Former Polish foreign minister

Bronislaw Geremek, 76, a former foreign minister of Poland who helped the Solidarity trade union movement lead the nation’s transformation from communism to democracy, died Sunday in an automobile accident near the city of Wielkopolska.

“Polish politics and scholarship have lost a great man, and many of us, a true friend,” Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk said in a statement.

Born in Warsaw, Geremek escaped from the Warsaw Ghetto when he was 11 and spent much of the rest of the war in hiding. His father died at Auschwitz.

Geremek joined the Communist Polish United Workers Party, but left the party after Warsaw Pact countries invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968.

He was a leading figure in Poland’s democratic opposition in the 1970s. He later joined Solidarity as an advisor to the movement’s leader, Lech Walesa, who became the country’s first democratically elected president in 1990.

Geremek served as a lawmaker in the Polish parliament and was foreign minister from 1997 to 2000. As foreign minister, he signed Poland’s accession treaty to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1999.