I also remember from my youth such tales as the same of Oskar Kokoshka as follows: “We made the endless journey to the Eastern Front in cattle trucks which also transported the horses. When we left Hungary, girls in colourful costumes brought us Tokay wine and cheered us; I lifted one girl on to my saddle. How proud I was to be on horseback! People in Galicia, the Austrian part of Poland, threw flowers and rejoiced in our coming; we were welcomed like liberators. I had done all my examinations, but did not understand much about tactics, and I always volunteered to ride the advance patrol, with an experienced sergeant. So although I was an officer, my sergeant was in command of the patrol. At the beginning, we were not wearing field-grey. Our uniforms, red, blue and white, stood out only too well, and as I rode out, I felt spied upon by an unseen enemy in the dense, dark foliage of the forests. The first dead that I encountered were young comrades-in-arms of my own, men with whom, only a few nights earlier, I had been sitting round the camp-fire in those Ukrainian forests, playing cards and joking. Not much more than boys they were, squatting there on the moss in their bright-coloured trousers, a group of them round a tree trunk. From a branch a few paces further on a cap dangled, and on the next tree a dragoon’s fur-lined blue cloak. He who had worn these things himself, hung naked, head downward, from a third tree. There was something stirring at the edge of the forest. Dismount! Lead horses! Our line was joined by volunteers, and we beat forward into the bushes as if we were going to shoot pheasants. The Russians had lured us into a trap. I had actually set eyes on the Russian machine-gun before I felt a dull blow on my temple. I only returned to my senses when enemy stretcher-bearers tipped me off their field-stretcher as a useless burden, beside a Russian with his belly torn open and an incredible mass of intestines oozing out. The stench was so frightful that I vomited, after which I regained full consciousness. What horrified me most was that I couldn’t scream. I couldn’t utter any sound at all, and that was far worse than suddenly seeing a man standing over me. I opened my eyes wide, which hurt, because they were all sticky, but I had to see what he was going to do to me. Actually all I could see of him was his head and shoulders, but that was enough: he was in Russian uniform, and hence my enemy. I watched him so long that I thought I should have to wait all eternity while he stood in the moonlight setting his glittering bayonet at my breast. In my right hand, the one that wasn’t paralyzed, I could feel my revolver, strapped to my wrist. The revolver was aimed straight at the man’s breast. The man couldn’t see that, because as he bent over me he was in his own shadow. My finger pressed the cock. I managed to do it lightly, and only I heard it, but the sound went right through me. In accordance with regulations, there was a bullet in the chamber. Then his bayonet pierced my jacket and I began sweating with pain. Now the point was beginning to pierce the skin, was searing into the flesh. My ribs were resisting, expanding, I couldn’t breathe. My capacity for endurance was failing. It was unbearable. And still I went on telling myself, as I grew weaker and weaker: “Just a second more! This ordinary Russian is only obeying orders.” Then suddenly I felt quite light and a wave of happiness – never since then in all my life have I felt so physically – a sense of well-being positively flung me upward. I was buoyed up on the hot stream of blood from my lungs that I was coming out of my mouth and nostrils and ears. I was floating in mid-air. So this was all there was to dying? I couldn’t help laughing in the man’s face before I breathed my last. And the ordeal was over. All I took with me to the other side was the sight of his astonished eyes (as Kokoschka fired his gun). The enemy ran away, leaving his weapon sticking in my body. What happened to me then I did not know. There are gaps in my memory. It seems that one, two, or more days later they lifted me into a railway wagon, and there was a Russian conscript who had lost both his feet who kept trying to push a withered apple into my mouth – but even a surgeon couldn’t have opened it, my face was so swollen.”(resp. Oskar Kokoschka, My life).

There are the dates from my life: -One family wants take me for an education (1963); -Joseph to wit mother’s brother death in 1967 year when at school for children which I heard from my mother about; -Lucy Wartak to wit my aunt’s for the future a visitation in my house near the church (1965); -the meeting with the professor Joseph Mikolajtis (1976-1980); -the watching in the chapel of St. Joseph near the mountain of Jasna Góra in Czestochowa “the defense of Jasna Góra during the Swedes’deluge”; -my father’s death in the age of 79 (in Spring 1978 year); -conclave with the pope John-Paul II (on October 16 th 1978)
-the friendship with the professor Joseph Tischner (October 1980 till June 2000); -the primary mass at Ząbkowice (on May 25 th 1986 year)
-the meeting with “Mocorongo” to wit the priest Thaddeus P. from Barasilian Amazon at Konopiska (on May name’s day 08 th 1988 year)
-Adalbert to wit an uncle death in the age of 76 (on November 02 th 1989 year); -the stay at my mother’s house in Dąbrowa Górnicza (1995-2004)
-a watching the film about the sinking of the Titanic( 1997); -the watching on the television the landing of a space-craft “Pathfinder” on Mars (in July 1997)
-St Silvester’s night at house on the street “Związku Orła Białego”(on December 31 th 1997); -the tower’s roofing at my house (on October 31th 2000)
-the mother’s house burn’s down (on December 05 th 2001); -the meeting with “Michelangelo”-to wit a priest Richard G.(on February 05th 2002 year till countermanded); -my mother’s death at Olkusz in the age of 86 (on May 15th 2005 year); -Parish-priest George Kuchcinski’s death in the age of 63( on July 30th 2007); -George Wartak to wit my uncle’s death in Zielona Góra in the age of 73 (on September 14th 2007)…
The periods of my life: 1. the maternal school (1961-67); 2. the eleven years in the near of the church with the primary school (1967-1975); 3. the ten years in the Seminary (1976-1986); 4. the nine years on the perishes (1986-1995) the appearance of the Sorcerer; 5. the nine years on the estate (1995-2004); 6. the years in Olsztyn (since 2002 till today) Since 2005 year I give the voyage abroad, it is a course on the foreign voyages as follow:
1. Vienna, Nice (1992); 2. Brussels, Louvain la Neuve (1992); 3. Rome, an audience with the pope J.-P.II (June 16 th 1995); 4. Paris (Mars 2000)
5. Ukraine (June 21 th 2002); 6. Rome, Castel Gandolfo ( July 20 th 2003); 7. Rome (a funeral of the pope J.-P.II (on April 8 th 2005)
8. Paris, London (July 2005); 9. Rome (September 26 th 2006); 10. Ryga, Tallin, Sankt Petersbourg, Aguona, Vilnius (June 2007)
11. Sinai(Egipt), Petra, Amman (Jordan), Israel (Jerusalem, August 2007); 12. Paris (a week in January 2008); 13. Rome, San Giovanni Rotondo (on May 28 th 2008); 14. Mexico city (January 2009), We have see there the film “A naked mind”; 15. Rome (the third audience with the pope Benedict XVI) San Giovanni Rotondo (in April 27 th 2009); 16. Edinburgh (Scotland, May 2009)…I have watched the film “A rose’s name” there; 17. Krapanj (Croatia, August 2009)…
So, I recently have made a visit to a country of Medjugorie…I still had been met professor Sebastian Ch. from India. I found him just returned from some art congress in Lodz. His conversation would often pass out of my comprehension, or indeed I think of any man’s, into a labyrinth of abstraction and subtilty, and then suddenly return with some verbal conceit or turn of wit. The mind is known to attain, in certain conditions of trance, a quickness so extraordinary that we are compelled at times to imagine a condition of unendurable intellectual intensity, from which we are saved by the merciful stupidity of the body. But now I was speaking to him and he invite me to India. It is my next future. What else, it is one of the great troubles of life that we cannot have any unmixed emotions. There is always something in our enemy that we like, and something in our sweetheart that we dislike. It is this entanglement of moods which makes us old, and puckers our brows and deepens the furrows about our truthful eyes. Reverend director, my last friend, are you feeling better now? Where were you anyway? You didn’t tell anybody where you were? And now you’re not going to tell me what happened in your life? I am not sure how to continue, what subject to broach or how to broach it. But I thought to write a note about if you could do me a small favour. I want to visit your country with you. I am available for interview in the magazine. I want also to be in the program of the television. I look forward to hearing from you. I always would like to speak to you.

Yours faithfully
fr Stanisław Barszczak
This is my official name:
Father mgr lic. Stanisław Barszczak
street Katedralna 16/20 ; 42-200 Częstochowa (a stable stay)
Or street Świętej Puszczy 6 (saint wilderness 6)
42-256 Olsztyn near Częstochowa
Tel. (034) 324-50-98; 669-945-423;
Centre of Meeting and Dialogue of the Young People, Poland
Mail: s.barszczak@wp.pl

In my life I also knew the priest Thadeus P. For he has been abroad then now I repeat another history. I may I quote W. Soyinka: “I saw nothing to remark in it at all; it was the most natural thing in the world to bring a friend home at his favourite meal-time. So Osiki became an inseparable companion and a regular feature of the house,… Finally, Osiki lost patience. He would usually wait for me at home even while Tinu had her own food. On this day however, being perhaps more hungry than usual, Osiki decided not to wait. Afterwards he tried to explain that he had only meant to eat half of the food but had been unable to stop himself. I returned home to encounter empty dishes and was just in time to see Osiki disappearing behind the croton bush in the backyard, meaning no doubt to escape through the rear gate…Finally, I stopped. I no longer saw Osiki…The house was still and quiet when I woke up…The house was still and quiet when I woke up. One moment there had been the noise, the shouts and laughter and the bumpy ride of the see-saw, now silence and semi-darkness and the familiar walls of mother’s bedroom. Despite mishaps, I reflected that there was something to be said for birthdays and began to look forward to mine. My only worry now was whether I would have recovered sufficiently to go to school and invite all my friends. Sending Tinu seemed a risky business, she might choose to invite all her friends and pack my birthday with girls I hardly even knew or played with. Then there was another worry. I had noticed that some of the pupils had been kept back in my earlier class and were still going through the same lessons as we had all learnt during my first year in school. I developed a fear that if I remained too long at home, I would also be sent back to join them. When I thought again of all the blood I had lost, it seemed to me that I might actually be bed-ridden for the rest of the year. Everything depended on whether or not the blood on my dansiki had been saved up and restored to my head. I raised it now and turned towards the mirror; it was difficult to tell because of the heavy bandage but, I felt quite certain that my head had not shrunk to any alarming degree…he bedroom door opened and mother peeped in. Seeing me awake she entered, and was followed in by father. When I asked for Osiki, she gave me a peculiar look and turned to say something to father. I was not too sure, but it sounded as if she wanted father to tell Osiki that killing me was not going to guarantee him my share of iyan. I studied their faces intently as they asked me how I felt, if I had a headache or a fever and if I would like some tea. Neither would touch on the crucial question, so finally I decided to put an end to my suspense. I asked them what they had done with my dansiki.”

There are still my friends at Ząbkowice a lot. I mention them always, but not at all. Sorry. But I remember all them still enough. For two years my fellow died, his name Adam T. I remember his words: “What sort of tone? Adam asked with a scowl”. And Tomas Mann said: “Hans Cane and Tonio Adams are a young Polish teenagers. Hans is a sedate, sensible, correct young man, appreciative of good living and before everything else is ambitious to do something, ambitious of power. About to enter a ecclesiastical firm, Hans goes to make a three-week visit at the parish Olsztyn, where his cousin is a associational priest. There, he learns that he himself has contracted illness of the spirit, and he spends seven years there. But schoolboy Tonio Adams discovers that he deeply admires, indeed loves, his classmate Hans Cane. The boys are physical and intellectual opposites. Hans is handsome with dark eyes, straw-colored hair, broad shoulders, and narrow hips, while Tonio has the brown hair, blue eyes. Hans’s walk is strong and athletic, Tonio’s idle and uneven. It hurts Tonio that Hans responds to his obvious admiration with easygoing indifference. When Hans is late for their after-school walk and finally appears with other…” So, my fellow from a youth, his name Janusz R. with his family is very often as a good friend at Olsztyn now. In my life I also met Mrs Renata Wisniewska with her husband Antoni, which years before she had been thrown from his horse while hunting and broken her arm and, because it had been badly set, suffered great pain for along time…They live close to my mother’s house at Ząbkowice. Once Tomas Mann wrote: “Rosalie von Tümmler, a widowed upper-class socialite of fifty who has settled in the city of Düsseldorf following her husband Robert’s “heroic” death in a car accident while serving in World War I. She and her two children, Anna and Eduard, live quietly and modestly together. She is a child of nature, a likable, happy, thoughtful, and slightly too chatty woman. She is a good friend of her daughter, Anna, who is unmarried….Torre di Venere is a bustling but faintly decaying resort village on the Tyrrhenian Sea. It shares fine white sands and high pine groves with other beachside towns along the way. By the middle of August, it is awash in humanity; during the day hordes of sunburned vacationers of all ages, both sexes, and several nationalities converge at the water’s edge. The narrator acknowledges his disappointment with these surroundings, which are no more auspicious than those of other southern Italian retreats. He and his wife are beset by redundant hotel and restaurant.”

Now I come back to one a history. When I lived at Ząbkowice “for a twice time”(1995 year) I knew the family Bozena and Zbigniew Z. from Bielovizna. So, we begin to live in a future serenely composed of the erasures of that history.
I would like to mention here the words of Zigniew Herbert: “The slightly mischievous beaming smile came over his face again. It was the kind of smile that assured anyone in his presence that good fortune was just around the corner for both of you, and that Zbigniew could not imagine being any happier in any other company…His sense of decency was both unstinting and unshakable…A look almost approaching awe came over Bowie’s face then, a look that suggested, sadly enough, that Bowie had never been treated quite as well by anyone in his entire life…Or think of decency in Nazi-occupied Warsaw: What it means is that you never know if the way you treat a friend today may be the last way you treat him at all…he dropped in after class/…./The innocent light of that smile came over his face again. So he wanted to buy a car. Well, I thought to myself,… Zbigniew had turned on the TV, and now sat before it with the rapt and attentive expression of a child on his face…Zbigniew sat in the back seat, answering letters, drawing in his sketch book. Oblivious, absorbed as a child in what he was sketching, his wide face held something both birdlike and very peaceful within it. He seemed happy with Katrina there, and happy with life. When Katrina had the Ford moving fast enough so that I could hear every hose and gasket singing under the hood and the rods beginning to chatter, she would suddenly turn to us, speaking either Polish or French, since she knew no English. It was as if the road no longer held much interest for her. Above forty-five, the whole car shook, but neither of them seemed to notice…They were, after all, Europeans. They lived in history. For Poles of their generation, for a very brief moment, De Gaulle once must have meant a possible future…they had wanted(Katrina and Zbigniew) to stay longer, and the death of something that wild must have seemed to hold, for both of them, wider and larger and more mysterious implications…We promised to write each other, and one night I sat down and wrote a three-page letter to Zbigniew. Then I tore it up. Perhaps some friendships are meant to exist only in a certain place, at a certain time—three people driving casually around L.A. in a blue Ford.”

Once Father Raniero Cantalamessa some notes about suffering in our life said: ”It has been written that the suffering of the innocent “is the rock of atheism.” After Auschwitz, the problem was posed in a still more acute way…if faith is not able to “explain” the suffering, much less is reason. The suffering of the innocent is something too pure and mysterious to try to close it up in one of our poor “explanations.” Jesus from a sign of malediction, he made it an instrument of redemption. Even more: he made it the supreme value, the highest order of greatness in this world. After sin, the true greatness of the human creature is measured by the fact of bearing the least amount of guilt possible and the maximum amount of punishment possible. It is not so much in the one or the other taken separately — that is, in innocence or in suffering — as it is in the co-presence of the two in the same person. This is a type of suffering that brings us closer to God. Only God, in fact, if he suffers, suffers as innocent in an absolute sense. Jesus, however, did not only give a meaning to innocent suffering, he also conferred a new power on it, a mysterious fruitfulness. Look at what flowed from the suffering of Christ: the resurrection and hope for the whole human race. But look also at what happens around us. How much energy and heroism is often brought out in a couple in the acceptance of a handicapped child, bedridden for years! How much unsuspected solidarity surrounds them! How much otherwise unknown capacity to love! The most important thing, however, when we speak of innocent suffering, is not to explain it; it is not to increase it with our actions and our omissions. But neither is it enough not to increase innocent suffering; we must also try to relieve the innocent suffering that exists! Faced with a little girl frozen by the cold, who cries because of hunger pains, a man cried out in his heart one day to God: “Oh, God, where are you? Why don’t you do something for that innocent girl?” And God answered him: “I certainly have done something for her: I made you!” I have desired, like every artist, to create a little world out of the beautiful, pleasant, and significant things of this marred and clumsy world, and to show in a vision something of the face of that land to any of my own people who would look where I bid them…I also knows missis Ivone W. with her family. On my first parish she was as a young girl in the ecclesiactical movement titled “Oasis”. So, she has built her dwelling far from the desperate field where men hang out their garments upon forked boughs to be banners of battle. O beloved daughter of Hope and Memory, be with me for ever.

On December 05th 2001 I burnt down…There was a fire in my house…There was something like a disgrace in my life. Now I may quote J. M. Cotzee: ”Nothing could be further from my thoughts. This has nothing to do with you, David. You want to know why I have not laid a particular charge with the police. I will tell you, as long as you agree not to raise the subject again. The reason is that, as far as I am concerned, what happened to me is a purely private matter. In another time, in another place it might be held to be a public matter. But in this place, at this time, it is not. It is my business, mine alone.’…Vengeance is like a fire. The more it devours, the hungrier it gets.’…’I don’t agree. I don’t agree with what you are doing. Do you think that by meekly accepting what happened to you, you can set yourself apart from farmers like Ettinger? Do you think what happened here was an exam: if you come through, you get a diploma and safe conduct into the future, or a sign to paint on the door-lintel that will make the plague pass you by? That is not how vengeance works, Lucy. Vengeance is like a fire. The more it devours, the hungrier it gets.’ ‘Stop it, David! I don’t want to hear this talk of plagues and fires. I am not just trying to save my skin. If that is what you think, you miss the point entirely.’ ‘Then help me. Is it some form of private salvation you are trying to work out? Do you hope you can expiate the crimes of the past by suffering in the present?’ ‘No. You keep misreading me. Guilt and salvation are abstractions. I don’t act in terms of abstractions. Until you make an effort to see that, I can’t help you.”

I also remember from my youth such tales as the same of Oskar Kokoshka as follows:

When I was eleven years old my friends from the class had been in my room to see the new radio “Ballada”. As I mentioned I love a taunt Lucy Wartak. She lived at Ząbkowice, then in Szczecin in the past, now in Rzepin.. My second mother Lucy is wonderful. “Even back in the period when I was utterly her thrall (she opened all the doors of the intellect for me, and I followed her, blind and enthusiastic, I nevertheless noticed this contradiction, which tormented and bewildered me, and in countless conversations during that time of my adolescence I discussed the matter with her and reproached her, but it didn’t make the slightest impression. Her pride had found its channels at an early point, moving through them steadfastly. While I was still quite young, that narrow mindedness, which I never understood in her, biased me against any arrogance of background…the collection of the signs, the books”. The big red-brick church from Ząbkowice had pleased me, and I was accustomed, when I saw the wooden balustrade that ran along the slanting edge of the roof, where nobody ever walked or could walk. I remember “the thorn birds” there. Still, however, it had some village characters and helped us to feel not wholly lost in the metropolis…I could not understand where the charm had gone that I had felt, when as a school-boy of twelve or thirteen, I had played among the unfinished houses,… When I was fifteen or sixteen, my teacher had told me about Kochanowski, Mickiewicz, Slovacki, Krasinski and Wyspianski and given me their poetry to read. On my way to the brothers of St John from God to Warsaw I recently had seen an image ‘Chmielowski’s fiancées’ in the gallery, the picture painted when an artist had lost his dramatic power and today not very pleasing to me, and its colour, its people, its romantic architecture had blotted all other pictures away. They were very ignorant men; they read nothing, for nothing mattered but knowing how to paint, being in reaction against a generation that seemed to have wasted its time upon so many things. Its quarrel of a young men is not with the past, but with the present, where its elders are so obviously powerful, and no cause seems lost if it seem to threaten that power…I was unlike others of my generation in one thing only, my thinking is old. But also am I very religious.

At seventeen years old I was already an old-fashioned brass cannon full of shot, and nothing kept me from going off but a doubt as to my capacity to shoot straight…Once a Czestochowa polish professor he was a poet and a writer of poetical plays: this bown man was good scholar and good intellect; and with him I carried on a warm exasperated friendship. Professor Joseph Mikolajtis, I remember encouraging him, with a sense of worship shared, to buy a very “expensive things of literature”. He displayed it without strong liking and would have agreed had there been any to find fault. If he had liked anything strongly he might have been a famous man, for a few years later he was to write, He had I think no peace in himself. He cared nothing for philosophy, nothing for economics, nothing for the policy of nations, for history, as he saw it, was a memory of men who were amusing or exciting to think about. He impressed all who met him and seemed to some a man of genius, but he had not enough ambition to shape his thought, or conviction to give rhythm to his style, and remained always a poor writer…If all these men were a little like becalmed ships, there was certainly one man whose sails were full. As I mentioned I was delighted to read Joseph Conrad, that an emotional man subject to fits of depression, self-doubt and pessimism, disciplined his romantic temperament with an unsparing moral judgment. “Much later, I came to realize that I, translated to the greater dimensions of mankind, am axactly as she was. I have spent the best part of my life figuring out the wiles of man as he appears in the historical cyvilizations. I have examined and analyzed power as ruthlessly as my mother her family’s coinheritance. There is almost nothing bad that I couldn’t say about humans and mankind. And yet my pride in them is so great that there is only one thing I really hate: their enemy, death…”(resp. E. Canetti)

In Cracow I was in the eighties years of the last century.. The few time that I was there friendly with aristocrats were wonderful. All my prejudices of that period are caused by other prejudices…On the parish in Rzasnia have I had the interesting friend. It so happened that /…/“But now it was Monday afternoon and my grandmother was sitting by the potato fire…(There was in Kielczyglow near Pajeczno in Poland) Today her Sunday skirt was one layer closer to her person, while the one that had basked in the warmth of her skin on Sunday swathed her hips in Monday gloom. Whistling with no particular tune in mind, she coaxed the first cooked potato out of the ashes with her hazel branch and pushed it away from the smoldering mound to cool in the breeze. Then she spitted the charred and crusty tuber on a pointed stick and held it close to her mouth; she had stopped whistling and instead pursed her cracked, wind-parched lips to blow the earth and ashes off the potato skin…In blowing, my grandmother closed her eyes. When she thought she had blown enough, she opened first one eye, then the other, bit into the potato with her widely spaced but otherwise perfect front teeth,…Taking advantage of the intermission, my grandmother tried to spit another potato, but missed it…All was as still as on the first day of Creation or the last; a bit of wind hummed in the potato fire, the telegraph poles counted themselves in silence, the chimney of the brickworks stood at attention, and my grandmother smoothed down her uppermost skirt neatly and sensibly over the second one”(G. Grass)I had many friends. For exemple Adam, I knew him from the days of my extreme youth. I could not justify an intervention of this kind in the life of another person. He was sitting on a seat in front of the British Museum feeding pigeons, when a couple of girls sat near and began enticing my pigeons away, laughing and whispering to one another, and he looked straight in front of him, very indignant, and presently went into the Museum without turning my head towards them. Since then he have often wondered if they were pretty or merely very young…He said: now I go to my work at home but I see the faces of the people become daily more corrupt. Then my family. They were uncle’s people. Their movements hung on his lips; they read their thoughts in his eyes; he murmured to them nonchalantly of life and death, and they accepted his words humbly, like gifts of fate. They were all free men, and when speaking to him said, “Your slave.” On his passage voices died out as though he had walked guarded by silence; awed whispers followed him. They called him their war-chief. He was the ruler of “three villages” on a narrow plain; the master of an insignificant foothold on the earth–of a conquered foothold that, shaped like a young moon, lay ignored between the hills and the sea…Uncle Adalbert swept his hand over it. “All mine!”

Then Mr Thadeus Budniak. He seemed about sixty, had a bald head, a grey beard, and a nose, as one of my father’s friends used to say, like an opera glass, and sipped cocoa all the afternoon and evening from an enormous tea cup that must have been designed for him alone, not caring how cold the cocoa grew.
My first meeting with priest Joseph Tischner was an astonishment. I met him in the church of saint Catherine in Cracow. I never before heard a man talking with perfect sentences, as if he had written them all over night with labour and yet all spontaneous. He seemed to be content with charm and humour. It was the prerogative of youth to take sides. Somebody said: ‘Mr. Bernard Shaw had had no enemies but is intensely disliked by all his friends,’…Priest Tischner was a very interesting human being. So I had admired him, it was in my bones. He showed me his early designs and they, though often badly drawn, fulfilled my hopes. I also have met in my life the priest George Kuchciński. Something of Blake he certainly did show, but had in place of Blake’s joyous intellectual energy a Saturnian passion and melancholy. Then I met Archbishop Stanisław N. I always was too loyal to speak my thought. Then I met priest Vladimir Skoczny. We were young men, none as yet established in his own, or in the world’s opinion, and professor Michael Heller was our leader and our confidant.
I remember a night I was arrested by a policeman. I was walking round our park barefooted to keep the flesh under good sort of thing to do—I was carrying my boots in my hand and he thought I was a burglar; and even when I explained and gave him half a crown, he would not let me go till I had promised to put on my boots before I met the next policeman. “While at breakfast with his brother, with whom he shared a room on the third floor of a corner house, he said that his nerves were out of order. Presently he left the table, and got out through the window and on to a stone ledge that ran along the wall under the windowsills. He sidled along the ledge, and turning the corner with it, got in at a different window and returned to the table. ‘My nerves,’ he said,
‘are better than I thought.” I also went to the church of Czestochowa with fellow, his name Darius N. Now he is the director of a house for the priests and families titled “Święta Puszcza” at Olsztyn. Some quarter of an hour’s walk from our house, out on the high road to Czestochowa, lives parish-priest Richard G. He is my very good friend. I very often was visited him. His heavy figure and powerful head, the disordered hair standing upright, his short irregular beard and moustache, his lined and wrinkled face, his eyes steadily fixed upon some object, in complete confidence and self-possession, and yet as in half-broken reverie, all are exactly as I remember him…I remember him, as though he had but one appearance and that seen fully at the first glance and by all alike. He was most human–human, I used to say, like one of Shakespeare’s characters–I disagreed with him about everything, but I admired him beyond words…I wanted the strongest passions, passions that had nothing to do with observation, and metrical forms that seemed old enough to be sung by men half-asleep or riding upon a journey. Once I found him just returned from some art congress in Czestochowa. My first meeting with him was an astonishment. I never before heard a man talking with perfect sentences, as if he had written them all over night with labour and yet all spontaneous, to be content with charm and humour. It was the prerogative of youth to take sides and when Richard said: ”now, you write a lot about the church at Olsztyn.”

Stanisław Barszczak- A Letter to director

Reverend Director,
I was born on January 03th 1961 in Tarnowskie Góry, Silesia, to Polish parents. Edward Chodzicki was then sixty-three, his housewife, Stefania Barszczak, twenty years younger…None of my ancestors was distinguished enough to be remembered, though there is a pleasing legend that Chodzicki was a owner of a dog that had gone from Warsaw to Kalwaria Zebrzydowska to his estate. After my birth my mother settled near Sosnowiec. She brought me up on her own. My mother gave me a magic chest. “My earliest memory is dipped in white. In the middle of our house there is a corridor. On our house to the left of the door a staircase goes down….Across from us, at the same height, a door opens Mr Wladislaus Nanus, the hero of my youth…Ząbkowice on the lower river Trzebyczka, where I found into the world, was the marvelous city for a child. I am giving an inadequate picture of it. Aside from the stable inhabitants there were many Workers, who lived in their own neighborhood. As a child I had no real grasp of this variety, but I never stopped feeling its effects. Some people have stuck in my memory only because they belonged to a particular ethnic group and wore a different costume from the others. Among the servants that we had in our home during the course of eleven years, there was Mrs Irena Ziebstova. My mother’s best friend was Mrs Lucy (Ludwika Solecka). Ząbkowice was as a rail station which made it fairly significant. As a station on the way Warsaw –Vienna, it had attracted people from all over…It would be hard to give full picture of the colorful time of those early years in Ząbkowice, the passions…Anything I subsequently experienced had already happened in Ząbkowice. The first children’s songs I heard were one’s about polish saint Stanislaus from Rostków. I heard a mother’s voice about the news of today…The proudest words one could hear about a priest were: there is a good priest…My mother although a work in the factory she knew became this passionate universality and her haughty pride that she never stopped nourishing. She witnessed all those things too, we often spoke about it. Her mind was penetraiting, her knowledge of human nature had been schooled in the great school of the experiences of her own life.”(resp. E.Canetti) It was with some surprise that I heard my mother remark: You have to trust and to pray more and more…Then she nodded agreement, smiling. ‘How did you know that was the right thing to do?’ I looked at her in some surprise, ‘But everybody knows.’ My holiday have I spent in the town Szczecin, where lived my aunt.. I have been learning there…But once day she wagged her finger at me… I was satisfied. ‘I’ll be ready for school tomorrow’ I announced. I learned to cast spells, although of a childish kind, before I had learned to read and write. I attended primary school in Ząbkowice Będzińskie from 1968 to 1976. I went on the secondary school in Częstochowa from 1976 to 1980, where I succeeded and I pass an exam. In that time there was a law against us and I have to obtain the company of the teacher in order to succeed a examination on the national school in Stettin. In the years 1980-1986 I made a theology in Kraków. I graduated from the Seminary. At the and of that period of my life I became a priest in the cathedral of Częstochowa on 18 May 1986.

At that time I also worked in parishes in Konopiska, Dąbrowa Górnicza, Rząśnia, Sosnowiec, Kraków, Blachownia, Radomsko, Bogdanów and in Częstochowa. Father was a professor in Cracow. My father died in Kalwaria Zebrzydowska in 1978 year, in spring. To become any kind of artist would have been unthinkable. Like everybody else I was intended for the land, though, vaguely, I knew this was not to be…My childhood was a sickly one. It was found that I was suffering from nothing worse than a war of sensations. Once I had been thrown from the stairs, nobody would insure my life. As a result of the ecclesiastical sensations I was sent to school in the Country, and only visited Ząbkowice for brief. When fiftheen I was uprooted from Ząbkowice and put at school at Czestochowa. I started reading and writing early on, my literary efforts from this age of about running chiefly to poetry and plays. In spite of holidays when I was free to visit Kraków, Katowice, Przemyśl, Warszawa, Szczecin, theatres and explore the countryside. I had discovered Hugo and Sienkiewicz in my later teens. When I was rising thirty four I persuaded my mother to let me return to Ząbkowice and at least see whether I could adapt myself to life on the land before going up to Czestochowa. I think to late I developed the habit of writing novels behind a closed door. But I might have done it earlier at my uncle’s in Rzepin, or on the family Krutnik at Międzyrzecze Górne, on the dining table. In fact I enjoyed every minute of my life at school, especially the discovery of French literature. At this period of my life I was in love with the books and the theatre. Each vacation I visited either France or Belgium to improve my languages. I wrote fitfully, bad plays, worse poetry. To my surprise, my bewildered mother, who heard little beyond book-prayer, and to whom I could never say a word if we found ourselves stranded alone in a room, agreed to let me have a small allowance on which to live while trying to write. I had become a writer. My mother died 2005. One form of success had gone . In 2005, submerged by the suburbs reaching mother into the country, we left Ząbkowice, and moved into the centre of Poland at Olsztyn. Looking back, I must also have had an unconscious desire to bring my life full circle by returning to the scenes of my childhood and the Polish people. I have had the best of both worlds. I have tried to celebrate the park of a liberty, which means so much to so many of us. When I was forty four there were travels in Europe, including Rome, Paris, London…Now I see great trees of my age…I live now in a house of our Archdiocese in Olsztyn on the road “święta puszcza 6”. That is my current stay. I like the foot-ball. If I remember, I was very merry child. 1989 the way into the West of Europe is free, this year all borders are open. Now from time to time I study philosophy in a small dwelling in the Centre of Częstochowa. I am interested in English language. As I mentioned I come from a village. With us nearly everyone has its own house with garden, and everyone knows still everyone. I spent my childhood in a little town titled Ząbkowice close of Katowice. I have always contact to my neighbours and friends. It is truth I grew up in the city of Częstochowa. I like the atmosphere of that town with the mountain of Jasna Góra where is a national sactuary of Our Black Lady Virgin Mary Mother of God. The bildings do not put me to trouble. The human beings hope there to find a better life for their Families. I know good a computer. I am interested in languages. Now I work in Częstochowa as a professor. I can do you on each luxury, without all so-called status symbols: fashionable clothes, expensive car and so on.

On what do I see particular importance in the life? Good training, it is the key to success. Thus one can reach everything; without training, nothing at all. Wealth and satisfaction are very important in life. The sense of the life according to my opinion consists having of it many friends around me and me understands. But the life is the sense. What means a happeness? To be content and give to other such a way with me, as I am. I’ m very happy to serve my country . I have many dreams, which I might have to realize. I am sure that I will create it a daily. I believe in God. I am enthusiastically more with the world, but I see in the future. If I did not have to work, then I became all countries to visit. I would become sport moderator. I think we may all things democratically to decide. After the maturity examination I did not know whether I should go to the Seminary or to the other university. Always I wanted to be great. As I sixteen, I had two possibilities. I could be famed or unostentatious either. But I decided on the priesthood. I remember from my childhood I was a large sportsman on. I had commentated the sport fight. I decided, probably I will become chairmen of the Olympic Games. Honestly saying had I many offers of the work in sport. Sometimes I think that it perhaps better to marry at that time and than I will be a good man for the Christians. I’ve been studying contemporary philosophy. I earned the degree of Bachelor of Arts in philosophy. In the year 2006 I went to the University of Silesia in Katowice. I’m going to do my PhD in philosophy in the close future. I wrote the book on philosophy. All my books are entitled: “The scarred wound”; “The fencer of God”(2004). I am writing to apply for a position “The corn-flowers of the freedom”, the book of my author, which I had published on May 19, 2005(550 books). I am currently employed as a priest in Częstochowa, but I am seeking a position which will offer a great challenge and more. So I wrote five books. The next was a book “The Friend loves always”, which I had published on January 11, 2006; next “The cross and its way”(2006); “The Wonderful Month of May”(2008); “One others and he. The philosophy of Paul Ricoeur and Emmanuel Levinas”(2008); “Petra and the holy Land”; “A look-in from my window”(2009).

As for my personal quolifying, I am a magister of theologie (1986) and a licentiate from the philosophie (1991). I am fluent in different languages: english, french, russich, italian, german and latin. I prefer to work, I am willingness to travel. I am a 48 year old. I am currently doing a teacher at college and looking for part-time the interesting people. I have a previous experience in computer. I am looking for a Personal Menager. I feel I would be well qualified to work as well as a guide. As you will see my biography, I have some experience of working with students. Last year I worked with students in Częstochowa. My responsibilitties included an arranging excursions to local interesting places of culture. I really enjoyed the work and would like to hale another apportunity of working from the beginning the new year. In addition my hobbies include plaing chess and reading books. I am available for interview. I look forward to hearing from you. If I mentioned about my books I wrote lot of tales. One from them is titled: “A lay of the proud knight”. There is in Karak, now in Jordania. I visited this city one year ago. In the year 1187 in Jerusalem was the king Baldwin IV. The soldiers carried him in a special seat on poles, because he was a lepper. One day he bent down at the place where Christ’s body was laid after he died on the Cross. In that day the Christians won the battle with the Muslims. But the days that followed they had to withdraw from Karak. In the city Karak is a great castle from the Middle Ages. During the battle between Christian soldiers and Muslims soldiers those lasts they threw people whose heads were encased in wooden cages off the castle walls from the height of 300 metres into a gorge. In my tale I wanted to express my admiration for Jesus. I want this tale and its translation as well to reflect Saint Francis’s of Assisi optimism and grace, because Saint Francis leads us to the joyful and polite faith. He always was and it’s a pleasure to go to Jesus with him. His external life, his deeds reflected his internal life. As I mentioned I wanted to perform the liberty’s duty in my Christian life. I would like to send You some texts to the magazine of you (The place for an Other), also the tale “A song about a proud knight”, “A Cousin of the flying Escadron” or “Chine vase” and go on.

The presence of so many illustrious persons assembled under the patronage of His Excellency, heightens the emotions that I feel at finding myself here and hearing the words of praise that have just been addressed to me…My first thought was of my country…I am proud of the exceptional mark of esteem the “Our Academy” has bestowed on me, but I cannot conceal my surprise from you. Ever since I felt your favour lie upon and almost overwhelm me, I have asked myself how to interpret it. I am happy that in making a Polish author its choice for this year, the ddistinguished Our Academy has thought fit to glorify our Polish literature in particular. On the other hand, I know some great poets among my compatriots, noble and powerful minds, whom your votes might have chosen with much better reason. Why then am I today in this place of honour?…I was still very young when I encountered, in a novel by the English writer Joseph Conrad, this reflection on one of his characters, for exemple captain Mac Gwirr…I know the best of his novels: ”We knew him in those unprotected days when we were content to hold in our hands our lives and our property. None of us, I believe, has any property now, and I hear that many, negligently, have lost their lives/…/The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness/…/I had ambition not only to go farther than any man had ever been before, but as far as it was possible for a man to go/…/All ambitions are lawful except those which climb upward on the miseries or credulities of mankind/…//All a man can betray is his conscience.” At this point I cannot also refrain from referring to the immortal example of Tolstoy, whose books have had a determining influence on my development. The born novelist recognizes himself by his passion to penetrate ever more deeply into the knowledge of man and to lay bare in each of his characters that individual element of his life which makes each being unique…I should like to conclude with a more sombre hypothesis, although I am embarrassed to disturb this festive mood by arousing those painful thoughts that haunt all of us. However, perhaps the Swedish Academy did not hesitate to express a special purpose by drawing the attention of the intellectual world to the author…For I am a son of the West, where the noise of arms does not let our minds rest. Since we have come together today permit me to confess how good it would be to think that my work – the work that has just been honoured in his name – might serve not only the cause of letters, but even the cause of peace. In these months of anxiety in which we are living, when blood is already being shed in two extreme parts of the globe, when practically everywhere in an atmosphere polluted by misery and fanaticism passions are seething around pointed guns, when too many signs are again heralding the return of that languid defeatism, that general consent which alone makes wars possible: at this exceptionally grave moment through which humanity is passing, I wish, without vanity, but with a gnawing disquietude in my heart, that my books about «Youth» may be read and discussed.