 The mic is now on, my name is Michael Jantowski and for the last 8 years I've been the Director of the Václav Havel Library in Prague. And thank you Raphael for your introduction, you saved us some time. So I can delve immediately into resistance and solidarity which is so great an infinite topic that I don't really know how to start or I didn't know until I tried to map the territory for me and our panelists a little. Usually we will have an opportunity to compare different expressions of the ideas of resistance and solidarity in different regimes and situations and more on that later, but first a short introduction first on resistance. You know when we speak about resistance we usually speak about the big stories, we speak about the heroes and the martyrs of resistance and it's important that we do, but we often have no time left for the smaller stories and it is a task of historians to cover the various layers of resistance such as they evolved in history. Obviously resistance can take a radical or even a violent form, the wartime resistance movements in Poland, in Czechoslovakia, in other European countries are cases in point, more controversially some of the movements of the radical left and radical groups in the 1970s and 1980s such as the Red Brigades and the Bar the Meinhof group are, although also sort of themselves and view themselves as movements of resistance, but we have a more extensive experience at least in our part of Europe with the non-violent forms of political resistance of this opposition groups like the Committee for the Defence of the Workers in Poland in mid-1970s, the Carter 77 movement in Czechoslovakia, the Committee for the Defence of the Unjustly Persecuted, the Solidarność movement in Poland and others and all those are forms of political resistance, but equally important or quite important in our and in my experience were the forms of cultural resistance in the forms of books and films and essays and poetry prose of people like Czeslaw Miloš, Wáclav Havel, the films of Miloš Forman and the Czechoslovak New Wave, Andrzej Wajda, but also perhaps Juan Antonio Badem and other filmmakers closer to here. Then and it's a different perspective from central Europe and I suppose in Spain and other countries religious resistance played quite an important part in bringing the totalitarian regimes down. They partly the dissidents and the resistance movements or groups were partly sheltered, partly supported by the Catholic Church in Poland, the Protestant Church in East Germany and elsewhere, but in other countries this did not apply. An interesting case in point are the modes of resistance in what we call the grey zone and there are enormous and quite interesting stories about the resistance activities in things like scout movement, Boy Scouts movement in psychiatry, later in the 1980s in environmental groups and so on and so was. They also played a role. There also was the original idea first coined by a Czech dissident, Váslav Benda, of the Parallel Police, which had manifestations, similar manifestations in different countries and it mainly meant the avoidance of a direct conflict with the totalitarian regime, instead creating networks which were free and independent of the system. The second culture, the underground culture, the Parallel education networks, the underground universities and schools that we remember Parallel economics and Parallel politics. Interestingly, they have this kind of thinking, has a very unlikely offshoot in existence today. The proponents of cryptocurrencies often refer to the Parallel Police idea and to Váslav Benda as a guru of the cryptocurrency idea, although he had, as far as I know, he had no such idea himself. But together, all these groups embody the origins and the growth of what Váslav Havel in his most famous essay called the power of the powerless. Different kinds of organizations, activities, styles and degrees of radicalism that in the end work together to bring the edifice of the totalitarian system down. But that much on resistance. Now on solidarity. Also an interesting stratification here. It seems that there are actually two types of solidarity. In evolutionary psychology, we speak of two types of altruism. One that we call the reciprocal altruism which is a practical kind of solidarity based on the idea that if I help you today or if I help the others today, others are more likely to help me in time. And then there is the second kind, the moral altruism. And this is, I think, very well illustrated by an idea of a Czech philosopher Jan Patochka, sort of one of the first spokesmen for the Chartres 77 and one of its inspirations, who spoke of the solidarity of the shaken. And the idea of the shaken means an individual whose everyday assurances have been overturned by a deeply shocking moral experience, seeing other people suffer, other people killed, etc., etc. And much of what we saw in the resistance movements in Central and Eastern Europe in the 1970s and 1980s stemmed out from this kind of solidarity, the solidarity of the shaken. And the solidarity works across different lines and different borders. It works inside the societies. And in Czechoslovakia, for example, unlike in Poland where the Solidarność movement was a massive, big, big movement with hundreds of thousands members and supporters, the resistance movement in Czechoslovakia was actually quite small. It numbered in thousands or ten of thousands at maximum people. But it depended on a large network of solidarity, both material, moral help, various kinds of refugees in mental institutions, various kinds of avoidance of the military service, the draft, etc., etc. All those were expressions, practical expressions of solidarity which helped. Then there was the solidarity between societies, between countries, again in our case, because it's the case I know best, starting with the protests in the Red Square in Moscow following the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw Pact armies, an incredible act of bravery and courage by eight Russian personalities, continuing with actually a number of cases of self-immolation in protest against the invasion, not just the Jan Palach sacrifice in Prague, but also Richard Sylviac's sacrifice in Poland, Vasyl Makuk in Kiev, who actually died protesting the invasion of Czechoslovakia and shouting Slava Ukraine. He was an early supporter of Ukrainian independence, Sandor Bauer in Budapest or Elia who rips in Riga. One of the best documented examples of this kind of solidarity between captured societies is the Polish Czechoslovak solidarity which became quite famous for several clandestine meetings of leading dissidents including Václav Havel, Petr Ula, Damichnik, Jan Litinsky, Antoni Macierewicz, Piotr Naimski, my neighbor on the left, Oryacek Kuroń on the top of the mountain range which divides Poland and Czechia. But it didn't start, it was preceded by a series of mutual declarations of support of the dissident groups of the Committee for the Defence of the Workers and Charter 77 and it was followed up by a long list of joint clandestine activities in the 1980s. Many of them organized by a group in Roslav led by Miroslav Yasinski and others. So this is quite a great story it is. And finally, and I will close on that, there were also important expressions of solidarity from the outside, from countries in the West which enjoyed freedom, had the material resources to help and found people and organizations to help the support from human rights groups, from famous intellectuals and writers from trade union groups such as AFL-CIO, to Solidarnoš, as opposed to many Western governments which promoted, at that time, promoted detente and host politic and other policies designed to conduct business as usual with the communist governments and it rings a bell at the present. And I think really this issue is becoming very topical in the light of the general failure of the West to support the opposition and the anti-war groups in Russia itself because there must be and there are people like that in Russia. And thus enabling the Putin regime to persecute them, isolate them and make them practically invisible. And I will end up with another idea in the legacy of Vaslav Havel, the duty to resist evil, the obligation, the moral obligation to resist evil even if we are not ourselves directly affected by the evil. And this idea in my mind cannot be subjugated to an understandable but often self-defeating desire to making peace even with people who are our enemies. So we have a lot to discuss in the next hour or so and at the end of the debate I will open the discussion to the floor and we have two excellent panelists to do it. Dr. Kamen Magayon, the director of the peace research center in Varagoda, committed with the advancement of women through researching their contributions to two important fields, science and peace. And also president of the Spanish section of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. Welcome, Dr. Magayon. And Dr. Piotr Namski, former member of the anti-communist opposition, one of the creators of the Workers' Defense Committee in Poland that I already spoke about, a Polish academic and politician who served in a number of parliamentary and government positions. But more importantly for the purposes of this discussion, was one of the leading figures in the Workers' Defense Committee and Solidarność during the years of communist oppression. Obviously our two speakers come from different vantage points and different perspectives, but that should make our discussion even more interesting. So let them speak for themselves. Piotr, did you agree to... Yeah, okay. So you must have made another arrangement in the meantime. Please, Kamen. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you for inviting me to this conversation. Buenas tardes. Buenas tardes. Good afternoon. I will speak in Spanish because my English is not so fluently enough. So I will speak in Spanish. My generation went through and experienced the latest years of Frankism at the University and we were a generation who resisted. We resisted from clandestine political parties and interestingly enough, and compared to my other members of the panel, it was that here communism was prohibited by Franco, by the dictator. Therefore we have to recognize that one of the groups who resisted the most was the members of communist parties. And then we didn't know anything about what real communism was, but we have to recognize this. And little by little we discover what communism was. I was a student of physics and the first time our generation learned that we belonged to Europe and that we had a relationship of solidarity with the other countries of Europe was in the 80s when we were united against the destruction imposed in nuclear weapons. During the 80s my city, Zaragoza, who had a US military base, we felt threatened by a nuclear bomb. That was the madness strategy of insure, mutual destruction. And in Europe there was a very powerful movement uniting the different countries in order to search for the end of nuclear weapons. That was the history of the position of the different missiles in the European floor with the capacity to reach quickly to the other extreme of Europe. And we, those in favor of peace, members of my generation were coming from the anti-dictatorship resistance to pacifism. Why? Because we wanted parties, we were all excited about having parties that had been prohibited during Franco, but then those political parties deceived us. There was deception. However, within this movement for peace we found a movement uniting our objectives with meaning, with significance, which made meaning to our lives. Neither with the West nor with Eastern countries, but we want to defend life. And here I would like to talk about my source of inspiration in order for me to become a pacifist. These were my grandmothers from a remote village of the province of Teruel, which as you know was one of the areas where the Spanish Civil War was hardest. Teruel there, the front was present, then first the Republicans, and then Franco arrived and my village Alcany was bombarded back in 1938. So the bombarding started in all the villages of Aragon, till the seafront in order to stop the advancing of the troops of the Republicans and in Alcany, small village, 500 people were killed. And we never knew who had bombarded Alcany. Some people didn't say it, and those were the Italians. They didn't say it in order not to feel guilty about these deaths, and the other ones, because they didn't want to demoralize their own ranks, therefore we had to wait until the researcher, a researcher to talk about this history of the bombarding of Alcany, we didn't know. Let me go back to my grandmothers. One of the challenges for this type of symposium is to recover the memory of women, and I would like to greet the exhibition of those women who contributed to building Europe, that you had placed downstairs, but the memory of European women is much richer, and it's a memory that we can study from two different perspectives, from a negative perspective, all the suffering they went through, all the barriers they had to overcome in order to enter into universities to access those rights that were denied to them, but also a positive perspective. How much they contribute with to history and I'm very interested in the positive perspective. My research has been driven towards recovering the contribution of women to science and to the construction of peace. In fact, in this law of democratic historical memory here in my country, we are working in order to name some of the research centers, to name those scientific women who had to go to exile during the civil war, and not only men, but the first Spanish scientist in the republic that nobody knew about until we recovered them. Let me go back to my grandmothers. What did they teach me? They belonged to the line of the daily resistance, and what did they do? And what do many women do during wars? Well, they do something which is necessary to recover, which is to keep life, and my grandmothers used to tell me with terrible anecdotes, but very positive, and they used to tell me the following. One of my grandmothers used to live in a house in the fields. It's called Masia in Catalan. These are the typical constructions, and the republican troops were there. When they had to exit, my grandmother prepared meal for the soldiers who were living, and when the Franco troops arrived, my grandmother fed them. Feeding somebody stops them from being aggressive to feed somebody is very important, so I think that memory consists not only in recovering what the politicians and members of society have been able to do, but also this memory of the daily life and what's important to recover. Therefore, this is a perspective from another paradigm, the paradigm which allows us to see different things. So my grandmother's paradigm was keeping life, preserving life, and this paradigm, let me now go back to a writer, Virginia Woolf, who taught us so much. When she was saying pictures about the Spanish Civil War, she said, when asked what can women do to avoid war, Woolf said the best thing we can do is avoid repeating the war, and the words and the methods used by men, men in power, that is. So going back to this remembrance is like preserving social biodiversity, because as women we can act as one more man, or not. I'm not being a sensualist here, but it's important to remember the legacy of peace builders, a legacy that dates back from 1915 when during First World War, women from different countries of Europe, German women from Belgium, from the U.K., and even from the U.S., they gathered in the Hague to suggest measures aimed at stopping the war. We're speaking about the first women conference where the International League for Women and Freedom was born. So men back then were killing each other, and women were capable of opening a dialogue. So this legacy, this capacity to overcome barriers dividing us is very important, because in conflict resolution theories, what matters the most is being able to criticize your own group and being able to engage with others. And I believe that the memory of European women has to be incorporated in the memory of resistance and solidarity. My grandmothers were illiterate. One of them was a self-made woman. She learned how to write and read, and the history of my family again is a dramatic one. One of my grandmothers' siblings was assassinated during the Spanish Civil War, and others went into exile. My dad was a fighter in the Spanish Civil War. He was a bit, but he survived. So this is the drama we are speaking about. This is what the war is about, and this is what made me a pacifist. This is what brought me to be willing to recover the contribution of women to peace-building and the science, because actually the first women who started reflecting about war and conflict from another perspective were the first judge of Germany, the first Dutch doctor, the first women who started carrying out a research about war from other paradigms. In science it is often times said that the change of paradigm in science are always promoted by young researchers who are not contaminated by all paradigms. Women in many times in history have not been subordinated and discriminated, which means that they have not been, let's say, forced to think from the logics of the existing powers. It is important then to recover the heritage of human biodiversity. When it comes to women scientists, we have been working and interacting with women from different countries, also in the field of pacifism. I know that in eastern European countries, western pacifism movements were seen in a, let's say, not necessarily totally well, but I'm going to leave it here. Thank you. Wonderful. I totally share your closing point if it were not for the biodiversity none of us moving here. Also, if it were not for the cultural diversity which informs us from one end of the continent. Sorry, again, from one end of the continent to another. But I spoke for long enough. Now is the 10 for Dr. Piotr Niemski. I'm sorry, Niemski. And Florezios. Thank you very much. Thank you for inviting me to this conference. You see I feel myself sometimes as kind of an artifact. You see, now 50 years, 50 years ago, more than 50 years ago, I was 17 when 68 happened. Not only in Poland, but I would like to stress that it was different, 68 in Poland, in Czechoslovakia and in western countries or western universities. Let me touch one already mentioned important thing, the resistance background, because there are differences. I mean different backgrounds and different resistances. Resistances against different oppressors or oppressors. Probably this meeting today is really very good one because we can confront experiences, completely different experiences in Spain and in oppressed by Soviet communism countries. Poland among them. In Poland, we started to be oppressed by Soviet, not in 1945, but 1939 or even 1920. You know, if I may mention, because we are mentioning our grandfathers or grandmothers, my grandfather volunteer and went to front during war with Soviet Russia 1920 in Poland, defending Poland. Actually, fortunately, we won at that time. There is no room in Poland for pacifist movement. We have to be prepared. We have to defend, actually, relatively often our independence with arms. After the Second World War, as Winston Churchill said, iron carton for dividing the European continent and we happen to be on the wrong side. I mean, side oppressed by communists. And the background of resistance in Poland is based on anti-communist activity. First, it was armed resistance from the underground army fighting communists after the Second World War in Poland till early 50s. The memory of these brave Poles was abandoned by, of course, ruling communists in Warsaw. So, if we are talking about remembrance in Poland, it means that we started to recover memory of those heroes from 40s and early 50s. And then we have series of spontaneous eruptions of resistance against communist regime in Poland, starting with 56 crushed by tanks on streets of big city in Poland, Poznan. And then we had 68 which was the eruption of opposition among intellectual student circles against a communist approach to the cultural heritage in Poland. Students, they fought for, against censorship in Poland. In December 70, I was already 20 years old. It was eruption of strikes in Polish cities, Gdańsk, Szczecin, Elblonk. And this was crushed by army and police. Many people were killed on the streets. The memory legacy of these events were deeply rooted in our memory in 76. In 76, once again, people were raised in factories close to Warsaw, in Radom, in other places in Poland, many places, dozens of places. Once again, the communist regime decided to crush this with force. This time, they were people in, I mean, not only in Warsaw, but in some other places. Not many of them, but we decided that this time we had to react. We had to react nonviolent way and open way because we knew perfectly well that communist regime, communist secret police and police, they are prepared to crush underground or clandestine organizations. So we decided to go openly. We decided to create this organization or committee, we called it committee, committee of workers' defense. Actually, you see, the name of the committee may suggest that we were people, I mean, basically from the left. We were not. But we wanted to create the link between intellectual circles, intelligence circles, and people working in factories. So we decided to organize assistance to those persecuted. We started to collect money, we provided lawyers assisting them during trials and so on and so on. And communist regime, I mean, communist party got surprised by this kind of action. They didn't know how to react at the moment, I mean, actually during first year. And this gave us certain room for activity and we succeeded. We succeeded because all people, even centers for years or 10 years of prison, they were released after a year. So it was beginning of organized anti-communist, non-violent movement in Poland. And then it was something really surprising happened. Karol Wojtyła was elected the pope. John Paul II came to Poland in 79 and it was something really, really unique. For the first time since many years, Poles were able to gather on the open squares. In Warsaw, he gave a mess and they were thousands, thousands of people. I was there. We felt something really strange. We felt that we are not alone. Not only because, you know, the pope, our pope came to Poland, but also because we were among thousands of thousands of Poles thinking the same way we were thinking personally. So it gave really certain spirit to many, many people involved and not necessarily involved in these anti-communist organizations or movement. But if we are talking about solidarity in Poland as the movement, one of the major roots of this movement is this spirit coming from the pope's visit. One year later, once again, workers started to strike. First in Gdańsk, then all over the country. And it was kind of, I mean, solidarity was in the name of solidarity, the name of the movement was decided not during the strike, but after the victory. After the end of August 1980, when the authorities decided, you know, differently than before to rather negotiate and wait than to send troops. It was another victory. And you see, the solidarity was, I mean, solidarity movement was national movement. It was movement for independence, organized as a trade union, but not mixed, you know, let's say regular trade unions with solidarity as the organization. Solidarity at a certain moment in 1981 had almost 10 million participants, 10 million participants. So it was national movement resistant toward communists and fighting for independent Poland. Because independent Poland was something which was, I mean, a described goal for the movement. Of course, bread is important, salaries were important. But as important was demand for a mass, Catholic mass every Sunday on Polish radio, which stays still now at 9 AM. And also, you know, same importance has demand of finishing censorship in Poland. And it happened then. So the resistance in Poland means today and meant for years before resistance against communism. Purely, point. So when we realized that, for example, mentioned by you, peace movements in Western Europe in the early 80s against crisis, American crisis in the missiles in Europe, in Western Europe, we got to know very early that these movements consisting with goodwill people, mainly, many of them. But these movements were maneuvered by Soviet agents and it was proved after. So, you see, I mean, there are different experiences, different oppressors. If I may turn to, because we started today with trying to find some definitions. So, John Paul II, being several times in Poland, being the Pope, he tried to explain to us, to Poles, what solidarity means. And he was very simple, repeating Saint Paul and saying, go on carrying the burdens of one another. And one thing I would like to add is that solidarity sometimes could be mixed with moral obligation. Moral obligation is something else. Sometimes it's a common ground between solidarity and moral obligation. But moral obligation is much, much deeper. Thank you. Thank you, Piotr, and thank you in particular for ending on this note about morality. Because I think this may be where the solution lies. Because on the outside it looks like on the two sides of the panel. We have a considerable degree of difference and disagreement. For you the communists were good, for us the communists were bad. For you the unilateral nuclear disarmament movement was good. For us it was terrible because if the West unilaterally disarmed, which the Soviets had no intention of doing, then you would be defeated. And we would be defeated with you, etc., etc. So is there any way to reconcile these two perspectives? And already last night when we were having a dinner, I thought of a story because all resistance and all solidarity is made up of stories that may suggest the common ground. There was a man named František Krigl born before the war in Czechoslovakia. He was a physician. He was a pre-war communist. In the pre-war communist party which did not have any power in Czechoslovakia. And in December 1936 he got up and joined the International Brigades in Spain and fought on the front as a physician, achieved a rank of major. And after the defeat of the Republican cause he crossed the Pyrenees to France but could not go back to Czechoslovakia because it was already occupied by the Nazis. So he went to Shanghai and joined the Chinese army fighting the Japanese. And then he moved to India and joined the American army fighting the Germans and the Japanese there. After the war he came back to Czechoslovakia. Regrettably he was a part of the communist party that took over power in a coup in 1948 in Czechoslovakia. And he for a time had some features and signs of a loyal Stalinist in the 1950s but gradually he changed his mind about communism and became a reformist. And in 1968 he was already a leading reformist in Prague. And when the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968 he was taken together with Aleksandr Dubcek and the rest of the communist leadership to Moscow and was detained there. And he turned out to be the only member of the Czechoslovak communist leadership who refused to sign the protocol that basically gave up Czechoslovakia to Soviets at which the Soviets said they would not let him go back, that he would disappear somewhere and fortunately the rest of the delegation refused to leave without him. He came back to Czechoslovakia and he became one of the original signatories of the Charter 77 the resistance human rights movement that brought the communist regime down. A full circle and that resonates with what Piotr said at the end about the power of morality and what Václav Havel said about the obligation to resist injustice. What was happening for us from the perspective of my father and my ancestors in Spain in the second half of 1930s was injustice waged against an elected republican system and what was happening to us in 1970s and 1980s was an injustice waged by a very cruel communist system. And that was happening in Central and Eastern Europe, but the morality of the story is the same. Yes, I want to say that we can find a common ground if we go to deep experience of people because for instance, church, for you church was a way to liberation, to build this spirit of we are not alone but for us, for Spanish people, church was this institution who blessing the dictatorship. So it's different. Just one of my, the brother of my grandmother was shot by communist anarchists or whatever during the war. A priest, a priest. A priest was a priest shot. Yes, yes, was a priest. But I meant the institution, the institution of charge was supporting dictatorship here. But what we have in common is that people were oppressed by communists or by the dictatorship one or the dictatorship two. So the common ground is fighting and resistance against dictatorship. And we were looking for freedom and you were looking for freedom and many ways to go to Roma. There are many ways to go to Roma and your way was... You know where is the difference? One of the differences is because you, as you are saying, you are fighting, you are fighting dictatorship in Spain. But this was Spanish. Talk to... Yeah. It is obvious. You were... Oh, okay, sorry. You were fighting dictatorship in Spain, indigenous dictatorship. We were fighting communists as foreign oppressors. It makes difference, I believe. Okay, they were some Polish communists established by Russian communists in Poland. But they were traitors of the nation. The nation was against them. Right? It makes difference. Yes, what I meant is daily life. Daily life of your people and my people were lacking freedom, lacking rights, lacking... And this is common to you and to us. Daily life oppressed. But you see... Sorry, but I don't accept that pacifist people are wishful thinking people. We have a propose and the propose is for the future. But I understand the reticence of you in front of the big ideas because you were vaccinated. We are buying in Poland... We are buying in Poland armed vehicles, tanks, planes and so on because we have to be prepared. There is a war on our border created by Russians, post-communist Russians. If I may offer another perspective, it's on. If I may offer another perspective, what seems to me lacking in some of these discussions is the moral complexity of the stories. And we, going back into the past and into remembrance and memory, we have to deal on our part with some of quite painful events in our history. And some of them have to do with the Czech-German relationships. The Nazis, the Germans during the Second World War have committed well-documented atrocities against our people. They murdered 92% of our Jews and so on and so on. After the war, as a retribution, we expelled from Czechoslovakia 3 million Germans who had been living in the country, some of them for centuries. And some of them were obviously Nazi collaborators, but most of them, or a large part of them, were women, children, old people, they were not guilty of anything. They were an example of collective guilt. And since 1989, we have done a lot of work on both sides to explore what really happened in those years, who committed, what was the German guilt and blame, what was our part of the blame and so on and so on. And the result is a much more plastic picture of history and of memory. And Kamen, I apologize for having to ask this, but in my imperfect memory and knowledge of the Spanish history in the 1930s, I think one thing that stands out that there were injustices committed on both sides of the Civil War and that on the Republican side of the Civil War it was quite often not a matter of fighting Franco or fighting the other factions inside the Republican camp. So my question to you is how deep are Spanish historians and the public, how deep are they willing to go into these complexities? Because there will be more complexities there. Yes, this is a complex question. And it's true that the two parts committed crimes during the war. And for this, the stories of my grandmother were plenty of them and maybe for that reason, maybe I traumatized it, but it's like that in these years they didn't think we were children. But the question is that after the war Franco, the dictatorship, go on killing people, killing. And after the dictatorship, after the war, there are many people who lost their position at the university. They have to go to exile and they lost everything because only the winners of the war were in power. And it's true that in this country we are not override the trauma because we are again divided. And nowadays there are people who says that the Republic was responsible for many things and even before the war began in 1934, there are many, many positions. Some people says that open the tombs is the graves, open the graves is open the wounded, the heredias. And it's this discussion because some countries, for instance Germany, I think they have a common vision of the past. We don't have this common vision. I don't know what you think about. We don't have this common vision. We have to reconcile ourselves. But it's for this that I'm thinking from this legacy, legacy of these peace makers, women peace makers. We have to reconcile ourselves and with you and with everybody. And these days I went to a play, a theater play in Madrid as based in one scene from Federico García Lorca, La canción del primer deseo. The play reflects very well this. The play explained the shot of people going out of the mess of the church during the civil war. And also the play reflects how many people still don't have the body, the corpse of his family, of their family. But there are one scene, two mothers they say, we are mothers. We have the same decide is that this happened never, never more so. And in this is for this matter that I always think that weapons will not save us. Weapon is not the solution. But sometimes it's necessary to defend ourselves. Weapons are not a solution unless somebody is about to kill you. Then what can you do? No, I'm not going into that. I think it's very short. You see these days, I mean during last year after Soviet Russian this time, Russian invasion to Ukraine, we decided spontaneously in Poland to support Ukrainians. Every possible means, every possible means. This is based on one side on our interest, Polish interest. Because we know that Ukrainian state disappearing on our border means that we'll have border with Russia. So we defend ourselves on Ukrainian fields. This is first, but also there is an idea, I mean not new idea. This is very old idea of Polish-Ukrainian cooperation, about including Ukrainians or Ukraine to Polish Commonwealth during First Republic, where we have Commonwealth with Lithuania, Grand Duchess of Lithuania. We had a lot of problems between us. Remembrance is necessary background to these ideas being part of practical or basis for practical doings. It means also that we have to remember those about 100,000 Poles killed by Ukrainian nationalists in 1943 and 1944 during the Second World War, where eastern part of Poland was under German occupation, but Ukrainian minority there were active, national, and they decided about ethnic cleansing killing Poles. So we have to remember about that, we have to admit it, they have to admit it, and this is necessary for future cooperation. And I believe that we are able to pass this very important and difficult moment. Now absolutely unexplored history inevitably comes back to haunt you. That's the experience you had, we had, everybody else had. And I don't want to repeat every time what Santayana said, but if we don't remember our history or don't know our history, we are condemned to repeating it. That's one general lesson from this. And now the second general lesson is that I promised there will be an opportunity for the audience to make their contributions and ask questions. So Marcus, please, you start. Thank you, Marcus Mechel from Germany. Piotr, I wanted to tell you a story, and not only you, about a visit in the 90s. I was very engaged and I am engaged for the opposition in Cuba, and I had good contact with Wastaf Havel about that. And then Wastaf Havel decided in the 90s that we should, he would want to send a delegation from dissidents of Central and Eastern Europe to Latin America to convince the countries there and to understand better that Cuba is a dictatorship, because very often in Latin America, Castro in that time was understood as a hero against the Americans. And so I was part of that delegation and Jan Rumel and other were there, and there was made the first day we had a meeting and discussed what is our message. And we saw that we had a strong disagreement about Mr. Reagan, and that's why I come to that point, you mentioned it. For you, I think in Poland and even in Czechoslovakia and other countries, Mr. Reagan was a hero, a hero for freedom, you thought. And we saw coming in East Germany, we had different position in that field. I think more similar to yours, that's why I raised that issue. And I told them what is the view of the Latin Americans with Mr. Reagan. They had the experience that Mr. Reagan was supporting all these authoritarian systems, even with Schiele, with Spinochet, even with the military dictatorship in Argentina, that was their view to Mr. Reagan. That was not your view, you lost this. But if you go to Latin America and tell them that Mr. Reagan is a hero for freedom, they ask you if you are right. And so I wanted to give you that point, it is not so easy with a different perspective, even in that time and even in that person of Mr. Reagan. So I think in the question of communism, we were together fighting against it. But in the question of nuclear armament, that was not at every point the same as the case. I wanted only to mention that to make clear that it is much more difficult and much more differentiated. Thank you very much. Thank you for the comment, Marcus. I don't think we have time to debate the positive and negative aspects of Ronald Reagan, but I will grant you he had both. Okay, please. Thank you. My name is Ion Yonica. I'm editor-in-chief of History Magazine in Bucharest, Romania. I understand very well what you, Dr. Ramagalan, are saying. I understand your trauma and the trauma of Spanish civil war. I understand very well what we are saying. Mr. Naimski, I'm coming from a former communist state, and I know the dictatorship of communism in Romania was the most atrocious, the last years of Ceausescu dictatorship. The Romanian revolution was a bloody one in Romania. So, I can understand your different perspective, but my question is, Mr. Dr. Magalan, have you seen a pacifist movement stopping an aggressor in history, in the First World War, in the Civil Spanish War, in the Second World War, they didn't work at all. It encouraged aggressor. And on the other hand, I believe, I strongly believe, the most important is to see who is the aggressor and who is the victim. In Spanish, the Spanish population was the victim of war, victim of dictatorship. In our countries, we the people were the victim of communist dictatorship. So, when you see a woman attacked by a rapist trying to violate the woman, the woman is the victim, the rapist is the aggressor. And the most important for us, a moral thing for us, is to not be confused who is the victim and who is the aggressor. We have to stand against the aggressor and help the victim. Thank you. Of course you are right. The aggressor has to be stopped. And I don't judge anyone who defends themselves, Ukrainians, and anyone, even myself, if I were attacked, I have to acknowledge that I have to defend myself. But this is a question. And other is that to be in our mind that these courses build reality. If we always defend weapons, we never go out the weapons. So, we have to understand the people who defend themselves, but maintaining our discourse as a way different for cooperating, for living together pacifically. And my question is, how many efforts are being made to build, for instance, a ceasefire or a negotiation? How many efforts? So, we have to maintain the two discourses, not only defend to send weapons, to send weapons. And I say that in this country that we, during the Civil War, the Republic wanted weapons, wanted weapons, and Europe, the democracies, didn't send weapons to Spain. But in this legacy of the women's internationally for peace and freedom, they didn't ask for weapons for the Republic and Spain. They wanted that Germany and Italy didn't support the Franco's rebellion. So, this is the coherence of one line of thinking. And we don't have a solution. You are true. You are true. So, this is true. But I want to maintain my discourse of pacifism. As I say, unfortunately it's not working. No, no, we need to pass the mic to our next question, or to our next lady questioner. Please. Mungaila Yurkutov from Lithuania, Genocide and Resistance Centre. I really don't want to disrespect your family history, history of your grandmother or your beliefs on pacifism. I strongly support peace myself. However, the statement that when we're dealing with the totalitarian regimes, authoritarian regimes, the way to respond to it is pacifism. It's actually a very, very disturbing statement. And that's why these kind of regimes, they do not respond with repression to how people are reacting. That's very important to understand this feature. They always come with the plan for repressions for terror in advance. These are pre-planned things which are implemented in the mass population without any regard how exact people are behaving. I mean, it's not what you did, but it's who you are, the category you receive. It's why you receive the repression. I think it's the response of my own country and any countries who were occupied by Soviet Union. After Second World War is this, but I will give the instance of my country because actually I know this the best. So we have a total number of 300,000 people repressed out of 3 million. So it's the big percentage. All those people, they were farmers mostly, they were not involved in a political life in any way. So those really innocent victims, actually this number is smaller, way smaller in comparison with the number which was prepared before the occupation. And today, in the situation of Ukraine, we had exactly the same model cause plants, they were for terror, for repressions, they were made in advance. And exactly the same scheme, people were divided into categories and four categories. Some of them were supposed to be killed, others were deported and so on. So it's very important to not miss this, it's very important. When the totalitarian regime is coming, the only way to deal with it is to stop it and not allow it to advance. That's the only possible reaction to a totalitarian regime. So there might be other situations when movements for peace are important for the peace one. So that was my first remark and the other remark concerns the common ground. I'm afraid we have to make time for another question, so if you could please. Oh, but that was a positive one about the common ground, but okay, we'll pass the mic. I'm sorry, but I'm afraid this was a comment and a fair comment, but I've been given a sign that we should be about to finish, so the last question will go to the gentleman here and I'm sorry. Is it working? Yeah, okay, I have a short remark on this or what you just said and following on what Dr. Magallion thinks, and I think correct me if I'm wrong, if nobody, okay, when she says pacifism, it means that if no Russian wants to go to war, there's no war. No, I know, but that's, it's like a utopia, the idea of if nobody wants to go to war, there will be no wars. So that's what I think you were trying to say, maybe. I have a question for you though. Dr. Naimski, it kind of surprised me that it's going to be a difficult question. When you say that Poles who were communists were traitors, you are actually, it reminds me of Francoists saying that people who were with the Republic were not Spaniards, they called them la anti-Spanish. So don't you think that your position kind of makes reconciliation impossible? I am not saying that Polish communists, they were not Poles. Unfortunately, they were Poles and I can also add that, you see, I don't know, I didn't, didn't meet any communist who was a Democrat or for democracy. I met series of former communists, dissidents who changed minds and they became Democrats or patriots, Polish patriots. But to be a communist in Poland was something contrary to being a Polish patriot. Final remark on the gender aspect of the war. To me, the victim, for instance, in the Spanish Civil War was my father, who seven years of his jobs have to go to fight with weapons against the war and then a civil service in the extreme of Spain, Galicia, our Galicia, not your Galicia. And then with all the people from Catalonia, all Catalans, soldiers and Aragon went to Galicia. Well, in this Ukrainian war at the beginning women and children went out of the country but men were obliged to fight and some men wanted to defend their right to no kill. So, who is the victim? Men are also victims, not only women. Well, I acknowledge that there may be a case of such men who did not want to fight but we have very little documentation of that. Well, this is the future. I mean, the future is next. But I will end on, and Piotr will forgive me, another point on historic complexity. And that touches upon Spain, touches upon Poland, touches upon Czechoslovakia. In Poland, communism was largely an imported phenomenon. Poland was not an industrial country at the end of the First World War and it did not have a massive communist movement. Czechoslovakia was one of the most industrial parts of Europe at the time. It had a very strong indigenous communist party. Before the war there were people intellectuals who believed not because of Russian or Soviet indoctrination but because of their own conviction in the idea as they must have been in Spain. So, I generally do not blame people who maybe mistakenly but in good faith supported the communist idea before the Second World War. Anyone who supported it after 1968 must have had something in his head missing or after 1945, after 1956, after 1953. So, we agree on that and it's wonderful to end up on a note of consensus. Thank you very much, you were a wonderful audience and thank Dr. Carmen Magallon and Dr. Piotr Namski. Thank you very much.