by | 25 November 2025 · 3:37 am

Poland to Manchuria and Back, 1940s

My latest compilation from Culture.pl has a long story about a Polish boy who went to Manchuria and back during the 1940s: Untold WWII Stories: A Boy’s Wartime Journey from Poland to Manchuria & Back. Here are a few excerpts:

Jerzy Sikora’s childhood was a whirlwind of war and exile. His father, a spy, vanished; his mother died, leaving him alone in Manchuria with his young sister. Arrest, hunger and betrayal shadowed his early years until an American soldier plucked him from chaos, setting him on a path back to Poland. But survival was just the beginning – reunion, loss and resilience would define the rest.

…

The story might have begun in 1936, when I was born, but let’s start with 1939, when my parents and I fled east after the war erupted. My mother (1909–1946) and my father (1907–1957) traveled as far as Busk, a town 40 kilometres east of Lviv. It was there that I was baptized, most likely in the Roman Catholic Church of Our Lady of the Rosary and St. Stanislaus. But our time together was short. On 15 September 1939, we were forced to separate from my father. The Polish military gave the order – it must have been in response to the Soviet invasion of Poland from the east. My mother and I suddenly found ourselves trapped in Soviet-occupied territory. Under the cover of darkness, we made a daring crossing of the Bug River, fleeing westward. After a long and arduous journey, we reached Siedlce, where fate intervened. By sheer chance, we encountered my uncle; with him, we made our way back to Warsaw.

…

Then, in early 1940, a Japanese man appeared at our door. Perhaps he was connected to the Japanese Embassy – I will never know for sure. But he carried something that would change everything: a letter from my father. In it, he begged my mother to apply for an official passport from the German occupation authorities to seek permission to leave for Japan. Somehow, money was arranged – perhaps through the Japanese messenger – enough to fund our journey. And so, in the spring of that year, we left Nazi-occupied Poland. Our escape was surreal – Berlin, Rome, Naples. We traveled by train, crossing hostile territory, until finally, we boarded a ship – the Hakozaki Maru. The journey carried us through the Suez Canal, across the Indian Ocean, at last reaching Japan, where we reunited with my father.

Our time in Japan was brief. Before long, we set sail once again, this time bound for Manchuria, eventually arriving in Changchun (then known as Hsinking). We settled in a small, single-story house with a garden, in a neighbourhood inhabited primarily by Japanese families in the northern part of the city. I spent my days playing with the local children – Japanese boys and girls from the neighbourhood. I picked up enough of their language to communicate with them easily. Childhood, even in the shadow of war, had its moments of normalcy.

…

On 29 January 1942, my sister, Anna Elżbieta, was born. At first, I barely registered her presence in my life. It wasn’t until nearly a year later that I truly ‘noticed’ her – when she sat down on our cat, and the cat did nothing. I was stunned. My own relationship with that cat had been nothing but claws and scratches. Whenever I tried to pet it, it defended itself fiercely. And yet, when Anna plopped down on top of it, the cat didn’t protest at all. Life changed again around that time. We moved into a larger, multi-story building, closer to the city centre. My father had an office on the upper floor, a space that was strictly off-limits to me. And yet, of course, that only made it more tempting. I snuck in a few times. Inside, I found kind, polite Japanese adults, but nothing particularly exciting. No grand mysteries, no hidden treasures – just stacks of paper and colourful pencils.

…

One day, I found myself witnessing a remarkable event: the last emperor of China, Puyi, being driven through the city. A convoy of cars made its way through the streets, and what struck me most was not the sight of the emperor himself but the fear that surrounded him. Fifty metres from the road, policemen blocked all movement. No one was allowed to approach. Worse still, we were ordered to turn our backs to the procession. No one was to look directly at him. One man hesitated – perhaps he didn’t obey quickly enough. A policeman slapped him across the face. I managed to sneak a glance. And what did I see? Just a few cars. That was all. And yet, the air was thick with tension, as if a single wrong move could change everything.

…

Not far from where we lived stood a Franciscan convent complex, surrounded by a high, solid wall. It wasn’t just a convent – inside, there was a chapel, a shelter for the poor, a small hospital, a school with a boarding house for girls and even a farm with cows and pigs. In the fall of 1945, I was admitted to the school as an exception – the only boy in an all-girl class.

Once again, I was faced with the challenge of forming letters into words – but this time, in English. I still resisted it, just as I had with Polish. Far more interesting were the mandolin lessons and drawing classes, especially because the drawing teacher was not a nun. She was a young woman, different from the others. I still remember how patient and kind she was, guiding my hand as I struggled to draw a pear. She showed me how to use three colours – yellow, red, and green – to make it look real. Her name was Larysa Ogienko. At the time, I knew little about her. Only later did I learn that she was the daughter of a White Army officer who had fled Russia during the October Revolution. I didn’t know it yet, but she would play a crucial role in my survival in China after I lost my parents.

The end of World War II was not a sudden event for me – it was a slow fading of the world I had known. The Japanese gradually disappeared from our surroundings. My father stopped going to work. I remember him sitting at home, carving wooden clogs. Was he trying to earn money? I’m not sure. Despite the massive changes happening around us, I didn’t sense hostility from the local Chinese. Life seemed to go on. And then, one day, everything changed.

…

It was the fall of 1945. I was playing outside in a courtyard with my friends, completely unaware of what was about to happen. Suddenly, my mother came running. There were tears in her eyes as she hugged me tightly. ‘Your father’s been arrested.’ I didn’t understand. He was often away from home – wasn’t this just another one of those times? The drama of the moment blurred even more the next day, when my father returned – escorted by two Soviet officers in uniform. They weren’t aggressive. They didn’t shout. They were calm, formal. They told me they had brought my father so I could say goodbye. I still didn’t grasp what that meant. At that age, I admired soldiers. Their uniforms, their posture – they seemed powerful, fascinating. I didn’t realize then that I could be seeing my father for the last time.

…

By then, it was warm outside – probably March or April 1946. Anna and I had regained consciousness in the hospital. But we were weak, frail and starving. I couldn’t even stand. The first time I tried to get up, I collapsed. My legs wouldn’t hold me. I could only crawl.

We were given very little food – they said that after typhoid fever, the body couldn’t handle large meals. But hunger doesn’t care about medical explanations. It consumes you. It burns inside you. It’s a feeling you never forget for the rest of your life. And then – something unexpected happened. One day, a visitor arrived at the hospital – Larysa Ogienko, my former drawing teacher. She was around 30 years old, with golden hair. She wasn’t just a friendly face – she had brought food. And more than that – she fed us. I asked about my mother, but she didn’t answer. She didn’t need to. Because what she did next saved our lives. After we were discharged from the hospital, she took us both into her home.

Larysa lived with her mother, whom I would soon call Babuszka [grandmother in Russian, AD]. She was without a doubt the most caring, loving person – and in the near future, she would become our only protector.

…

Then, one day, an American soldier arrived at Larysa’s home. His name was Henry, and he asked me a single question: ‘Would you like to go to Poland?’

The answer was obvious. I would go anywhere – as long as it meant escaping. At that time, a few Americans had arrived in Changchun. The city had briefly been retaken by Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist army, pushing back Mao Zedong’s forces. Henry and others like him were working with UNRRA (the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration) and the International Red Cross, searching for people who wanted to be repatriated from China. Everything happened quickly. Mao’s troops were preparing to encircle the city again, and it was only a matter of time before they stormed back in. Among the few belongings I managed to take with me was my father’s collection of postage stamps, acquired during his time in Manchuria.

In May 1947, we boarded a DC-10 aircraft with Major Henry, departing from Nanking (Nanjing). We spent a few days there, though I learned only later that it was in Nanking that the Polish consul had issued us passports. I still have mine to this day. It was also there, on a beach by the Chinese sea, that I tasted something extraordinary for the first time – an ice-cold Coca-Cola. The next flight took us to Shanghai, and I quickly discovered that early aircraft had a terrifying flaw – whenever they hit thinner air, they would suddenly drop, plummeting before stabilizing again.

The feeling was horrible, but after a few days of travel, we grew attached to Henry. And then – another unexpected separation. In Shanghai, Henry was not allowed to continue with us. Instead, we were placed in the care of another American – Erling Logan. At first, I felt uneasy, even afraid. Henry had been our guardian, our protector – who was this stranger? But the fear didn’t last long. Erling Logan wasn’t just kind and protective – in some ways, he reminded me of my father. Even his age was similar.

We stayed with Erling in a luxurious hotel, a stark contrast to everything I had known. It was blisteringly hot, and to our surprise, taking a hot bath turned out to be the best way to cool down. For the first time in a long while, I felt safe.

…

In June 1947, we boarded the SS Marine Lynx – our final passage out of China. Our cabin housed four people: me, Anna, a German woman, and her young child. Meanwhile, Erling Logan was in charge of the entire transport of about 700 emigrants to Europe. We saw him only occasionally, as he was busy overseeing the journey. The voyage from Shanghai to Naples, Italy, lasted nearly two months, but despite its length, it was anything but boring. The sailors created a small pool for the children, stretching canvas to form a makeshift basin where we could splash and cool off.

…

The last leg of our journey took us by train to Warsaw, arriving at the Main Railway Station. From there, we rode in a horse-drawn carriage to Hotel Polonia, where we spent our final night together with Erling. The next morning, on 7 September 1947, we traveled to Anin, to the home of my aunt – my father’s sister. Our return to Poland was even mentioned in the newspaper Wieczór (Evening). And then – it was time to say goodbye to Erling. I was not happy about it. Once again, I felt that I was being handed off like an object, given away to someone I barely knew. I only learned many years later that Erling wanted to adopt us. He had no children of his own and had grown deeply attached to Anna and me. But to make it official, he needed my aunt’s permission. And she refused. At the time, I thought I was saying goodbye to Erling forever. There was no reason to believe our paths would ever cross again. And for years, with no word from him, rumours even surfaced that he had died during the Korean War.

After returning to Poland, I found myself in the home of my extended family. We lived in a modest apartment with my aunt and uncle, Irena and Wacław, along with their four children – Hanna (born 1934), Jan (1936), Tadeusz (born 1945) and Marek (born 1946). Also living with us was Aunt Wilunia (my grandmother’s sister) and her daughter. For a child, adaptation is instinctive. The will to survive is powerful, and at a young age, the mind is still flexible. Within a few weeks, I regained my ability to speak Polish, and soon I began making new friends.

…

In early spring of 1954, some family friends in Anin mentioned that they had received a letter from my father. I was stunned.

Why had they not shown us the letter? It seemed impossible that my father could be alive. Then, about a month later, a phone call came from the local post office. I picked up the receiver. And on the other end, I heard my father’s voice. He asked for directions to where we lived, and we arranged to meet at the crossroads near our house.

And just like that, it happened. He walked toward us as we approached from the opposite direction. He was thin, unshaven and wore a quilted jacket and trousers. His entire life’s belongings were packed in a bundle slung over his back. It’s impossible to describe the feeling of that moment. It was so unreal that none of us could fully comprehend it at first. For nearly eight years, my father had no idea whether we were alive. For nearly eight years, we had no idea that he was alive.

…

I was fortunate to preserve my father’s handwritten biography, written by him in 1954. From this document, I was able to reconstruct key moments of his life.

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Filed under China, Germany, Japan, language, migration, military, Poland, U.S., USSR, war

by | 24 November 2025 · 8:32 am

RLS & Fanny as Newlyweds

From Storyteller: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson, by Leo Damrosch (Yale University Press, 2025), Kindle pp. 311-312:

The newlyweds entered this union with their eyes open. A fragmentary essay that Louis drafted in San Francisco shows deep understanding of the relationship they were now confirming.

In all our daring, magnanimous human way of life, I find nothing more bold than this. To go into battle is but a small thing by comparison. It is the last act of committal. After that, there is no way left, not even suicide, but to be a good man. She will help you, let us pray. And yet she is in the same case; she, too, has daily made shipwreck of her own happiness and worth; it is with a courage no less irrational than yours that she also ventures on this new experiment of life. Two who have failed severally now join their fortunes with a wavering hope.

Biographers have suggested that Fanny was lucky to get Louis, but the reverse was equally true. He commented a year later that she had married him “when I was a mere complication of cough and bones, much fitter for an emblem of mortality than a bridegroom.” Nellie said that “she married him when his fortunes, both in health and finances, were at their lowest ebb, and she took this step in the almost certain conviction that in a few months at least she would be a widow. The best that she hoped for was to make his last days as comfortable and happy as possible.”

…

Fanny certainly didn’t imagine that she was uniting herself with a future celebrity. “She married Louis,” Belle said, “not expecting that he would live, but hoping by her devotion to prolong this life now so dear to her. Though she admired his work, she had no idea he would ever become famous.” In fact his later achievements had much to do not just with Fanny’s belief in him, but with her intelligent criticism and advice. Nellie also said, “Her profound faith in his genius before the rest of the world had come to recognize it had a great deal to do with keeping up his faith in himself.”

Belle added a moving reminiscence: “I remember coming through the hall, and stopping suddenly at a light joyous sound. With a catch at my heart, I realized it was the first time I had ever heard my mother laugh.” As Nellie commented in quoting this, Belle never grasped until then “what a sad and bitter life Fanny Osbourne’s had been.”

More than any of Louis’s biographers, Richard Holmes does justice to this remarkable union. “When one considers other Victorian literary marriages—Hardy’s, say, or Dickens’s—Stevenson’s is something phenomenal, dynamic, explosive. It contained energies, tempests, fireworks, and sheer anarchic excitement that would have obliterated any conventional household. To find anything like his relationship with Fanny—and the comparison is significant in the largest way—one would have to look forward to Lawrence and Frieda.”

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Filed under family, literature, migration, travel, U.S.

by | 23 November 2025 · 8:41 pm

Ukrainian Rikishi Wins Emperor’s Cup

Aonishiki Arata, a 21-year-old rikishi from Vinnitsya, Ukraine (sister city of Kielce, Poland), won the Emperor’s Cup at the just-completed Kyushu Basho in Fukuoka, Japan.  The talented, fast-rising youth in former rikishi Aminishiki‘s new Ajigawa Stable is now being considered for Ozeki (Champion) rank in Sumo’s Top Makuuchi Division. Congratulations to him. おめでとう！

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Filed under Japan, language, migration, sumo, Ukraine

by | 21 November 2025 · 10:41 pm

RLS in the “Long Depression”

From Storyteller: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson, by Leo Damrosch (Yale University Press, 2025), Kindle pp. 276-277:

This was the time of a “Long Depression” that lasted for six years throughout Europe and the United States. Britain was hardest hit of all. Louis was now confronted with a reality he had been insulated from, and as Furnas says, “There rubbed against him the direct knowledge that to be penniless was more miserable than picturesque; that economic disaster was cruel to individuals as well as abstractly depressing to masses; that alcoholism was incapacitating, not jolly.”

In many ways The Amateur Emigrant anticipates Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London half a century later.

Those around me were for the most part quiet, orderly, obedient citizens, family men broken by adversity, elderly youths who had failed to place themselves in life, and people who had seen better days. . . . Labouring mankind had in the last years, and throughout Great Britain, sustained a prolonged and crushing series of defeats. I had heard vaguely of these reverses; of whole streets of houses standing deserted by the Tyne, the cellar doors broken and removed for firewood; of homeless men loitering at the street-corners of Glasgow with their chests beside them; of closed factories, useless strikes, and starving girls. But I had never taken them home to me, or represented these distresses livingly to my imagination.

In a real sense Louis was escaping from defeats of his own. “We were a company of the rejected. The drunken, the incompetent, the weak, the prodigal, all who had been unable to prevail against circumstances in the one land were now fleeing pitifully to another, and though one or two might still succeed, all had already failed. We were a shipful of failures, the broken men of England.” Of Scotland too, of course. “Skilled mechanics, engineers, millwrights, and carpenters were fleeing as from the native country of starvation.” What skills was he himself bringing?

Yet a surprising optimism prevailed. “It must not be supposed that these people exhibited depression. The scene, on the contrary, was cheerful. Not a tear was shed on board the vessel. All were full of hope for the future, and showed an inclination to innocent gaiety. Some were heard to sing, and all began to scrape acquaintance with small jests and ready laughter.” Louis always enjoyed children, and noted with amusement that they were attracted to each other “like dogs” and went around “all in a band, as thick as thieves at a fair,” while the adults were still “ceremoniously maneuvering on the outskirts of acquaintance.”

As the title of The Amateur Emigrant suggests, he belonged among these people only in a sense. It would be some years before he could support himself by writing, but his parents might resume their subsidies before then, as indeed did happen. His fellow travelers were not just emigrants but immigrants, whereas (despite what the passenger list said) he had no intention of making a home in America. In much the same way, by the time Orwell published his book he had ended his experiment of being down and out. Still, the voyage was a turning point. “Travel is of two kinds, and this voyage of mine across the ocean combined both. ‘Out of my country and myself I go,’ sings the old poet: and I was not only travelling out of my country in latitude and longitude, but out of myself in diet, associates, and consideration.”

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Filed under Britain, democracy, economics, labor, literature, migration, U.S.

by | 20 November 2025 · 8:02 pm

RLS First Tries Writing Fiction

From Storyteller: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson, by Leo Damrosch (Yale University Press, 2025), Kindle pp. 266-267:

Robert Louis Stevenson is best remembered as a novelist, but until his thirties he found the scope of a novel daunting and was reluctant to attempt one. By the end of 1879 he did have three works of nonfiction in print, the two travel narratives and Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes. In addition he had published twelve essays and fourteen short stories, many of them in Leslie Stephen’s Cornhill Magazine. A historian explains that a demand for such work had been created by a proliferation of new periodicals that needed “to fill columns of white space with agreeable reading matter.” They brought in some income, but not nearly enough to live on.

The term “short story” seems to have been used for the first time in 1884 by the American critic Brander Matthews, to describe a distinct kind of condensed and focused narrative, as opposed to a tale that merely happens to be short. Matthews emphasized the excellence of Poe and Hawthorne in this genre; Louis admired and consciously emulated them. Late in life he gave a penetrating description of the new aesthetic: “The dénouement of a long story is nothing; it is just a ‘full close,’ which you may approach and accompany as you please—it is a coda, not an essential member in the rhythm; but the body and end of a short story is bone of the bone and blood of the blood of the beginning.”

The early stories are interesting as first steps in the storyteller’s art, but are completely overshadowed by Louis’s later achievements. One collection, published later in book form as New Arabian Nights, was admired for its experimentalism. In it a prince of Bohemia seeks out adventures in London in imitation of the caliph in the original Arabian Nights, which Louis had read and enjoyed as a boy. The critic George Saintsbury praised “the fertility of extravagant incident, grim or amusing or simply bizarre, with the quiet play of the author’s humour in the construction of character, the neatness of his phrase, the skill of his description, the thoroughly literary character of his apparently childish burlesque.”

Some reviewers thought that the author must have been laughing at the reader, others that he was laughing at himself. A writer in the Century Magazine suggested that it might be both:

The stories are linked together by the adventures of one central character, who is half Monte Cristo and half Haroun al Raschid up to the last page, where in an unexpected fashion he leaves you laughing at him, laughing at yourself, and wondering how long his inventor has been laughing at you both. This is the book on the face of it. But then, in fact, you cannot speak of the book on the face of it, for under the face is a fascinating depth of subtleties, of ingenuities, of satiric deviltries, of weird and elusive forms of humour, in which the analytic mind loses itself.

Scholars have taken these efforts seriously as harbingers of modernism, but Louis didn’t. Instead he turned to a now-unfashionable narrative mode that he had always loved—romance, in the old sense of action and adventure, not love affairs. By the time New Arabian Nights came out as a single volume in 1882, he had moved far beyond it with his classic Scottish tales “Thrawn Janet” and “The Merry Men,” and with Treasure Island in its first serialized form.

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Filed under Britain, literature, travel, U.S.

by | 19 November 2025 · 11:45 pm

RLS as Amateur Emigrant

From Storyteller: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson, by Leo Damrosch (Yale University Press, 2025), Kindle pp. 272-273:

As Louis relates in his book about the voyage, The Amateur Emigrant, he engaged a second-class cabin for ₤8, ₤2 more than passengers in steerage paid, which meant that he was furnished with bedding and had a private room with a table to write on. Still, it was only a little enclave in the midst of steerage. Located near the machinery that powered the ship, the steerage was crowded, malodorous, and poorly ventilated.

Alfred Stieglitz’s classic photograph (fig. 38), taken on the Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1907, makes it clear that steerage passengers got up on deck whenever they could. Still higher up, the wealthy ladies and gentlemen are literally looking down on them.

In Edinburgh Louis had been accustomed to mix with working-class people in a rather touristic way, but now he was one of them, although paying for second class did qualify him as technically a gentleman. “In the steerage there are males and females; in the second cabin ladies and gentlemen. For some time after I came aboard I thought I was only a male, but in the course of a voyage of discovery between decks I came on a brass plate, and learned that I was still a gentleman. Nobody knew it, of course. I was lost in the crowd of males and females, and rigorously confined to the same quarter of the deck.”

The description “steamship” may conjure up images of a mighty vessel like the Queen Mary, but the Devonia was low-slung and modest in size, a vessel of thirty-five hundred tons (the Queen Mary was eighty-one thousand). There were just 256 passengers. Nicholas Rankin had the inspiration of tracking down the original passenger list in the New York Public Library. Fifty-one people were in the first-class saloon and identified as clerks, divines, and nil—not unemployed, but too rich to need employment. Twenty-two were in the second-class cabin: 15 Scots including Louis, 6 Scandinavians, and an Irishman. The remaining 183 were in steerage. They were Scottish, Irish, German, Scandinavian, and a Russian. Thirty occupations were listed, including brewer, carpenter, lawyer, marble cutter, and silk weaver.

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Filed under Britain, democracy, literature, migration, travel, U.S.

by | 18 November 2025 · 5:09 am

Polish Heweliusz Series on Netflix

My latest weekly update from Culture.pl includes a profile of a new and interesting Polish film series: Heweliusz: Netflix Revisits Poland’s Most Tragic Ferry Disaster. During our recent pilgrimage to Gdansk, we stayed in a nice hotel on Heweliusz Street not far from Gdansk Main train station. Here are some excerpts from the story on Culture.pl.

Jan Holoubek’s blockbuster is more than just a solid piece of good entertainment. In this Netflix series the story of the greatest maritime disaster in post-war Poland becomes a tale of the victims of the transformation and the brutal verdicts of history.
…
It was 5:12 a.m. on January 14, 1993, when the rail-truck ferry Jan Heweliusz, operating between Świnoujście [= Ger. Swinemünde] and Ystad, capsized in the stormy winds. A few minutes earlier, Captain Andrzej Ułasiewicz had broadcast a ‘Mayday! Mayday!’ message, calling for help from all nearby vessels. He had 36 passengers and 29 crew members on board, all of whom found themselves in the water at a temperature of 2 degrees Celsius during a raging storm, force 12 on the Beaufort scale. Ułasiewicz didn’t even try to save himself – he remained on the bridge until the end, trying to relay information to rescue units – German, Danish, and Polish. When the waters receded, he was named as the main culprit in the Heweliusz tragedy, whose story is now told in Jan Holoubek’s series.
…

From its inception, the MF Jan Heweliusz was considered an exceptionally unlucky vessel. Launched in 1977 at the Norwegian Trosvik shipyard, it sailed under the Polish flag for the next 16 years, experiencing around 30 different breakdowns during that time. Its history of adventures was so rich that Swedish sailors dubbed it ‘Jan Haverelius,’ or ‘Accident John.’

The Polish ferry capsized twice while in port (hence why one of the series’ characters explicitly calls it ‘a f…cking roly-poly toy’), its engines failed, and its ballast system malfunctioned. The Heweliusz also collided with a fishing boat.

…

However two other failures proved crucial to the tragic events of January 14, 1993. The first was damage to the ferry a few days before the sinking. While docking at the Swedish port, the vessel struck the quay, bending the gate securing the ferry’s entrance, allowing water to enter. The shipowners, Euroafrica company, a subsidiary of Polish Ocean Lines, were aware of the defect but decided not to suspend operation until it was fully repaired. The reason was simple – a vessel sitting in port wouldn’t earn any money, and the company’s management wouldn’t allow it. The crew members themselves were supposed to carry out makeshift repairs, but without the proper equipment and time, they could only partially repair the damage.

…

The second of the ferry’s structural defects proved even more significant and far-reaching. It involved a multi-ton concrete cover on one of the decks. In 1986, during a voyage, a refrigerated truck caught fire on the ferry, spreading to other vehicles and engulfing the vessel’s superstructure on one of the upper decks. The ferry was then renovated at the Hamburg shipyard, and the damaged deck was poured with a layer of concrete. Immediately after the Heweliusz tragedy, attempts were made to argue that the poured concrete weighed ‘only’ 30 tons (a small amount compared to the vessel’s total weight), and that the reconstruction concerned one of the lower decks. However, in reality, the ferry was loaded with more than twice that weight, and the renovation only affected one of the upper decks, significantly affecting the vessel’s stability. Stability, which had already been far from ideal, chiefly due to the wide captain’s cabin on the bridge, which, in hurricane-force winds, turned into a veritable sail. All of this meant the ferry was unable to cope with the severe storm that struck the ship that January night, claiming the lives of 20 sailors and all of the ferry’s passengers.

…

The questions that researchers of the Heweliusz tragedy have been asking themselves for years resonate powerfully, yet at the same time, seemingly incidentally, in Jan Holoubek’s series. Not as a theme in itself, but as a footnote to the story of the people grappling with the consequences of the disaster. Kasper Bajon’s story skillfully transports us across several timelines and between characters examining Heweliusz’s case from different perspectives. Guides through this world include a crew member (Konrad Eleryk) who survived the disaster, plagued by remorse; Captain Ułasiewicz’s widow (Magdalena Różczka), who must defend his memory and care for her teenage daughter; and the truck driver’s wife (Justyna Wasilewska), who lives in the same neighborhood and is left destitute after his death. Finally, there is Captain Piotr Binter (Michał Żurawski), a sailor and friend of Ułasiewicz. As a juror deciding the causes of the disaster, he must choose between loyalty to his deceased friend and his career, which is threatened by the pressures of a political and business alliance.

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Filed under cinema, economics, Germany, industry, labor, Poland, Scandinavia, travel

by | 16 November 2025 · 7:49 am

Pilgrimage to Gdansk, 2025

Last weekend, we took advantage of Poland’s November 11 (= 11 Listopad ‘leaf-fall’ month) Independence Day holidays to make a pilgrimage to Gdansk, where my father and (doctrinally pacifist) Quaker/Mennonite/Church of the Brethren volunteers aboard the S.S. Carroll Victory Liberty ship arrived in 1946 to help deliver horses and chickens to devastated Poland.

My principal mentor in linguistics, Byron W. Bender, who was raised a Mennonite in Pennsylvania and later attended Quaker meetings in Honolulu, also arrived in Gdansk in 1946 on a similar mission aboard another Liberty ship, the S.S. Stephen R. Mallory.

These UNRRA efforts, including the delivery of goats to postwar Okinawa by my dad’s Quaker crony, Herbert Nicholson, a prewar missionary to Japan known as “Yagi-no-ojisan” (Uncle Goat) in postwar Japan. During the war years, he helped AJA internees in the U.S. After the UNRRA program ended, its participants founded the Heifer Project, now Heifer International.

The granddaughter of one of these Church of the Brethren volunteers, Peggy Reif Miller, has gathered many stories from other participants and built a very informative website titled Seagoing Cowboys.

I long ago started my Poland album on Flickr with scans of photos from my dad’s trip. Someone gave him a camera to record some of it. We managed to visit and photograph several sites he took photos of. Here are links to a few of his photos and our photos of the same sites, all much improved in 2025.

Oliwa Cathedral in 2025 vs. 1946. We managed to arrive there just in time for the noontime pipe organ concert on what was once the largest pipe organ in Europe. The cathedral was jam-packed.

Gdansk Old Town Hall in 2025 vs. 1946.

Hala Targowa (Market Hall) (under renovation) in 2025 vs. 1946. A string of kebab shops now obscures the old building from across the street.

We took a sleeper train (first class in our own 2-person compartment). It ran from near-midnite to near-dawn in each direction and required long waits in stations with no amenities except floors and benches and restrooms after 9 p.m. Nor was there any lulling clickety-clack, but lots of lurches as we lay down to sleep. That’s another story.

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Filed under Japan, military, NGOs, Poland, religion, travel, U.S., war

by | 15 November 2025 · 6:43 pm

Scottish vs. English Universities, 1867

From Storyteller: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson, by Leo Damrosch (Yale University Press, 2025), Kindle pp. 102-104:

In November 1867, just as he was turning seventeen, Louis entered the University of Edinburgh as the first step toward a professional career, and his life changed dramatically. It was the same year in which the Stevensons took their lease on Swanston Cottage….

As an undergraduate Louis continued to live at home; there was no residential housing at the university, and students from out of town had to rent lodgings. All the same, he enjoyed plenty of freedom, unlike students at Oxford and Cambridge, who had compulsory chapel and lectures, wore caps and gowns, and were punished if they stayed out after curfew. It’s notable that those were the only two universities in all of England. In Scotland, in addition to Edinburgh, which was the most recently founded, there were also St Andrews, Glasgow, and Aberdeen. In an essay some years later Louis celebrated his university’s freedom and urban energy.

The English lad goes to Oxford or Cambridge; there, in an ideal world of gardens, to lead a semi-scenic life, costumed, disciplined and drilled by proctors. Nor is this to be regarded merely as a stage of education; it is a piece of privilege besides, and a step that separates him further from the bulk of his compatriots. At an earlier age the Scottish lad begins his greatly different experience of crowded class-rooms, of a gaunt quadrangle, of a bell hourly booming over the traffic of the city to recall him from the public-house where he has been lunching, or the streets where he has been wandering fancy-free. His college life has little of restraint, and nothing of necessary gentility…. Our tasks ended, we of the North go forth as freemen into the humming, lamplit city. At five o’clock you may see the last of us hiving from the college gates, in the glare of the shop windows, under the green glimmer of the winter sunset. The frost tingles in our blood; no proctor lies in wait to intercept us; till the bell sounds again we are the masters of the world.

As a master of the world, Louis declined to do much studying. He found the teaching formal and tedious, and was already accustomed to self-education. Besides, he was supposedly there to learn engineering, which he already knew he disliked. That engineering was taught at all made Edinburgh very different from the English universities, where the curriculum was heavily classical and mathematical. At Cambridge Isaac Newton, one of the greatest physicists of all time, had been a professor of mathematics, not physics.

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by | 14 November 2025 · 9:34 pm

Where RLS Learnt Lallans

From Storyteller: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson, by Leo Damrosch (Yale University Press, 2025), Kindle pp. 82-84:

Louis picked up much of his Lallans from a shepherd named John Todd, known as “Lang John” for his height, with whom he would tramp for hours in the hills while the sheep were grazing. “My friend the shepherd,” he said later, “speaks broad Scotch of the broadest, and often enough employs words that I do not understand myself.” Louis recalled Todd in an essay entitled “Pastoral”: “He laughed not very often, and when he did, with a sudden, loud haw-haw, hearty but somehow joyless, like an echo from a rock. His face was permanently set and coloured; ruddy and stiff with weathering; more like a picture than a face.”

But it was Todd’s eloquence that captivated Louis. “He spoke in the richest dialect of Scotch I ever heard, and this vocabulary he would handle like a master. I might count him with the best talkers, only that talking Scotch and talking English seem incomparable acts. He touched on nothing, at least, but he adorned it; when he narrated, the scene was before you.” Many of Louis’s original readers would have recognized a famous phrase that Samuel Johnson composed in Latin for his friend Oliver Goldsmith, Nihil tetegit quod non ornavit: “He touched nothing that he did not adorn.” The allusion is a beautiful tribute to the old shepherd, ranking his skill in language on a level with a writer of great distinction.

It was Todd, Louis said, who taught him to appreciate the spirit of the hills.

He it was that made it live for me, as the artist can make all things live. It was through him the simple strategy of massing sheep upon a snowy evening, with its attendant scampering of earnest, shaggy aides-de-camp, was an affair that I never wearied of seeing, and that I never weary of recalling to mind: the shadow of the night darkening on the hills, inscrutable black blots of snow shower moving here and there like night already come, huddles of yellow sheep and dartings of black dogs upon the snow, a bitter air that took you by the throat, unearthly harpings of the wind along the moors; and for centerpiece to all these features and influences, John winding up the brae [slope], keeping his captain’s eye upon all sides, and breaking, ever and again, into a spasm of bellowing that seemed to make the evening bleaker. It is thus that I still see him in my mind’s eye, perched on a hump of the declivity not far from Halkerside, his staff in airy flourish, his great voice taking hold upon the hills and echoing terror to the lowlands; I, meanwhile, standing somewhat back, until the fit should be over, and, with a pinch of snuff, my friend relapse into his easy, even conversation.

Though the shepherd’s casual talk might be “easy,” it was direct and to the point. In another essay Louis contrasted it with the conversational style in England, where “the contact of mind with mind [is] evaded as with terror. A Scottish peasant will talk more liberally out of his own experience. He will not put you by with conversational counters and small jests; he will give you the best of himself, like one interested in life and man’s chief end.”

Swanston people remembered that Todd used to say of Louis, “He is an awfu’ laddie for speirin’ questions about a’ thing, an’ whenever you turn your back, awa’ he gangs an’ writes it a’ doon.” A “speirin” questioner is prying and inquisitive. Years later some old-timers told a visitor the same thing. “Stevenson would dae naething but lie aboot the dykes. He wouldna wark. He was aye rinnin’ aboot wi’ lang Todd, amang the hills, getting him to tell a’ the stories he kent.” “Lang Todd” prompts one to wonder if John passed his nickname on to Long John Silver in Treasure Island.

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