Eulogy for Irena Kirkland

Carl Gershman, President
The National Endowment for Democracy
Arlington National Cemetery

January 29, 2007

It is very hard to sum up in a few minutes what Irena meant to me and, I think, to Laurie as well, but I'll try. She was more than the dearest of friends. She was family, and that's how I mourn for her – as a member of my family.

I'm sure I'm not alone in saying that Irena was one of the most distinctive people and powerful personalities I have ever known. Those who knew Irena were connected through her not just to the immediate experience of her suffering at the hands of the two great totalitarian evils of the last century, but also to her resistance against those evils and to her triumph over them. She was a survivor, to be sure, of Auschwitz and communist prisons. But she was more than that. She was a fighter, who fought with a fierce spirit to defend Israel and to defeat communism. She fought in her own fashion, of course, and for more than a quarter of a century she did so in partnership with Lane.

Irena and Lane were decidedly secular in their beliefs, but I cannot help but believe that in some way their marriage was made in heaven. We all know that Lane was a formidable person. But in Irena he had clearly met his match. She was beautiful and incredibly sophisticated. She needed no lessons in politics and could move in all circles. And she had a sense of herself. She told me that when she returned to Prague from Auschwitz, not yet twenty years old, she wanted to be Czechoslovakia's Foreign Minister. One would expect no less from Irena, and arguably, she achieved the equivalent of that and more. She was also what Leon Wieseltier, in a recent message to me, called "a wickedly keen observer of other people," an attribute that I'm sure appealed to Lane. She was not without her flaws, of course. She had a perfect grasp of English grammar and on one occasion even corrected Laurie's use of a pronoun. But she did occasionally lapse into malapropisms, albeit in a lovely and characteristically inimitable manner. Strait-laced Washingtonians probably don't realize that the drop-off area for spouses and others at the Metro station is called "kiss and tell," and it's comforting to know that our civil liberties are being protected, sometimes a little too aggressively perhaps, by the UCLA. Such was Lane's "Sugar."

I cannot overstate my personal debt to Irena. I believe that I would not be doing what I am doing today if she hadn't believed in me. Knowing her – and Lane – is one of the great blessings of my life, and I know that Laurie feels the same way. We were bound together in many ways, some of them unfathomable. It was somehow appropriate that the last words I said to her, ten hours before her death and right after Alena had said them to her in Czech, were that my daughter Sarah had just given birth to a little girl. I was reminded of the passage in Ecclesiastes, that "One generation goes and another generation comes…" It is a thought that gives me some comfort at this sad time -- that and the thought that Irena will now lie in peace next to Lane.