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Adam Zagajewski - A week-long exodus by train from Lwów to Gliwice (4/50)

To listen to more of Adam Zagajewski’s stories, go to the playlist: youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVV0r6CmEsFzyCHpawMfzZc5HzhP38Qz7 Adam Zagajewski (b. 1945 in Lwów) is a Polish poet, novelist, translator and essayist. He is considered as one of the leading poets of the Generation of '68 or the Polish New Wave (Polish: Nowa fala) and is one of Poland's most prominent contemporary poets. [Listener: Andrzej Wolski] TRANSCRIPT: There was also the episode of the journey from Lwów to Gliwice which took a week. It was a transport [train] which wasn't nearly as terrifying as those transports we read about which were destined for the concentration camps. Our transport was relatively civilised. From what I've been told, each goods wagon had room enough for two families who were able to bring some of their furniture with them, too. There was a degree of... well, it certainly wasn't comfortable. That train was unmercifully slow because it had to give way to all of the Russian transports which were mainly travelling from Germany to Russia, most probably loaded with countless amounts of looted goods. We were travelling – I say 'we' although we weren't the active party in this exodus – but we were travelling... we left on the very day of my father's name day, 28 October, and arrived on 4 November which was my grandfather's name day, although he wasn't travelling with us then. During the journey, I fell gravely ill. These are, of course, things that I don't know, don't remember, I was four months old at the time. But I've been told that I nearly died, that I had something seriously wrong with my stomach, some kind of food poisoning. Luckily, one of the carriages was a mobile hospital, an indication that it was a well-organised transport that it even had a hospital, and in this mobile hospital there was a doctor from Lwów whom my parents knew well, a paediatrician – Dr Kochanowski. This was my first contact with Kochanowski – he wasn't yet a poet but was a paediatrician; he visited us frequently when I was ill, and I was very often ill as a child. So this is all a mythical time suspended somewhere in my memory. For me, it's important and interesting... I wouldn't say that with every year it becomes more so, let's not get too carried away, I haven't given in to some sort of pedantry of memories, but in my mind it forms a kind of aura around the first few months of my life.