Grace (Grazyna)

I was born seven years after the Second World War ended. The war and its consequences for Poland, the country I was born in, have cast a deep shadow over my whole life.

The country, which sustained the biggest loss per capita in terms of human life and capital, was sacrificed as a prize for the Soviet effort in the war. Poland, whose pilots, soldiers and navy men fought on all fronts of the war, and in terms of numbers were the fourth-largest allied army, became the sacrificial lamb presented to Stalin at the Yalta and, later, the Potsdam Conference.

Of course, when I was growing up, I did not know any of this.  These were taboo subjects, discussed only in strict family circles, in certain kind of families – I suppose you can call them intelligentsia families. Mind you, not many such families survived the war, as the Nazis began their occupation of Poland by scrupulously liquidating all the university professors, teachers, civil servants, priests, etc. Nevertheless, I met youngsters who came from such families throughout my school years – primary, secondary and, finally, university education. There was always a certain aloof mystique hanging over them. They always enjoyed an elevated status in peer groups. 

My parents came from aspirational working-class families, and they were very young when I was born – my father was 25 and my mother barely 21. My father had socialist leanings as he remembered the grounding poverty in which he grew up in pre-war Poland. He was therefore quite sympathetic towards the communist reality.  My mother was dead against it, which caused lots of heated discussions in the family. 

My father was barely 14 when he was transported to Germany as part of the forced labour system. The German occupants demanded a youngster from every Polish family to be sent to Germany to work in factories or on farms.  Strictly speaking, my father was too young for this conscription; it was his older, 16-year-old sister who was called up. However, my granny managed to talk the Zwangsarbeiter Buro official into letting her younger son go, as she thought it was slightly safer for boys in that uncertain world. It seems mothers in occupied Europe were regularly faced with such impossible choices. My father received a modest compensation from the German government 60 years after the war, when Poland became part of the EU. Of course, the country never received any help through the Marshall Plan, as Stalin forbid the USSR’s satellites to be part of any Western capitalist charity. I remembered this injustice was discussed quite a lot in my family, particularly that Poland, in the post-war years, witnessed West Germany burgeoning, generously assisted by the largess of the Marshall Plan.

I was growing up in an impoverished country, which was licking its war wounds throughout my entire childhood. There was a thick cloud of melancholy hanging over Poland, which started lifting only around the memorable year, 1989. When my husband-to-be travelled to Warsaw from Paris on the Paris-Moscow express in November 1976, he said that it was like travelling back in time to the point of the First World War. He was first to draw my attention to this veil of melancholy and angst. This was produced, I now know, by a powerful cocktail of disappointment, betrayal, a sense of injustice and the awareness of unfulfilled potential. The country felt part of the Western culture and aspired to be part of the ‘free world’, while the reality was that it was being yoked to the Soviet empire.

Education was free and well organised.  Subsequently, I have wondered if it was part of the communist system, or specifically a Polish trait that authorities attached a great value to education. Now I think it was a mixture of both. Of course, “Education, Education, Education” was one of the main propaganda slogans of every communist regime; however, I also think that Poles have always set great store by educating their young. Then and now.

The education system was based on French and German ideas. Like in France, the curriculum was highly centralised and prescriptive. You knew that when your class was covering, let’s say, the French revolution in history lessons, the whole population of pupils your age, in town and country, were covering the same topic in their history lessons, at the same time. Therefore, there was no problem when you needed to move and change school half-way through the school year. I was quite shocked when my own children reached school age in Britain and particularly when I, myself, became a teacher here, by how laissez-faire and disjointed the state educational system is. The technical education was organised on German lines. There were trade and technical schools.

Our teachers were a motley bunch. We had quite a few pre-war intelligentsia types, but also a smothering of apparatchiks. God knows how they rubbed along in the staff room.

For my secondary education I went to a French lycée. The start of my four years there was quite symbolic. We were scheduled to have our first lesson of French language and literature on 7th September 1967.  However, this was not to be. On this particular day, General de Gaulle visited Warsaw. He was extatically welcomed by a huge crowd of Varsovians, positioned along the route his cavalcade of limousines was travelling. Of course, our French teacher, Mme Struzynski, could not let such occasion go to waste. The whole class, of about 40 of us, were given the French tricolours, hastily taught two basic slogans – “Vive le General de Gaul” and “Vive la France” – and were sent off to stand along the General’s route. It was a warm late-summer day, le General was waiving gracefully, and we had a lot of fun. Definitely, a very memorable start to our French education.

I loved school, at all levels. I think I was what you would call ‘the class swot’. I suppose to some extent I wanted my parents to be proud of me but, also, I was genuinely thirsty for knowledge and curious about the world, particularly that the reality around was pretty grey. I was seven when I had my first English lesson. The teacher was a young, beautiful woman with a long, blond ponytail. When she introduced herself to us in English, I felt a shiver going down my spine. I started adoring the language there and then, a love affair which has lasted all my life.

The humanities curriculum in all lycées was broad and comprehensive. In addition to the great works of Polish literature, we studied the greatest of French, German, English, American and Russian literature. Professors in those days believed that their students should be regularly memorising huge tracts of poetry, so I ended up with my head full of Byron, Goethe, Pushkin and Baudelaire. And, of course, we were all dreaming of visiting Paris, Vienna or London.

My youth in Poland had a schizophrenic quality. This was also reflected in the life of the school. We commemorated great national historical anniversaries, usually remembering various uprisings directed against the Russian Tsars, but also the anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. Every year, there was an assembly on the 7th November or thereabouts, with speeches, recitation of Soviet poetry, etc.

My first visit to “the West” was to London, in 1975. I travelled via the check-point Charlie in Berlin, then by train to Ostend from where I took a ferry to Dover. I remember I started choking with tears when the majestic White Cliffs of Dover rose from the sea. I clearly had a fairly good grasp of history as the images of valiant Britain, fighting it alone flooded my brain. Churchill, the Spitfire pilots, among them the Polish squadrons, Dunkerque, etc, raced through my mind with such power that I could hardly breathe. I remembered watching the film, The Battle of Britain in my last year of primary school, in 1967. Our young class teacher reserved half of our local cinema near the school and took the oldest pupils to watch. The film made a great impression on all of us and obviously played on my mind when I was crossing the Channel. I hope my children forgive me for having to watch The Battle of Britain whenever it came up on the telly when they were growing up.

I was a student at Warsaw University in the seventies and students were given some privileges which were largely not available to the rest of the population. One of those was the freedom to travel to “the West”. So, in 1976, I came to London again, and on the way back to Poland visited Paris, in the company of my future husband. It was the first visit to the City of Light for both of us. I was in total ecstasy throughout. Steve said that I must have been living in Paris in my previous incarnation. I simply took him by the hand and led him to the places immortalised in Hugo’s Les Misérables or Balzac’s Père Goriot. I think my teachers from my old French Lycée would have been proud knowing that they had manged to implant so much French culture into my soul.

I was not alone in having this European dream. Living behind the Iron Curtain, the majority of us created this parallel existence in our minds. Largely cut off from “the West”, we dreamt this perfect European dream and cherished every bit of European civilisation. My generation, the Solidarity generation, were ready to embrace Europe when the opportunity opened up. The post-communist transition in Poland happened relatively swiftly and smoothly.

History of Poland has been a mixture of tragedy and heroism in the face of powerful neighbours.  When Poland “arrived in Europe”, most Poles and their friends gave out a big sigh of relief - at long last, the country reached its historical and spiritual destination.  However, nobody bargained, not least the Poles, the Czechs, the Hungarians that Europe, the leading civilisation in the history of humanity, would be going through the period of self-loathing and self-flagellation.  As Douglas Murray writes in his book, “The Strange Death of Europe, Immigration, Identity, Islam”, Europe is a continent and culture in the throes of committing suicide. What a time to join the European project! It has come to me as no surprise that the Poles, the Czechs, the Hungarians are quickly becoming the betes-noires of the EU.  My heart goes out to them. Watch this space!