This photo was taken to commemorate the visit of some Chinese educators to Theodor’s school in Chocen. Theodor is standing second from the left, next to his wife, my grandmother Zofia (also a teacher), and the boy between them is my five-year-old dad. 

                                                             Theodor

As a child, I adored my grandfather on my father’s side. My mother’s father was not destined to experience grand-fatherhood: he died of typhus at the age of 40 at  Auschwitz concentration camp, ten years before my birth. Looking back, I see my only living grandfather, Grandpa,  as an elegant older gentleman, clean-shaven and smelling of men’s cologne, with a watch chain draped from his vest pocket.  He used to wear creaking shoes, which made him very special in my eyes. From today’s perspective there was something 19th century about him.  And his name? Oh, his name, Theodor, not very common, impressed me so, that I could not stop myself from sharing it with the whole world. I would announce proudly “My grandpa’s name is Theodor!” to strangers met on a train or in a park, curious for their reaction, which usually was rather disappointing; they would only smile politely, and praise me for being such an outspoken little girl. Obviously the name did not seem extraordinary to them. 

As a young man, in the 1920s and 1930s, Grandpa taught at schools in small Polish towns and villages. He liked classes of small children best. In Chocen, a village in north-central Poland, where he became principal in 1929, he created an exemplary school, which made the village inhabitants and the school authorities in the area proud. The school was once visited by a delegation of Chinese instructors interested in modern education… It’s a delightful story, often recalled by my dad who was a toddler at the time, who knew it from his parents. The story was recorded in detail in the school chronicle kept by Theodor, and the local newspaper wrote an article on the event.

Let me give you the background of the story: in early 1931, in the midst of tumultuous political change in China, the government, under the leadership of Chiang Kai-Shek, had contacted the League of Nations to ask for its help in  modernizing of the country. The League of Nations then sent four experts to China whose goal was to evaluate the Chinese educational system. One of the experts was a Pole named Marian Falski, responsible in his country for primary education. The other three were: Carl Heinrich Becker, a German minister of education in Prussia; the well-known French mathematician, and professor at the Collège de France, Paul Langevin;  and Richard Henry Towney, a British teacher and a specialist on China. A delegation of Chinese instructors visited seven European countries in 1932, Poland among them, to take a closer look at their educational institutions. 

This is the point at which Theodor and his school come into the story. The Polish expert on education, Marian Falski, chose Chocen as a good example of  a modern seven-year village school to show the Chinese delegation. Such schools constituted a novelty in rural Poland, and there were not many of them due to a lack of resources. This school, however, built in a relatively prosperous area, with the help of the aristocratic owners of the village, the Higersbergers, had a small lab for physics and chemistry classes, a workshop for boys’ manual training with all the necessary tools, as well as a properly equipped kitchen for girls’ cookery classes. Whether the Chinese educators approved of what they saw is uncertain, as they remained silent and their faces did not reveal any emotions (as we read in the school chronicle). However, after seeing the school, they expressed a wish to see  how the teachers lived, so my Grandpa invited them to his three-room apartment. Here, at the sight of his library, which, reputedly, amounted to some two thousand volumes, their composure finally cracked. The rest of the visit passed in a more relaxed atmosphere, and the guests spared no praise for the sandwiches prepared by the schoolgirls, and served to them by pupils in the region’s traditional dress. 

I’ve mentioned the aristocratic owners of Chocen and their contribution to the existence of the school. In fact, the school owed its origin to the worthy landowner Aleksander Higersberger, and especially to his daughter Maria, affectionately called Marysienka, who donated two acres of land to the town in 1927 - a  birthday present from her father - to be used as a future school site. The Higersbergers were Polonized Germans whose ancestors settled in the area during the reigns of the Saxon kings in Poland in the mid-18th century. Aleksander Higersberger was a wealthy man; however, the sudden death of his daughter Maria at the age of 23, as well as the global economic crisis made him sell Chocen in 1933, after 40 years of living there and of co-running the sugar factory there. But the school survived tough times and the turmoils of history, and it continues teaching successive generations of children. The Higersberger’s traditional Polish manor house, built around 1884, surrounded by a beautiful park with magnificent oaks, chestnuts, ashes and hornbeams survived too and in good condition. The residents of Chocen take good care of  Marysienka’s grave at the parish cemetery. 

I should now say something about the man who brought the Chinese delegation to my Grandpa’s school. Marian Falski, then forty years old, had a turbulent past. As a young engineer, a graduate from Warsaw University, he was an anarchist and a socialist, fighting against the tsarist regime; he organized school  strikes during the Revolution of 1905, and around the same time participated in destroying a huge portrait of Tsar Nicholas II at a rally at the Technical Institute in Warsaw. His socialist activities led to his arrest and expulsion from the Russian partition of Poland, so he moved to Cracow (in the Austrian partition). There he started his life anew: he enrolled at the university to study psychology and pedagogy, and completed his doctoral thesis on the psychology of reading in 1917, one year before Poland regained its independence. His greatest life achievement was the authoring of the most popular Polish reading primer, that served many generations of young Poles, including myself. 

Even though it has been 60 years since I first went to school, I still remember well not only the smell of the printing ink and the rustle of the stiff, thick pages of my new reading primer, but also its oblong shape, the hard green  cover with a picture on the front of happy rural kids, sitting on a bench in the shade of a large oak tree and reading books. The reading primer starts with the name of a little girl - Ala, then we learn about a dog called As. For the whole school year, we followed Ala and As, Ala’s brother Janek and their friends and pets, in their everyday routines and little adventures, being amazed at the similarity between the lives of the invented children and ours. 

Only recently did I find out that Ala, who seemed to be an invented character, was, in fact, a real girl. She came from a Jewish family of doctors, close friends of Marian Falski, and her name was Alina. Alina Margolis was born in 1922, the same year as my mother. As the first generation of Poles to be born in the free motherland since the late eighteenth century, they were subjected - both at school and at home - to a patriotic upbringing. They sang nationalistic songs and recited nationalistic poems with ardor. Public life in Poland had a nationalistic tone, and the cult of Marshal Pilsudski, the leader of Polish independence, was predominant… This is all understandable considering that for almost one hundred and fifty years, Poland was partitioned by three hostile powers, Prussia, Austria and Russia, and simply did not exist as a state.

Both my mother and Alina Margolis were only seventeen when WWII broke out. Since both my grandfathers joined a conspiracy, their wives and children had to fend for themselves, working for the occupier. Alina shared the fate of other Polish Jews: the horrors of the ghetto, where she became a nurse at a Jewish Hospital. She miraculously survived  the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943, and the Warsaw Uprising in 1944, in which she took an active part. After the war, she became a doctor specializing in pediatrics, and married Marek Edelman, one of the leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, also a doctor, with whom she had two children. All this time she had led a “double life”: the fictional life of the forever young schoolgirl Ala, and the real life of the respected doctor Alina Margolis-Edelman. Anti-Semitism belonged to the painful past, never to be reborn again. Or so it seemed… 

During the turbulent year of 1968 in Poland, Poles of Jewish descent, among them intellectuals, scientists, artists, economists and politicians - including party members - were blamed for causing the social unrest, which, in fact, was manipulated by factions within the Polish Communist Party. Many people lost their jobs solely because they were Jewish. A large group of Poles with Jewish roots was forced to leave Poland. Although Alina’s husband Marek Edelman decided to stay “with all those who perished here” (meaning during WWII), she and the children emigrated to France. True to her calling, she participated in the “Doctors without Borders” expeditions, a French organization funded in 1968 by two French doctors, helping to save the lives and health of people all over the world. A truly remarkable person, she worked on hospital ships helping Vietnamese refugees, and in hospitals in El Salvador, Chad, Bosnia and Herzegovina, where during the Civil War there she helped to create a support center for rape victims. It's only a small part of her noble accomplishments, the list of which is long, varied and impressive. 

(Isn’t it a little strange that recounting the out-of-the-way visit of a pedagogic Chinese delegation to my grandfather’s rural school took me so far in terms of time and place, and even from the mood of the story about my Grandpa, the dedicated teacher, which I initially intended to write? But, as they say, you never can be sure where your story will take you until you finish it.) 

Returning to Theodor’s school, there were more bright moments in its  prewar history. One day in the 1930s, for example, the authorities in the village learned that the Marshal of Poland, General Edward Rydz-Smigły, who was the first person in the line of government rule after the President of the Republic, was to pass through Chocen, and, that he might even stop there for a moment! Feeling honored by this unexpected distinction, the inhabitants decided to show him their respect to the best of their modest possibilities. Therefore, on the appointed day, the village’s mayor and his small entourage, all in solemn dark jackets, lined up expectantly along the town only street; the fire brigade, dressed in uniforms with shiny buttons and dazzling helmets, stood in front of the fire station; and Theodor, surrounded by his pupils, some of them barefoot but all neatly combed specially for the occasion, gathered in front of the school. They all waited patiently, watching the road with bated breath. Finally, they heard, and a moment later saw, a black car looming in the distance: the Marshall's limousine! 

I can imagine their anxiety: the mayor nervously clearing his throat, getting ready to recite the brief greeting that he had been preparing for days; the firefighters standing, no doubt, at attention; the children, who were told to wave their hands cheerfully at the passing car, shuffling their feet and waiting for the right moment to begin. As the story goes, the Marshall's limousine passed the mayor, almost without slowing down, passed the firefighters, and stopped - to everyone’s utmost surprise - in front of the school. The car door opened, and out stepped the Marshal’s aide, carrying a large paper bag which he handed to my astounded grandfather. Then the limousine quickly drove away leaving behind the proverbial trail of dust. What was in the large paper bag? I was hoping you’d ask. Some ten pounds of soft candies. I bet the kids remembered the joy of eating them for a long time. 

Just before WWII Theodor became the principal of another school, in the small town of Kiernozia, famous for being the birthplace “in some dreary manor house full of bats” (as she referred to it in her memoirs) of a Polish countess, Maria Walewska, Napoleon’s Polish mistress, and mother of his illegitimate son, Alexander. 

Legend has it that Maria, then only eighteen years old and already a wife and  mother, caught Napoleon’s eye in 1806 when, on his way to Warsaw, he stopped at a village to change horses. The young countess, dressed simply, in a black hat with a black veil, pushed her way through the crowd and managed to get close to his carriage and exclaim: “Be welcome, a thousand times welcome to our land, Sire!”  Maria had a sweet, childlike face and an air of modesty and melancholy. Napoleon remembered her and requested to see her in Warsaw, intending to start an affair with her.They were introduced later, at a ball. Since Poland had been wiped off the map at the end of the previous century, Polish nationalists had high (but hardly justified) hopes that  Napoleon would liberate Poland from the Russians and the Prussians. To satisfy Napoleon’s fancy, the cunning aristocrats in a way forced Maria into his bed. Call it patriotic adultery. Their son, Alexander, was born in 1809. At the time of her romance with Napoleon, Marie was married to a much older man,  Count Walewski, a wealthy land-owner whom she later divorced. It seems she got really attached to Napoleon. They met secretly in Warsaw, Vienna, Paris, Naples, and on Elba; however, Napoleon never gave Poland the liberty he had promised Maria in exchange for her love. Marie died in Paris in 1817, at thirty-one, having failed to recover from the birth of her third son. A few weeks after her death, her brother asked that her body be brought back to Poland. While her heart remains in the family crypt of her last husband, d'Ornano in Père Lachaise cemetery, Marie’s body now lies in the local church’s crypt at Kiernozia.

As I mentioned before, during WWII Theodor did not teach. In the territories incorporated into the Reich, education in Polish was banned and punishable by death. Being active in counterespionage, Theodor could not also participate in the secret teaching organization, but he let my dad attend clandestine classes, which were organized all around the country. These were dark times.

After the war, Theodor, as always in elegant coats, shoes and hats, in defiance of the modern style favoring workers look, became a school inspector and moved to the city of Lodz. Apart from visiting schools, (a dull occupation in comparison to teaching), he researched the  history of education in Poland. History  was his second vocation. Regardless of how crowded was his schedule was, he always made time to rummage through archives and libraries. Whenever I visited, he was sitting at his huge desk that almost filled his small study. The typewriter's clatter would stop only when somebody knocked at the study door to announce that tea was ready. In his last years of life we had several cordial chats about my travels, interests we had in common, and poetry; Theodor liked reading poems aloud. As the years pass, I realize now what a very remarkable person he really was. He belonged to a more noble, a more worthy generation than mine, and lived up to those values.

Religion in my life 

Random thoughts and reminiscences

In the scientific age in which we live today more and more people choose to reject religion. THERE IS NO GOD. Or, if one insists otherwise, GOD IS DELUSION. While this may be true, there is still a human need for the experience of spirituality.  There are several definitions of spirituality in current usage. I prefer to define 'spirituality' as a way of life in which one attempts to seek meaning for our existence through various spiritual practices such as meditation, looking at beautiful artwork, listening to music, being surrounded by nature or by praying - according to personal desire and belief.

Not being a religious person in the traditional sense, and practically not visiting church (except as a tourist), I strongly oppose the fierce attacks on religion by some prominent scientists, supported by my own husband, a scientist himself,  that I’ve been witnessing for some years now. Beyond mere defiance, I have my personal reasons for a positive attitude towards religion, in this particular case - Christianity.  They are outlined below. 

1. Religious family background

My family as such did not consider itself notably religious, although we were not hardcore atheists either. For instance, my grandmother Sofia taught catechism to grade school students at a young age,  before 1926,  and my other grandmother’s cousin, auntie Vlada, entered a convent in 1928 and became a prioress. My great-grandmother Jadwiga was a devout Catholic;  her deep faith in God, whom she believed “worked in mysterious ways”, helped her hold steady through the hard times when she lost two husbands and two sons, one after the other, to tragic deaths. My parents, a doctor and a teacher, described themselves as non-practicing Catholics (a somewhat evasive attitude, one might say). 

2. A gloomy small-town childhood in postwar Poland 

I was born in Poland in the era of Stalin. Although it may seem inconceivable or illogical, the overwhelming majority of children born in the postwar Communist Poland was baptized in infancy in the Catholic Church, and received the First Communion at the age of nine, which constituted a significant emotional event in the life of a child, a spiritual rite of passage. Young Poles, myself included, were expected to diligently attend  catechism classes at a local church until graduating from secondary school. Attending mass on Sunday was a regular part of  life for an average Polish family. All Catholic holidays were celebrated by both believers and non-believers alike (read: the Party officials, although the latter did it rather unobtrusively, if not in secret). 

As for me, I quit catechism classes in the eighth grade because of an abusive priest, and stopped attending services because the sermons bored me to death. Both decisions coincided with my resolution to start to think independently.

As a little girl, in the nineteen fifties and sixties, before my rebellious adolescence, I had lived with my parents for a period of seven years in Żychlin, a small gloomy town with a big smoky factory looming over it. Every morning at 7  except Sundays, the factory would swallow up the majority of the town’s adult population only to spit it  out eight hours later. At the wail of the siren, the huge iron gates would open, and the dun crowd of tired workers would spill out, greeted by their none too well-fed children, with keys dangling on shoestrings around their rarely-washed necks. 

All children went to elementary school, then to secondary school or vocational school, depending on their abilities and interests, and the family background and ambitions. In post-War Poland, anyone with a completed secondary education was considered by small-town residents to be a respectable  member of the intelligentsia (the Polish term for well-educated members of the society) and held in esteem - even though that the Communist propaganda glorified workers and peasants. 

Those, who possessed a university degree (e. g. physicians, veterinarians, pharmacists, high-school teachers, and lawyers) represented a small percentage of the overall population. University-educated people were treated with distrust and contempt in the post-War Poland. Could this be interpreted as a manifestation of class struggle in a society which, in theory at least, eliminated class distinction? In the situation of general poverty such as then existed, people fed themselves on envy, pettiness, and resentment.

The older part of the town consisted mostly of shapeless one or two-story houses built around the intersection of the two main streets; many of them had formerly been Jewish homes.The houses had no running water, no toilets, and no baths; just as they had been in the pre-War period, they were then inhabited by “God fearing” people - in this case, peasants born in the surrounding villages, who took possession of the modest dwellings as soon as the Jewish population was evicted from them (which I learnt of many years later). I’m not sure today how these families made a living, but work in Communist countries was a citizen’s constitutional right, and everyone had easy access to some employment. 

3. My first aesthetic experiences 

It would had been unthinkable for any Polish town or village not to have a church, with its distinctive silhouette visible from afar. Similarly in my town, Żychlin: St. Peter’s and Paul’s, which dated back to the 14th century, stood predictably on a square adjacent to the main intersection. The parishioners were proud of their church, which had been rebuilt several times throughout its history, to finally end at the late Baroque. Looted, and turned into a warehouse during the German occupation, the church was gradually restored and renovated after Stalin’s death. In my time, it acquired new stained-glass windows, and new confessionals and pews. 

We lived on the outskirts of town, in one of the modern housing blocks designed for the factory workers. The factory was opened in 1921 by two Swiss engineers named Brown and Bovery, and had  specialized in the production of electric machines ever since; nationalized in 1945, it subsequently bore the name of a German communist, Wilhelm Pieck. The older worker blocks, constructed at the same time as the factory, had faded plaster facades, while the newer ones, constructed of red brick, represented the dreary socialist realist style, which maybe lacked individuality, but at least provided the tenants with running water for cooking and washing, not to mention the customary Saturday night bath. 

In this world devoid of color and excitement - at least in my memory - only Sundays were worth waiting for. On Sundays, as if by magic, the common untidiness yielded to festive cleanliness, grayness to color - still subdued, true, but already signifying something more sublime than everyday life. Visible effort was undertaken to beautify our gloomy reality in order to make this day special: the sidewalks of the streets leading to the church were swept clean the day before, and people dressed in their Sunday best. No wailing factory siren that day - only the joyful church bells. 

The contrast was not lost on me. I vividly remember the feeling of elation which usually accompanied me on my way to church: I almost danced. What made me so happy? Surely, not the freshly-ironed dress, the white socks (in summer), and the brightly polished shoes. The clothes, restraining to a certain degree the individual’s behavior, did play an important role in the whole experience. As a child I loved going to church. For me, entering the baroque church then was like entering another world: I marveled at the huge paintings depicting events in the life of Jesus and the saints, the altars, the plaster Stations of the Cross, the marble baptismal font, the marble sculptures, the shiny silver goblets, the heavy red fabrics embroidered with gold thread, and the white lace adorning altars. Being a compassionate child, I was deeply impressed by the heroism of  the martyrs, the courageous men and women, tortured and murdered in strange ways - stoned or riddled with arrows, for example - for believing in Jesus. The organ’s  encompassing music only added to my overall exaltation (although I could barely withstand the out-of-key singing by the congregation.) It is to this parochial church that I owe my very first exposure to art. However limited this exposure was, it awakened my aesthetic sensitivity. Had I stayed in this small town, the church  might have been the only contact with art, or rather religious-themed art, in my whole life. 

I read somewhere recently that the Council of Trent in 1563 laid down the following rule in reference to religious art: that it was to be dramatic, and appeal to the viewers’ emotions in order to raise their faith and religious fervor. It certainly worked on me, although my faith left a lot to be desired.

4. My religious beliefs

Despite my exaltation, and despite praying to St. Monica, my patron saint and perhaps my first role-model, the patient mother of the early Christian philosopher and theologian Augustine of Hippo, I had never believed in God, and still less in the Christian Trinity. At the same time, I had never doubted that Jesus of Nazareth really existed.To me he was an extremely smart and charismatic man who demonstrated gentleness and compassion in the brutal world he was born into, surrounded by guards with spears, and ruled over by powerful Roman governors. Jesus of Nazareth taught love and empathy, and he was kind to women and children. His martyr’s death gave rise to a new religion. 

This overly simplistic understanding of the New Testament was enough for a nine-year-old girl.  But was it really all about brotherly love, I kept wondering in later years, or was there something more? Surely, Pilate would not have killed Jesus for performing alleged miracles and claiming to be God's Son. He would have considered him a lunatic and sentenced him only to flogging. Instead, he gave way to Sanhedrin, which saw Jesus as a serious threat - and probably rightly so.  Jesus’ actions were political, no question about it: he challenged his society's social structure by, for instance, throwing out the merchants from the Temple. Thus, he was executed as a political trouble-maker. 

It wasn't Mahatma Gandhi who introduced non-violence as a political strategy to the Western world, it was Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus took a non-violent stand against the Jerusalem Sanhedrin’s collaborators with the Roman occupiers; Gandhi imitated him by opposing the British occupiers in India. In turn, Gandhi’s works inspired Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in his civil rights activism. “Jesus Christ gave the motivation,” King wrote, “Gandhi showed the method”. Nonviolence and spirituality also inspired Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela.

5. The religious and cultural “tribes” I identify with

I consider Christianity to be my cultural heritage. Understanding paintings and the visual arts of the Middle Ages and later centuries, as well as the literary references of any period of European History, requires at least a cursory knowledge of the Gospels. The birth, life, and death - and the Resurrection - of Christ have stirred the imagination of countless European artists, architects, musicians, and writers, and still do. The history of Christian civilization is a European history. Denying it means denying who we are. In a vain attempt, as it proved, to completely dismiss religion as “bourgeois superstition and nonsense”, Communist governments tried to reject large parts of their countries’ cultural and religious heritage -  which would have been an irreversible loss, indeed, had they succeeded. 

Christianity has its roots in Judaism, which makes us, as Europeans, part of a larger and very old “tribe” (the history of Judaism spans more than 3,000 years). Christianity borrowed heavily from Judaism:  the concept of monotheism (the Trinity was developed over the span of three and a half centuries after the time of Jesus), the belief in miracles and signs, not to mention incense, the Eucharist  (matzah), confession, the center of worship, the concept of resurrection and of a Messiah. The Old Testament is full of captivating miracles: the plagues sent upon the Egyptians, the parting of the Red Sea, the manna and quails in the desert, to name only the most spectacular ones. All this was the work of God, not of prophets like, for instance, Moses. To confirm his divine nature, Jesus of Nazareth simply had to perform miracles, demonstrate healing power, and predict things that were going to happen well in advance.  

Last but not least, Christians adopted the Decalogue from Judaism. In countries with a Christian  heritage, the Ten Commandments still serve as a solid foundation of ethical behavior in society. Those of us who don’t subscribe to the concept of a divine origin of social order, still ask ourselves whether morality is inherent in human nature. Charles Darwin proposed that morality was a byproduct of evolution, a human trait. Francisco Ayala, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California, Irvine sees morality as consisting of two parts: the capacity for ethics and the specific moral codes that we follow. He proposes that, while ethical capacity is a product of biological evolution, moral codes are products of cultural evolution. Unlike other animals, humans can understand the benefits of morality. This understanding has inspired humans to create laws that enforce the moral codes that benefit their society. In my opinion, at the beginning of human social history people invented laws and gods (at least before they developed this ethical capacity) to control the violence among people. It was the fear of the punitive, judgmental gods and the force behind the rule of law that created the foundation of society. 

Incidentally, morality was initially a “noble morality” which means that the noble class judged what was good and bad. According to Nietzsche, the eventual conversion of pagan Rome to Christianity is the evidence of the victory of Judeo-Christian morality over noble morality. Something to consider in the context of the contemporary world: aren’t Westerners the new “noble class” of the contemporary world? 

Early Christianity developed in Rome, which makes us close to Greco-Roman culture.  We owe our philosophy, science, drama and sculpture to the Greeks and the Romans. We also owe them law, roads, warm baths, and central heating. Greeks and Romans worshipped numerous gods. There are some pagan elements in Christianity, such as the cult of relics in Catholicism, prayer for the dead, sainthood, and even the doctrine of the Trinity. Christianity offered a sense of belonging to a group, a promise of immortality, and relief from earthly misery by believing in Heaven.

The word “catholic” means "universal”; “Catholic” was first used to describe the Christian Church in the early 2nd century to emphasize its universal scope.

6. Final remarks

For as long as people have existed they have needed religion. It is quite probable that all religions were born out of fear, out of the feeling of helplessness in the face of unbridled nature. When humans first inhabited the earth they created gods and goddesses to help them survive. Gods initially represented various aspects of nature such as the sun, wind, rain, and fire. Over the course of time,  people came up with animal-like gods, then with more powerful human-like gods. We could reject religion now, as we understand more or less how nature works and we don’t fear it, but we still need something which infuses life with meaning. Could it be art, now? Creativity? Science? The beauty of Nature?

Christianity continues to exist within the modern world, although its presence in the lives of people has been visibly declining. Some say that this Christian civilization is about to complete its allotted life of two thousand years. If so, then why waste time on waging virulent anti-religious campaigns? Why saw off the cultural branch on which one sits? Let's appreciate our heritage and enjoy what is left of it! 

Rebecca Thaddeus, the author of One Amber Bead, is a contemporary American writer with Polish roots. In her novel she describes the complicated and difficult circumstances in which Polish people lived in the chaotic and tumultuous 20th century, as seen through the eyes of two cousins, one living in U.S. and the other one in Poland. 

There are three heroines in One Amber Bead. In order of appearance they are Jadzia, Apolonya  and Evelina or Evie. Jadzia and Apolonya live in a Polish village called Niedzieliska in southern Poland; Evie lives in Chicago. Jadzia and Evie are cousins of  the same age (born around 1923), and Apolonya is a couple of years older. The three girls differ not only in their looks like day and night but also in their personalities. 

The pale and fair-haired Apolonya (whom I prefer to call Pola, though she has nothing in common with the famous Hollywood silent movie actress Pola Negri, apart from the name and a rural origin) is more serious than her age, bitter and disillusioned. She knows exactly what she wants, which is to never leave Niedzieliska. Being a principled 18 year-old woman, Pola won’t forgive her brother Antek, a Nazi sympathizer, for his treason, when he voluntarily joins the German army. Proud and fearless Pola refuses to be forcibly deported from her village. This act of disobedience costs her her life - she is shot by a ruthless Nazi commander in front of her whole village, including her best friend Jadzia. 

Equally pretty, but dark-haired and complected Jadzia is her best friend opposite: cheerful, immature, naïve, and full of illusions about human nature. She had dreamed of leaving the village, so she is not afraid of being deported and initially treats it as a kind of adventure. Later, as a slave laborer in a German countryside, she maintains positive feelings toward her masters and tries very hard to please them. As if this was not bad enough, she falls in love with their 16 year old son. Had she forgotten that there was a war going on and that she had not come to Germany of her own volition? Had she not been taught  at school and at home the legend of the Polish princess Wanda, who chose to drown in the waves of the Vistula river, rather than marry a German prince? Her naïvete causes Jadzia physical and mental humiliation, and she almost ends up in Auschwitz. After the war, disillusioned Jadzia marries a gentle, kind man, has two kids, and adapts quite well to life in communist Poland. When her kind husband dies, she marries … Antek, who meanwhile returns to Poland from Argentina, where he was hiding along with many other Nazis, and adopts his brother’s name, Alfons. Jadzia’s and Antek’s past affection towards Germans, the centuries-old enemies of Poland is the shameful secret they share now. 

Evie, Jadzia’s American doppelgänger, leads a life typical of the second generation of Polish immigrants to the States at the beginning of the 20th century: her dad and older brother work, her mom stays at home and takes care of the younger children.  While Jadzia’s dad is kind and dedicated to his family, Evie’s father is abusive and scary. He does odd jobs and drinks heavily, so the family lives very modestly. The sudden death of her mother and her younger brother put an end to Evie’s fairly happy childhood. She takes on the responsibility of her mother’s role with her little sister (who was born just before her mother died), and her father then becomes even more  abusive and violent towards the girls. Evie’s situation is not to be envied, but it does  suddenly improve: just before U.S. enters the war in December of 1941, Evie gets engaged to a Polish young man, Mikosz, whom she has known since their schooldays and whom she initially despised. When Mikosz goes to war, Evie takes a job at a defense factory. She meets the factory owner at a dance and soon afterwards they become romantically involved. She is not naïve, yet at the same time she has a glimmer of hope that the rich man will eventually want to marry her. It does not happen, so she marries Mikosz, and leads an ordinary middle-class life raising two daughters. 

Typically, the second generation of immigrant families  feels little connection to the parents’ country, considering itself  American rather than of the parents’ nationality. Not Evie though: she is proud of her Polish descent; she celebrates the holidays and weddings as it was all done in her mother’s village. When it comes to Polish food, the natives and immigrants alike seem excessively (at least to me) attached to pierogi, kiełbasa, bigos, and kołaczki, the latter considered as comfort food (presumably some local delicacy, perhaps from Małopolska or Silesia, unknown to the people from central Poland), and vodka. 

Jadzia and Evie, finally meet in 1970 in Chicago after 37 years of exchanging letters in which they confide their innermost secrets to one another. 15 years after this meeting, shortly after Jadzia’s death,  Evie travels to Poland to visit her mother’s and Jadzia’s village. It’s a difficult journey, a bit like going back in time (there are still outhouses in small villages!), for which she is not mentally prepared. However, she bravely tolerates all discomforts, and overcomes the feeling of alienation and not fitting in.  She even comes to terms with Jadzia’s deepest secret about her husband, Antek, and returns to the  U.S. with a sense of a mission fulfilled: Poland became her second home. 

Au-pair

In the late sixties of the last century, my aunt got me an au-pair position with a wealthy family living a short drive from Oxford, in rural Oxfordshire, somewhere between Abingdon-on-Thames and Dorchester-on-Thames.  

The family owned a historic house with a thatched roof and leaded windows (made of small diamond-shaped panes with lead casings to hold them together). Quite a gem! The rooms downstairs had beamed plaster ceilings, gothic dark wood paneling and wainscoting. There was a spacious kitchen with a long rustic wooden table with wooden benches on each side, copper pots and pans hanging above it, a tall cupboard to keep the tableware and a pantry. A shelf of decorative plates adorned the beamed walls, and there were lace curtains at the windows. A medium-size living room (or a “drawing room”, as they call it in England) consisted mainly of a large sofa and matching easy chairs arranged in front of an old-fashioned hearth. The dining room had an18th-century feel to it with its long dark oak table and chairs, and sideboard; on the walls hung framed lit paintings or prints of English hunting scenes—horses, hounds and colorfully dressed riders in pursuit of fox or hare. The solemn, dark interiors and the smell of furniture oil reminded me of a museum. 

In contrast to the stately downstairs, upstairs was light and bright.There were three small bedrooms (gable rooms overlooking a pretty garden), one small bathroom, the master bedroom with an ensuite bathroom, and a nursery.  

This impressive house, which I  think the family had acquired by purchase rather than inheritance, stood in the proverbial “middle of nowhere”: as far as the eye could see, there was nothing but gray fields and a dusty rural road disappearing into the horizon.There was  hardly a tree or shrub. As much as I loved the house, I couldn't make myself admire the bleak surroundings. 

My employer, Mrs. Sanderson, was an attractive woman in her late twenties or early thirties with shoulder-length sandy blond hair, who dressed stylishly in pastel clothes. Her physical appearance, however, did not match her voice. Although she looked refined and dignified, and moved with the elegance of a dancer, her voice sounded unbearably squeaky. Her handsome and taciturn husband Michael, a couple of years older than she, was a businessman of some sort. He would leave home every morning after a breakfast of a glass of orange juice (freshly squeezed by Mrs. Sanderson) a soft-boiled egg (which was wearing a tiny knitted hat to keep it warm), half of a slice of buttered toast and a cup of coffee, while she only had coffee in their big dining room. They sat at opposite ends of the long table which had been laid the evening before. (I must interject here that laying the table was my chore which I enjoyed tremendously. I loved playing with all the elegant plates and cups, expensive silver cutlery and fancy cloth napkins secured with silver napkin rings. My favorite gadget was an antique silver milk jug in the form of a cow; the bee on the cow’s back had to be lifted to fill the jug with milk which poured out of the cow’s mouth.) Mr. Sanderson would not be back until late at night, usually past my bedtime - which explains why I don’t remember whether they ate anything in the evening. He was not  around much on weekends either.

The couple had two little girls, Tanya and Alexa, who were cared for by a professional nanny. Stephanie (I think her name was) wore a uniform: a dark dress and a white apron, like a maid or Mary Poppins. The domestic staff was completed by Mrs. Sage, a heavy woman from the village. She used to come once or twice a week to polish the furniture and the floor. Stephanie cooked for the girls and herself, and for me when I was with them. The plates and dishes arrived from the kitchen in the dumbwaiter. While Stephanie was preparing the food downstairs, my job was to play with Tanya and Alexa, who constantly laughed at me, and ridiculed my English. Stephanie was not a great cook; she lacked culinary imagination, but her meals were at least nutritious. At times Mrs. Sanderson would join us for lunch, which consisted of steamed green beans or peas, mashed potatoes, stewed chicken or boiled beef, milk to drink, and tapioca pudding or custard pie for dessert. She and Stephanie would talk about the girls, what Stephanie was going to cook the next day, and what groceries she needed. (Mrs. Sanderson bought the food.) After lunch we all usually went for a long walk in the fields, with little Alexa toddling in the rear  closing the procession. I accompanied them, although walking in the windy fields wasn't my cup of tea. The paths were muddy, we had to wear galoshes or wellingtons, as the English would say.

Mrs. Sanderson did not seem to me to be a happy person. Every now and then, when she was having a particularly bad day, she would take me and her two dogs for a wild ride in her sporty Jaguar on the desolate rural roads. I’m not sure how fast she drove, but I could feel the force of the speed pushing me into my seat. She never said a word, lost in her sad thoughts. Sometimes we would stop for coffee at the neighbor’s that lived down the road from us, a rich farmer and his wife. A chat with her friend would calm Mrs. Sanderson down, and on the way back to the house, she would drive more slowly.  Once a week, when the nanny had her day off, Mrs. Sanderson would drive the girls to their ballet lessons; she liked me to go with them. Mrs. Sanderson and I would sit on a bench and watch Tanya practice,  while Alexa - also in a pink tutu and ballet slippers, but too young to stand en pointe and keep her balance - played on the floor attempting to unlace her shoes. 

When in the mood, Mrs. Sanderson, would share the slides of her fabulous honeymoon trip to Italy with us. One of the slides showed her dressed in a semi-sheer negligee on the  balcony of a luxury hotel; she looked particularly beautiful that morning. Mrs. Sanderson used to contemplate the image with sad longing. Once she took off her wedding band, played with it for a while, as if trying whether it would fit better on another fingers, then stuffed it in the cushions of the sofa. On another occasion, she looked sadly at her wedding ring, took it off, and slipped it into her pocket. Did she regret marrying Mr. Sanderson?

Occasionally Mr.and Mrs. Sanderson hosted dinner parties and other social gatherings. On these occasions, they would hire a professional cook and waiter. In the Spring, Mrs. Sanderson threw an Easter tea party for her daughters and their friends. After sweet treats had been eaten by the kids at the table while the grown-ups stood behind the kids, tending to their needs, the egg hunt and other games would be held in the garden, after which the kids would be invited to see a puppet show which usually ended the party.

Both Sanderson girls were pretty, but quite dissimilar in looks and temper: Tanya had brown eyes and dark curly hair like her dad, while Alexa was blonde with blue eyes like her mother. Tanya was skinny and tall; Alexa was a sweet, plump toddler; with dimples in her cheeks and knuckles. Tanya was a naughty, mischievous little rascal: she would pinch Alexa’s arm when nobody was watching, and she was very sneaky about it. Of course, Stephanie would spank her whenever she caught her, but it made no difference - she continued to pinch her sister’s arm. (In 1969, spanking was considered acceptable as a corrective to misbehavior.)

Thanks to English child-rearing practices, the girls were never sick - they didn’t even have runny nose; and the practices were harsh: each evening, after taking a bath in a bathroom heated only by a small electric heater turned on only for this occasion, they would run barefoot to their bedroom, which seemed to be the coldest one in the whole house. Thankfully, the nanny always put hot water bottles in their beds, so the sheets were not icy cold or damp when they got in. In fact, nobody in that house went to bed without a big mug of hot cocoa and a hot water bottle; it was a ritual. 

Although we did not talk much, Mrs. Sanderson gave me the impression that she liked me. She had a small greenhouse in the corner of the garden where she grew primroses; once or twice she potted some for me and brought them to my bedroom. She was kind and considerate: once she caught me crying. She asked me if I was homesick, but I told her no, I just could not stand the coldness of the house any longer. She drove to the village right away, and bought an electric heater for my room!  Also, when she learned that there was another au pair living nearby, she drove me to her house, so we could get acquainted. Antonietta, an Italian girl, was about my age. I enjoyed her company and we actually did get along, although my English was very limited at that time, and we had almost no conversation. Mrs. Sanderson bought me a bicycle, so I could visit my new friend on my own; she also arranged for me to  attend English classes with Antonietta at Oxford. This caused inconvenience for both families, because we were coming back late in the evening, and someone, usually Mr. Sanderson (already in his pajamas, bathrobe and slippers) as I lived deeper in the country than Antonietta did, had to pick us up from the bus stop. I could sense that Stephanie, the nanny, was jealous of all the attention I was getting. Suffice it to say that when Mrs. Sanderson raised my allowance, she begged me not to tell Stephanie.  

In spite of being pampered by the Sandersons, I decided to abandon them in favor of a more suitable educational and cultural environment, namely Westminster College in Oxford (but that's another story for another time). Have I ever regretted leaving them? Well, not really, at least - not until recently. Put it down to a change of perspective that comes with age, but I haven’t been able to stop thinking about them. I keep wondering what became of the family. Did the marriage last? Mrs. Sanderson would be seventy something by now. And the little girls, who are they today? They must be around fifty and probably have their own grown-up children. I’ve been trying in vain to recall the address of the place, to track the house down on Google maps, but no luck yet. Surely the lovely English cottage which dates back to the 16th century should be photographed, and shown to the world! It seems to me that the house, by hiding itself from me, is taking revenge on me for not saying a proper goodbye to its inhabitants, for leaving without looking back. In my defense I can only say that I was not ready to appreciate it all then. Today I would be wiser. 

How I remember it

We all remember the most important events in our lives, the unforeseen ones in particular. Just like people, nations too have such memorable moments in their history: each generation as a whole has witnessed a number of unanticipated, shocking incidents which have engraved themselves into its memory. We all share many common memories, despite the fact that we have never met. In a sense shared memories unite people all over the world. 

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     Take the assassination of John F. Kennedy as an example: everyone who lived in the United States or elsewhere - within reach of Western news - at that time vividly remembers November the 22nd, 1963. The Americans were aghast and devastated, and nearly the entire world was stunned. The assassination itself was not broadcast, but the funeral was transmitted by satellite to many countries, the Soviet Union included.  I was twelve at the time living in Poland, and the event barely registered in my young consciousness, which might partly have been due to our not owning a T.V.  In the aftermath of President Kennedy’s assassination, people from all over the world, including children, wrote to Mrs. Kennedy and her children expressing sympathy and respect. The next fall, when we moved to another town, a girl at my new school - presumably wishing to win my friendship - showed me the response card which she had received from the White House: Mrs. Kennedy is deeply appreciative of your sympathy and grateful for your thoughtfulness. Even without the signature of Jacqueline Kennedy, it made a deep impression on me. It came from afar, from the forbidden land (the Communist point of view). It was hard for me to imagine that a Polish schoolgirl’s letter had been able to get through a crack in the Iron Curtain, travel far beyond the horizon of our world, and land on a desk in the White House – amazing.  Thus the tragic death of the American President had caused a small miracle. This fact imbued me with a feeling of inexplicable hope. The condolence letter which my schoolmate (today a retired teacher) wrote over fifty years ago resides now at President Kennedy's library, among hundreds of thousands of similar letters. And when I think back to the death of J.F.K, I see, invariably, two pictures: the black letters of Mrs. Kennedy’s response card, and the small, appealing boy on his third birthday, saluting his assassinated father’s casket.

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     Now, take the landing on the Moon on July 20, 1969. That day (or rather that night since the landing was in the wee hours of the morning in Europe) I remember clearly; I was taking English classes at Westminster College in Oxford with ten or so other European teenage girls, and working there as a waitress – known as a “Dining Hall Girl”. We were living on the premises: each had a small bedroom furnished with a single bed, covered with a pink chenille embroidered bedspread, an old-fashioned dresser with a mirror, a tiny oak desk, and a sturdy folding chair. There was a common washroom with bathtubs each enclosed in its own wooden surround. We also had at our disposal a large common room equipped with armchairs and a coffee-table, a black and white television set, an upright piano, and a sewing machine. (The latter inspired me to make my own clothes with the help of sewing patterns which I used to buy at Marks & Spencer and Woolworth.)  Black and white television sets were standard then, and few people owned or rented a color T.V. When off-duty, we used to watch episodes of “Dad’s Army” - a B.B.C. sitcom about the Home Guard during the Second World War. It was a brilliantly humorous comedy which even today still makes me laugh.

     The evening of the landing we all gathered in our lounge to watch the B.B.C.  We nodded and smiled as the sounds crackled from the television, but none of us applauded nor cheered when Neil Armstrong spoke. I guess we did not grasp the importance of this “giant leap for mankind”. I must confess that as a passionate reader of the Polish science fiction writer Stanisław Lem’s novels, I felt deeply disappointed, as I expected the astronauts to truly explore the Moon, and not just take “one small step for Man”.

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The next memorable and sensational event which caused great public interest on the world stage was the election in 1978 of Karol Wojtyła as Pope John Paul II - the first non-Italian pope (which was repeatedly emphasized by the media) since the Dutch Adrian VI, who reigned for only one year, from 1522 to 1523. Karol Wojtyła was elected on October the 16th. Being a somewhat “unconnected” person, who rarely read newspapers, listened to the radio or watched T.V., I would certainly have overlooked the event had it not been for an old boyfriend, a journalist, with whom I was having a short romantic interlude. He served me the news along with our morning coffee: “I’ve just heard on the radio that Cardinal Wojtyła has become Pope. Can you imagine?” I just shook my head in a lame attempt to hide my ignorance; I knew nothing about Cardinal Wojtyła at that time, and did not care about popes. I sank into reverie trying to figure out why it did matter or whether it did?

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I spent the summer of 1980 with my friend Ola in Edinburgh. We lived in a remote part of town, sheltered by kindly young teachers, but the majority of our time we spent at the house of a couple who owned a trendy restaurant downtown with murals of rural scenes, which my friend had painted the previous year. This summer, they were employing her to paint rural scenes to complement the murals on an old wardrobe and on a wooden pail; the pail would serve as an umbrella stand.

The summer of 1980 was not a fun summer: the United States and some other countries boycotted the Olympics in Moscow to protest the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and Polish shipyard workers were on strike - which aroused interest around the world, and, of course, met with strong disapproval in Russia. My Scottish friend, Graeme, travelled to Moscow to see the games. Back in Edinburgh, he told us about the extremely hostile reception of a Polish pole vault jumper by Soviet spectators, who booed him and whistled at him. Having just secured his gold medal, Kozakiewicz made his Bras d’honneur (an elegant French name for an obscene gesture which carries the same connotation as giving someone the finger) defying the Soviet crowd which later made him famous.  During the Olympics, on July the 24th, 1980, the legendary Soviet actor and a singer-songwriter, Vladimir Vysotsky, died of a heart attack. Graeme saw the sad crowds in front of Moscow's Taganka Theater and tried, without success, to buy Vysotsky’s record in the Soviet Union.  (He did buy the record later in Paris, where he stopped on his way back.)

I followed the events in the Gdansk shipyard which my artist friend Ola found upsetting: she was sure it was going to end in bloodshed. I didn’t blame her, as developments boded nothing good for the shipyard workers. On the last day of August, our last day in U.K., just as we were on the gangplank in Harwich boarding a ferry to Hoek van Holland, some harbor workers who must had guessed where we were from (how? they heard us speaking and recognized the language?) shouted to us from below: “Hey, they signed the agreement! The Polish shipyard workers won!” We waved to them happily.

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     Then there was the assassination attempt on the Pope’s life on Wednesday the 13^th of May, 1981, the shocking and incomprehensible act of a Turkish hired killer. While John Paul II was fighting for his life in the Gemelli hospital, people from all over the world were praying for his recovery, and the Poles were dying of anxiety. “If he dies, we’re busted” I told my mother. It was obvious that without the Polish Pope, our fragile Solidarity movement was doomed. The question that troubled us all was, who hired Ali Aǧca? The Bulgarian secret service on behalf of the Soviet Union's security agency, the K.G.B?  Probably nobody will ever know.  The Pope, luckily, survived, and we could all heave a collective sigh of relief - or so it seemed.

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     On December 13, 1981, General Wojciech Jaruzelski, an awkward person with a bizarre sense of humor, and Poland’s then leader, declared “a state of war”, which is the Polish version of martial law: he ordered the army and special police units to seize control of the country, apprehended Solidarity's leaders, and prevented all further union activity. Tanks and other military vehicles poured into Poland’s streets, a curfew was imposed, telephone lines were disconnected, and the country’s borders were sealed.

     Three weeks earlier, I had been traveling in Spain with my Dad. On the weekend of November the 20th, we witnessed a creepy and ominous spectacle: hundreds of nostalgic supporters of Franco gathered in Plaza San Juan de la Cruz - the only square in Madrid where a statue of Franco remained - to commemorate the sixth anniversary of his death.  In the Falangista uniform of blue shirt with the crimson yoked-arrows insignia and a black lanyard looped over the shoulder, with fierce looks on their faces, the supporters performed the Roman salute (also known as “Heil Hitler”). Swastikas and other fascist symbolism was on display. This lasted one weekend: by Monday, the posters had been removed, and the streets swept; no sign remained.

     I could had stayed longer in Spain, or gone to Morocco, where my Dad lived and worked at the time, but I decided to cut my trip short because my then boyfriend, a Scot, decided to spend the coming Christmas with me in Poland. He booked his flight for Friday, December the 11th - so I rushed back. It was the beginning of December, and there were rumors that General Jaruzelski had been planning something. According to the radio Free Europe, the “evil empire” was getting impatient and even more evil… Presumably, the Soviet troops were moving toward our borders. All our conversation began with “Will they (meaning the Russians) enter?” It had seemed imminent.

      Graeme did not get there as planned: no planes landed in Warsaw on December the 11th - due apparently to a snowstorm. He finally did arrive late the next evening. We decided to spend the night at a mutual friend’s studio on the top floor of a prewar building at the corner of Mokotowska and Koszykowa streets in Warsaw, located by ironic coincidence next to the Solidarity office.

      I slept badly that night; some people were screaming on the street below. I took them for drunks. I thought that the bar at the corner was closing, and they got kicked out - hence the loud protests.   On Sunday, December the 13th, 1981, our artist friend was taking a shower, while the Scottish guest cooked his daily porridge on a small electric stove in the kitchenette next to the shower stall. Traditional porridge requires a lot of stirring - clockwise (for luck), and simmering for twenty minutes. Still in bed and bored with watching Graeme generating luck, I turned on the radio, which in a twist of fate happened to be tuned to the B.B.C.  The announcer - whose voice we heard with difficulty through the crackling static - was saying something about a “state of war”, and “civil war”.  It took me a good few seconds to realize, with horror, that he was talking about Poland. My response was that maybe a lack of sleep was playing tricks on me. I looked questioningly at Graeme, who by this time had stopped stirring his porridge, and with his hand suspended in midair, was listening to the news. The look of concern on his face assured me that I had not misheard. We were both dumbfounded.  Meanwhile our artist friend, happily unaware of what was going on, was singing in the shower…

      I tried to call my mother in Otwock, but the phone lines were dead. (We later learned they had been cut.) We went out onto the street. Helmeted riot police carrying shields and batons were blocking both ends of Mokotowska Street, and no one was allowed to enter the block. After showing his passport to the policeman, Graeme was allowed to go to the British Embassy “for instructions”. At the embassy he was told that the embassy could no longer protect him, and that he should leave Poland as soon as possible - which he did the next day on a charter flight to London, along with other foreigners. This is my memory of the introduction of martial law in Poland which had a dramatic  effect on our lives and forced nonconformists to choose “inner emigration”. Poles recall it with sadness and as a very dark period, even darker than the communism itself. (It was lifted, at least partially, in July, 1983.) 

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     The world remembers the 4th of June, 1989 mainly because of the Tiananmen Square massacre. One particular scene has stuck in the collective memory: the image of a lone man with a shopping bag in each hand, standing before a column of tanks.  (Apparently that picture was taken the next day, near the infamous square. To this day, we don't know what had happened to the Tank Man).   A Chinese friend later told me that when she heard the shootings, she took her two-year-old son and had walked for hours to get as far as possible from the centre of Beijing.

     On the same day, on the other side of the globe in another communist country, Poles were voting in their first free elections since the end of World War II. Watching with horror the events in China, we asked ourselves if the communists in Poland would reject the election results, and start shooting us, following the example of their Chinese counterparts. Provided with an official authorization for observing the elections issued by Solidarity, I sat at the election table at the designated polling station and made sure that the voting process was conducted  in an orderly manner. Later I helped to count ballots, and in the morning, the results were posted on the wall of the polling station.  There was quite a crowd studying the results in silence. The Solidarity candidates won, by an overwhelming majority.  “Is it going to be better now?” one elderly woman asked her son. “I don’t know, mom”, he responded. “But for sure it will be different.”

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     In October 1989, my husband and I drove from Poland to West Berlin to buy a computer. While we did not have much time for sightseeing, we managed a stroll on what is known as the most elegant street in Berlin - Ku'damm (Kurfürstendamm), and we walked to the infamous Berlin Wall, where we were able to look into East Berlin from a viewing platform.  It was late afternoon, almost sunset, when Ed took my photo with the Wall in the background. Evidently, this was not a popular spot for tourists nor  for locals - nobody else was there but us.  A week or two later, we were traveling in Peru with a small group of friends. One of them, a professor, read a newspaper every day, and it was he who told us about the fall of the Berlin Wall. It was hard to believe it had happened. 

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      I was in Poland when Diana, Princess of Wales  died on August the 31st, 1997. I don’t recall what I was doing when I first heard the breaking news about the tragic accident in a Paris tunnel, but I remember watching the funeral on TV.  And I remember that I sobbed loudly - to the astonishment of my mother and myself. Her life and death were like a romantic drama, like Erich Segal’s film “Love Story” or a soap opera. It felt as if the main goal of the scriptwriter of her life was to make it “cheesy” and bring the audience to tears. I was not the only person who cried in grief at her life’s foolish waste.

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     Then, of course, there are the September the 11th attacks: on the morning of Tuesday, September the 11th, 2001, I was driving to work listening to the music of the Bolivian-born artist Oscar Reynolds. My husband Ed and I had recently been on a trip to New Mexico, where we had come upon Mr. Reynolds playing the pan flute in a small outdoor restaurant in Santa Fe. This music invariably brings good memories of the best vacation of my life, which was in Peru, where I fell in love with many things, the pan flute among the others, so we stopped in to listen. I was charmed by the Bolivian artist and his trio. In Oscar’s music there was longing, there was wistfulness, and there was joy there too.  I had met someone who, I sensed, felt the same as me - and that is a rare event. I would have stayed with him for the rest of my life if I could have. Alas, it was not to be, so I only bought his CD’s and left. Driving from Cupertino to San Jose on September the 11th and listening to Oscar Reynolds’ music, I was overcome with a longing for something I could not name, but I also felt joy in being a software engineer. It was in this mood that I arrived at work. I noticed, though not right away, that the atmosphere was different, and the people seemed quieter than normal; they were whispering to one another. I overheard my colleague saying, “One plane is still in the air”. I plucked up the courage to ask, “Was there a plane crash today?” My colleagues looked at me in boundless amazement: “You don’t know anything? Don’t you listen to the radio?” And they told me about the four hijacked planes, three of which had already slammed into the World Trade Center in New York and in the Pentagon. One was still unaccounted for …

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      I was driving to the cobbler’s to get my shoes fixed in Tualatin, Oregon, where I live, on the morning of the 2^nd of April, 2005 when I heard about Pope John Paul II’s death on the radio.  I couldn't help but shed a tear on behalf of my compatriots who loved him dearly, regardless of what the world was saying about him (that he was conservative). Polish people have always understood that it is “better to die on your feet than live on your knees”.  He had given us the strength to get up, to battle communism. He had helped us regain our pride and dignity as a nation. Without him we would never have made it as far as we had.  For this, we should always remember him and be grateful to him.

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      Out of these ten milestones, five were uplifting: the landing on the Moon, the election of Karol Wojtyła as Pope John Paul II, the victory of the Polish shipyard workers (Wałęsa and Solidarity), the first free elections in Poland, and the fall of the Berlin Wall; the last four are linked together. It is true that liberals and feminists in the U.S. and elsewhere had different hopes of the Polish Pope than what turned out to be the reality, but if it weren’t for the Polish Pope, there would not have been a Solidarity movement, and without Solidarity, there would not have been free elections in Poland, which in turn led to the fall of communism, and without the fall of communism in Poland, the Berlin Wall would have stood much longer.  It was a domino effect. And if one thinks of it, the landing on the Moon had a political aspect too which was to humiliate the Soviets. It appears that everything I remember had some political impact. It is puzzling - for a person who claims to have a lack of interest in politics.  

            You can close your eyes to reality but not to memories. - Stanislaw Jerzy Lec, a Polish poet and aphorist