Category Archives: education

by | 5 March 2026 · 3:54 am

Kapuściński Joins the Party, 1953

From Ryszard Kapuscinski: A Life, by Artur Domoslawski (Verso, 2012), Kindle pp. 55-57:

In 1952 Kapuściński writes an application requesting to be ‘admitted as a candidate for the Polish United Worker’s Party’.

It is my greatest need and desire to join the ranks of our beloved Party. This necessity is on a par with my greatest aspiration, which is to serve the cause of our Party with all my strength and my entire being. Throughout my life, ever since I understood to whom I should devote it, I have felt how every victory brings me closer to the Party, and how every defeat or mistake demands that I make an even greater effort not to turn back on the road I have taken – the road to the Party.

Being admitted as a candidate for our Party will be a very great reward and honour for me, and also a very high obligation. I want even more and even better to live the Party life, to work and fight to fulfil the tasks set by the Party for the best Party comrades. I pledge to safeguard the recommendations which Comrade Stalin has vowed to protect and fortify in the name of all ‘people of a special cut’.

My guiding light shall be total dedication to becoming worthy of that title, and to remaining so for the rest of my life.

On the next few pages of his application to join the Party, Kapuściński provides a self-critical report, saying that the young communist in him did not awaken quickly enough: ‘My world outlook was still burdened by remnants of petty bourgeois ideology, there were many things I did not understand, and I did not feel the need to get involved.’

Among his mentors at this time he mentions Wiktor Woroszylski, a young socialist-realist poet and the editor of the culture section of the ZMP newspaper Sztandar Młodych, as well as several other poets and writers, above all Władysław Broniewski. (Someone later tells me that as president of the Young Writers’ Circle affiliated with the Polish Writers’ Union, Kapuściński made sure that the notoriously drunken Broniewski drank a bit less.)

In support of his application, Bronisław Geremek, Kapuściński’s fellow student in the year above, writes him a letter of recommendation: ‘I have known Comrade Ryszard Kapuściński since October 1951 from work within the ZMP organization at our college.’ As well as praising his ‘dedication and devotion, youthful enthusiasm and eagerness, militant attitude’, and also his ‘political sophistication’ and ‘exemplary moral attitude’, Geremek informs the Party of the candidate’s ‘serious mistakes and shortcomings’:

1) failure to understand the role of the Party organization within the faculty, an inappropriate, ill-considered attitude to his Party comrades in Year One,

2) an immature attitude to his studies, continuing from the previous year, which recently Comrade Kapuściński has managed to overcome, as evidenced by his good results in the summer session,

3) a not fully collective style for his work in managing the faculty organization, originating mainly from a lack of confidence in people and in the collective,

4) reluctance to accept criticism, and also too little self-criticism,

5) immaturity of decisions often involving youthful bluster and leftism.

‘That was the lyrical style required for recommending candidates to join the Party,’ explains the famous historian. ‘It wasn’t appropriate to give nothing but praise.’

Despite his critical words, Geremek supports Kapuściński’s request, ‘in the belief that our Party will gain a member worthy of it’.

On 30 June 1952 a meeting of the PZPR executive at the history faculty is held to discuss admitting Kapuściński to the Party. The participants include Bronisław Geremek, Adam Kersten, Jerzy Holzer and a few other activists. The candidate is present too.

Comrade Kersten takes the floor:

‘Comrade Kapuściński shows evidence of a certain failure to appreciate the value of academic studies. For Comrade Kapuściński, the chief measure of an activist is social work.’

Another comrade polemicizes:

‘Comrade Kersten is somewhat overcritical of Comrade Kapuściński’s academic situation. This issue came up in the winter session. Comrade Kapuściński’s attitude to his studies has now changed for the better.’

Comrade Geremek stipulates:

‘Comrade Kapuściński should be cut off from organizational work so that he can put more emphasis on his studies. Comrade Kapuściński does not always know how to work with colleagues who are not committed.’

Comrade Kapuściński defends himself:

‘What has been said in the discussion is fair, but I am sorry it has been limited to academic issues. I did indeed have a non-Party attitude to my studies, and I have not yet fully overcome that attitude.’

Comrade Holzer rushes to Comrade Kapuściński’s rescue.

‘He has done good work on the ZMP Faculty Board. He has a strong emotional attachment to the Party. He is highly enthusiastic and eager to work. He has not entirely overcome the following defects: an insufficiently serious attitude to his studies, not always fully considered decisions, and a not always self-critical approach. Being admitted as a candidate for the Party will help Comrade Kapuściński to overcome these faults.’

From the stenographic record: ‘Comrade Kapuściński was unanimously accepted as a candidate for the PZPR’; he becomes a Party member on 11 April 1953.

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Filed under biography, democracy, education, philosophy, Poland

by | 3 March 2026 · 8:42 am

Pole Useless in China, 1956

From Travels with Herodotus, by Ryszard Kapuscinski (Vintage,  2009), Kindle pp. 61-62, 71-72:

With each passing day I thought of the Great Wall more and more as the Great Metaphor. I was surrounded by people with whom I could not communicate, encircled by a world I could not fathom. I was supposed to write—but about what? The press was exclusively in Chinese, so I understood nothing of it. At first I asked Comrade Li to translate for me, but every article, in his translation, began with the words: “As Chairman Mao teaches us,” or “Following the recommendations of Chairman Mao,” etc., etc. Is that what was actually written? My only link to the outside world was Comrade Li, and he was the most impenetrable barrier of all. To my every request for a meeting, a conversation, a trip, he responded, “I will convey this to the newspaper.” And I would hear nothing more on the matter. Nor could I go out alone, without Comrade Li. But where could I have gone anyway? To see whom? I did not know the city, I knew no one, I had no telephone (only Comrade Li had one).

Above all, I did not know the language. Yes, I did try studying it, right from the start. I attempted to tear my way through the thickets of hieroglyphs and ideograms only to come up against the dead end of each character’s maddening multiplicity of meanings. I had just read somewhere that there exist more than eighty English translations of the Tao Te Ching (the bible of Taoism), all of them competent and reliable—and all utterly different! My legs buckled beneath me. No, I thought to myself, I cannot cope with this, I cannot manage.

…

I returned to Warsaw. The reasons for my bizarre situation in China, my lack of real purpose, my senseless suspension in a vacuum, quickly became clear. The idea of sending me to China arose in the aftermath of two thaws: that of October 1956 in Poland, and in China, that of Chairman Mao’s One Hundred Flowers. Even before I arrived in China, an upheaval was under way in Warsaw and in Peking. The head of the Polish Communist Party, Władyslaw Gomułka, initiated a campaign against the liberals, and Mao Tse-tung was launching the draconian politics of the Great Leap Forward.

Practically speaking, I should have left Peking the day after I arrived. But my newspaper was mum—fearful and fighting for its survival, it had forgotten about me. Or perhaps the editors had my interests in mind—perhaps they reckoned that away in China I would somehow be safe? In any event, I now think that the editors of Chungkuo were being informed by the Chinese embassy in Warsaw that the correspondent of Sztandar Młodych is the envoy of a newspaper hanging by a thread and it is only a matter of time before it goes under the ax. I think, too, that it was traditional Chinese principles of hospitality, the importance the Chinese ascribe to saving face, as well as their highly cultivated politeness, that kept me from being summarily expelled. Instead, they created conditions which they assumed would lead me to guess that the models of cooperation that had been agreed to earlier no longer obtained. And that I would say of my own accord: I am leaving.

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Filed under China, education, language, philosophy, Poland, travel

by | 1 March 2026 · 10:12 pm

Herodotus as a Child?

From Travels with Herodotus, by Ryszard Kapuscinski (Vintage,  2009), Kindle pp. 44-46:

When I immersed myself in various sources, however, I learned that we know little about Herodotus’s life, and that even the few facts we do have are not entirely reliable. For in contrast to Rabindranath Tagore—or, for instance, his contemporary Marcel Proust, both of whom meticulously parsed every detail of their childhoods—Herodotus, like the other great men of this epoch—Socrates, Pericles, Sophocles—tells us next to nothing about his. Was it not customary? Was childhood considered irrelevant? Herodotus says only that he came from Halicarnassus. Halicarnassus lies above a calm bay shaped like an amphitheater, in a beautiful part of the world, where the western shore of Asia meets the Mediterranean Sea. It is a land of sun, warmth, and light, of olive trees and vineyards. One instinctively feels that someone born here must naturally have a good heart, an open mind, a healthy body, a consistently cheerful disposition.

Biographers tend to agree that Herodotus was born between 490 and 480 B.C.E., perhaps in 485. These are greatly important years in the history of world culture. Around 480 B.C.E., Buddha departs for the other world; a year later, in the Lu principality, Confucius dies; Plato will be born fifty years later. Asia is the center of the world; even insofar as the Greeks are concerned, the most creative members of their society—the Ionians—also live in Asia. There is no Europe yet; it exists as myth only, in the name of a beautiful girl, Europa, daughter of the Phoenician king Agenor, whom Zeus, transformed into a white bull, will carry off to Crete to have his way with her.

The parents of Herodotus? His siblings? His house? All of this is in deep shadowland uncertainty. Halicarnassus was a Greek colony on land subject to the Persians, with a non-Greek native population—the Carians. His father was called Lyxes, which is not a Greek name, so perhaps he was a Carian. It was his mother who most probably was Greek. Herodotus was therefore a Greek Carian, an ethnic half-breed. Such people who grow up amid different cultures, as a blend of different bloodlines, have their worldview determined by such concepts as border, distance, difference, diversity. We encounter the widest array of human types among them, from fanatical, fierce sectarians, to passive, apathetic provincials, to open, receptive wanderers—citizens of the world. It depends on how their blood got mixed, what spirits settled in it.

What sort of child is Herodotus? Does he smile at everyone and willingly extend his hand, or does he sulk and hide in the folds of his mother’s garments? Is he an eternal crybaby and whiner, giving his tormented mother at times to sigh: Gods, why did I give birth to such a child! Or is he cheerful, spreading joy all around? Is he obedient and polite, or does he torture everyone with questions: Where does the sun come from? Why is it so high up that no one can reach it? Why does it hide beneath the sea? Isn’t it afraid of drowning?

And in school? With whom does he share a bench? Did they seat him, as punishment, next to some unruly boy? Or, the gods forbid, a girl? Did he learn quickly to write on the clay tablet? Is he often late? Does he squirm during lessons? Does he slip others the answers? Is he a tattletale?

And toys? What did a little Greek living two and a half thousand years ago play with? A scooter carved out of wood? Did he build sand castles at the edge of the sea? Climb trees? Make himself clay birds, fish, and horses, which we can study today in museums?

Which aspects of his childhood will he remember for the rest of his life? For little Rabi, the most exalted moment was the morning prayer at his father’s side. For little Marcel, it was waiting in a dark room for his mother to come and hug him good night. Which experience did little Herodotus anticipate in this way?

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Filed under China, education, Greece, Mediterranean, philosophy, religion, South Asia

by | 1 March 2026 · 8:39 am

Herodotus Awaits Stalin

From Travels with Herodotus, by Ryszard Kapuscinski (Vintage,  2009), Kindle pp. 5-6:

Before those future prophets proclaiming the clash of civilizations, the collision was taking place long ago, twice a week, in the lecture hall where I learned that there once lived a Greek named Herodotus.

I knew nothing as yet of his life, or about the fact that he left us a famous book. We would in any event have been unable to read The Histories, because at that moment its Polish translation was locked away in a closet. In the mid-1940s The Histories had been translated by Professor Seweryn Hammer, who deposited his manuscript in the Czytelnik publishing house. I was unable to ascertain the details because all the documentation disappeared, but it happens that Hammer’s text was sent by the publisher to the typesetter in the fall of 1951. Barring any complications, the book should have appeared in 1952, in time to find its way into our hands while we were still studying ancient history. But that’s not what happened, because the printing was suddenly halted. Who gave the order? Probably the censor, but it’s impossible to know for certain. Suffice it to say that the book finally did not go to press until three years later, at the end of 1954, arriving in the bookstores in 1955.

One can speculate about the delay in the publication of The Histories. It coincides with the period preceding the death of Stalin and the time immediately following it. The Herodotus manuscript arrived at the press just as Western radio stations began speaking of Stalin’s serious illness. The details were murky, but people were afraid of a new wave of terror and preferred to lie low, to risk nothing, to give no one any pretext, to wait things out. The atmosphere was tense. The censors redoubled their vigilance.

But Herodotus? A book written two and a half thousand years ago? Well, yes: because all our thinking, our looking and reading, was governed during those years by an obsession with allusion. Each word brought another one to mind; each had a double meaning, a false bottom, a hidden significance; each contained something secretly encoded, cunningly concealed. Nothing was ever plain, literal, unambiguous—from behind every gesture and word peered some referential sign, gazed a meaningfully winking eye. The man who wrote had difficulty communicating with the man who read, not only because the censor could confiscate the text en route, but also because, when the text finally reached him, the latter read something utterly different from what was clearly written, constantly asking himself: What did this author really want to tell me?

And so a person consumed, obsessively tormented by allusion reaches for Herodotus. How many allusions he will find there! The Histories consists of nine books, and each one is allusions heaped upon allusions. Let us say he opens, quite by accident, Book Five. He opens it, reads, and learns that in Corinth, after thirty years of bloodthirsty rule, the tyrant called Cypselus died and was succeeded by his son, Periander, who would in time turn out to be even more bloodthirsty than his father. This Periander, when he was still a dictator-in-training, wanted to learn how to stay in power, and so sent a messenger to the dictator of Miletus, old Thrasybulus, asking him for advice on how best to keep a people in slavish fear and subjugation.

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Filed under education, literature, Poland, travel, USSR

by | 28 February 2026 · 7:38 pm

Polish Animal Idioms

My latest compilation from Culture.pl includes an article by Marek Kępa titled The Peculiar World of Polish Animal Idioms. Here’s his intro:

Curious what it means to have a snake in one’s pocket or buy a cat in a bag? In this article, Culture.pl discusses popular Polish animal idioms – presenting their literal translations, explaining their figurative meanings and providing examples of their use in Polish texts. Be advised: some of the animal idioms found here might sound peculiar to English speakers!

And here’s the list, without his explanations and examples:

  • Pierwsze koty za płoty ‘First cat over the fence’
  • Kupić kota w worku ‘To buy a cat in a bag’
  • Siedzieć jak mysz pod miotłą ‘To sit like a mouse under a broom’
  • Nudzić się jak mops ‘To be bored like a pug’
  • Nie dla psa kiełbasa ‘The sausage isn’t for the dog’
  • Ciągnie wilka do lasu ‘A wolf is drawn to the woods’
  • I wilk jest syty, i owca cała ‘The wolf is full and the sheep’s unscathed’
  • Na bezrybiu i rak ryba ‘When there’s no fish, a crayfish is a fish’
  • Czuć się jak ryba w wodzie ‘To feel like a fish in water’
  • Mieć węża w kieszeni ‘To have a snake in one’s pocket’
  • Robota nie zając, nie ucieknie ‘Work is not a hare, it won’t run off’
  • Koń by się uśmiał ‘A horse would laugh at that’
  • Znać się jak łyse konie ‘To know each other like bald horses’
  • Gapić się jak cielę na malowane wrota ‘To stare like a calf at a painted gate’
  • Jedna jaskółka wiosny nie czyni ‘One swallow doesn’t make it spring’

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Filed under education, language, Poland

by | 15 February 2026 · 12:18 am

Montagu vs. Montagu

From Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory, by Ben Macintyre (Crown, 2010), Kindle pp. 84-87:

Montagu and Cholmondeley were blasé about the danger of being found out by an enemy agent in Britain, for the simple reason that they did not believe there were any. “There was almost complete security,” wrote Montagu. “We were able to put over what we liked to the enemy.” True, of the several hundred enemy spies dropped, floated, or smuggled into Britain, all but one was picked up and arrested: the exception was found dead in a bunker after committing suicide.

…

Montagu would cycle home every evening, his briefcase full of secrets, complacent that he was “the only deceptioneer in daily contact with the whole of special intelligence” and that his secrets were perfectly safe. Yet there were numerous spies living in London from supposedly neutral countries happy to furnish information to the Axis powers. Ewen Montagu never knew it, but there was one spy operating under his nose, a man with whom he shared a taste for exotic cheese, a love of table tennis, and both parents.

Ivor Montagu was addicted to founding, and joining, different clubs. From the Cheese Eaters League and the English Table Tennis Association, he had graduated to the Association of Cine Technicians, the Zoological Society, Marylebone Cricket Club, the editorial board of Labour Monthly, the World Council of Peace, the Friends of the Soviet Union, Southampton United Football Club, the Society for Cultural Relations with Soviet Russia, and chairmanship of the Woolwich-Plumstead branch of the Anti-war Congress.

He had also joined a less public and even more exclusive club, as an agent for Soviet military intelligence.

In part to antagonize his patrician parents, Ivor Montagu had from an early age displayed a keen “enthusiasm for all things Russian” and a penchant for radical politics. In 1927, the twenty-three-year-old Ivor was contacted by Bob Stewart, a founding member of the British Communist Party and a recruiter of Soviet agents in Britain. Stewart told Ivor, “We have had a request from the Communist International for you to go at once to Moscow. How soon can you leave?” In Moscow, Ivor was feted and flattered: he played table tennis in the Comintern building with “the keenest players in Moscow,” went to the Bolshoi, and watched the revolutionary parade from a VIP stand in Red Square. Someone in the upper reaches of the Soviet state was taking good care of Ivor Montagu.

Back in Europe, Ivor’s film career blossomed, as did his interests in table tennis, small rodents, and Soviet movies. At the same time, his commitment to communism deepened. In 1929, he began to correspond with Leon Trotsky, the Bolshevik revolutionary expelled from the Communist Party and now living in exile on the Turkish island of Prinkipo.

…

The meeting with Trotsky marked a turning point. Ivor Montagu was attracted to this “fascinating and commanding personality” but “repelled by his self-admiration,” the raw ambition of the revolutionary in exile: “I felt I understood now why he was impossible in a party, that his personality swamped his judgement.” Ivor was not yet thirty, but he was already a party disciplinarian and a fully committed Stalinist. Trotsky knew that Ivor was a willing tool of the Soviet regime. In 1932, he wrote: “Ivor Montagu has, or had, some personal sympathy for me, but now he is even on that small scale paralysed by his adherence to the party.”

That adherence was now absolute and permanent: he gave speeches, wrote pamphlets, and made films in support of communism. The more covert, and more dangerous, manifestations of that party obedience remained secret for the rest of his life.

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Filed under Britain, education, Germany, military, philosophy, USSR, war

by | 13 February 2026 · 7:07 pm

Bentley Purchase, Royal Coroner, 1943

From Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory, by Ben Macintyre (Crown, 2010), Kindle pp. 44-47:

UNDER ENGLISH LAW, the coroner, a post dating back to the eleventh century, is the government official responsible for investigating deaths, particularly those that occur under unusual circumstances, and determining their causes. When a death is unexpected, violent, or unnatural, the coroner is responsible for deciding whether to hold a postmortem and, if necessary, an inquest. Bentley Purchase was a friend and colleague of Spilsbury in the death business, but Purchase was as cheery as Sir Bernard was grim. Indeed, for a man who spent his life with the dead, the coroner was the life and soul of every occasion. He found death not only fascinating but extremely funny, which, of course, it is. No form of violent or mysterious mortality surprised or upset him. “A depressing job?” he once said. “Far from it. I can’t imagine it getting me down.” He would offer slightly damp chocolates to guests in his private chambers and joke: “They were found in Auntie’s bag when she was fished out of the Round Pond at Hampstead last night.” A farmer by birth, Purchase was “rugged in appearance and character,” with “an impish sense of humour” and a finely calibrated sense of the ridiculous: he loved Gilbert and Sullivan operas, toy trains, boiled eggs, and his model piggery in Ipswich. He never wore a hat and laughed loudly and often.

Montagu knew Purchase as “an old friend from my barrister days” and dropped him a note asking if they might meet to discuss a confidential matter. Purchase replied with directions to the St. Pancras Coroner’s Court and a typically jovial postscript: “An alternative means of getting here is, of course, to get run over.”

Purchase had fought in the First World War as a doctor attached to the field artillery, winning the Military Cross for “conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty” and fighting on until 1918, when a shell splinter removed most of his left hand. By the time war broke out again, he was nearly fifty, too old to wear a uniform but “aching to get into the war.” Indeed, he had already demonstrated a willingness to help the intelligence services and, if necessary, “distort the truth in the service of security.” When an Abwehr spy named William Rolph killed himself by putting his head in a gas oven in 1940, Purchase obliged with a verdict of “heart attack.” In the same month that he received Montagu’s note, Purchase had been called in to deliberate on the case of Paul Manoel, an agent of the Free French Intelligence Service who had been found hanging in a London basement following interrogation as a suspected enemy agent. Purchase’s inquest was “cursory in the extreme.”

The coroner was initially dubious when Montagu explained that he needed to find a male corpse for “a warlike operation” but “did not wish to disclose why a body was needed.”

“You can’t get bodies just for the asking, you know,” Purchase told him, grinning. “I should think bodies are the only commodities not in short supply at the moment [but] even with bodies all over the place, each one has to be accounted for.”

Montagu would say only that the scheme required a fresh cadaver that might appear to have drowned or died in an air accident. The matter, he added gravely, was “of national importance.”

Still Purchase hesitated, pointing out that if word got out that the legal system for disposing of the dead was being circumvented, “public confidence in coroners of the country would be shaken.”

“At what level has this scheme been given approval?” the coroner asked.

Montagu paused before replying, not entirely truthfully: “The prime minister’s.”

That was enough for Bentley Purchase, whose “well developed sense of comedy” was now thoroughly aroused. Chortling, he explained that, as a coroner, he had “absolute discretion” over the paperwork and that in certain circumstances a death could be concealed, and a body obtained, without getting official permission from anyone. “A coroner,” he explained, “could, in fact, always get rid of a corpse by a certificate that it was going to be buried outside the country—it would then be assumed that a relative was taking it home (i.e. to Ireland) for burial and the coroner could then do what he liked with it without let, hindrance or trace.” Bodies were pouring into London morgues at an unprecedented rate: in the previous year Purchase had dealt with 1,855 cases and held inquests into 726 sudden deaths. Many of the bodies “remained unidentified and were in the end buried as unknowns.” One of these would surely fit the bill. The St. Pancras mortuary was attached to the coroner’s court, so Purchase offered to give Montagu a tour of the bodies currently in cold storage. “After one or two possible corpses had been inspected and for various reasons rejected,” the two men shook hands and parted, with Purchase promising to keep a lookout for a suitable candidate.

The St. Pancras mortuary was without doubt the most unpleasant place Montagu had ever been; but then, his had been a life almost entirely free of unpleasant places and upsetting sights.

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Filed under Britain, education, Germany, military, war

by | 10 February 2026 · 6:12 am

Reading Być Jak Polak

From Być Jak Polak & Nie o takim życiu marzyłam: 2 Engaging Stories in Simplified Polish for Polish Language Learners (Polski Daily Stories), by Paulina Lipiec. The italicized items in the following excerpt are helpfully footnoted and translated in the original text. This story is pitched at people whose Polish reading is in the range of A2 and B1 (high beginner and low intermediate). I find I can read it a page or so at a time if I add my own lookups. It’s not at frustration level, and it gives me more practice with past tense forms. I’ve finished all 30 sections of DuoLingo and now just get a round of review exercises each day.

Dopiero kiedy był studentem, poznał Kasię. Kasia studiowała razem z nim historię.
Only when he was a student, he met Kasia. Kasia studied history together with him.

Jej rodzina pochodziła z Polski, więć Kasia doskonale mówiła po polsku.
Her family came from Poland, so Kasia spoke Polish perfectly.

Pewnego dnia Kasia zaprosiła Jasona do swojego domu.
On a certain day, Kasia invited Jason to her house.

Następnego dnia mieli mieć ważny egzamin i chcieli się razem uczyć.
The next day they were to have an important exam and wanted to study together.

Kiedy Jason wszedł do mieszkania rodziców Kasi,
When Jason entered Kasia’s family residence,

przypomniał mu się jego przyjaciel z dzieciństwa.
he remembered his [Polish] friend from childhood.

W tym mieszkaniu wszystko było polskie.
In this flat everything was Polish.

W przedpokoju leżały kapcie dla gości.
In the hallway lay slippers for guests.

W salonie nad kanapą wisiał obraz Matki Boskiej z Częstochowy.
In the living room above the couch hung a picture of Our Lady of Czestochowa.

W szafce za szybą stały biało-niebieskie filiżanki i czajnicek do herbaty.
Behind glass in the cupboard stood white and blue cups and a teapot for tea.

Na stole leżał biały obrus.
On the table lay a white tablecloth.

Mieszkanie pachniało makiem, bo mama Kasi właśnie piekła makowca.
The flat smelled of poppyseeds, because Kasia’s mom was baking a poppyseed cake.

Jason był zachwycony!
Jason was amazed.

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by | 30 January 2026 · 9:39 pm

Polish Realia: Imperatives

Ciągnać ‘Pull’ [cf. Pociąg ‘train’, Ger. Zug ‘train’ < ziehen ‘pull’]
Chwyć dowolne uchwyty ‘Grab any handles [on the equipment]’
Mów, pisz i czytaj [po Japońsku] ‘Speak, write and read [Japanese]’
Odkry ponad 70 smaków ‘Discover over 70 flavors’
Otwieraj i zamykaj ‘Open and close [here]’
Otwórz teraz ‘Open now’
Pal tutaj ‘Smoke here’ [in designated area]
Pchać ‘Push’
Pochyl się lekko do przodu ‘Lean slightly forward’
Poczekaj tutaj ‘Wait here’
Popłyń z nami do Szwecji ‘Sail with us to Sweden’
Trzymaj drzwi zamknięte ‘Keep door closed’
Siedź prosto ‘Sit up straight’
Skontaktuje się ‘Contact [us here]’
Skup/Sprzedaż ‘Buying/Selling’
Stań przed urządzeniem ‘Stand in front of the device’
Ustaw siedzisko ‘Adjust the seat’
Wykorzystaj kupon na zakupy ‘Take advantage of the coupon for shopping’
Zagłosuj tutaj ‘Vote here’
Zamów/Odbierz (tutaj) ‘Order/Pick up (here)’
Zeskanuj tutaj ‘Scan here’
Znajdź nas ‘Find us [here]

Negative imperatives
Nie hałasuj ‘Don’t make noise’
Nie odrywaj ‘Don’t tear off’
Nie skacz ‘Don’t jump’
Zakaz biegania ‘No running’
Zakaz palenia ‘No smoking’
Zakaz pływania ‘No swimming’
Zakaz picia ‘No drinking’
Zakaz wjazdu ‘No entry’
Zakaz wstępu ‘No entry/access’

Clickbait
Dowiedz się więcej ‘Find out more’
Kup teraz ‘Buy now’
Nowy sezon | Oglądaj teraz ‘New season | Watch now’
Pobierz aplikacje ‘Download app’
Przeglądaj ‘Browse’
Sprawdź ‘Check [it out]’
Szczegóły wydarzeń na [URL] ‘Details of events at [URL]’
Więcej na [URL] ‘More at [URL]’
Zagraj teraz ‘Play now’
Zarejestruj się ‘Register [yourself]’
Zarezerwuj ‘Reserve [here]’
Znajdź sklep ‘Find store’

Recruiting brochure
Zamieszkaj w USA na wakacje. ‘Live in the USA on vacation.’
Poznaj ludzi z całego świata, ‘Get-to-know people from the whole world,’
rozwijaj się i odkrywaj uroki Stanów ‘develop and discover the charms of States’
po zakończeniu programu wymiany. ‘after the end of the exchange program.’

Wyjedź na wakacje do USA! ‘Go-away on vacation to the USA!’
Spędź lato w Ameryce w ośrodku kolonijnym dla dzieci
‘Spend the summer in America in a [summer] camp center for kids’

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by | 21 January 2026 · 9:09 am

Wrocław: Każda podróż to opowieść

The catchphrase on a travel poster, Każda podróż to opowieść ‘Every journey is a story’, in our fine hotel in Wrocław caught my eye because Polish opowieść is cognate with Romanian poveste ‘story, tale’, an old borrowing from Slavic. The Romanian infinite verb is a povesti ‘to tell a tale/story/lie, etc’. But for a polyglot traveler, podróżnik poliglotów, călător poliglot, every journey is a vocabulary lesson.

We were in Wrocław sightseeing for a few days on the way to a conference in Szczecin for my better (unretired) half and some other foreign teachers in Poland and neighboring countries. One of Wrocław’s major tourist attractions is the hundreds of tiny krasnal ‘gnomes’ all over the city, but I found its topographical vocabulary more interesting, especially in contrast to Kielce, which was never a castle town (or a river town).

Like every old town in Poland, Wrocław has a ratusz ‘town hall’ in a rynek ‘central market square’ surrounded by its stare miasto ‘old town’. Our hotel overlooked one piece of the old moat (fosa) side of the old town. The Odra river, with its many branches, islands (wyspy) and bridges (mosty) bordered the far side of the stare miasto, which is nowadays typically criss-crossed with trams and busses. The large railway stations in both Wrocław and Krakow touch the edges of each city’s carefully maintained stare miasto, which is surrounded by przedmieścia ‘suburbs’, a bit like the Japanese jōkamachi ‘castle towns’ that lie outside the castle walls and moats. One such early suburb in Wrocław is Przedmieścia Świdnickie (formerly Schweidnitzer Vorstadt), which lay outside the Świdnica Gate.

By the way, every one of the (six or eight) young English-speaking staff we queried at our hotel had studied six or more years of German in school, then let that ability lapse in favor of informally acquired (often fluent) English! This seems to be the pattern throughout Polish Silesia.

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