Simple Living with Wanda Urbanska

Wanda's Diary Entries

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

My awakening to the rich cultural life here in Warsaw officially started this week — on Monday, to be precise, when I had lunch with two friends at the Cafe Blikle near Plac Wilsona. Cafe Blikle is a Warsaw institution, a restaurant and coffee shop that’s been around since 1869, serving such Polish specialties as duck, salmon and potato pancakes. But it was not so much the nostalgic, ’30s-style atmosphere of the place that brought me to life as it was engaging with young Poles from abroad, who are here on their own volition, engaging in the nation’s Renaissance.

Eric Bednarski, a talented, Polish-Canadian filmmaker in his early 30s, is at work on a film about the Communist-era neon signs that are rapidly disappearing from the city. (In the fall of 1956, when communism started loosening its vice grip on the country for the first time since the War, then-President Gomulka promoted the installation of Western-style neon signs in an attempt to brighten the otherwise drab city. These signs didn’t advertise any brand, but only generics: “Flowers.” “Library.” “Dancing.” They belonged to no one, and to everyone. Since the collapse of communism in 1989, these signs have been coming down. Though almost no one sentimentalizes those dark days of Soviet domination, still these signs represent a piece of the past, a part of history. Eric wants to capture them before they completely disappear.)

Our other lunch companion was Katherine Cioch, a beautiful, ambitious Polish-American from Chicago, who is here on a Fulbright fellowship studying human trafficking. Katherine passionately described the instrumental work she’s doing to document the methodology of the non-profit for which she’s working. Her heart has reached out to the people (mostly women) who are kidnapped and enslaved — primarily in brothels, but also sometimes as agricultural and factory workers. Her goal is to document the non-profit’s work so it can be replicable in countries where the problem is great, such as the Ukraine, Belarus and elsewhere.

Last night, I had the privilege of attending the premier of a Polish Television documentary, “Historia Kowalskich,” about a true incident from World War II in which a large family named Kowalski was massacred for hiding Jews. One boy in the family was spared death, as he was gone for the day searching for work. Interviews from this surviving member of the family, and his descendants, were interspersed with re-created footage of the terrible time.

After the screening, Pani Malgosia and I feasted on the ample spread of sushi and other glorious finger food, a spread that was Hollywood-worthy. While there, I met Carol, a young woman from Australia, who had come to Poland for the first time. At the age of 20, Carol had just met her first cousins in Krakow and was heading north to meet her grandmother, who is in a nursing home in Ostrow Wielkopolski, suffering from Alzheimer’s. Carol is a member of the Polish diaspora — one of millions of people of Polish extraction who are scattered around the world. A tremendous yearning among them — among us — exists to travel to the motherland, to see this proud, mythic and tragic land for ourselves. And what a lovely moment to be here, as Poland rebuilds itself yet again — this time, we hope and pray, forever.