As I was leaving Poland in October 1972, I knew it was for a long “trip”.
I think my family also knew although, to avoid pain we had never discussed it.
Communist Poland of those days was offering dull prospects for young people and the dissatisfaction was widespread. That was some years after March students’ manifestations and invasion of Dubcek’s Czechoslovakia in 1968 and many years before KOR-Solidarnosc movement and John-Paul II.
I had graduated from the Warsaw Polytechnics two years earlier and had been working for a state owned company in Warsaw while still living with my parents.
In Paris, I stayed with family’s friends who offered me shelter.
I started looking for a job but as soon as a company was willing to employ me, I crashed against the immigration laws and bureaucracy.
After four months of vain efforts, of many hours spent in police immigration lines and interviews it became clear that France was not willing to accept me.
Disappointed, despite support from friends, I was about to decide for a different destination, Australia or Canada when unexpectedly one employer, using his personal relations, obtained a work permit for me. Then I acted unfair and untrue with him and used the work permit for a job which suited me better, with a different company. I apologize to you, friend.
I could envisage life in France now and was planning to marry the daughter of my friends whom I had known for some years and who was a support to me during tough months.
Few months after I started my job, a routine health scan showed that I had tuberculosis and I was sent to the Alps to the Sancellemoz cure house.
The illness is so discouraging when you are young and need all your energy to build your life. Some of the antibiotics I was treated with were really pulling me down to an abyss.
I wanted to go home.
In those days, a visit of friends was a comfort I remembered long after.
Some months later I was cured and was able to resume my job.
We married one year later and rented an apartment at Montmartre.
It was a very happy September 1977 day when our daughter was born. Our son was born ten years later.
