Photographs chronicling the events that led to the fall of Communism in Poland 30 years ago have been displayed at an exhibition launched today at the National Library in Chisinau. The event, organized by the Polish Institute of National Remembrance in Bucharest, is opened to the public only today.

Pawel Sasanka, one of the authors, said the idea of the exhibition occurred to him as we was hunting for Cold War materials in the libraries of some important capitals of the world, when he realized that, to the existing abundance of texts, there weren’t too many photographs documenting that period in Poland. For him the ensuing search for photographs was like traveling back in time, which ironically consumed a lot of time, but was worth it. “As a historian, I have a historical perspective about those events. With the help of these photographs, I wanted to show the other aspects of the Cold War as well, the economic, the humanitarian, the social ones”, stated Pawel Sasanka.

Slawomir Stepien, another co-author, said the photographs on display possess a great emotional load. While some of those photographs became famous, the stories behind them remained unknown. Often a photograph can encapsulate more testimony than a text, says Slawomir Stepien, and this is why holding such an exhibition was the choice for marking the 30th anniversary of the fall of Communist in Poland.

Poland’s Ambassador to Moldova  Bartlomiej Zdaniuk gave a brief account of the 1989 events: the first partially free elections brought about the first mainly non-communist government in the entire Eastern Bloc; also that year the Berlin Wall came down, and the Romanian revolution started. “It was a very evetful year. It marked a path that was later followed by other nations”, stated Bartlomiej Zdaniuk.

The Revolutions of 1989 formed part of a revolutionary wave in the late 1980s and early 1990s that resulted in the end of communist rule in Central and Eastern Europe and beyond. The period is sometimes called the Autumn of Nations, a play on the term Spring of Nations that is sometimes used to describe the Revolutions of 1848. The events of the full-blown revolution first began in Poland in 1989 and continued in Hungary, East Germany, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and Romania.