I belonged to a generation that thought about peace, dialogue, and reconciliation in Europe
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Janusz Bertram Witt was born in January 1934 in Wieluń into a family of Polish Lutherans. His father was a schoolteacher and a cantor in the Evangelical Church. As a child, he survived the bombing of Wieluń—the first German attack on Poland on September 1, 1939. His father took part in the defensive war of 1939 and was later taken prisoner by the Germans. During the German occupation, his parents were involved in clandestine teaching, which allowed Janusz Witt to begin his education already during the war. For his university studies, he moved to Wrocław, a city he has remained connected with ever since. He studied German philology. After graduating, he worked as a journalist for “Arbeiterstimme,” a German-language newspaper published for the German minority. After the paper was closed in 1958, he worked as a lecturer in German and English at the Wrocław University of Economics. He has been actively involved in the life of the Evangelical Church in Wrocław and in Polish-German dialogue. He is one of the co-founders of the Krzyżowa Foundation for Mutual Understanding in Europe, the founder and chairman of the Polish section of the Bonhoeffer Society, and one of the initiators of the establishment of the District of Mutual Respect in Wrocław.
