Hogan & Hartson poaches top partner from Weil, Gotshal
He goes to rival Washington-based law firm Hogan & Hartson's Warsaw office. In addition to working with H&H Managing Partner Michael Cheroutes - who brought him over - Wieckowski will help Hogan & Hartson develop East European and Russian activities.
Wieckowski told the Weil, Gotshal staff early last week and, pending the formality of a partnership vote at Hogan & Hartson today (Nov. 2), he will move into the Atrium suites immediately.
Last week in a totally separate move, Wieckowski was appointed to the supervisory board of National Investment Fund (NIF) No. 1. His parents left Poland after World War II, and he was born in Canada and reared in Boston. He became a Harvard man and a Boston law firm partner before deciding to come see what role he could play in the new Poland.
• • •
Late last month, some leading scholars from Poland, Germany, the Netherlands, Israel and the United States grappled at a Krakow conference on the issues of reconciling the past to get on with the future.
No easy road maps here. That is especially true of the Holocaust and attitudes and actions in the countries such as Poland where fully free debates about the past have been possible only since 1990.
Some leading Polish political scientists disagreed about the government's strategy in the current hot-potato issue of Catholic radicals urging Poles to put up crosses on the fringes of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camps to protest plans by the government and international Jewish groups to remove all religious symbols there.
Warsaw University history professor Jerzy Jedlicki said that "both the government and the (Catholic) church are afraid to act against the small groups of fanatics." Especially, he said, when the fanatics are trying to make this into a crusade to commemorate the Poles who died in Auschwitz.
But Wojciech Roszkowski, chairman of the reconciliation conference and a history professor at the Warsaw School of Economics (SGH), said, "I think the government is not acting from fear but out of pragmatism." If it moved to reclaim the land, or to forcibly remove the crosses, it would enhance the "professional victim" status of the man leading the crusade. By taking a more circuitous approach, he said, there ultimately will be a resolution of the crisis - and the Auschwitz-Birkenau area can be preserved as an international site.
Israeli political scientist Shlomo Avineri expected no quick solution. He also was dismayed at the impasse. "What's wrong with civil society, which is very strong and very liberal in Poland? Why don't people demonstrate against this?"
The forum for the "reconciliation" debate was a three-day retreat near Krakow of European fellows of the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars in Washington. The original intent was to look at de-communization and "lustration" policies - what had worked or backfired in East Germany and the Czech Republic. Poland only now is starting its program whereby Poles can see the files kept on them in the past decades under communism.
But the agenda was broadened, partly at the insistence of British professor Michael Pinto-Duschinsky, as the crosses-at-Auschwitz controversy made international headlines. Avineri was a late addition to the roster of speakers and proved to be the conference standout. His family came from Bielsko-Biala. His father, he said, was a "crazy Zionist" who defied his family's wishes and in 1939 emigrated to Palestine. Avineri lights 23 candles on the days of remembrance "for three grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins" who stayed behind in Poland. "None of them survived."
But he had no easy "reconciliation" answers. Germany's steps were motivated by economic-political necessity, as they moved to start again on a path to join the modern world. He said he had much respect for Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel as a writer but "I have great doubts that you can make being a victim into a profession.."
The very idea of personal forgiveness is difficult. "Should one forgive Hitler? And forgiving today's young Germans is irrelevant - they haven't done anything." He said Poland could learn from what Germany did, however, "to make reconciliation and discourse part of its life. It didn't come easily."
Germany has "invested in the relationship with Israel more than most people know," including vast numbers of "people-to-people relationships" between Germans and Israelis. He says he opposes the current pattern in Israel of sending massive numbers of young Israelis to Poland - only to see the concentration camps and cemeteries. Much more is needed.
But he said initiatives from Poland will not come easily or automatically, especially since only with the end of communist rule in 1989 could Poles openly ask blunt questions and expect answers about what happened to them under Stalinist rule. He said the "moral ambivalence" about the Holocaust is partly because "for many Polish people, the issue of Katyn was much more of a trauma than that 3 million Jews were killed" in Auschwitz and other death camps. "The fact that one-third of the (Polish Army) officers killed in Katyn were Jews never was part of the dialogue.
Wieckowski told the Weil, Gotshal staff early last week and, pending the formality of a partnership vote at Hogan & Hartson today (Nov. 2), he will move into the Atrium suites immediately.
Last week in a totally separate move, Wieckowski was appointed to the supervisory board of National Investment Fund (NIF) No. 1. His parents left Poland after World War II, and he was born in Canada and reared in Boston. He became a Harvard man and a Boston law firm partner before deciding to come see what role he could play in the new Poland.
• • •
Late last month, some leading scholars from Poland, Germany, the Netherlands, Israel and the United States grappled at a Krakow conference on the issues of reconciling the past to get on with the future.
No easy road maps here. That is especially true of the Holocaust and attitudes and actions in the countries such as Poland where fully free debates about the past have been possible only since 1990.
Some leading Polish political scientists disagreed about the government's strategy in the current hot-potato issue of Catholic radicals urging Poles to put up crosses on the fringes of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camps to protest plans by the government and international Jewish groups to remove all religious symbols there.
Warsaw University history professor Jerzy Jedlicki said that "both the government and the (Catholic) church are afraid to act against the small groups of fanatics." Especially, he said, when the fanatics are trying to make this into a crusade to commemorate the Poles who died in Auschwitz.
But Wojciech Roszkowski, chairman of the reconciliation conference and a history professor at the Warsaw School of Economics (SGH), said, "I think the government is not acting from fear but out of pragmatism." If it moved to reclaim the land, or to forcibly remove the crosses, it would enhance the "professional victim" status of the man leading the crusade. By taking a more circuitous approach, he said, there ultimately will be a resolution of the crisis - and the Auschwitz-Birkenau area can be preserved as an international site.
Israeli political scientist Shlomo Avineri expected no quick solution. He also was dismayed at the impasse. "What's wrong with civil society, which is very strong and very liberal in Poland? Why don't people demonstrate against this?"
The forum for the "reconciliation" debate was a three-day retreat near Krakow of European fellows of the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars in Washington. The original intent was to look at de-communization and "lustration" policies - what had worked or backfired in East Germany and the Czech Republic. Poland only now is starting its program whereby Poles can see the files kept on them in the past decades under communism.
But the agenda was broadened, partly at the insistence of British professor Michael Pinto-Duschinsky, as the crosses-at-Auschwitz controversy made international headlines. Avineri was a late addition to the roster of speakers and proved to be the conference standout. His family came from Bielsko-Biala. His father, he said, was a "crazy Zionist" who defied his family's wishes and in 1939 emigrated to Palestine. Avineri lights 23 candles on the days of remembrance "for three grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins" who stayed behind in Poland. "None of them survived."
But he had no easy "reconciliation" answers. Germany's steps were motivated by economic-political necessity, as they moved to start again on a path to join the modern world. He said he had much respect for Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel as a writer but "I have great doubts that you can make being a victim into a profession.."
The very idea of personal forgiveness is difficult. "Should one forgive Hitler? And forgiving today's young Germans is irrelevant - they haven't done anything." He said Poland could learn from what Germany did, however, "to make reconciliation and discourse part of its life. It didn't come easily."
Germany has "invested in the relationship with Israel more than most people know," including vast numbers of "people-to-people relationships" between Germans and Israelis. He says he opposes the current pattern in Israel of sending massive numbers of young Israelis to Poland - only to see the concentration camps and cemeteries. Much more is needed.
But he said initiatives from Poland will not come easily or automatically, especially since only with the end of communist rule in 1989 could Poles openly ask blunt questions and expect answers about what happened to them under Stalinist rule. He said the "moral ambivalence" about the Holocaust is partly because "for many Polish people, the issue of Katyn was much more of a trauma than that 3 million Jews were killed" in Auschwitz and other death camps. "The fact that one-third of the (Polish Army) officers killed in Katyn were Jews never was part of the dialogue.
