The Foreign Service Journal, November 2019

50 NOVEMBER 2019 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL In the Airport with Walesa John J. Boris Warsaw, Poland T he Berlin Wall had just fallen, and Lech Walesa was head- ing to the United States. Those of us serving inWarsaw, Krakow and Poznan in 1989 had front-row seats as Solidarity, the free trade union, through negotiations, activism and elections, outmaneuvered the Polish UnitedWorkers’ Party (i.e., the communists) into the step-by-step surrender of its power. As the deputy to the political counselor at Embassy Warsaw since July 1988, I had lucked into the exception- ally interesting role of maintaining working-level contact with the trade union, a job that brought regular interaction with some of Solidarity’s most eminent figures, such as AdamMichnik, Bogdan Lys and, at times, even ChairmanWalesa himself. When President George H.W. Bush visited Poland in July 1989, I was the site officer for the home-cooked lunch at which Lech and his wife, Danuta, hosted the president and first lady. By the time I escorted the fourth congressional delegation—a total of 21 mem- bers over the course of 18 days in August 1989—to Gdansk, the union leader and I were simply nodding at each other in greeting. That presidential visit, and the wave of visiting legislators, led to invitations for Walesa to visit the White House and address a joint session of Congress. Walesa and his party were planning to fly out of Warsaw on Friday, Nov. 10, and several of us from the embassy planned to use that Veterans Day holiday to see themoff. I was washing my breakfast dishes that morning as the BBC World Service reported that, late the previous evening, the East German authorities had lifted border controls. The BerlinWall had fallen. I teared up. Poland had seen a succession of evermore remarkable “Is this really happening?” developments over the course of the year, but even by those standards, this news was breathtaking. That is certainly how the Solidarity delegation inWarsaw’s Okecie airport departure lounge viewed things. “Nie do wiary!” (Unbelievable!) averred Krzysztof Pusz, Walesa’s aide-de-camp and one of my closest contacts, as we exultantly greeted each other. Ambassador John Davis and his spouse, Helen Davis—a savvy dip- lomatic presence in her own right—were engaged in conversation with a beaming Walesa. I could not hear what they were saying, but it was not hard to read the trade union leader’s mood. Indeed, all of us in the departure lounge were quietly or giddily incredulous. Walesa’s upcoming Nov. 15 address to a joint session of Congress had just taken on even greater significance. In 1989, before Poland’s market reforms had kicked in, it was common for Embassy Warsaw personnel tomake several shop- ping runs a year to U.S. military facilities inWest Berlin. By a happy coincidence of timing, my wife and I had scheduled one beginning on Nov. 13. Within days of the fall of the BerlinWall, Anne and I were outside the KaDeWe (Kaufhaus des Westens, a department store), gaping at the Trabants full of people gaping back at us. John J. Boris joined the U.S. Foreign Service in 1980. He was the deputy political counselor inWarsawwhen the BerlinWall fell. Mr. Boris lives in Annandale, Virginia. JAMESTALALAY Graffiti on the longest-remaining section of the Berlin Wall, featured at the open-air East Side Gallery, Berlin, 2015.