PROLOG
I'm a writer. And although I had a number of successes in the country and beyond, I remained a not-known writer. I say this not due to the grief of the underappreciated creator, but only due to the fact that the ground upon which my words fall is not favorable to me everywhere. Even erstwhile I was serving my many years of sentence, I was reasoning about writing a book in which I would give a actual witness to the best of the systems, I did not believe that it would be able to appear in my life and for an unwritten manuscript I sought in the imagination a deep gap in the old willow. After I got out of prison and had my first book stopped by censorship, I grew up long adequate to compose what I dreamed of in a prison cell. I yet wrote, 4 volumes. They are, even beautifully released, only hard-to-access, silent. They are written by a few, but not many critics. If you read 1 of these cycles, you will know to whom the fact contained in them is so uncomfortable, though I did not search revenge. And this small book is only a memory of my dangerous path, which I have come to so badly by many of the subjects seen.
CHARGE TABLET
It was good to have bread out of the leaves, wheat to separate black from white. But to make a sign to compose was adequate dark, Kazon. From that 4th that you got with the morning coffee, you had to choice out a small soft, wet it somewhat with this lure and smite it carefully. However, the crushed mass had to be blackened somehow, and soot was needed. But where do I get a soot in a prison cell? But there were 2 ways. If individual could get matches, all they had to do was burn a part of rag to the level over the toilet, only the matches were rare. The key, erstwhile beginning the door, served fire to a cigarette, would be hard to fire a rag from it. In fact, he seldom served it twice, 3 times a day, so passionate smokers had to cope. They pulled a fewer fibers out of a towel or a haystack, ripped them apart and twisted a hard roller filled with respective crystals of potassium permanganate. This medicine could be obtained from a doctor’s cellmate, complaining of a sore throat. But that the desire to smoke was greater than the request to rinse the throat, they kneeled, put the roller on the concrete level and the sole of the wood mill rolled it until explosive crystals caught fire in it. erstwhile the flames spread, they ripped the load, blew the burning heat in it, and burned themselves a cigarette. The remainder of the burning was perfectly fit for the black. They were pressed into the mass from which the tablet was to be created. Now the dough was rolling in a coffee pot. A black pancake was formed in this way. It was cut into a rectangle with a sharpened nail. This nail was in all cell. The microscopic machete and reinforced on the concrete floor, which was at the end, was utilized to cut the nail. However, it was strictly prohibited. For his possession, you could have been in the gap for twenty-four hours. However, the most strictly forbidden object in the cell was a pencil. Although almost unattainable under prison conditions, the penalties for possession were straight draconian. It's a flu-writing tool! It would have been useless for deficiency of paper anyway, though those narrow strips from the newspapers that the prisoners had not received for years... These strips alternatively of toilet paper, these paper unprinted margins, could be utilized by them for specified evil purposes. With their help, prisoners could rise rebellion or, worse, convey beyond the walls the message of how they were treated here. But the bread tablet, with impermanent writing, stiff, bent, hard to hide, hard to smuggle, did not origin much anxiety in prison authorities. Treated by them leniently, she became to the prisoners something that reminded them that they were literate.
Who was her inventor is unknown. But for this part of humanity it was a large invention; a large 1 - to the measurement of Gutenberg. Simple peasants, sentenced to many years in prison for overnighting partisans who did not ask them for permission, if only they got in a cell with individual educated, urged him to teach them on a plaque of fractions. Others, no little thirsty for knowledge, took notes on it from lectures on history, physics, biology... After all, there was an elite of Polish intelligence. It did not necessarily take teachers to learn abroad languages. If you were lucky, you could be a foreigner. Robineau, for example, from the French embassy, convicted in a fake espionage trial, or an worker of any another diplomatic facility. I learned French from a reemigrant from France, while English from Jan Radożycki, a future translator of the works of Flavius from Greek. The bread tablet contained respective twelve words or various exercises. Par example: ‘Qu'est-ce que c'est? C'est une prison". Then the powder would blur and compose again.
But let's get back to just making the sign. It was simpler than making chess - which required more creative invention, and which rolled between the ridges of 2 combs - but besides very laborious. So we've already cut the pancake, we've got a ready plate, we're waiting for the night to dry. From the yard you can hear the steps of the guard, the light of the headlight licks the blocked windows, and it drys under the court. After the morning roll, we choice up clothes exposed to the door at night, while after breakfast we take a small bit of lard. He's from a discharge, bought in a prison canteen with his own prison money. We distribute it very thoroughly after the black surface of the already dried tablet. Fatty, ready to take the emulsion. It'll be white powder. Everybody's got adequate of him in a bag, so tell me! The fat will absorb part of the powder, the remainder must be blown away. I can't believe how white-haired my tablet is. It's not a part of cough bread, it's a part of large chalk cardboard, just writing! And I've dreamed of it since I was a kid. It's actual about prose, about the novel, and on this part that can fit, only the poem. individual brought in a message from sight that poets on the loose compose poems in defence of peace. There are no books in the cell, no newspapers, there are only rules on reading. Nothing is known about what is happening in the world, but no 1 has any illusions that Stalin wants to conquer him, and the poets of peace request only to lull the vigilance of the Western world. So I catch a sharp match and compose with all passion on my bread plate:
W Moscow Workers' Day
The hard-talk verbel talking.
Frenchman, sleep! I number the volleys.
Hundred, it's nothing, it's a defilement.
................................................................................
They'll wake the glare from their sleep.
Stop Spaski Clock!
Today I could say: I made my debut in 1952 in a prison cell in Rawicz on a plate of bread anointed with greave and sprinkled with powder. My debut wasn't noticed and all the luck, due to the fact that if individual reported what I wrote, well, not waiting! Even though I wasn't a rusophobe. The Russians were always closer to me than to others, not to the Slavs, and what I wished to Stalin, I truly did not want Russia. So in this poem, I didn't mean that beautiful clock on the Kremel tower, I meant Joseph Stalin's pocket watch. But fear, fear to have it written. After reading to my colleagues (and I believed that there was no snitch in the cell), I learned the poem by heart, after which I poured the powder into my teeth and very, very thoroughly covered.
Readers usually wonder how a poem is written. Well, the poem is written by walking on a cell. A fewer steps from door to window, turn and the same fewer steps back to door. The passage is narrow due to the fact that half the cell occupies an open legion. It was opened for the night before the war, and closed for the day. But now, erstwhile there is not 1 sage, and six, there is no way to close. They lie on an open bunk covered with blankets equally under the cant, adorned on edges wrapped from the bottom with a sheet. These 2 white rails on top of a straw cube, called a catafalcus, execute an crucial function. erstwhile the door opens, it's a retention locker for the sign. Put between the blanket and the sheet, he safely stores the verses written on it. After the poet's key is gone, they don't immediately pull the poet out of the catafalcus. Listening to the rhythm of the guard’s distant steps, he returns to his poem. And again from door to window, from window to door. And further strofes are born, like the uncertain endurance of bird chicks. The poet has 10 more years to go, possibly he can get those poems out of his head. So it's good to compose them on the tablet, so that before it wipes them off, you can memorize them.
Wooden
Above me, under me, the shoe keeps knocking.
I spend days listening to this walk.
Whether it's dawn or dusk, it's inactive throbbing in my ears
The patient stump of this wooden soul,
And the rhythm speaks so painfully to me,
That he's my pulse in the day, and my sleep hurts.
And he plays me a melody of suffering,
And this chorus is repeated with a note:
To the beat he taps on the concrete, to the beat beats on the pavement,
To the rhythm of the pipes up the stairs wooden shoe.
And soft on the snow, and hard on the ice,
It's grits on the gravel, it's hounds on the water
Year one, year 2 and year three, and year four
Yellow shoe, black shoe, fresh shoe, torn shoe.
Sometimes slow, like the night walk of the guard,
And he walks in silence, meditates and weighs.
His lazy memories snort,
He'll halt by the window and look at it for a long time...
But erstwhile a thunderbolt in the windows of blood bursts with a hoodie,
Butts, steel, reciting with a beating.
The sinister lusts of the perch to the wall are deafly struck
And rotation his hand in the cuckoo... What's he gonna do then?
‘Exchange! Wooden to say, to change!"
And there's people coming up the wall:
Who tore, get, and have his own
Wooden trees besides big, besides small, besides tight.
And he knocks on the concrete, and beats the pavement,
And there's a wooden shoe rolling down the stairs.
And soft on the snow, and hard on the ice,
It's grits on the gravel, it's hounds on the water
Kok one, year 2 and year three, and fourth
Yellow shoe, black shoe, fresh shoe, torn shoe.
And erstwhile clouds gather in the sky
And the darkness is in the cell - the shoe treads gloomy.
And I feel that there is simply a weakness in the soul; something faints,
So the step is accelerating... But she's losing hope.
And then 1 day, erstwhile he walked so hard,
He fell, he wobbled, he was supported for a while...
Then his brown blood gushed through his mouth.
Then what? I don't know, but it's stopped.
Today I listen, and this verbel beats daily.
The same timbers, but the gait is different.
The shoe again stumbles and rumbling in my temple,
Its wooden past is forged in concrete.
And he knocks on the concrete, and beats the pavement,
And there's a wooden shoe rolling down the stairs.
And soft in the snow, and hard on the ice,
It's grits on the gravel, it's hounds on the water
Year one, year 2 and year three, and year four
Yellow shoe, black shoe, fresh shoe, torn shoe.
Rawicz 1953
Then, in the corridor, there is laughter, or a crippler, and erstwhile he punches his fist at the door, he cries out, “Spacer, walk, walk!” You gotta hide the tablet. But it's better not with a blanket wrapped in a sheet, but somewhere deeper, between the haystacks. For erstwhile prisoners are in the yard, there is simply a “airman” in the buildings. He's got a wooden hammer that's gonna crack the bars. The difference in the sound of the banged rod announces its sawing. But nobody's always heard of a lattice sawing. You don't like it. You go back to your cell, and here it's all turned upside down, and it's all rolled up, and it's all covered in hay. Did they find the sign? They found it. They're asking whose. Was there anything incorrect with it? For French words will escape, but for English... Well, is there going to be a gap or not? It all depends on the humor of a peculiar manager, a alleged specialist. But most importantly, the poem wasn't on it. Remembered, blurred powder, it takes place under the skull, where they can no longer scope it.
Roundabout
Somewhere on the river, somewhere after the wave
The last storm echoes.
It's like they're swapping wood.
It's like individual punches the door.
And we're going to walk around,
And we're going to circle, circle, two...
We're just having fun:
"Antek, rotation the carousel!"
The lame Ants are spinning.
In the mediate of the leaves the yellow pond.
We always want to play,
So in the ellipse behind Antek, catch, catch.
“Push, Antek! live, I will help,
As then in indulgence, there, on Sunday,
Push!" Antek lost his leg in the woods,
And now he's shooting a carousel.
***
Today in the windows, blue sky,
The wind, whistling, ran through the gate
And under the dentures
He's throwing cold snow.
And we're in a circle, come on, cheers!
(), what a comic vortex in the head.
And the winter of the hard is in the icicles,
And under the shoes, it's snow, skim.
The windows of the pavilion are spinning
And the wall of red goes circular and round,
And the black crow of the spotlight
He's on 1 leg.
With a glass of the tower the wind hit,
What's up, chimney or smoke?
It's getting more and more in your head,
I got drunk to death, I don't know what.
***
Pac, a hat fell off the roof,
There was a frost on the wall.
And came in a puddle to splash
Five black-forged crows.
And we're going to walk around,
And we're going to circle, circle, two...
We're just having fun:
"Antek, rotation the carousel!"
But something's not fun today.
Is it due to that shit?
That's how your shoes get thick! ‘Nothing, around
Keep pushing, Antek, get in the mud!"
You know, I've had a small fun,
There's any power in that wheel.
Ah, these, brother, merry-go-round,
He spins, he spins day and night.
***
From the wall, the lava is full of heat.
And reddish to piss,
From the sun, he took care of this heat.
And on the wheel, in the yard
And tap, tap, tap, and tap, tap, tap...
The red cloud of dust is spinning
Dripping in a 100 and 50 legs.
And the carousel drum plays,
Oh, the game is to laughter at the tears.
Who the hell is that again?
Is she like a dying dog?
Why is his eyes so open?
With his fingers in his skinny chest,
What's shaking him? ‘Antek
Stop, individual on the wheel is throwing up blood!"
Rawicz 1954
Sentence goes on. No books, no newspapers. There's no 1 in the cell who knows a abroad language or any field of knowledge: physics, history, biology, theology, anything to occupy the mind! But there isn't. It's like a job, even in the hallway: carrying soup boilers, bottled floors. Ah, what a fascinating activity, rubbing the boards with the bottom of a bottle, until it is crushed! But it's movement, effort, muscle gymnastics, unfortunately only for the chosen. I didn't deserve it, and in my cell, only those fewer steps from the door to the window, from the window to the door, and the stool where you can sit.
A letter to the family, erstwhile a month. "Don't compose to me again, I don't want to know that you are, I don't want to know that there is another world." I give the letter back to the keyboard, I stand by the wall, and I pluck out a lump of dry paint from it. It's a intellectual crisis, suicidal thoughts are born.
The Glass Song
In the yard under the stone
With a slanted eye, the glass flashes,
The star of the dungeon colour changes,
Hand slide to shake.
In the dark cell on the bed kneels,
The window grated.
Like marble - in dusk is the hand,
Like marble - cold and white.
Like light blue smoke
With a smudge up, you lived.
Crossed by a short line,
The blood's red.
Then the tupot, someone's faces,
In the sight of death, the shadow of the fabled,
The odor of medicines and bandages
They attach a thought to the grate.
Think about it, I want to fly,
He wants to get out of this mess.
And in the hair, the night goes in
And the song, the 1 about the glass.
Rawicz 1953
Stalin died. His pocket watch stopped, people breathed - both in Poland and Russia. In prison, too, incredible changes. There are commissions going around, asking if there's any harm to prisoners here. I don't think so, 'cause nobody says anything, but for concrete purposes, wooden floors have been laid, but for the uncommon peas, there's a second dish. Whoever has the money can buy honey for the discharge. There's flies all over the glass. White bread, as many as anyone wants. There are matches, no problem with making chess, and after writing an application to the warden of the prison, you can get approval to write. A plate of bread, great, for this part of humanity an invaluable invention, goes back into the past of method thought. Now the notebook and pencil. But I was refused permission. I started a hunger strike. After Stalin died, it was no longer risky. They didn't question their teeth with bayonets to bring in a feeding tube, not to lock them up as punishment in the hole, to negotiate. It worked. The next day the door opened and a young prison educator stood there.
- I'm sorry. The soup is good, eat! - he said thoughtfully, and giving me something murmuring, he added: - Here is simply a notebook and a pencil. People's power gives you that.
I'll never forget it. After all, it was something I had waited many years for, the joy of receiving specified tools! But it was besides for me the real end of the bread plate. I crushed quite a few them due to the fact that a lot was taken from me. But I haven't been worried about the fat for her or the powder or the soot since. I wrote with a pencil in my notebook, but not everything. erstwhile the amnesty of the fifty-sixth arrived, the poems written in the cell I preferred to carry out forged in memory. People’s power, although so miraculously changed, would not be delighted with this poem:
This is Workuta, this is Workuta!
There's voices on barbed wires.
This is Kolyma, this is Kolyma!
It's a snowing noise.
Besides, the poem became obsolete due to the fact that they had already returned to the homes of those erstwhile driven to mines and to logging.
After I got out of prison, I was hired at a printing house. I was helping put on a printer's machine, which I was carrying in a cart, dense bales of paper. What a delight it was to see the printed pages of newspapers jumping from the press! I was reasoning about my bread plates. How much fat and toothpaste is better with printing paint!
At 1 time, during the night shift on which I came to work, I received the warm edition of "Just". Then I look, my poem: Carousel. A fewer days ago, I rewrote it from memory, put it in the editor's office of that student-taught 2 weeks ago and waited for an answer, print it or not? And he's already here, on the back of this magazine! Not in powder, not on a bread plate, in print. What a satisfaction! I decided to show it to the manager of the shift. Last night, erstwhile there was nothing to do, he caught me taking a small nap.
- I'm sorry. It's an honor to work in a printing shop. You're young, 1 day you'll want to take my position, while you sleep on the night shift," he said.
I was ashamed. I felt that he had leniently treated me, and I had no regrets about him, and erstwhile I showed him this newspaper, he looked at the name above the poem, and he mixed up and said,
- I'm sorry. Well, you won't be here long.
And I didn't. The roundabout was my real debut. A large debut in writing, after which it became in the tail, due to the fact that there was only 1 could read the fact about the Stalinist system. In a prison cell in Rawicz or Wronki, it would not happen to me that my poem, written in specified fear, stored in my head for years, would be sold in the Kiosk of the Movement. I felt like a poet who was very successful.
The method is developing at a staggering rate. erstwhile I got out of prison, the typewriter was long ago invented. But I, after 9 years in prison, were late, for any time writing with an eternal pen; but very briefly. I was in a hurry to compose prison stories. So I rapidly switched to the machine. inactive the first volume, At the loss, I was tapping on my eric, screwing on the roller for respective punctures to have copies in case of an unexpected confiscation. On the second volume, entitled Face to the wall, I switched to a computer. It's a crazy leap from a plaque of bread greased with toothpaste and from a sharpened match that was scratched out by the handwriting, to this device writing down any font on the screen all thought and yet asking if you want to keep it and in what form. Incredible! But it's besides hard for me to imagine sitting on a prison stool behind a pile of haystacks, my laptop on my lap, and I write,
And he knocks on the concrete, and beats the pavement,
And there's a wooden shoe rolling down the stairs.
And soft in the snow, and hard on the ice,
It's grits on the gravel, it's hounds on the water
Year one, year 2 and year three, and year four...
No, this is unthinkable! possibly only a pencil could replace the plaque, but inactive these written pages would should be torn, and the poem carried out in memory.
After I left Wronek, I wrote a collection of prison stories. It was intended to be released by the State Publishing Institute. But it took me a while to put it all together, and then it turned out it was besides late. I was told, "You know, October ended in November." And so the collection What a large sun was taken down by censorship. Shortly after that, I wrote an business novel, Haracz the Grey Day. In PlW, in which Colonel Rozanski, erstwhile manager of the safety Investigation Department in Mokotów, where I sat for almost a year, was not wanted to talk to me anymore. individual told me to bring the fresh to PAX. I brought it, they spent it. And that was my book debut. It was well written about him. Julian Przyboś said, “You entered literature with applause.”
But in order to make a living, I decided to do a story. compose it down, Kisch. A world-famous reporter, Egon Erwin Kisch! And he wrote it! Why shouldn't I compose something like that? But 9 years in prison, 9 years behind the wall... What was I, an amateur reporter, expected to know about the planet I was abruptly in? It was a black hole! But I had another advantage, and I was rediscovering this planet like a child. Vegetables in the store exhibition, leaves in the wind, pine cones in the forest, flowers in the garden - all of this was so strange, so wonderful, all of this became the subject of my deep emotions. I haven't seen it in so many years! I was just afraid if I could call it, describe it. But it's hard, I thought, I'd take my chances and get on the road. I went to the quarries, I sailed with sugar bars to Gdańsk, I flew to pollinate the forests in front of the starfish, I drove down to the ceramic clay mine, I moved as a convoy with cattle to the slaughterhouse and I learned surviving language, language and PRL everywhere. It was appreciated: I received the first literary award - the "Iskry" and the "Standar of the Young".
Then I became a hermit. For years I sat in my agrarian hut on the Bug, where my wife, Barbara, was delivering food to me and where I wrote these 4 volumes of Peerelian saga: To be executed, Face to the wall, Impotence and Before the agony. But I didn't just write, I read. I've always been a greedy reader. So possibly a fewer words about my reading.
TERMIT IN AN ANALYSING ATLANTIC
When the war broke out, I had Tarzan behind me among the monkeys, Buffalo Bill and Sergeant King of the Royal Horseback, as well as Baska Murmanska Ksaver Pruszyński, a dramatic communicative about the arrival of a white bear from Russia to Poland, along with her fellows. I have passed the adventures of Zdzich (Zdzich seeks father, Zdzich seeks mother). I don't remember the author, but I remember where Zdzich looked for his parents in Siberia, among the exiles. At the time, I was fascinated by this, as well as many of my peers. Today, I think most ten-year-olds would despise reading like this. due to the fact that what is interesting about it, where, after which Works, Kolymach was dragged by his grandpa or for what his father was interned during the martial law. So many more interesting things can be found on TV! Besides, who in the youth writers writes about it?
After submitting to Warsaw to the Germans, in the thirty-nineth, I could not return to reading. On suburban fields, in roadside ditches, Polish helmets were shot down in the bomb funnels, while injured soldiers, defenders of the capital, were lying in Warsaw hospitals. So late they marched through town with a carnation from a girl stuck in a firearm barrel! They went to the front for victory, suffered defeat, many fell. What they've been through, we've been carrying a pack of dryhouses from home war supplies.
Our school was located on Karowa Street. At the first Polish language lessons after the war, the teacher read to us Reduta Ordon. Behind the windows there was smoke from the ruins of Krakowskie Przedmieście, flags with swastika, somewhere from Bristol hotel drummed steps of German gendarms, the class listened in a gloomy silence.
The eleven-year-old, a sixth-class student of the commoner, was horrendously called this defeat: the brazenly entering Wehrmacht troops, the execution in Wawra, a 100 nights dragged out of bed, shot; despair, hatred and throat-suffering powerlessness! Ordon Reduta
Immediately after school I ran home, pulled from the library closet of Mickiewicz's work, opened...
We weren't told to shoot. I joined the cannon.
And I looked at the field. 2 100 harmat thundered.
I learned the poem by heart, and I haven't forgotten it yet.
But I was just a boy, and I wanted a simple adventure. I cooled off any of the terrible experiences in the besieged Warsaw. My home didn't miss the blast of bombs anymore, and I wasn't in danger of falling under its rubble, and I was more calm, so I threw myself at the Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huck Adventures. Forget about the dreary occupation, find with Tomk a treasure buried in the cemetery, sail a raft with Jo, a runaway Negro slave, in broad Mississippi waters! Criminals, no! They bore me. I have frequently preferred dramas in natural nature: Cooper, Grey Owi, Curwood, London; to fly over Yukon sleighs with a dog team, to follow in snow rockets a herd of horned caribou. I besides read Verne a fifteen-year-old captain. How boldly he took command of the ship after the dead! But that sneaky small part of magnet under the busola needle! And alternatively of America, they hit the shores of the Black Land. Kidnapped by slave traders! But these caravans driven by the African jungle chained by Negroes were strangely associated with hunting the population of Warsaw. Green gendarmes. They jumped out of them suddenly, and locked the exits of the street with barrels of bergmans. Walkers trapped, nowhere to run, catch! due to the fact that Hitler sent the Germans to the front, and the Reich needed hands to work. So in allied weapons factories, Polish slaves in quarries...
Even then, I thought I'd become a writer. Of course, before all my beloved physicists, I will write, think of the chaotic West, like Charles May. But in the face of the cruelty of the Nazi occupier, the chaotic West paleed me completely and I began to bite in the school notebook something about street catchers. But fear of Gestapo. How do I hide the notebook so they don't get their hands on it in the event of a search? The problem was solved by the Warsaw uprising. Shortly after his explosion, the home was flooded with petrol, a grenade was thrown into it, and my book with a future fresh burned down with a canary in a cage.
But before that, I read by Pharaoh's carbide lamp. She fired a torch, wigged like an old cleaver, burst unexpectedly through the side of gas, smelled like carbid, but lit brightly. erstwhile my parents put it out, I went to bed, but with a book and an electrical flashlight under the covers. For a long time I could not part with the priests of Ramesses, and the eclipse of the sun, which would turn the people distant from him, came with sleep. Yet as the tampon from the cotton wool came from the window the night screams of German gendarmes, arrows. In the morning, erstwhile I went out on the town, I faced the advertised pole with a list of hostages shot yesterday.
I was already in the Grey Ranges, putting anti-Hitlerian flyers on the walls: "Deutschlad Kaputt!", I had on-calls in Wilson Square, where I secretly recorded the entrances and departures of German military cars, WII, WL, and I counted that at any minute I could fall into the hands of Gestapo. Today, I wonder how, in the atmosphere of fear, everyday executions, shortly burning ghettos, it was possible to read at all.
After the uprising there were German concentration camps: Oświęcim, Hersbruck, Dachau; gas chambers, black crematorium smokes, and a white stain on my reading map. Freed by the American army, exhausted, starved, unpacked the packages received officially from PNRRA. Priceless ham and eggs, pork, pudding, chocolate, milkpowder, cheese, sardines, but not a single book! In a large Polish dipiser camp in Wildficken close Fulda something that is not known from where collected and which would barely be called a library. But there, at least from an oral application, I learned by heart the poem of Konstanty Ildefons Gałczyński 3 flags:
And erstwhile the days were fulfilled and the summertime came to die,
Four soldiers from Westerplatte went to heaven;
and a poem by Władysław Broniewski, who already mentions russian sage in the English canteen:
There's a pine tree by the pine tree in Oświel,
Big mast trees have grown.
We have dealt with the boron with the dense axe,
Not for Poland - for Russia, for Russia...
................................................................................................................
It's a good thing we're not where winter, Wheel,
Where Works, Irkutsky, Tobolski,
From the Caspian Sea to the Libyan Sands
We return to Poland easily.
Both occupations were recorded in my memory.
Until I returned to the country for 2 years, I read almost nothing but emigration newspapers. And as shortly as I returned, I was in KPZ-et, it is in Kamiera Preventiful Zakeyenja, due to the fact that that was the name of the arrest in Information of the Polish Army at Oczki Street in Warsaw. I was imprisoned there, interrogated there, all night I had a light in my cell, right in my eyes, but not a single book. There were only regulations to read, and in the investigative room, the minutes of my own testimony. It's highly interesting due to the fact that there's always something in them that I didn't attest to. From a Russian officer sitting with me who was incorporated into the Polish People's Army, I learned many beautiful Russian songs.
Contaminants the didiadia of witches' not gifts
The mask burn the fires,
Frenchman, open the door.
either
Tiomnaja night, tolkoThe pot was whirring.
So it's not printing again, it's just an oral application.
After my investigation, I went to prison in Mokotów, where, as I know, there was a library inactive pre-war, but not for the enemies of the people. I secretly learned English in the cell corner. He erstwhile unexpectedly came here, as a package paper, a full sheet from an English magazine with a study on the lives of the Laplands in Kiruna. I read it with the aid of a teacher. In the second year of prison, specified live printing, and the very communicative of another unknown world, what an experience! Far North, something like London, fascinating! On this occasion, I could make certain that my teacher did not teach me Finnish or Hungarian, and that was English. due to the fact that I had no another way to find out.
In a cell in Mokotov, we had large hopes in the Crows. There will be books at last! With a 15-year conviction on my neck, I took a ride to this book Eldorado. erstwhile we arrived, we were divided, and 2 of them were put together with the prisoners who were already there. The cell was small, entering, I noticed 2 books on the table: the Bells of Basel Aragona and the Island of the Penguins of France. I was excited, like a gold rush. So in order not to let my friend know, I caught the Island. Well, that can't be expressed!
These young people, for whom the book is like a stone around their necks, I would advise you to be locked up, under any petty pretext, even for a small while, in prison. But in the decent way I was in. No forced work, no screaming radio, no smart TV... And just a library, like in the crows, okay, before the war. And after a long intellectual post, abruptly find yourself next to the monk, Father Mael, in a stone bear in the mediate of the Ice Ocean. Whispering with him in the spirit of the Sergilius strofa, sail under a makeshift sail to a polar island and meet a tiny evening-dressed folk who father Mael will begin to convert. They will perceive diligently to his sermons, until yet the short-sighted missionary baptizes his interesting creation teachings, which unfortunately will turn out to be penguins. And imagine that this incredible adventure happens to you in a prison cell!
The books were here without restriction. all day a trade, for everyone according to his wishes. And it would be large if we didn't find out we were sitting with Intelligence Service agents.
They offered us an escape to London. What do you mean, get out of here now that so many books? Besides, they don't think we're gonna get fooled by this stupid joke. What am I doing! I had a conversation with a friend, tapping him under a Morse blanket in his knee. He wrote that in his opinion it was not about our consent to escape, but about us ratting them out. What do you mean, why? Well, if we rat out, it's like we signed with TJB. And even the hooded ones will be happy too. They'll say, "Well, finally! Welcome, brothers, to our stone family! So possibly it'd be better to put a ft on someone's stool? No, no, no...! Then they'll take us out of here immediately and put us where we know there's not a single book. So as long as we can, let's pretend we're willing to take part in the Intelligence Service's escape. And during that time, read, read as much as you can...
Finally, the peculiar Branch, seeing that we were neither to flee nor to cooperate, that we were of no use, ordered a general metastasis and ordered us to be put in the average ward. And here neither books nor chess, nothing... blinds the wall. But I looked into the locker, there's something that nobody touches: Cancer, a ten-page brochure under that title. What kind of cancer, pancreas, brain, potato? No, just a crustacean. I've been in this cell for over six months, and I've read it so I don't forget the letters. I inactive remember his antennae, his antennae.
But what a fortunate guess! They put me in an accident with a colonel in the People's Army. He had a book permit. Course Marxist, but besides a fewer in English. I'm looking at Introduction to Philosophy. I don't remember the author anymore, but as the introduction showed, he was an officer of the American army who, fighting on the west front, understood the request to popularize doctrine and wrote this book after returning from the war. There's plenty of area for solipsism. He told how he explained it to his soldiers, who asked if a solipsist could see a German tank as the sum of his impressions only or as a circumstantial object. And the philosopher replied that the tank may be only their sum, but for the 1 who knows it, it will hide from it. It wasn't very convincing, but it excited me to read something that neither Marx nor Lenin wrote. Unfortunately, they shortly took the colonel along with his books, and there was only a thin brochure on hop farming left on the locker. She testified that prisoners were not deprived of books.
Stalin died. I was at the prison infirmary at the time, and it was only through that death that I was granted the previously refused streptomycin. Coming out of tuberculosis slowly, I might not have thought about the cemetery anymore and started reading. It truly was something. The books Shakespeare, Dickens, Wolter, Molier, Conrad, Balzac, Hugo, Maupassant, Flaubert, Romain Rolland, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgieniev, Pushkin were besides placed on the usual, non-tuberce target. Slovak, Mickiewicz, Reymont... I can't number them all. Conrad took me most. This tap, erstwhile the hammer fell aboard Patny, where the bulkhead was about to break and plunge the ship into a turbid state. It took more than 3 years to wait for amnesty, long! But I've never had that much time to read in my life.
I was curious in philosophy, and that pre-war books, hostilely ideologically, including the Book of the jungles, had already been burned in the boiler room, I began taking notes of Marx and Engels' works. Besides, due to the pryingness of the cabbages, I titled my book "Marxist Literature". And they just threw a Jesuit priest in our cell. He took my notebook, looked with a stone face at the title, re-knitted and smiled with a wide, cordial smile. He's a philosopher, he understands! due to the fact that all I wrote from these Marxist books was quotes from Plato, Fichty, Kanta... The priest, careful, did not say no, but his grin was adequate for everything.
Finally amnesty, I left. On the wave of October, by the iron curtain, the forbidden literature of American imperialists entered Poland: Caldwell, Steinbeck, Hemingway, Dos Passos, Capote, Faulkner... She not only fascinated me as a reader. I was looking for patterns for my own prose. I found my first prison communicative interesting only due to the subject, but dead in form. I was choking under the weight of 19th century literature. I knew I'd gotta throw off all this junk with so much problem getting read in prison. But how hard it is to let go! In this fight with themselves, they came to my sukurs Hemingway and Camus. uncovering my own style, I was like a small bit of freedom. The first liberated of the nineteenth century ballast I brought a communicative to Julian Przyboś. He read, he said, Monster is beautiful. A monster, due to the fact that that's what I called it.
The hunger for reading, coupled with the hunger for knowledge, frequently leads to confusion. The Solzhenitsin brought me there. Once, returning from Paris, I took with me the received in the Library of the Polish Gulag Archipelago. In the sleeping compartment of the train, 2 Negroes were coming with me to survey in Moscow. I was expecting a search at the border. I asked 1 of them if they would have smuggled in the forbidden book. "You will not be searched by Poles, you are transit" - I said. They did. 1 stood at the door to see if anyone was going, the another rapidly took off the suitcase, repacked. erstwhile it was over, he said that they, in Africa, had books that were not allowed into the country. I figured it wasn't Marxist.
But what about those unrighteous books that were published in the free country? any of them were burned, while on the chaotic were on the index. Fortunately, they complemented the shortcomings of second circulation publishing. But what are these releases? In the field of Stanisław Rembek I had to read by specially purchased magnifier. A book not much bigger than a box of matches. But I get it, it was just to keep it from SB. Only, damn it, that fine print, the glasses weren't enough! And so many books I had to read like a stamp philatelist. It was only freedom that brought full freedom in the choice of reading. However, so restrained prices that erstwhile I one more time want to look at Rembek, I scope again for the magnifier; glass.
But back to how I got into the crime scene. due to the fact that I could not miss specified readings as Alexander Wat My Age, Józef Czapski On the inhuman land or Another planet or diary written at night by Herling-Grudziński. I got the last 1 in Paris from the author himself, with the ded3'kat. But on a loose card, a separate one, intended after crossing the border to paste. The emigration author realized that this visitor from the best of the systems might be in problem erstwhile he returned to the country, that he met him and talked to him, or possibly even agreed with his views. Unfortunately, that book with the inscription on it is missing.
Well, briefly, the communicative of my reading-.
But my dear listeners! It passes the era of written word. With fear, I am reasoning of a fresh era of sound and image culture, for greater seriousness called audiovisual. The 3rd millennium will surely bring it. Will an invasion of the image culture be like an invasion of the barbarians into Rome? Will only remains of the memorials of the written word? possibly any of them will be translated into pictorial language. But what about my beloved book by prof. Tatarkiewicz? I bought it right after I got out of prison. In her 3rd volume Marxism was discussed. He occupied only 2 sides, he sank completely in the wealth of Western philosophical thought, it's a horror! So he was banned before October. I'm talking about the past of the large professor's philosophy. And I am peculiarly afraid about the destiny of this wonderful book. due to the fact that what about doctrine can be shown on the screen?
Ockham's razor? But how about a generation of philosophers who can think only with the aid of a monitor? I, a proseman, a playwright, besides think in pictures, but what about the word? Will it be just a slender instrument for the rapporteur of the football game? I'm not asking for print anymore, due to the fact that illiteracy won't be anything embarrassing. So without being ashamed of my stubbornness, I compose in spite of everything. To this magnificent, millennium-old structure of the written word I would like to add another grain of sand, like the termite on the collapsing Atlantis.
After I got out of jail, the first prosator song I always did was Monster. I wrote it after struggling hard with 19th-century prison reading prose. Lessons I've been so hungry for after a long ban on reading, and now they've truly muddled my brain. And then the Americans... They've already released me from Dachau once, and now again. But no longer from the concentration camp, but from this beautiful, greedy, after specified a long forced fast, absorbed ballast: Hemingway, Steinbeck, Caldwell, but besides Camus. And this extraordinary discovery that you can, so sparingly and that it is in the realities, not in the protracted rhetoric, that there is the energy of the word.
***
Janusz Krasiński (1928 - 2012) - a large patriot and prominent writer. Author of radio and theatre music. associate of the Grey Lines. Prisoners of German concentration camps (such as Auschwitz and Dachau) and prisoners of Mokotov, Wronek and Rawicz after the war.
He won many literary awards, including the Józef Mackiewicz Awards in 2006.
Author of autobiographical pentalogy - “On Loss”, “They Face the Wall”, “Infirmity”, “Before the agony” and (posthumously) “The Breakdown”.
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