Krzysztof Jaxa-Rożen

“They dropped bombs all over the place. It changes your outlook and what you value in life. When you see a whole city dying, ruined. For instance, we had beautiful pictures, a piano - in short, it was a house of people who had done well for themselves. My father was an officer, and in Poland an officer was Someone. Especially the higher ranks. When you see all that go to ashes, you reckon, what’s the point in having things, owning thins... [Q: So your house burnt down as well?] Yes, they raised our house. When everything calmed down, we went to have a look, and there was nothing to be found there. It was all in ashes. The family silver, it was all lost. I thought, we had it, it was nice, but there’s nothing of it now. So if you own something, you shouldn’t brag about it too much because you might lose all of it. One way or another.”

“Martial law did pose a certain limitation because, say, when we wanted to go from Wrocław to my parents, to Nemodlin, we had to report to the police and obtain a travel permit to go there. Movement was limited among the population, and they checked who went where and when.”

“Czechoslovak Communism was harsher, I’d say. It persecuted people on a larger scale than in Poland. There were problems in Poland as well, of course, especially in the armed forces, but the things that went on in Czechoslovakia, that was unparalleled in the Communist bloc. Say, I know that the Czechoslovak pilots who came home as victors together with the Poles from Great Britain, they had to sit in prison with German murderers or slave away in the mines; they were targeted for disposal. That’s how it was said, MAFDO: man for disposal [an approximation of the Czech ‘mukl’, an acronym meaning ‘man designated for disposal’ - trans.]. So a lot of them died there.”

“When the armies invaded, I wrote the Polish ambassador a letter that I can’t work at an institute that represents an aggressive state. That I had a certain historical legacy, and so not to embarrass my ancestors, I was handing in my resignation. That got me into even greater troubles, because suddenly I was a traitor from the Polish side and also a traitor from the Czech side. So I was in a kind of a double pincer. But I had to look into the mirror to see my face, which is the face of a decent person.”