RLS at Peak Productivity

From Storyteller: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson, by Leo Damrosch (Yale University Press, 2025), Kindle pp. 447-449:

From 1884 to 1887 Louis produced an astonishing number and range of publications. Most notable were Kidnapped and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. In addition there were The Silverado Squatters, Prince Otto, A Child’s Garden of Verses, other poems collected as Underwoods, stories collected as More New Arabian Nights and as The Merry Men and Other Tales and Fables, the essay collection Memories and Portraits, and a Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin (his Edinburgh mentor had died at this time, at the early age of fifty-two). Prolific as this output was, he enjoyed telling friends that he was completing other works as well, such as Herbert and Henrietta: or The Nemesis of Sentiment, Happy Homes and Hairy Faces, and A Pound of Feathers and a Pound of Lead.

This torrent of writing may seem surprising, since as Rosaline Masson noted in her biography of Louis, he had been almost constantly incapacitated by illness since sailing to America in 1879.

He had been a chronic invalid, submitting to an invalid’s life, at Monterey and San Francisco; in the Highlands—Pitlochry and Braemar; at Davos; at Stobo Manse; at Kingussie; again at Davos; in France—St. Marcel and Hyères—ever seeking for health, never finding it. And now at Bournemouth there awaited him a life of accepted invalidism spent chiefly in the sickroom, suffering constant pain and weakness, often forbidden for days or even weeks to speak aloud, and having to whisper or write on paper all he wanted to say to his wife or his friends. And yet these three years proved a very industrious and successful time in Stevenson’s life.

But it’s equally possible that if he had been more active, he would have written less.

George Eliot once wrote, “To know intense joy without a strong bodily frame, one must have an enthusiastic soul.” Louis didn’t care for Eliot’s novels—he thought they were too preachy—but he did have an enthusiastic soul, and experienced joy even at the darkest times. Although he often declared that action was more important than writing, for him writing was action.

Louis remarked that he was living in an age of transition, and that was a widely used term when traditional assumptions about art were giving way to modernism. Reacting against the dense and earnestly moralizing Victorian novels, writers were now emphasizing individuality of vision and skillfully crafted style. The author of Treasure Island and Kidnapped would never have espoused the slogan “Art for art’s sake,” but the contemporary critic William Archer was right to call him “a modern of the moderns, both in his alert self-consciousness and in the particular artistic ideal which he proposes to himself. He professes himself an artist in words.” Alan Sandison takes this statement as the keynote for his Robert Louis Stevenson and the Appearance of Modernism, showing convincingly that “his experiments, his ceaseless questing among forms, ensured that of all his contemporaries his works show the greatest and most radical diversity.”

Louis did take offense at Archer’s suggestion that he indulged too freely in “aggressive optimism.” Louis wrote to Archer to say that far from devoting his life to manly exercise, as Archer had assumed, he had been a perpetual invalid, and his art was compensation for that. “To have suffered, nay, to suffer, sets a keen edge on what remains of the agreeable. This is a great truth, and has to be learned in the fire. Yours very truly, Robert Louis Stevenson.” Archer quickly made amends, and they became friends.

At this time Louis fell under the spell of Dostoevsky, reading Crime and Punishment in French translation since there was no English version as yet. In a letter to Henley he exclaimed, “Dostoieffsky is of course simply immense—it is not reading a book, it is having a brain fever to read it.”

Taboos in Treasure Island

From Storyteller: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson, by Leo Damrosch (Yale University Press, 2025), Kindle pp. 381-383:

It’s important to note that due to Victorian conventions, much of real life had to be left out of Treasure Island. A few years later Louis composed a sailors’ song purportedly heard in a London pub:

It’s there we trap the lasses
All waiting for the crew;
It’s there we buy the trader’s rum
What bores a seaman through.

The rum got into Treasure Island, the lasses didn’t. Although one wouldn’t expect female characters to play an important role in a quest for treasure, it’s still striking that Jim’s mother is the only woman in the entire book. In later novels, Catriona above all, Louis would try hard to give women a major role, but like other writers at the time he felt seriously inhibited by obligatory prudery. Publishers made their biggest profits by selling to lending libraries, which rejected outright any novel that hinted at sex. Louis told Colvin, “This is a poison bad world for the romancer, this Anglo-Saxon world; I usually get out of it by not having any women in at all.” Even when he did create female characters later on, he took great care to avoid sexually suggestive implications.

Victorian taboos were so strict that Louis’s pirates couldn’t even swear, though he himself, as Lloyd recalled, “could swear vociferously.” While he was writing Treasure Island he complained to Henley, “Buccaneers without oaths—bricks without straw.” He solved the problem by never actually quoting what they said: “With a dreadful oath he stumbled off.” No doubt he appreciated Dickens’s solution in Great Expectations, which was to write “bless” whenever Bill Barley, an old sea dog, would have said “damn”—“Here’s old Bill Barley, bless your eyes. Here’s old Bill Barley on the flat of his back, by the Lord. Lying on the flat of his back, like a drifting old dead flounder, here’s your old Bill Barley, bless your eyes. Ahoy! Bless you.”

The last of the seventeen installments of Treasure Island was published in Young Folks in January 1882, for a total payment of ₤30. For book publication Henley, as de facto agent, negotiated a contract with Cassell for ₤100; that may not sound like much, but it was a lot at the time, equivalent to ₤6,500 today. At that time Henley had an editorial position at Cassell’s, and had thrown the Young Folks installments on the chief editor’s desk with the exclamation, “There is a book for you!” Louis wrote to thank him: “Bravo, Bully Boy! Bravo! You are the Prince of Extortioners. Continue to extortion.” To his parents he described it as “a hundred pounds, all alive, oh! A hundred jingling, tingling, golden, minted quid.” Not only did he get ₤100 from Cassell, but they agreed to a royalty of ₤20 for every thousand copies after the first four thousand.

Polish Gym Terms

To help us endure the long, cold winter here, we joined what appears to be Poland's largest chain of fitness centers. Its name and motto hints at its international connections: Zdrofit: Więcej niż Fitness. The motto translates into 'More than Fitness' and the name itself is a mashup of Zdro[wie] 'health' plus fit[ness].

Much of its equipment is manufactured by Matrix Fitness, a division of Johnson Health Tech Co. Ltd., out of Taichung, Taiwan, with several subsidiaries in Cottage Grove, Wisconsin. The exercise machines are named in either Polish or English, but each comes with a list of instructions in Polish.

For instance, the LAT PULL and PECTORAL FLY machines both show diagrams with Polish labels Faza Początkowa (starting position) and Faza Końcowa (ending position). Some machines mark those positions in English. Underneath, they show human figures with the zaangażowane mięsnie 'engaged muscles' in red. (Compare mięso 'meat' with mięsień 'muscle'.)

Step-by-step instructions for Wykonanie Ćwiczenia 'performing the exercise' follow.

Our branch of the gym at the Galeria Korona shopping mall had a major plumbing disaster about a month ago, so users of the restrooms in the Szatnia Męska (men's locker room) and Szatnia Damska (women's locker room) were invited to make use of the shared łazienka i przysznic dla osób z niepełnosprawnościami 'bathroom and shower for people with not-full-efficiency-Inst' (in instrumental case).

Some Polish Christmas Traditions

My latest compilation from Culture.pl includes notes about some beloved Christmas customs. Here are a couple of them:

Straw Ornaments
Christmas decorations in the 19th and early 20th centuries were deeply inspired by nature. They were crafted from natural materials, with designs reflecting the beauty and importance of the natural world in people’s lives. It is important to note that this was a time when the Polish population was mostly agrarian, relying on agriculture and the success of their crops for their livelihoods. Whether large or small, straw decorations have been, and continue to be, a significant part of Polish Christmas traditions.

Straw ornaments, which symbolised life, were traditionally placed on a Christmas tree or a podłaźniczka (more about this below) throughout Poland, a practice that continues today. The straw was cut in various ways, with each method creating a distinct effect. There are several traditional shapes of straw ornaments, each rich with meaning. The most important is believed to be the star, crafted from flat pressed straw combined with a straw stalk. Round ornaments, symbolising apples, were also popular and represented happiness and love. These could be left plain or painted red, as this colour was traditionally thought to protect against evil. Other common shapes included fish, symbolising Christianity, as well as icicles and angels. A straw chain was also a popular decoration, and the longer the chain, the better, as it was believed that it indicated the length of one’s life, as well as happiness and abundance.

However, straw did not always need to be crafted or beautifully finished to be placed in the home at Christmastime. For example, unthreshed wheat sheaves were often placed in the corner of the room to bring good luck and abundance for the coming year. Similarly, individual ears of grain were scattered on the floor to provide shelter for souls coming from the afterlife.

...

Podłaźniczka

The Christmas tree as we know it today originated in Germany in the 19th century. However, Slavic folk tradition featured a decorated green tree long before. The podłaźniczka, a decorated upper part of an evergreen tree, was hung upside down from the ceiling. But it was more than just a decoration – it held deep spiritual, cultural and even political significance. In 1918, when Poland regained its independence, many Polish households rejected the display of Christmas trees, a tradition of German origin, and instead chose to showcase the podłaźniczka. Maria Gerson-Dąbrowska, a Polish artist and historian, echoed this sentiment in her 1922 household advice magazine Choinka Polska (Polish Christmas Tree). She encouraged readers to ‘get rid of foreign designs and products’, emphasizing that ‘we have an inexhaustible source of aesthetic ideas among our national decorations’.

Spruce, pine or fir were the preferred tree choices for the podłaźniczka because they thrived through the harsh winter and symbolised the awakening of nature. Their needles were also believed to protect the household from illness and evil spirits, ensuring happiness and well-being.

The process of selecting the tree for the podłaźniczka carried its own significance. Tradition held that a man had to visit the forest early in the morning, as the first person to obtain the branches was thought to secure the fastest ripening of grain on their land. But what about the decorations? In the past, just as we do today, people took great care in selecting what they placed in their homes. The podłaźniczka was carefully decorated with specific, meaningful ornaments, many of which were sourced from the forest or the homeowner’s land and which we’ve discussed earlier in this article. Fruits symbolised fertility and abundance, while nuts represented prosperity, strength, wisdom and vitality. Apples stood for vegetation, health and the heavenly tree of knowledge. The branches of the podłaźniczka were lit with candlelight to ward off darkness and evil.

Handmade polychrome ornaments such as paper decorations, wafer świąty and straw chains adorned the evergreen. Some ornaments retained their natural earth colours, while others were painted in bold hues such as red, green and yellow. These colour choices were not accidental, as each carried its symbolic meaning, as did everything else on the podłaźniczka.

Many Polish Christmas traditions and the products associated with them were developed between the mid-19th and the early 20th centuries. During this period, the partitioned nation was eager to construct and preserve a distinct national identity, and adopting or creating traditions became a powerful way to achieve this. Some customs were inspired by ideas from dominant neighbouring countries, such as Germany, and were readily embraced by the Polish people.

Death Camp Workforce Induction, 1942

From The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World, by Jonathan Freedland (HarperCollins, 2022), Kindle pp. 71-72:

The next morning brought a 5 a.m. start for Appell at 6 a.m. As he had already learned at Majdanek, roll call was to count both the living and the dead, the latter category understood also to include the dying. If the figures all tallied, and no one was missing or presumed escaped, then the roll call would be declared over and the corpses could be taken away – each body carried by a single prisoner on his back, with the lifeless head lolling over one of his shoulders. As the pairs staggered off, they looked to Walter like double-headed monsters, prisoner and corpse joined together shuffling slowly towards the mortuary: it was hard to tell which one was dead and which alive, because they were both skin and bone.

It was strange for him and the other new arrivals, lined up in their civilian clothes, watching the inmates march off to hard labour while they were to stay behind. They were left to amble around the camp, around its open areas at any rate, trying to make sense of it. It was only on the following day that they were plunged into the ritual of induction, a re-run of the process Walter had undergone two weeks earlier in Majdanek.

It began with a forced trip to the showers. The Kapos beat them in there with clubs, herding 400 into a room built to contain thirty at most, then beat them back out again, kicking and clubbing them until they were standing naked in the cold. After that, still naked and shivering, came something new. They lined up to be tattooed with their Auschwitz number. Two fellow prisoners acted as clerks, taking down the inmates’ names and places of birth: Walter was entered into the ledger as having been born in Pressburg, the old Austro-Hungarian name for Bratislava. He gave his occupation as ‘locksmith’, adopting the trade of the man who was not quite his stepfather but regularly at his mother’s side. That done, it was time to be marked. Previously, the tattooing process had meant being leaned against a wall by a prisoner who then pressed a special stipple, resembling a stamp with metal numbers, into the left side of the chest, just under the collarbone. Often it was done with such brutality that many deportees fainted. But on this day, Walter was offered a choice. He could be branded on the left or right arm, on the outside or the underside. Walter nominated the top of his left forearm, where the mark would be immediately visible, and so it was done. For the next two and a half years, he would not use his name officially again. From that day on, he was 44070. Before long he would learn the importance of numbers in Auschwitz, how a low, ‘old number’ marked you out as a veteran, putting you closer to the top of the camp hierarchy whose strictures and privileges inmates strictly observed.

Eventually, they were given clothes. Their old ones were taken away, never to be returned and they were handed the familiar uniform made of coarse cloth, patterned with dull grey-blue and white stripes. So Walter would be a human zebra like all the others. Yet as he pulled on the tunic-cum-shirt – his number sewn on to it alongside the standard symbol for Jewish inmates, a star formed from two triangles, one the red of a political prisoner, the other yellow – as well as the trousers, baggy cap and wooden clogs, he took comfort, and not only from the fact that he was no longer exposed to the elements. He also liked that he was now indistinguishable, at a glance at least, from the rest of the pack, that he could, if he worked at it, melt unnoticed into the crowd. To disappear was, in its own way, a kind of escape.

Max Heiliger's Recycled Wealth

From The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World, by Jonathan Freedland (HarperCollins, 2022), Kindle pp. 108-111:

WHAT WALTER SAW in Kanada was proof that Auschwitz had not lost its founding ambition, the one nurtured by Heinrich Himmler. Even if it were now tasked with the business of mass murder, its Nazi proprietors were clearly determined that Auschwitz should continue to serve as an economic hub, that even in its new mission it should turn a profit.

For Kanada was a commercial enterprise. Every item that was not broken was collected, sorted, stored and repackaged for domestic consumption back in the Fatherland. In one month alone, some 824 freight containers were transported by rail from Auschwitz back to the Old Reich, and those were just the ones carrying textiles and leather goods. Walter could see this traffic for himself, how a goods train would pull up every weekday to be loaded with stolen property. It could be high-quality men’s shirts on a Monday, fur coats on a Tuesday, children’s wear on a Wednesday. Nothing would be allowed to go to waste. Even the unusable clothes were sorted, then graded: grade one, grade two, grade three, with that last category, the worst, shipped off to paper factories, where the garments would be stripped back to their basic fibres and recycled. If there was even a drop of value, the Nazis would squeeze it out. Murder and robbery went hand in hand. Some of these goods would be distributed for free to Germans in need, perhaps via the Winterhilfeswerke, the winter relief fund. A mother in Düsseldorf whose husband was off fighting on the eastern front might have her spirits lifted by the arrival of a thick winter coat or new shoes for the children – so long as she did not look too closely at the marks indicating the place where the yellow star had been torn off or think too hard about the children who had worn those shoes before.

Besides the women’s clothing and underwear and children’s wear, racially pure Germans back home were eligible for featherbeds, quilts, woollen blankets, shawls, umbrellas, walking sticks, Thermos flasks, earmuffs, combs, leather belts, pipes and sunglasses, as well as mirrors, suitcases and prams from the abundant supply that had caught Walter’s eye. There were so many prams that just shifting one batch, running into the hundreds, to the freight yard – pushed in the regular Auschwitz fashion, namely in rows of five – took a full hour. Ethnic German settlers in the newly conquered lands might also get a helping hand, in the form of furniture and household items, perhaps pots, pans and utensils. Victims of Allied bombing raids, those who had lost their homes, were also deemed worthy of sharing in the Kanada bounty: they might receive tablecloths or kitchenware. Watches, clocks, pencils, electric razors, scissors, wallets and flashlights: they would be repaired if necessary and despatched to troops on the front line. The fighter pilots of the Luftwaffe were not to miss out: they were given fountain pens that had once inscribed the words and thoughts of Jews.

A few items would find a new owner on the spot. Those SS men who could get away with it, accompanied by their wives, would treat themselves to a trip to Kanada, dipping into the treasure trove for whatever took their fancy, whether it be a smart cigarette case for him or a stylish dress for her. The place was brimming with luxuries for every possible taste. Still, it was not these delights that gave Kanada its economic value or that took Auschwitz closer to its founding goal of becoming a moneymaking venture. A clue to the greater treasure was in that bench of women squeezing toothpaste tubes, looking for jewels or rolls of banknotes. Even beyond the high-end goods, Kanada was awash with precious stones, precious metals and old-fashioned cash.

Walter saw it with his own eyes, often barely concealed, stashed by victims in their luggage. It might be in dollars or English pounds, the hard currency that deportees had acquired after selling their property: their homes or their businesses, sold at giveaway prices in the hurried hours before their expulsion from the countries where their families had lived for generations. There was a team of clearance workers who specialised in finding money and jewels, but everyone in Kanada had the argot: ‘napoleons’ were the gold coins that carried the image of the French emperor, ‘swines’ the ones that bore, even a quarter-century after the Bolshevik revolution, the face of the Russian tsar. There seemed to be cash from every corner of the globe, not only francs and lire, but Cuban pesos, Swedish Croons, Egyptian pounds.

Walter had never seen wealth like it, a colossal fortune tossed note by note and coin by coin into a trunk set aside for the purpose. All the stolen valuables went into that trunk: the gold watches, the diamonds, the rings, as well as the money. By the end of a shift, the case would often be so full that the SS man would be unable to close it. Walter would watch as the Nazi in charge pressed down on the lid with his boot, forcing it to snap shut.

This was big business for the Reich. Every month or so, up to twenty suitcases, bulging with the wealth of the murdered, along with crates crammed with more valuables, would be loaded on to lorries and driven, under armed guard, to SS headquarters in Berlin. The destination was a dedicated account at the Reichsbank, held in the name of a fabulously wealthy – and wholly fictitious – individual: Max Heiliger.

Slovakia in 1939

From The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World, by Jonathan Freedland (HarperCollins, 2022), Kindle pp. 27-29:

Pupils at the gymnasium were given a choice of religious instruction: Catholic, Lutheran, Jewish or none. Walter chose none. On his identity papers, in the space set aside for nationality, he could have entered the word ‘Jewish’ but instead chose ‘Czechoslovak’. At school, he was now learning not only German but High German. (He had struck a deal with an émigré pupil: each boy would give the other advanced lessons in his native tongue.) In the class picture for 1936, his gaze is confident, even cocky. He is staring straight ahead, into the future.

But in the photograph for the academic year 1938–9 there was no sign of fourteen-year-old Walter Rosenberg. Everything had changed, including the shape of the country. After the Munich agreement of 1938, Adolf Hitler and his Hungarian allies had broken off chunks of Czechoslovakia, parceling them out between them and, by the spring of 1939, what was left was sliced up. Slovakia announced itself as an independent republic. In reality it was a creature of the Third Reich, conceived with the blessing and protection of Berlin, which saw in the ruling ultra-nationalist Hlinka, or Slovak People’s Party, a mirror of itself. A day later the Nazis annexed and invaded the remaining Czech lands, marching in to declare a Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, while Hungary seized one last chunk for itself. Once the carve-up was done, the people who lived in what used to be Czechoslovakia were all, to varying degrees, at the mercy of Adolf Hitler.

In Slovakia, the teenage Walter Rosenberg felt the difference immediately. He was told that, no matter the choice he had made for religious studies classes and the word he had put in the ‘nationality’ box on those forms, he met the legal definition of a Jew and was older than thirteen; therefore, his place at the Bratislava high school was no longer available. His education was terminated.

All across the country, Jews like Walter were coming to understand that although the new head of government was a Catholic priest – Father Jozef Tiso – the state religion of the infant republic was Nazism, albeit in a Slovak denomination. The antisemites’ enduring creed held that Jews were not merely unreliable, untrustworthy and irreversibly foreign, but also endowed with almost supernatural powers, allowing them to wield social and economic influence out of all proportion to their numbers. So naturally the authorities in Bratislava moved fast to blame the country’s tiny Jewish community – 89,000 in a population of two and a half million – for the fate that had befallen the nation, including the loss of cherished territory to Hungary. Propaganda posters appeared, pasted on brick walls; one showed a proud young Slovak, clad in the black uniform of the Hlinka Guard, kicking the backside of a hook-nosed, side-curled Jew – the Jew’s purse of coins falling to the ground. In his first radio address as leader of the newly independent republic, Tiso made only one firm policy commitment: ‘to solve the Jewish question’.

Treasure Island is Born at Braemar

From Storyteller: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson, by Leo Damrosch (Yale University Press, 2025), Kindle pp. 357-358:

To amuse themselves during the endless rain, Louis and Lloyd drew a map of an imaginary island and made up stories about it. As Louis remembered, “It was elaborately and (I thought) beautifully coloured; the shape of it took my fancy beyond expression; it contained harbours that pleased me like sonnets; and with the unconsciousness of the predestined, I ticketed my performance Treasure Island.” The tale may have been predestined, but its title wasn’t. Originally he called his story The Sea Cook after Long John Silver, the former pirate who joins the treasure-seeking voyage disguised as a cook. The Sea Cook is almost as unpromising a title as Trimalchio at West Egg, which Fitzgerald originally wanted for his masterpiece The Great Gatsby. It was a publisher who told Louis that Treasure Island would be more effective.

Louis added that the story “seemed to me as original as sin.” There were plenty of melodramatic sea stories in existence, as well as histories of eighteenth-century piracy that he had devoured, but those are forgotten today while Treasure Island is a world classic, translated into scores of languages and reissued in countless editions. It was especially gratifying that the project brought out the adventure-loving romantic in Thomas Stevenson.

I had counted on one boy, I found I had two in my audience. My father caught fire at once with all the romance and childishness of his original nature. His own stories, that every night of his life he put himself to sleep with, dealt perpetually with ships, roadside inns, robbers, old sailors, and commercial travelers before the era of steam. He never finished one of these romances; the lucky man did not require to! But in Treasure Island he recognised something kindred to his own imagination; it was his kind of picturesque; and he not only heard with delight the daily chapter, but set himself actively to collaborate.

Treasure Island is constructed with consummate art, but the best art conceals art. The story is told by Jim Hawkins, recalling his boyhood in a seaside inn kept by his parents in the west of England.

Poland to Manchuria and Back, 1940s

My latest compilation from Culture.pl has a long story about a Polish boy who went to Manchuria and back during the 1940s: Untold WWII Stories: A Boy’s Wartime Journey from Poland to Manchuria & Back. Here are a few excerpts:

Jerzy Sikora’s childhood was a whirlwind of war and exile. His father, a spy, vanished; his mother died, leaving him alone in Manchuria with his young sister. Arrest, hunger and betrayal shadowed his early years until an American soldier plucked him from chaos, setting him on a path back to Poland. But survival was just the beginning – reunion, loss and resilience would define the rest.

...

The story might have begun in 1936, when I was born, but let’s start with 1939, when my parents and I fled east after the war erupted. My mother (1909–1946) and my father (1907–1957) traveled as far as Busk, a town 40 kilometres east of Lviv. It was there that I was baptized, most likely in the Roman Catholic Church of Our Lady of the Rosary and St. Stanislaus. But our time together was short. On 15 September 1939, we were forced to separate from my father. The Polish military gave the order – it must have been in response to the Soviet invasion of Poland from the east. My mother and I suddenly found ourselves trapped in Soviet-occupied territory. Under the cover of darkness, we made a daring crossing of the Bug River, fleeing westward. After a long and arduous journey, we reached Siedlce, where fate intervened. By sheer chance, we encountered my uncle; with him, we made our way back to Warsaw.

...

Then, in early 1940, a Japanese man appeared at our door. Perhaps he was connected to the Japanese Embassy – I will never know for sure. But he carried something that would change everything: a letter from my father. In it, he begged my mother to apply for an official passport from the German occupation authorities to seek permission to leave for Japan. Somehow, money was arranged – perhaps through the Japanese messenger – enough to fund our journey. And so, in the spring of that year, we left Nazi-occupied Poland. Our escape was surreal – Berlin, Rome, Naples. We traveled by train, crossing hostile territory, until finally, we boarded a ship – the Hakozaki Maru. The journey carried us through the Suez Canal, across the Indian Ocean, at last reaching Japan, where we reunited with my father.

Our time in Japan was brief. Before long, we set sail once again, this time bound for Manchuria, eventually arriving in Changchun (then known as Hsinking). We settled in a small, single-story house with a garden, in a neighbourhood inhabited primarily by Japanese families in the northern part of the city. I spent my days playing with the local children – Japanese boys and girls from the neighbourhood. I picked up enough of their language to communicate with them easily. Childhood, even in the shadow of war, had its moments of normalcy.

...

On 29 January 1942, my sister, Anna Elżbieta, was born. At first, I barely registered her presence in my life. It wasn’t until nearly a year later that I truly ‘noticed’ her – when she sat down on our cat, and the cat did nothing. I was stunned. My own relationship with that cat had been nothing but claws and scratches. Whenever I tried to pet it, it defended itself fiercely. And yet, when Anna plopped down on top of it, the cat didn’t protest at all. Life changed again around that time. We moved into a larger, multi-story building, closer to the city centre. My father had an office on the upper floor, a space that was strictly off-limits to me. And yet, of course, that only made it more tempting. I snuck in a few times. Inside, I found kind, polite Japanese adults, but nothing particularly exciting. No grand mysteries, no hidden treasures – just stacks of paper and colourful pencils.

...

One day, I found myself witnessing a remarkable event: the last emperor of China, Puyi, being driven through the city. A convoy of cars made its way through the streets, and what struck me most was not the sight of the emperor himself but the fear that surrounded him. Fifty metres from the road, policemen blocked all movement. No one was allowed to approach. Worse still, we were ordered to turn our backs to the procession. No one was to look directly at him. One man hesitated – perhaps he didn’t obey quickly enough. A policeman slapped him across the face. I managed to sneak a glance. And what did I see? Just a few cars. That was all. And yet, the air was thick with tension, as if a single wrong move could change everything.

...

Not far from where we lived stood a Franciscan convent complex, surrounded by a high, solid wall. It wasn’t just a convent – inside, there was a chapel, a shelter for the poor, a small hospital, a school with a boarding house for girls and even a farm with cows and pigs. In the fall of 1945, I was admitted to the school as an exception – the only boy in an all-girl class.

Once again, I was faced with the challenge of forming letters into words – but this time, in English. I still resisted it, just as I had with Polish. Far more interesting were the mandolin lessons and drawing classes, especially because the drawing teacher was not a nun. She was a young woman, different from the others. I still remember how patient and kind she was, guiding my hand as I struggled to draw a pear. She showed me how to use three colours – yellow, red, and green – to make it look real. Her name was Larysa Ogienko. At the time, I knew little about her. Only later did I learn that she was the daughter of a White Army officer who had fled Russia during the October Revolution. I didn’t know it yet, but she would play a crucial role in my survival in China after I lost my parents.

The end of World War II was not a sudden event for me – it was a slow fading of the world I had known. The Japanese gradually disappeared from our surroundings. My father stopped going to work. I remember him sitting at home, carving wooden clogs. Was he trying to earn money? I’m not sure. Despite the massive changes happening around us, I didn’t sense hostility from the local Chinese. Life seemed to go on. And then, one day, everything changed.

...

It was the fall of 1945. I was playing outside in a courtyard with my friends, completely unaware of what was about to happen. Suddenly, my mother came running. There were tears in her eyes as she hugged me tightly. ‘Your father’s been arrested.’ I didn’t understand. He was often away from home – wasn’t this just another one of those times? The drama of the moment blurred even more the next day, when my father returned – escorted by two Soviet officers in uniform. They weren’t aggressive. They didn’t shout. They were calm, formal. They told me they had brought my father so I could say goodbye. I still didn’t grasp what that meant. At that age, I admired soldiers. Their uniforms, their posture – they seemed powerful, fascinating. I didn’t realize then that I could be seeing my father for the last time.

...

By then, it was warm outside – probably March or April 1946. Anna and I had regained consciousness in the hospital. But we were weak, frail and starving. I couldn’t even stand. The first time I tried to get up, I collapsed. My legs wouldn’t hold me. I could only crawl.

We were given very little food – they said that after typhoid fever, the body couldn’t handle large meals. But hunger doesn’t care about medical explanations. It consumes you. It burns inside you. It’s a feeling you never forget for the rest of your life. And then – something unexpected happened. One day, a visitor arrived at the hospital – Larysa Ogienko, my former drawing teacher. She was around 30 years old, with golden hair. She wasn’t just a friendly face – she had brought food. And more than that – she fed us. I asked about my mother, but she didn’t answer. She didn’t need to. Because what she did next saved our lives. After we were discharged from the hospital, she took us both into her home.

Larysa lived with her mother, whom I would soon call Babuszka [grandmother in Russian, AD]. She was without a doubt the most caring, loving person – and in the near future, she would become our only protector.

...

Then, one day, an American soldier arrived at Larysa’s home. His name was Henry, and he asked me a single question: ‘Would you like to go to Poland?’

The answer was obvious. I would go anywhere – as long as it meant escaping. At that time, a few Americans had arrived in Changchun. The city had briefly been retaken by Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist army, pushing back Mao Zedong’s forces. Henry and others like him were working with UNRRA (the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration) and the International Red Cross, searching for people who wanted to be repatriated from China. Everything happened quickly. Mao’s troops were preparing to encircle the city again, and it was only a matter of time before they stormed back in. Among the few belongings I managed to take with me was my father’s collection of postage stamps, acquired during his time in Manchuria.

In May 1947, we boarded a DC-10 aircraft with Major Henry, departing from Nanking (Nanjing). We spent a few days there, though I learned only later that it was in Nanking that the Polish consul had issued us passports. I still have mine to this day. It was also there, on a beach by the Chinese sea, that I tasted something extraordinary for the first time – an ice-cold Coca-Cola. The next flight took us to Shanghai, and I quickly discovered that early aircraft had a terrifying flaw – whenever they hit thinner air, they would suddenly drop, plummeting before stabilizing again.

The feeling was horrible, but after a few days of travel, we grew attached to Henry. And then – another unexpected separation. In Shanghai, Henry was not allowed to continue with us. Instead, we were placed in the care of another American – Erling Logan. At first, I felt uneasy, even afraid. Henry had been our guardian, our protector – who was this stranger? But the fear didn’t last long. Erling Logan wasn’t just kind and protective – in some ways, he reminded me of my father. Even his age was similar.

We stayed with Erling in a luxurious hotel, a stark contrast to everything I had known. It was blisteringly hot, and to our surprise, taking a hot bath turned out to be the best way to cool down. For the first time in a long while, I felt safe.

...

In June 1947, we boarded the SS Marine Lynx – our final passage out of China. Our cabin housed four people: me, Anna, a German woman, and her young child. Meanwhile, Erling Logan was in charge of the entire transport of about 700 emigrants to Europe. We saw him only occasionally, as he was busy overseeing the journey. The voyage from Shanghai to Naples, Italy, lasted nearly two months, but despite its length, it was anything but boring. The sailors created a small pool for the children, stretching canvas to form a makeshift basin where we could splash and cool off.

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The last leg of our journey took us by train to Warsaw, arriving at the Main Railway Station. From there, we rode in a horse-drawn carriage to Hotel Polonia, where we spent our final night together with Erling. The next morning, on 7 September 1947, we traveled to Anin, to the home of my aunt – my father’s sister. Our return to Poland was even mentioned in the newspaper Wieczór (Evening). And then – it was time to say goodbye to Erling. I was not happy about it. Once again, I felt that I was being handed off like an object, given away to someone I barely knew. I only learned many years later that Erling wanted to adopt us. He had no children of his own and had grown deeply attached to Anna and me. But to make it official, he needed my aunt’s permission. And she refused. At the time, I thought I was saying goodbye to Erling forever. There was no reason to believe our paths would ever cross again. And for years, with no word from him, rumours even surfaced that he had died during the Korean War.

After returning to Poland, I found myself in the home of my extended family. We lived in a modest apartment with my aunt and uncle, Irena and Wacław, along with their four children – Hanna (born 1934), Jan (1936), Tadeusz (born 1945) and Marek (born 1946). Also living with us was Aunt Wilunia (my grandmother’s sister) and her daughter. For a child, adaptation is instinctive. The will to survive is powerful, and at a young age, the mind is still flexible. Within a few weeks, I regained my ability to speak Polish, and soon I began making new friends.

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In early spring of 1954, some family friends in Anin mentioned that they had received a letter from my father. I was stunned.

Why had they not shown us the letter? It seemed impossible that my father could be alive. Then, about a month later, a phone call came from the local post office. I picked up the receiver. And on the other end, I heard my father’s voice. He asked for directions to where we lived, and we arranged to meet at the crossroads near our house.

And just like that, it happened. He walked toward us as we approached from the opposite direction. He was thin, unshaven and wore a quilted jacket and trousers. His entire life’s belongings were packed in a bundle slung over his back. It’s impossible to describe the feeling of that moment. It was so unreal that none of us could fully comprehend it at first. For nearly eight years, my father had no idea whether we were alive. For nearly eight years, we had no idea that he was alive.

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I was fortunate to preserve my father’s handwritten biography, written by him in 1954. From this document, I was able to reconstruct key moments of his life.