APRIL 22, 2022 – Upon returning to my cousin Merith’s family apartment in Malmö, I gave my eager audience—Merith, Peter (her husband, the Polish count), and my cousin Mats-Åke (Merith’s brother)—an exhaustive account of my travels across Poland. After a long nap, I began the project of writing home about it. Through the prism of time, the observations I included and analyses I attempted are like an old photo album with narrative captions. How will it read, I wonder, after another 41 years?
As mentioned in an earlier post, I returned to Poland nine months later—June 1982—under the very different circumstances of martial law. My principal mission on that subsequent visit—apart from witnessing the effects of an altered political landscape—was to take food to the family of Michael Sobieski, a violinist and colleague of my sister Elsa in the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra. That tale is for another day (it’s quite a story—as is the one of my entanglement in a mass protest in Warsaw as the dreaded Zomo or riot police gave chase across the main city square).
In 1985, when my wife’s parents offered to take us on a trip wherever we wished to go, I suggested a trip . . . back to Poland. Her parents, seasoned travelers, were game, and to everyone’s credit, they and my wife thoroughly enjoyed the adventure, despite—or perhaps because of—the continuation of martial law, though a more relaxed version than I’d experienced in 1982.
Today? In many respects modern Poland would be unrecognizable to me, though the icons of its history—original or reconstructed—would stand out. Today I’d visit the places I missed—the Białowieża Forest on the Belarus border, the Hel Peninsula (a 22-mile long sandbar separating the Bay of Puck from the Baltic Sea), the eastern cities of Lublin and Białystok, and the onces in Silesia—Katowice, Częstachowa, Wrocław (in full), and Jelenia Góra. But with Poland’s hard turn to the political right, what would I see of the freedom and spirit that infused every conversation in those heady days at the apex of the Solidarity Movement? What would young people know about the literary works of Słowacki and Mickiewicz?
And what will the future bring as war rages in Ukraine next door? Will it lead to another generation of Poles learning the pleasure of fighting Russians?
Earlier this week I talked to my good friend Jurek—a Polish-born/educated Minnesota lawyer. He informed me that next month he’ll fly to Poland to look after his 95-year old mother who lives in Rzeszów near the Ukraine border. With the trans-shipment of Ukraine-bound weapons and war materiél through Rzeszów, Jurek worries that Russian missiles will soon be trained on that target. He doesn’t want his mother, who endured unspeakable horrors during WW II and hardship under the Communist regime that followed, to experience a repeat of such violence and in her sunset days.
Permanent peace in Poland is elusive. Violent disruptions are the way of its history.
(Remember to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.)
© 2022 by Eric Nilsson
