Jacek Kuroń - My father moves to Lwów (3/150) скачать в хорошем качестве

Jacek Kuroń - My father moves to Lwów (3/150)

To listen to more of Jacek Kuroń’s stories, go to the playlist:    • Jacek Kuroń (Social activist)   Polish activist Jacek Kuroń (1934-2004) helped to transform the political landscape of Poland. He was expelled from the communist party, arrested and incarcerated. He was also instrumental in setting up Workers' Defence Committee (KOR) and became a Minister of Labour and Social Policy. [Listener: Jacek Petrycki, Marcel Łoziński; date recorded: 1987] TRANSCRIPT: The story of how my father came to be in Lwów is also very funny. He was, and this is a story which links in with Solidarność, namely, I used to travel to the coalmines in Silesia, in Zagłębie, to hold meetings with the coalminers about free Saturdays. The point was for them to work eight free Saturdays as a gift to the nation, Solidarność had called for these eight free Saturdays and so the mining commission was going to decide but first, we needed to talk with the miners so that the whole crew would be in agreement. All of us, all of the Solidarność bosses travelled to these places. Wałęsa went, Lis went and so did others including me. So I arrived at the Zawadzki coalmine in Sosnowiec and I realised that it reminded me of something. I asked the director what was the name of this coalmine before the war. He says, 'Reden'. And is there a shaft here called Paris? There is. So then we had the meeting, it was a huge rally held in one of the rooms they called a dividing room, where part of the team went down so those who were going down to the pits came in dressed and wearing their lamps, you know how, and then the others came up. So that's when the two shifts met and I spoke to them both and there was a bit of a barney, a discussion, they wanted to beat me up in that Reden. And there were questions. Some guy lept up, he must have been a Party member, and says to me, 'Perhaps you could tell us something about your parents, about what they did in life'. I don't know, he probably thought I was Michnik. So I said to him, 'Yes, I'll gladly tell you. Before the war, in '23-'24, my daddy worked in this Reden coalmine in the Paris shaft where he was the assistant to the engineer'. It was in this Paris coalmine after '20, because my daddy had been a volunteer and when he was 15 years old, he'd sent his friend in to take his place while he volunteered to go and fight on the front in '20. He left for the front with a copy of 'The Trilogy' in his knapsack, and he was volunteered to be part of the execution squad at the Citadel in Żolibórz. He executed deserters right opposite our house. I think this scarred him for life. The things that he told me about '20, the things my daddy said about '20 is 'Babel' except from the other side. After all, 'Babel' was his favourite, one of his three favourite books, 'The Good Soldier Svejk' being another and 'Pan Tadeusz' being the third. He read these three books over and over. So you can get quite a good picture of my daddy from these three books. I'll say more about that in a moment. Let's go back to that pit, because I haven't lost anything, let's go back to that pit, Paris, where my daddy's working. When he returned from the war, he began to work as the engineer's assistant before which he took his graduation exams and then went to work there. One of the machines broke down and an expert came over from France to fix it because the owners were Frenchmen and they wouldn't allow any Pole to touch the machines. He took it apart, put it together, took it apart, put it together again. My father said, 'I blew into one of the pipes and saw that it was blocked'. There was grease inside and it had blocked the pipe. So then he said, 'What if I fix this machine?' And that's what he did. He pushed through the grease, saying nothing, just told them to leave him on his own, pushed through the grease, warmed it up, put everything back together and they gave him 2000 złoties and a grant to study in the Lwów polytechnic. So daddy went to Lwów where he seduced my mother and that's how I came to be born.