INTRO
I could have been five
or six then. My father had just returned from his first Gastarbeiter spell in Sweden and brought me a present—a Batman
flying kite. It may have been a Saturday, and we went out of town to fly it.
The early-spring morning was clear, the breeze healthy, and we drove to the
edge of a vast swampy field flanked in the distance by a pine forest, through
which, I sense, a river may have been flowing. The tall reeds swayed
rhythmically in the wind, the sun shone invincibly, and the cool fresh air was dizzyingly
exuberant.
My father started with a
hesitant run, the kite tucked under his arm like something alive but not yet
awake. The wind was his real partner—he felt for it, tested it, waited for that
steady pull against his face. Then he lifted the kite, let it catch, and
released just enough line. It fluttered at first, unsure, dipping and tugging,
until a gust filled it like a lung. And suddenly it climbed.
I watched as his hands
learned the rhythm: give, hold, give again. The string hummed faintly, a thin
line of tension connecting him to something that seemed to want more sky than
he could afford to give. The higher it went, the steadier it became, its
nervous flapping turning into a calm, distant poise. It was no longer something
he was flying—it felt like something he was holding onto.
We were perfect in that
moment—connected, balanced like a pyramid, as close as a father and son can be.
Then the wind sharpened.
A stronger gust pulled
harder than before, the line biting into his fingers. He braced, instinctively
leaning back, laughing or maybe shouting without realizing it. The kite surged
upward, straining, the string pulled so tight it sang. For a moment it felt
like a contest—his grip against the invisible force lifting it away.
And then—without
warning—the line snapped.
The tension vanished so
completely it almost threw him off balance. His hands jerked back, clutching
nothing. The broken end fluttered uselessly at our feet.
Up above, the kite wavered,
freed. It tilted, recovered, and then drifted—no longer tethered, no longer
guided. It climbed once more, lighter now, carried entirely by the wind. I
watched as it grew smaller, the black Batman shape still sharp against the open
sky, then a speck, then something I was not entirely sure I still saw.
At first I expected him to
fix it—to do something, to run after it, to bring it back the way he had sent
it up. When he didn’t, a bitter disappointment settled in me, sudden and heavy,
It wasn’t just the kite. It felt as if something invisible had snapped along
with the line, something between us that I hadn’t known was fragile. I stood
there, silent, holding that feeling without understanding it, only knowing that
something had gone wrong in a way that couldn’t be mended as easily as string.
For a long moment, we both
kept looking, as if the thread might still be there, invisible, as if one of us
might somehow pull it back.
But the sky had taken it.
PRELUDE
My father was a civil
engineer. We lived in a ten-storey block of flats in the north of Warsaw, on a
newly built housing estate—me, him, my mother (also a civil engineer by training),
and my younger sister. On the surface, it seemed ordinary enough, but in truth
it was anything but.
The estate, though part of
a larger urban borough, skirted semi-rural terrain, at times almost wild.
Remnants of the village it had replaced still lingered: orchards, crumbling
cottages, cows grazing quietly beside busy streets. A narrow rivulet ran
nearby, once powering water mills and feeding fish ponds established by
Camaldolese monks brought from Cracow in the mid-17th century. From their white
habits, the area took its name: Bielany. The mills and the monks were long
gone, yet the Rudawka—so called for its water tinged with a reddish
hue—remained, its swampy valley seeming to cut us off from the rest of the
world. At least, that was how it appeared to the boy I was.
Our block stood barely
fifty yards from a waterlogged alder wood, aptly called Olszyna, a surviving
fragment of the marshes and bogs that once dominated the area. That was our
playground. To us, it was a jungle: canals where sticklebacks could be caught
with string and a makeshift hook, elderberry shrubs with trunks thick as a
man’s arm, old trees with roots twisted and exposed like mangroves somewhere
far away, sunflowers towering three meters high, and a cacophony of birds—wild
ducks, sparrows, starlings, tits, jackdaws, woodpeckers, and owls. Every corner
of that wood seemed alive with possibility, a wilderness stitched into the
edges of the city.
It was the 1970s, possibly
the most optimistic period in post-war Communist Poland. Consumer spending was
finally encouraged after decades of austerity, Western loans were fuelling the
economy, happy songs played on the radio, and fashion—mini-skirts, bell-bottom
jeans, long hair fluttering in the streets—hinted at freedom. Polish football captured
our hearts, though we preferred playing it ourselves for hours on the grass, on
the tarmac, on school pitches.
Yet beneath the vibrancy,
tension simmered. Authoritarian paternalism, latent violence, and the strict
hierarchy of the system allowed no freedom of discourse. Everything was fine as
long as you stayed in line, but step outside the rules and the response was
swift and physical. Ideology was beyond question, and punishment was standard.
Looking back at old
photographs, I can trace my father’s evolution: from a clean-shaven, smiling
young engineer in the late 1960s to a bearded, grim-faced man by the mid-1970s.
Family life had evidently dimmed his youthful optimism; dreams had yielded to
the steady prose of earning a living.
Years later, I would learn
that he had wanted to be a sailor. In his late teens, he ran away to sign on to
a ship, but his father pursued him, bringing him back, giving him a thrashing,
and forcing him into a building college instead. Violence received often begets
violence, unless one learns to work through it—and I would soon find myself on
the receiving end.
I was an unruly boy at
school, always clowning around, teasing the teachers. By third or fourth grade,
I was regularly beaten by him: his leather belt on my bare buttocks, usually
after he returned from a parent-teacher meeting. I screamed and squirmed, but
he would tell me, “My dad used to lay it on me, but I grew up all right. That’s
how it works.”
His roots were suburban,
but not the kind most people imagine. He was born in Sulejówek, in a house by
the railway tracks, and I only learned years later that his grandfather had
been the crossing-keeper there—possibly the most important one in the Second
Polish Republic. The crossing had been installed in the 1920s when the Marshal
built a villa across the road. My great-grandfather’s job was simple and
monumental at the same time: see the Marshal safely off to Warsaw each morning
and bring him back each afternoon.
The Marshal—the father of
Polish independence, already failing in health, forbidden to drink at
home—would reportedly sneak out for walks, sharing a glass or two with my
great-grandfather in his basement. My great-grandmother, in turn, was said to
be the only person in the country allowed into the Belvedere, the presidential
residence, freely and without a permit, riding her horse-drawn cart daily to
bring fresh milk for the Marshal’s daughters.
By the 1970s, of course,
none of this was something to boast about—or even mention. The Marshal, like
all figures of the pre-war republic, was the antithesis of People’s Poland, and
any connection to him was taboo. To speak of it openly could invite trouble.
Against this backdrop, my
father’s marriage to my mother seemed improbable. Culturally, they could not
have been more different. Post-war socialism promised to erase class
distinctions, but such integration could be faked only for so long. In this
sense, their union became emblematic of both the hopes and the compromises of
the Polish People’s Republic.
My mother’s parents, by
contrast, were also a mismatched pair, yet somehow remained together. Their
story, too, reflected broader social truths. My maternal grandfather, a
professor at the Warsaw University of Technology, had volunteered as a
seventeen-year-old in the 1920 war against Soviet Russia. By the standards of
the Nuremberg Laws, he was Jewish—both of his parents were Jewish, and he was
baptized only in his teens—but he survived the war unmolested, a mystery in a
time when anyone with “non-Aryan” ancestry could be denounced or blackmailed.
In the 1930s, he married the daughter of a renowned Warsaw family of bronze
founders, 100 percent Polish heraldic bourgeoisie.
It was at the university
where he taught that my father met my mother. I suspect the ambition of a young
upstart to “bag” the professor’s daughter played no small part in the story.
Whatever the motivations, I was the product of their unlikely coming together—a
living testament to the improbable intersections of history, ambition, and
desire.
Despite the occasional
thrashing, my relationship with my father remained alive, if strained. For
reasons he could neither understand nor change, I refused to follow his “work
hard first, everything else later” philosophy. At school, I excelled in certain
subjects, but largely on talent alone, and I resisted the steady, disciplined
effort he expected of me. Notes about my behavior kept piling up, which must
have frustrated him deeply—“proper conduct” was, in his mind, the cornerstone
of success in life. I can still picture him sitting through those meetings,
reddening in silent rage as teachers recounted yet another of my foolish
pranks. That rage would find its outlet at home, in the broad sweep of his
leather belt across my skinny ass. Patriarchy was still the unquestioned order
of the day, and he was not one to doubt its supposed virtues. Perhaps
unsurprisingly, I found myself resenting my mother more for not stopping him
than my father for doing it.
And yet, we had our
moments.
Sometime around 1978, he
took me on my first trip abroad (not counting the one to Bulgaria I had made in
my mother’s belly the summer before I was born). We took a taxi to Dworzec
Gdański—the station from which thousands of Polish Jews had departed after the 1968
anti-Semitic campaign[1],
and from which, in the spring of 1976, David Bowie had wandered off to nearby
Plac Wilsona during a stopover on his Moscow–Paris train—and from there we
traveled on to Vienna. Whether it was significant or not, my first glimpse of
the “West” was a newsstand at the Vienna station, dazzling in its riot of
glossy, colorful covers—among them, perhaps, magazines of a kind I was not yet
meant to notice.
In Vienna, my father bought
a green Lada for a thousand dollars, and we drove on through Czechoslovakia and
East Germany—stopping at Alexanderplatz for the famed Milchpyramide—before reaching Sassnitz, on the island of Rügen.
From there we took the ferry to Trelleborg in Sweden, crossing a stretch of
water that, though modest, seemed to carry something of the open sea he had
once dreamed of. I did not know that then, of course, but I can see it now: the
way he stood on deck, looking out, as if measuring a distance he had never been
allowed to travel.
We went on to Malmö, to
visit his sister—my aunt. Her husband, Busse, was, I think, a sailor (a figure
that will reappear later on this story), and there I met, for the first and
last time, my Swedish cousin: Bertil Kennet Gunnar Andersson.
They lived in a block on Stadiongatan,
and my grandmother was there too, minding Bertil while my aunt worked. In a
scene that seems, in retrospect, perfectly attuned to the Zeitgeist, the adults sent us children out of the room and—despite
my grandmother’s embarrassed protests—watched a video of a kind where the men
wore nothing but black socks. Through the glass door, we could still glimpse
fragments of what was going on.
On our last day, my father
took me to a large store—perhaps Mobilia—and told me to choose any souvenir I
wanted. I went straight to the model kits. To his mild disappointment, instead
of picking an impressive caravelle or something equally grand, I chose a modest
Spitfire and Hurricane. Aircraft, not ships. Even then, without knowing it, I
was already charting a different course.
Around that time, feeling
increasingly stifled in our second-floor flat in Bielany, my father persuaded
his father-in-law—my grandfather—to sell his summer cottage in a professors’
colony in Serock. It was there, in 1975, sitting by a goldfish pond, that I had
watched the Soyuz–Apollo docking on television; at the time, life seemed
unlikely to get any better. The cottage was sold so that we could buy a house in
the lake district in the north of the country.
The house stood far beyond
the village, by a lake and a narrow brook, without electricity and badly in
need of repair. This suited my father perfectly. A natural do-it-yourself man,
he threw himself into the work with renewed energy, as if, in that remote
place, he could reclaim something of the life that had eluded him. Water was
always nearby now—moving, waiting, promising something.
A new rhythm began. Every
Friday afternoon, the four of us would leave Warsaw, crammed into our tiny Fiat
126p, and drive to Purda, as the place was called. Near midnight, we would
inflate a rubber dinghy, hoist it over our heads, and make our way along a
swampy path to the lake. There, in the dark, we would paddle out and set dozens
of simple floats—pieces of pine bark with string and hooks attached—to catch
eels.
At dawn, we would return to
collect the floats, then clean and prepare the catch, frying or smoking it on
the spot. In those moments, it truly was like father, like son: side by side,
wordless, bound by something that did not need explaining.
We spent all our summer
holidays there, and it was there that I acquired—perhaps reluctantly at
first—the habit of long walks through the forest: roaming without purpose
across wide, empty spaces where the mind could drift unrestrained, chopping
wood, drinking cold water straight from the brook. The days unfolded slowly,
almost imperceptibly, one dissolving into the next. Time seemed to stretch
toward infinity, as if this way of life might continue unchanged, indefinitely.
But it would not.
Tensions were building—both
in the country at large and within our family—quietly at first, then with
increasing force. Something was tightening, like a line drawn too taut, and it
was only a matter of time before it gave way, leading to a rupture from which
there would be no return.
In the summer of 1980,
which, for a change, we spent partly at my maternal aunt’s seaside cottage,
strikes broke out, first at the nearby Gdańsk Shipyard (which, again, will
recur later on this story). I remember seeing slogans written on the shipyard
wall—words like “solidarity,” “dignity,” “freedom.” I was too young to grasp
the political gravity of the moment, but the sight was nonetheless striking:
until then, public space had been exclusively controlled by the regime, and
this was the first time that visual monopoly had been breached. Something was
clearly ending: the “golden” ’70s, childhood, sweet ignorance.
On the morning of December
13, 1981—it was a Sunday—my father greeted me with unexpected words: “A war has
begun.” It was something of an overstatement, but martial law had indeed been
declared by the regime. The significance again eluded me, and I spent the
evening at a friend’s, where we listened to the likes of Slade and Smokie, and
she even allowed me a kiss. Dazed, light-headed, excited, I walked home late,
happy as a lark, only to be met by my parents beside themselves with worry;
they had been imagining the worst. I could hardly understand what all the fuss
was about.
Meanwhile, my mother had
joined Solidarity, like ten million others, but my father had not. Now that the
country had shifted from a pseudo-democracy to something closer to a junta,
however, he joined the pro-regime trade unions. There was clearly in him some
longing for a “strong leader,” for a hard line—or perhaps he was simply an
opportunist. Whatever the case, he was now pursuing a political career—if only
on the scale of the institute where he worked—and had much more to lose.
And then came the day when
he returned from yet another parent-teacher meeting at my school. He pulled my
history textbook from his briefcase—I had probably already forgotten it had
been confiscated—and opened it to the page with the images of Marx and Lenin.
“What is this?” he demanded, pointing at their noses, which I had clumsily
redrawn as penises—yet another of my schoolboy jokes. I looked and shrugged.
That’s when he went off the rails. He shoved me so hard I slammed into the
wall, then grabbed my skateboard—one of the first on the estate, a gift my
mother had brought back from a trip to Paris—and started hitting me with it. He
wouldn’t stop for what felt like an impossibly long time. I’m not even sure I
felt the physical pain; I was so terrified by the very fact of being violently
attacked by a grown man—my father. This was no longer the ritualized, almost
formalistic spanking of earlier years. This was the collapse of the world as I
knew it, the opening of a black abyss, a bottomless pit into which I was falling
as he hit me, and hit me, and hit me again.
Afterwards, I lay sobbing
in my room while my mother tried to console me, to no avail, of course. I
refused to go to school the next day, which he commented on
sarcastically—something about me being a wimp, a crybaby. In his world,
everything was in order: a crime had been punished, law and order restored. One
was obliged, after all, to beat folly out of a young man’s head so that he
would not go on to worse things.
Which, of course, I
inevitably did.
The
cigarettes I took from him. While he was trying to quit and had switched to a
pipe, he still received his martial-law quota, and it was in the form of uncut cigarettes thirty or so
centimeters long, straight out of factory. When I discovered a bag of those in
his wardrobe, the magnetic force of addiction gripped me with its iron hand.
This was still primary school, and I remember the pride of being among the few
initiates who gathered during breaks in a corner behind the changing rooms to
pull nervously on a fag. Cigarettes those days were a status symbol across all
social classes and all generations—an echo of the great war, no doubt—and so
teachers smoked during classes, office clerks smoked behind their glass
windows, and there were special non-smoking compartments on trains for those
weirdos who did not dig the mighty sport. Indeed, the most basic brand was
called just that, Sport. It was, however, looked down upon by us,
self-perceived trendy youngsters, as we aimed at something better, more
elegant, more stylish, something like Stołeczne, with their modern
orange-and-blue color scheme, like the shorter Caro, or the longer Carmen,
which brought to mind breath-accelerating images of women with glossy red
manicure, preferrably leaving lowly generic brands like Klubowe and Radomskie
to times of necessity rather than choice. By principle, we would never touch
the menthol Zefir, while Mocne and Extra Mocne, though hardly aromatic or
attractively packaged, seemed acceptable, probably because their promise of
“extra strength” made you look more manly. The most irresistible object of
desire, naturally, were Western brands: from the world-famous Marlboro and
Camel, which we knew from movies and popular TV series like Kojak and Columbo, through Lucky Strike, Pall Mall, and Winston, to lesser-known ones like Lark
or St. Moritz. They were sold officially at state-licenced hard-currency shops
(a paradoxical entity known as Pewex, short for “domestic export company”), and
unofficially, under the counter, by restaurant cloakroom attendants, waiters,
or bartenders. Since we were too young to be allowed in, it was usually
cloakroom attendants that we dealt with—if we could afford the price, of
course, which, for me at least, happened very seldom. But by then the allure of
spending money on even the most attractive model airplane was nothing compared
to the liberating, intoxicating, almost revolutionary act of buying a pack of St. Moritz 120s.
The
alcohol, since my dad drank only occasionally (he was, fortunately, more of a
glutton than a boozer), I took from others. One friend, P., was particularly
instrumental in introducing me to it. He lived in the apartment block next to
mine and would have been a professional musician like both of his parents, but
his father orphaned him early, leaving P. to take it out on his mother. It was
him who proved to me that one could actually down a whole beer in one go—rather
than sipping the disgustingly bitter liquid through clenched teeth—and it was
him, two years my senior, who took me to my first “real” parties, where you
were perhaps not so much expected, but perfectly excused for puking out of the
window sooner or later. He also played the piano and the guitar, distributed
Solidarity samizdat, and had access to cassette tapes with recordings of banned
bards, starting with Jacek Kaczmarski, the defining protest voice of the era,
our equivalent of Vladimir Vysotsky. P. had a girlfriend and even hinted that
she was not against allowing him to visit her through the back door, so to
speak. Needless to say, my imagination ran completely wild.
But
that was only the preliminaries, the play-up to the actual breakthrough. I was
becoming ready to adopt a new male role model—now that my relationship with my
father had been irreparably damaged. I was searching unconsciously for it, and
it was only a matter of time before I found one. “When the student is ready,
the teacher will appear.”
My
teacher, in this case, was a classmate, D., who was a year my senior and was
repeating the eighth, final grade. He was being raised by his mother (if you
are beginning to detect a father-issue pattern here, it’s probably because
there is one), who happened to be working at the US Embassy in Warsaw. This
meant D. had an irresistible pull over me and was perfectly suited to become
the shaman who would take me to the other side: he was older enough, wore
original US Army cargo pants and Nike sneakers, smoked original Marlboros, and,
most important of all, had a record player and access to brand new LPs.
Needless to say, being as he was, he didn’t listen to bland pop or sublime jazz
(which is not to say that he had no refined taste). No, this was the early
‘80s, the New Wave of British Heavy Metal was rising, and so I was introduced
to Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden, Saxon, Judas Priest, AC/DC, and... Yes, you
guessed it. One day after school—it was around 1982 or 1983, but the exact
chronology eludes me—he treated me to a Marlboro 100, put on a record he had
just received, turned the volume knob so far right that the needle crackling
itself became almost too loud to bear, and showed me the cover at exactly the
moment when the first riff began and the words “If you like to gamble / I’ll
tell you I’m your man...,” sung by a characteristically gravel-throated voice,
boomed from the speakers. I would say that I was thunderstruck, if it were not
a misnomer. So let’s say I was hit right between the eyes, like in a
revelation, an enlightenment, a satori.
I needed to look no further—that was it. The combination of sound and visuals: the
growl, the chainsaw bass, the relentless, fast-tempo drive, the raw, clear, and
sparse feel, the “live” energy, the logo, the line-up, the overall aesthetic,
the whole thing—well, I was sold
instantly, hook, line, and sinker.
When I
was 9 or 10, I recall, my parents had taken me to a big toy store, possibly for
my birthday, and let me choose whatever I wanted. I opted for a cowboy outfit:
a Colt, a vest with a “Sheriff” star, and a hat. On that day at D.’s, I was
initiated into the real thing rather
than a lousy substitute. Those were real men,
and there was nothing that I wanted more in that moment than to be like them.
Lemmy, the natural leader; Eddie,
the slightly dreamy virtuoso; and Phil, the riotous rebel—they were like a new,
groundbreaking branch of philosophy, a hypnotically fascinating replacement for
the worn Marx-Engels-Lenin triad. Or perhaps a new, exciting religion—an
alternative Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, if you prefer.
And so, a new me was born.
A new path had opened, and I was determined to follow it toward ultimate
empowerment.
Meanwhile, a new era had
begun for me on a more mundane plane: I finished primary school and entered high
school. It was, in theory, a simple transition—one institutional threshold
replacing another—but in practice it carried the quiet weight of
self-definition. To avoid the risk of failure, or perhaps of exposure, I chose
not to attempt the entrance exams to one of the more prestigious liceums. It
was a decision that disappointed my parents deeply: a small, deliberate act of
downward mobility in that peculiar society which proclaimed itself classless
while quietly obsessing over hierarchies.
It was a world of curious
dualities, where one could belong simultaneously to the Party and to the
Church, where ideology and ritual coexisted without apparent contradiction, and
where a master’s degree in the humanities functioned as the ultimate social
fetish—at least among the white-collar strata to which my family belonged.
Cultural capital, rather than money, marked one’s place in the invisible
pecking order. And so my choice—to opt out of that competition, to decline the
symbolic ladder—was not merely practical; it was, whether I knew it or not, a
kind of heresy.
Instead of one of the
“fine” high schools, I chose one known for its disrepute, for accepting
virtually anyone—an unforgivable sin in the eyes of the self-appointed
guardians of distinction. Even its patron was a provocation. Not a national
poet, not a king, not a revered scholar, but a democratic socialist:
journalist, historian, patriot. A man who had been friends with Friedrich
Engels, who had opposed the authoritarian drift of the 1930s, and who did not subscribe
to the belief that Catholicism was the indispensable foundation of moral life.
To the petty bourgeois—some first-generation, others tenth—who populated my
parents’ social universe, this was an affront, a subtle but unmistakable
deviation from the canon of respectability. Had I been capable of such
reasoning at the time, it would have confirmed me all the more in my choice. As
it was, I did not give a damn about any of it.
History, however, had other
plans, and it entered my life not as abstraction but as shock. My first weeks
at high school coincided with the murder and funeral of Jerzy Popiełuszko, the
priest who had dared to speak openly against the regime and to stand with the
workers of Solidarity. It was the autumn of 1984. The church where he preached
lay just five minutes from my school, and we all attended the funeral.
What I remember is not so
much the ceremony as the scale, the density of human presence: hundreds of
thousands filling the streets, an ocean of bodies extending far beyond the visible
horizon. People stood in silence, knelt on the pavement, wept openly. It was
not only grief—it was something closer to collective recognition, as if a truth
long suppressed had suddenly become undeniable. The regime, which had always
claimed omnipotence, revealed itself in that moment as both brutal and fragile.
Something cracked. The spell was broken.
In retrospect, it is
tempting to see that moment as the beginning of the end. The slow erosion that
followed—the cautious liberalization, the hesitant negotiations with
Solidarity, the gradual emergence of a public sphere no longer entirely
controlled—can all be traced back to that convergence of outrage and mourning.
But at the time, I sensed it only dimly, as a shift in atmosphere rather than a
clearly defined turning point. The air itself seemed altered, charged with a
possibility that had not existed before.
One of the more tangible
consequences of this shift was the loosening of control over information—among
other things, the gradual legalization of photocopying technologies. It was a
small technical detail, easily overlooked, yet it opened a door. In early 1986,
I took my mother’s typewriter, moved temporarily into a classmate’s flat, and
produced the first issue of Metallian, one of the earliest heavy-metal
fanzines in Poland, perhaps the first. The cover, inevitably, featured Lemmy
Kilmister.
From there, things began to
accelerate. I produced more issues, each more ambitious than the last;
established contact with dozens of bands; helped organize concerts; traded
tapes and flyers in ever-expanding circles. In short, I became part of
something that was only just coming into being: the Polish underground metal
scene, raw, unstructured, and intensely alive. It was, in its own way, another
form of dissent—less overtly political, perhaps, but no less real: a refusal of
conformity, an insistence on alternative forms of expression, identity, and
belonging.
And then, in late 1988, the
horizon widened once again. I reached out to Øystein Aarseth about the possibility
of a visit. I had interviewed him earlier for my zine—by then renamed Eternal
Torment—and he seemed receptive. The idea, once planted, quickly took on a
life of its own. I applied for a passport, secured a Swedish visa—Norway, a
NATO country bordering the Soviet Union, still remained largely closed to
us—asked my parents for money, packed my things, and bought a ticket for the
ferry from Gdańsk to Stockholm.
[1] The prelude to which, in March 1968, were the
student protests sparked off by the regime’s politically motivated decision to
ban further performances of Adam Mickiewicz’s Forefathers’ Eve at the Dramatyczny Theatre. These protests were then
exploited, including through active provocation, by hardliners within the Party
with the goal of ousting the then First SecretaryWładysław Gomułka. The
particular riot in the area of the Warsaw University of Technology on March 8
was the reason why I didn’t come out of the womb on March 22 as planned; my grandfather
being a professor at the WUT, my grandparents lived at the campus, and my
parents were visiting them that day for lunch. Having left and turned the corner,
they suddenly found themselves in the middle of a violent riot. This got my
mother nervous and me kicking. And so instead as an Aries with Mars and Saturn in
Aries—a soldier, a pioneer, an athlete—I was born a few days prematurely as a Pisces: full of self-contradictions,
self-doubt, and self-delusion.
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