The Wars, Multiplied - a prologue

I was twelve and escaping Poland because of war. Actually, because of
two wars. Three, if truth be told.

The first of these was actually the Second World War, meant to have
ended forty years before my mother, my younger sister and I started
packing for exile. But even though Hitler was very much history by the
time I was born in 1973, many considered Poland to still be in the
fight. Thousands of partisans soldiered on well beyond German
capitulation, refusing to accept the new borders or the presence of
Soviet armies within them. Our Red Comrades kept hunting them down well
into the Fifties. After that, it was Poles themselves who did the blood
letting. I remember all too well the funeral of Father Popiełuszko in
1984, a few streets from my home in Warsaw, beaten to death by the
secret police. And the murder of a dissident student, again by our own
version of the KGB, in a record shop just behind my school.

The Cold War thus became the second all-out conflict of my childhood.
My father left us for London on December 13th 1981, mere hours before
the state of Martial Law was declared (as a reaction to Solidarity’s
increasingly indefensible popularity). I remember the evening he flew
out, his plane delayed due to heavy snow. It was the last such flight
out of Warsaw before tanks starting rolling into our streets. We woke
in the morning to find our father gone, the phone lines cut and nothing
on TV but our new head of state, General Jaruzelski*, mumbling lies
behind his infamously dark glasses.

This new implosion interrupted the third and most vital conflict of my
childhood – that between my parents. Having seen the Iron Curtain slam
shut behind the tail of his London-bound plane, my father became free.
Free from political oppression. Free from a wife he had grown to
detest. Free from the children and vast extended family for whom he had
been forced to maintain the overt identity of “good husband”.

 Continue reading here... the manuscript is finished, 10 chapters,
illustrated
all site design, art work, photography and words are mine
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MAREK RECENTLY
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