In its match against Sweden yesterday, Poland fell behind in the 81st second. It then went down 2-0, but its players did not give up. With 10 minutes to play, the star striker Robert Lewandowski tied the score with his second goal of the match. Unfortunately, Sweden scored a third time. From the Warsaw Uprising to Euro 2020, the national motto should be “Heroic in Defeat.”
I took Ayad Akhtar’s Homeland Elegies to read in the hospital, a bad choice, I discovered: While experiencing great pain it is hard to muster up sympathy for someone else’s suffering.
Back home I’ve been reading only things that make me feel better (the one exception being the Sunday New York Times). Yesterday I plucked from my shelves (in the Polish section) Gary Gildner’s The Warsaw Sparks. The author was a Fulbright professor in Warsaw in the late ’80s where, in addition to teaching English, he coached a makeshift baseball team. Halfway through the book Stan Musial, paying a visit to his ancestral homeland, meets the team. Twenty pages later, Gildner has a meeting in Gdansk with Lech Walesa. There are not many books in which those two men both make appearances.
Today is the 40th anniversary of the founding of Solidarity, a development that marked the beginning of the end of communism in Eastern Europe.
My friend Marek saw yesterday’s post and sent me a YouTube video from the Krakow cabaret where Ewa Demarczyk sang in her early years. It contained great archival footage – not just of Demarczyk, but of dances and costumed parties with the youth and le tout-monde of Krakow – and watching I thought what a revelation it would be for Americans who grew up during the Cold War, with a vision of life behind the Iron Curtain as unremittingly bleak, and what a revelation it is today, not just during the pandemic, but in the age of social media, with its scenes of young people having absolute fun.
The world lost one of its great singers this weekend: Ewa Demarczyk. Though she was sometimes called “the Edith Piaf of Poland,” I thought of her more in the mold of Jacques Brel, an impression that was only strengthened the one time I saw her perform live, at the Town Hall in Manhattan. Unlike Brel, she sang the verses of various poets – Julian Tuwim, Osip Mandelstam – but she had the same urgency, the same ability to move from a soft and delicate lullaby-like cadence to a fiery passion that sometimes sounded almost martial. She stopped performing not long after I saw her, and a few years ago, buying one of her CDs in Krakow, her hometown, I was told by the shop assistant that she had become a recluse, and didn’t want her records to be sold any longer. Happily, her voice, and her genius, live on in them.
This week marks the 75th anniversary of the start of the Warsaw Uprising, which began on August 1, 1944 and continued for two months. The “battle for Warsaw,” is it was known at the time, was a desperate attempt by Poles to free their capital from Nazi occupation, and during its course thousands of soldiers and civilians were killed, many of them young people. At the uprising’s conclusion, 85% of the city lay in ruins. Some people question the Home Army’s decision to take on the Germans – though it was believed at the time that help would come from outside – but nobody questions the bravery of the participants. The lack of attention this anniversary is receiving in the West is indicative not only of Eastern Europe’s perennially low profile here, but also, perhaps, a lingering sense of shame.