Italian President Giorgio Napolitano and former prime minister Romano Prodi were among the participants in a symposium in tribute to former Polish foreign minister Bronislaw Geremek, who died in a car crash last summer.

Held  at the Italian Academy of Science in Rome, it was organized by the historian Paolo Prodi, the former prime minister’s brother. The Polish ambassador at the Vatican Hanna Suchocka recalled Bronislaw Geremek’s activities at the time of the 1989 parliamentary elections which paved the way for the collapse of communism.

Editor of the Gazeta Wyborcza daily Adam Michnik stressed that in his youth Bronislaw Geremek went through the Jewish Ghetto in Warsaw and during martial law in 1981 was interned by the communists. He said that Geremek’s record as foreign minister of independent Poland was truly outstanding, stressing that his vision of a Poland of internal reconciliation has triumphed.