HE was tall, slim, and grey-haired and always wore glasses. He was a legend in the Department of History at Warsaw University. His name was spoken with awe and admiration, next to the names of Tadeusz Manteuffel, Marian Malowist, and Aleksander Gieysztor. I was then eighteen years old and my soul was revolting against the sickening world of Communist dictatorship that many accepted without protest.

I was eighteen years old and did not understand what was the basis of the strength and stature of these elderly men teaching history and writing about remote times. Stefan Kieniewicz seemed to me to be excessively careful. I knew neither him nor his make-up, neither his generational experience nor his intellectual achievements. And later, throughout the subsequent years, his books and essays were with me constantly. I still cannot get used to the fact that I shall never read a new essay of his again. He was a historian from an excellent pre-war school, and during the years of the Second Republic he won prizes and distinctions for his work on the nineteenth century.

Polish destiny, in a nineteenth century terrible and rich in events and individuality, invariably fascinated him. He wrote prolifically, staying under the influence of the tradition of the Warsaw school, and later under the influence of Marxism, which he was able to transform into an incomparable instrument for the analysis of our history. During the occupation he was connected with the Armia Krajowa (Home Army), then, as a professor at Warsaw University, he undertook in his research such complex subjects as the Galician massacre of 1846 and the peasant question. Always a faithful son of the Catholic Church, always stubbornly ferreting out the secrets of the Polish compromisers and Polish insurrectionists.

He was a magnificent historian, wise, enquiring, versatile, and fearless. From among the many works written by him, for me Stefan Kieniewicz will remain, first and foremost, the great chronicler of the January Insurrection. His monumental work constitutes the turning-point, not only in Polish knowledge of that time but also in Polish thought about the nineteenth century. Kieniewicz proposed this maxim for dealing with the nineteenth century: ‘Be free of fanaticism, but not free of judgement.’