The silent hero of Poland’s post-communist transition, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, has passed away aged 86.  Mazowiecki was the first non-communist Prime Minister in the Eastern block serving between September 1989 – January 1991.  A quiet intellectual, portrayed uncharitably in Polish cartoons as a tortoise, he did not come to symbolize the end of communism in the same way as Vaclav Havel or Lech Walesa did, but it was during his time in office that Poland’s transition from a communist dictatorship to liberal-democracy became irreversible - writes Marcin Zaborowski in El Pais.