UN General Assembly
2000

for the human being, and of genocide and blind violence perpetrated by utopias intent on thus building “brave new worlds”. The Polish poet and Nobel laureate in literature in 1980, Czeslaw Milosz, wrote in The Witness of History that the twentieth century's original contribution to the history of the human race was “the near disappearance of the concept of values” and concluded: “The extermination camp became the central fact of the century.” Nonetheless, the end of this century seems to bring more optimism. This is not only the assessment of the Foreign Minister of reborn and democratic Poland. It is also the personal feeling of a man who, having been a prisoner of two totalitarian systems, the Nazi and the Communist — incidentally, I am, I think, the only Foreign Minister to hold this “distinction” — has known the sufferings specific to this century, and it reflects the hope ingrained in human nature. But as well as destruction and hatred, I have also been, since as long ago as the days of the Holocaust, a witness of