WARSAW, MY WARSAW…
ALINA CZERNIAKOWSKA
There are issues, events which are difficult to understand, and more difficult to console with. Since the Sunday election, I have had a different look at Warsaw, at passing by people, as if Warsaw stopped being mine, with which I have been related for generations. From my childhood I remember stories told by my grandpa Stanisław Czerniakowski about Warsaw of his youth. The grandpa recalled images of Warsaw from the beginnings of the 20th century which I later found in the book ‘Lalka’ by Bolesław Prus, poems by Or-Ota, Lechoń, Wierzyński….Whereas Warsaw of my father, cavalryman, soldier of September 1939, and later of conspiracy of the National Army, was always the most heroic city in the world. When he was speaking about the Warsaw Uprising, he could hardly help crying and pride was heard from his every word. The history of Warsaw are full of heroic uprisings and great battles, like the one from 1920. When I was making a documentary about pre-war Warsaw and was listening to pronouncements of few real Warsaw inhabitants, they often said about honour, principles, with a sigh that today that Warsaw does not exist any longer. The first and the second occupier killed educated Poles and patriots from all social spheres, and after the war Stalin and his native traitors managed to build the communist capital city of Poland about which Boleslaw Bierut spoke in his speeches on 1 May.
Now in Warsaw there is conglomeration of next generations of that influx of the post-war population, very communized and today, the so-called jars, which are impressed on by celebrities from TVN and ‘Gazeta Wyborcza’, as there are those who are ‘modern and European’. The lack of historical knowledge as well as the one more familiar to us and concerning the changes of the 80s of the 20th century and later of the Third Republic of Poland, the lack of the truth are favourable for liars and cunning people. A few more sad conclusions should be added here. This is the lack of citizens’ thinking, care about the common welfare, as everyone, even the worst enemy of the Law and Justice party, the most blinded, knew who the candidate of the Civic Platform is – Rafał Trzaskowski. It is difficult to mention even one of his feature which would justify him as a candidate for the post of president of the capital city. The lack of being cunning, ideas, no energy to act, blunt pronouncements. He seemed to be somebody who had been deceived with promises, who had been ordered to get subordinated. A man named Paweł Rabiej was complementing the whole….Patryk Jaki was a loser – a young man with passion, extremely hard-working, full of energy who got famous for being a chairman of the Reprivatisatoin Commission in Warsaw, who grabbed back lots of tenement houses and squares from our thieves and gave them back to our beloved city, and their inhabitants – their dignity and normal life. Even the current authorities of the Town Hall agreed that in Warsaw a mafia was acting, crooks were stealing and sharing monumental tenements, palaces, squares among one another, as they were not going to steal cemented communist housing estates, but they reached out for that pre-war Warsaw, which they had been fighting for whole decades as capitalist, hostile and unknown for them. Enemies of former Poland, patriotism, our national pride, ridiculing at our fights for independence, were usurping the best places and buildings, erected by generations which gave their life for these ideals, both the unfamiliar and mocked at by corrupted crooks. A terrible irony of fate, history…
Translated by Aneta Amrozik
Niedziela 44/2018 (4 XI 2018)