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| 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 |
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