Others were more structured. But all added to the debate.

These visioning documents and other initiatives were instrumental tools in sparking a national conversation, advancing discussion from ‘we want peace’ to ‘this is why and how we want it’. Over the next few years, the responses, seminars, conferences and commentary provided a wealth of views to compare. That coincided with the start of secret and then public negotiations between the main parties. By then the information gleaned via the visioning process enabled identification of common ground. It became clear what issues needed to be on the negotiation table versus those able to be dealt with in working groups or elsewhere. This made the prospect of negotiations less daunting for all.

By the time negotiators took their seats, the visioning process had given everyone an idea of what peace would actually look like. It was less abstract. Politicians, paramilitaries and the public moved thinking beyond a sole focus on the risks and red-lines, which were becoming a tool for spoilers and an excuse for non-negotiation. Mindsets shifted from thinking of peace in terms of loss to what they could gain.

Northern Ireland, and its visioning process, exemplifies the advice that multiple speakers gave at the International Conference on the 50th Anniversary of the Helsinki Final Act. It reflects Michael Cotey Morgan’s observation that success can be painful, and boring, because it requires meeting upon meeting upon meeting. Piles of proposals. Forests-worth of documents. What Northern Ireland and the Helsinki Final Act both underline is how important it is to invest in ideas. But in both cases, to use Cotey Morgan’s phrase, it was the “willingness to outlast” that led to a degree of success that had been unimaginable just a few years prior.

The conference was a timely reminder that invoking the Spirit of Helsinki requires commitment to creativity, ideation and vision. But success also hinges on equally important element:

Perseverance.

The beginnings of my close connection with the European Network Remembrance and Solidarity are linked to an event that is profoundly tragic, namely the plane crash in Smolensk on 10 April 2010. Among its victims was Minister Andrzej Przewoźnik, who led the negotiations on the Polish side that resulted in the establishment of our Network and was its first Polish coordinator. Andrzej Przewoźnik was an exceptional figure on the Polish political scene, as he effectively directed what we now call the memory policy of this country since the transformation, for nearly twenty years. The uniqueness of his position lay in the fact that he built his unassailable standing in a very divided and contentious political environment and society.

The same plane crash claimed the life of the outstanding Deputy Minister of Culture, Tomasz Merta, who had made the decision just a few days before his tragic death to establish the Secretariat of the European Network Remembrance and Solidarity and to appoint Rafał Rogulski as its director. A few weeks after the deaths of Andrzej Przewoźnik and Tomasz Merta, I was appointed Polish coordinator of the Network by decision of the Minister of Culture, Bogdan Zdrojewski.

Looking back, I believe that in the Network we have not betrayed the legacy of the personalities I have mentioned here, whom we always remember with respect and a sense of loss.

We act with the conviction that international dialogue, even about the most difficult, traumatic events from 20th-century history, based on truth, whose criterion is primarily compliance with the state of scientific research on the subject, can open the way to overcoming the frequent antagonisms, prejudices stemming from the past, and false historical narratives that are so prevalent in Europe now. The aggression of Russia against Ukraine, which we have witnessed for over three years now, is frightening evidence of how a distorted, false Russian vision of history, based on erroneous assumptions, is turning into a dangerous weapon.

Overcoming past conflicts and disputes, to be effective, cannot rely on silence and the denial of uncomfortable facts, but rather on their thorough, mutual understanding and the social internalization of that knowledge. What I am talking about is a process that must last many, many years; for this reason, we have not been, and are not, advocates of imposing on Europe ad hoc, ideologically motivated, supposedly common historical narratives. For the same reason, the members of the European Network Remembrance and Solidarity, while not losing sight of the traditions and interests of their own country, must be apolitical in their own way because, as I mentioned, achieving the goals for which we have been appointed will take much longer than even the longest term of any democratically elected government, and frankly, longer than the duration of our professional life.

We owe our governments gratitude for understanding not only the need for the existence of our Network but also the special conditions of our work mentioned here. I would like to cite the example of Poland: every Polish government we have dealt with has contributed, either organizationally or financially, to increasing the potential of the European Network Remembrance and Solidarity. We owe our gratitude to all six Polish ministers of culture and their excellent collaborators!

However, enough of these rather serious reflections.
I remember the beginnings of the Network's Secretariat, which then consisted of the director, Rafał Rogulski, Agnieszka Mazur-Olczak, who is still with us today, and one more colleague. The Secretariat was then located in two office rooms and was dependent on another Polish cultural institution for organizational and accounting matters, which was inconvenient and burdensome. Today, thanks to the vision of what the Network can and should be, the unwavering energy, and the excellent communication skills of Director Rafał Rogulski, the Institute of the European Network of Remembrance and Solidarity has nearly thirty wonderful collaborators and occupies an entire floor in an office building that itself is a lieu de mémoire of Polish history in the 20th century.

The Network team consists of amazing young and very young people whose skills and talents often simply make me shy. As part of our Network's mission, they have already organized hundreds of events, located between Tbilisi and Barcelona, between Sarajevo and Tirana, as well as Dublin and Helsinki. We have already reached Japan, and soon we will be present at the UN in New York.

I fondly remember our lively discussions with Professor Matthias Weber and Dr. Burkhard Olschowski about what truth in history is and whether it even exists. With gratitude, I recall our meeting with sociologists Dr. Joanna Wawrzyniak and Dr. Małgorzata Pakier, which resulted in the Network initiating a series of annual scientific conferences on memory, history, and memory politics under the collective title Genealogies of Memory. This series, at a time when the concepts of memory politics and historical politics were seen as suspicious and contested, provided the Network with a strong intellectual foundation.

I smile recalling our first trip to the Ústav pamäti národa (the Slovak National Memory Institute) in Bratislava, the Slovak partner of the Network, to discuss the conditions for the practical cooperation that was just beginning. Both we and our Slovak partners and friends assumed that Slovaks and Poles, speaking such closely related languages, would always understand each other, and we did not take care to provide professional translation during the discussions. I remember the shock we experienced when, after exchanging pleasantries, we sat down to discussions and found that we absolutely did not understand the formal legal and financial terminology in our partner's language.

I cannot fail to mention the role of Professor Attila Pók, the first Hungarian coordinator of the Network, who works with us to this day. His vast experience, kindness, and tactfulness have often allowed us to conclude particularly heated debates and find solutions in complicated situations.

I have devoted a considerable, non-negligible part of my professional life and a large part of my heart to the European Network Remembrance and Solidarity. I have been, in part, a participant and, in part, an observer of its emergence, its organizational childhood, and then its creative adulthood. Therefore, allow me to conclude by wishing all its collaborators and friends, as well as myself, that the Network endures and develops not only now, when only hard power is beginning to count in the world, but also when our successors and the successors of our successors take the helm of this organization!

Franziska Niehoff
Germany

Giuseppe Francavilla
Italy

My grandfather Joseph fought both world wars. The second as a lieutenant in the army. He was taken prisoner by the Nazis and liberated as a translator of French for them. He always had a great passion for foreign languages and in fact they saved his life. After that he flight in the United States to study and there he obtained two degrees. Grandfather Joseph was also an avid writer.

He wrote essays, short stories and was also a poet. In these photos you can see the typewriter he used, an Olivetti.

When my grandfather Giuseppe welcomed the guests in his study he always kept the door closed. And many times I stopped staring at his shadow from behind the glass. I always have the impression to see him every time his son Augustus, then my uncle, passes behind that door. It's a bit like seeing him again at home.

Aleksander Tylman
Poland

This photograph features my great-grandfather, Kazimierz (in the back) and one of his brothers, Bolesław, called Bolek, during a Sunday stroll in Ozorków in late 1930s. 
All of the siblings shared a passion for newly available photography and Bolek, as my grandpa recalled, ”was the happiest and the most handsome one.” During the second world war, Bolek kept his job in the city hall’s road department, but worked in conspiracy against the Germans, passing on secret information. During spring of 1942 was exposed and arrested along with his colleagues from Łódź. He died later that year after a brutal interrogation in the headquarters of Gestapo, leaving behind his wife and daughter.  The headquarters, nowadays a school, is two steps from my current flat and every time I pass by it during my Sunday strolls, I can’t help remembering this story. The cheerful family time seen in the photographs my ancestors left behind was forever broken, which was a case for many civilian families in Poland during the war.

Although it is not easy to put together the facts, I keep researching the archives to recreate as much of his life’s story as possible. The least that can be done is to remember.

Izabela Grzelak
Poland

I have one photo of my great-great-grandfather Wawrzyniec Lubiński. The family told a story about him: he went to war and never came back. He left his wife and a baby girl who never knew her father. The case remained unsolved for years. His only daughter died in February 2024. I promised her that I would try to find out what happened to her dad. I looked through hundreds of archived civil status records.

It worked!

I already know that Wawrzyniec was born on 5 September 1906 in Mochowo (in Mazovia) and died on 21 September 1939 in Zamość near Lublin. The district court confirmed his death, but we don’t know the circumstances of his death. I can check it in the state archives. Perhaps my hypothesis will be confirmed that Wawrzyniec died fighting the Germans in Zamość. How did he get there? Does he have his grave in the Lublin region? I’m proud of the results of my research. Unfortunately my great-grandmother didn’t know them during her lifetime.

A graphic memoir.
Written by Luba and Eugene Ostashevsky.
Illustrated by Igor Karash.

Our project is a graphic novel about our grandfather, Victor Torkanovsky, who served in the Soviet Army during WWII. It recounts Victor's experiences from 1941, when he signed up to serve at the war's outbreak; to his participation in two major battles: the defense of Leningrad and the battle of Stalingrad; to his service in Central Asia and in Ukraine, where he visits his family home. He began the war as a gangly university student with bottle thick glasses and emerged as a hardened soldier.

Our grandfather was one of tens of millions traumatized by the war. Researching his story made us see the war's toll on people. Victor nearly starved to death; he experienced aerial bombardment and was shot; he watched his friends die. He was also thrust into morally compromising situations: drafted into the NKVD (secret police), he was forced to arrest his childhood nanny as well as shoot people suspected of being saboteurs. In Central Asia, during the Kalmyk rebellion, he captured German prisoners and executed them. Interviewing him, we saw how deeply he still felt the events of the war, even 65 years later, with feelings of deep remorse and sadness.

If he had lived in the west, he would have been able to talk about his experiences openly. However, in the Soviet Union, veterans' narratives were eclipsed by official propaganda and many took their secrets to their graves.

We hope that our rendering of Victor's service can shed light on real events and bring the tough reality of what that generation experienced to the attention of young people today, who know little about it and are not prone to reading lengthy historical volumes. This is why we chose the medium of a graphic novel. We hope that its visual and succinct approach can transport readers back and provide a vivid and memorable story to which they can relate and from which they can learn.

Daria Grzelak
Poland

In the photo there is a man standing in a group of photographed people (third from the right). This is my great-grandmother's oldest brother – Stanisław Dobrzeniecki. He was born on 28 November 1900 in Lisewo Wielkie (currently Gozdowo commune) as the second child among eleven offspring of the mayor of the Lisewo commune and at the same time the heir to the village of Lisewo. The handwritten description of the photograph with a dedication to his younger brother Edward, was very valuable. This man was a soldier in the The Home Army (AK) during World War II with the alias- Titan. The lack of a postage stamp and address suggests that the photo was attached to the letter. Stanisław happily returned home, where his wife and three children were waiting for him. During the war, he lost his hearing in an explosion. He died on 28 November 2000 in the Sierpc hospital on the day he was discharged home. At home, his family was waiting for him with a party to celebrate his 100th birthday.

The “Rooted” Project is a collaborative initiative by the students of Class 2A at Primary School No. 110, Rev. Jan Twardowski, Kraków.

Project Coordinator: Elżbieta Rzepecka
Teacher of History and Early Primary Education

The aim of the project is to provide patriotic education in accordance with the current priorities established by the Ministry of National Education. The project has been preceded by history classes for upper grades during which students were eager to share their personal stories, pictures, and information about their ancestors. Due to an insufficient number of history classes, I decided to introduce extended knowledge in the area of patriotic education for the second grade. It will involve children (and parents) finding their ancestors, who have often left their mark on Polish history. The children will have a unique opportunity to prepare their family tree (interactive or traditional), with an emphasis on identifying someone who has made a significant mark in the history of their family, their city, or their homeland.

Together, we will write the history of such “forgotten” heroes, since history often remains silent about those who shed their blood. We do not know the names of those who participated in uprisings and wars or those who undertook sabotage actions during the occupation, yet we know that such heroes were part of our families. Without a doubt, the added value of this innovation is discovering such heroes and the historical circumstances they lived through. Given the fading of national values and the blurring of borders, national identity is particularly important. Patriotic education from an early age will allow us to raise a generation that is proud of its history and not ashamed to say and feel Polish. This is especially true in families where the spirit of a hero has lived for generations, so that the children's roots—the foundation of everything—remain consistent and stable, taking root permanently in our homeland, wherever life takes our young citizens.

Alicja Śmiejkowska
Poland

Memory and history are the foundations of our personal and collective identity. Family stories shape our values and cultural traditions, and archival documents offer priceless insight into the past. Letters, for instance, let us glimpse the emotions and experiences of people who lived before us. Each of us can help preserve history by safeguarding family keepsakes.

One such keepsake in my family is a letter written to my grandfather, Henryk Kamiński, by his friend “Kuba” on 14 February 1943 in Warsaw. I discovered it in 1994, after my grandfather’s death, while sorting through his home library. The letter lay between pages 22–23 of Akcja pod Arsenałem by Stanisław Broniewski (Stefan Orsza), published by Iskry in 1957. I believe Granddad placed it there intentionally.

Martyna Dąbek
Poland

Lena Sulz
Poland/Germany

During the last school holidays I stayed in Warsaw with my grandmother Basia. We spent long evenings talking about our family—her parents, how she met my grandfather, our ancestors, and countless family stories.

One day we went to Café Nero for Grandma’s favourite coffee, while I sipped a smoothie and ate a warm baguette sandwich. That was when I asked her how she had spent her own childhood: what she did at my age, where she went to school, and the name of her best friend.

Grandma hesitated to revisit those years, and I did not understand why. Eventually she took a little calendar from her handbag; tucked behind the cover was a small blue booklet, worn and fragile, like an old identity card. She began to talk. Wanting to preserve her memories, I decided to film her with my phone so I could take the recording back to Germany, show it to my older sister Maja and to Dad—and perhaps use it later in Polish history class. Our history teacher once said that if our grandparents are still alive, they could visit the Polish school in Germany and share their childhood stories.

Grandma insisted we should remember the good things; the episode she was about to tell had never been a happy memory for her family, who had tried to forget it. She herself knew the story only from her mother’s account—she had been far too young to remember any of it.

I was hearing it for the first time. Grandma Basia was born in 1938, just before World War II. Her parents were well educated, owned a large house, employed a nanny and a housekeeper, and my great-grandfather Tadeusz Koryciński managed an arms factory in Kraśnik.

When Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, the factory began to evacuate east. On 17 September 1939 the Soviet Union attacked as well, dismantled the plant within days, and deported the workers and their families deep into Russia.

Great-Grandfather Tadeusz, his wife Władysława, their baby daughter (my grandma), and the child’s nanny were transported to Siberia. Tadeusz’s sisters, Alina and Stefania Breyer, missed the train and thus remained in Poland.

Grandma—barely a year old—travelled in a freight wagon thousands of kilometres east. The cars, meant for animals, had no windows, no seats, no heat. Passengers sat on the floor through a journey that lasted weeks, given only an occasional slice of bread and a little water. They finally disembarked in Novosibirsk, some 4,000 km from Warsaw.

The Soviets ordered everyone off the train to fend for themselves. To cross the River Ob, Great-Grandfather built a raft. The family boarded it, but the craft broke apart; Grandma, her mother, and the nanny were swept one way, her father another. The current was strong, and they remained separated for a month before finding one another in an area where Poles were being forced to work.

They were assigned to the collective farm “Krasny Partizan” near Novosibirsk. Great-Grandmother and Great-Grandfather laboured for nothing but a slice of bread and a few carrots.

Grandma recalls that she was always hungry. She and her younger brother Czesław—born in Siberia in 1940—constantly begged their mother for food, saying that the mothers who had stayed in Poland gave their children something to eat. All they had was a weed called goosefoot, boiled into soup. At five she began primary school in Siberia, quickly mastering Russian and becoming a top pupil. Her sister Krystyna was born there in 1943.

The family endured seven years of forced labour and Siberian winters. When the Polish Kościuszko Division formed in the USSR, Great-Grandfather Tadeusz enlisted; military service was the only hope of bringing families home. He fought all the way to Berlin and was awarded the Cross of Grunwald in spring 1946. That year his family returned from Siberia and settled in Końskie, where Great-Grandmother’s parents lived. Two more sons were born after the war—Piotr in 1947 and Aleksander in 1950. Of all the children, only Grandma, Aunt Krystyna, and Uncle Czesław survived the ordeal in distant Siberia.

Grandma came back to Poland malnourished, with health and skin problems caused by hunger, filth, and poverty. When relatives met them at the railway station, the family were so exhausted, dirty, and ragged that no one recognised them. For many years they were forbidden to speak of what had happened. Only when my mother was at school did Grandma receive her Sybirak (Siberian Exile) identity card, and reunions were organised for those who, like her, had been deported.

Grandma’s story moved me deeply. I listened carefully and asked whether she had any keepsakes from that time. I had never heard her speak of it before, nor had I known that my grandmother was a Sybiraczka—a survivor of Siberian exile.