Youth & family

Bronisław Geremek was born on 6 March 1932 in Warsaw into the Lewartow family. Most of his family, including his father, perished during the Holocaust.

In an interview with J. C. Vidal, he recalled: “Warsaw is my city, the city where I spent my whole life. I was born and spent my childhood in the same district where I have lived for the last forty years. Almost nothing is left of its landscape. I remember the town with the signboards on which I learned to read. Those signboards are no longer there, not even those houses, only the street names remain.”

From 1945 to 1947, he lived in the city of Wschowa, where his stepfather Stefan Geremek served as district governor. There he graduated from the Queen Jadwiga and Władysław Jagiełło Gymnasium (today’s Tomasz Zan High School).

After moving to Warsaw, he passed his baccalaureate exam in 1950 at the Bolesław Limanowski Secondary School. During his studies at Warsaw University, he lived in Warsaw’s Praga district, and from 1952 at 25 Piwna Street in the Old Town.

Bronisław Geremek’s wife, Hanna, was a history graduate from the University of Warsaw, a papyrologist and researcher of the history of antiquity and its reception in Poland. In 1954, she defended her master’s thesis on the Brutus conspiracy, and in 1967 she obtained her PhD researching on the rural settlement of Karanis in Egypt. From 1958 to 1979, she worked as an assistant and assistant professor at the University of Warsaw’s Institute of History, and later at the University Library’s manuscripts department.