Anna Katarzyna Dubowska, editor
A YEAR IN POLAND
A year In Poland is a kind of not a very intimate diary
to describe what was happening since today up to … we will see. The purpose to
write it is to pay back for a hostile treatment of the Batras in Delhi India in
1998, which is my stay in India I’ll remember forever and found myself not
enough delicate and tactful to show the same level of interest and care to
maintain the contacts.
Today is the 31st of October 2009, a gloomy
and quite chilly day in Wrocław/Poland. Sitting in Grzegorz’s room in our flat
on the 5th floor I can watch builders repairing the roof on the
opposite block of flats. It has already been the second time within this month
as the previous reparation was probably bad quality what has been proved by the
two days of not heavy rain. The streets of the city, which I can watch from here,
are full of crowd and mainly hectic cars going to the cemeteries or giving the
lift to the other cities to visit cemeteries there. It’s because today is
Saturday. If it had been a regular week day people would visit cemeteries after
work as to prepare graves to celebrate the 1st of November which is
a seriously treated holiday in here in the mode of falling lives, covering
ground and falling temperatures and shortening daylight. The world famous
Halloween hadn’t been celebrated before English teachers started to teach
English popularly at Polish schools replacing Russian language in early 90’s.
English lessons of culture facts mentioned about this odd way of remembering the
deceased but as an English teacher I’m
not very proud of laughing Halloween celebration in Poland although I had often
used it as a subject of my special lessons even at a Jewish School’s students’
treating it as a kind of fun. Kids, putting witches’ costumes, painting their
faces and bringing coke, chips and sweets were easier to teach and not
conscious the teacher’s trick studied eagerly vocabs for a little treat. In the
evening it seems to get more popular for teenagers and even for more than twenty-year-old
having fun enjoying a theme clubbing, occasions for having a cup of beer or a
disco or fancy dress party in friends or pales company with a thrill of mysterious
atmosphere. Carved pumpkins, plastic
baths, ghosts, spiders’ webs and
witches’ costumes bump up a sale at florists, restaurants, shops and compete
with a regular that time purchasing of huge amount of candles, ever-burning
fires, lamps and chrysanthemum used to decorate tombs for the 1st of
November. This Halloween new joy caught
by young is not very favourable for the older generations tied to serious
attitude to death and charged with the memories of bloody war and post war
history of Poland so we can even observe a clinch of generations when last
Halloween party guest tipsy comes back home screaming in the yard first car
engine start before the dusk to set for tiring journey covering sometimes long
distances to lit candles at distant family graves.
In the meantime, I had a short break for a lesson with
my student from neighborhood who gave some news from her former class I taught
last school year and miss a bit. And again the old trick worked – she did lots
of work unconsciously solving boring grammar drills only because they were
about ghosts and monsters. As a
thirteen-year old she did nothing about the place she lives so we talked about
Frankenstein who is told to be created in a town 60 km nearby nowadays called
Zabkowice Slaskie - formerly in German times over 60 years ago - called
Frankenstein. She did know nothing about the biggest common tomb of
Wroclaw’s (formerly Breslau’s)
inhabitants frozen in February 1944 during waiting for train to the west while escaping from coming Russian army and
approaching war’s front nowadays covered with bushes and grass on the opposite
side of our street where we are going to lit candles tomorrow. Although the sun
has appeared it’s still a poor 3 centigrades and pretty cold so decides to stay
home and continue writing.
The 1st of November – silence, nobody walks
in the street. Sunny morning lights frosty white roofs and cars that remain in
the yard car park under yellow and red autumn trees as their drivers are still
sleeping or decided to go to a cemetery on a tram to avoid traffic jams and far
circles around these areas protected by the police because of thousands
people’s crowds. On TV quite interesting although a bit sorrowful programmes
about famous world’s, European or Polish cemetaries or interviews with wives or
families of eminent people who died last year. The toplas tree completely lost
its leaved during last night because of frost so I can see peoples in the
opposite block of flats getting ready their breakfasts in pijamas krzątać się [to pronounce: kshontatsh shyem], go around] in the
kitchens as yesterday they were cleaning
windows with ceremonny probably because families coming today for a visit.