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Return to Poland:
Pages from a Diary
- Abstract
GLANCING through the diary which I kept during my three-week stay in Poland last autumn, I keep returning to those pages which describe the young people I met, talked and argued with for hours without end in my hotel, in sundry kawiarnias (cafes), in untidy apartments, on the streets, in busses and in streetcars. Against the drab Polish landscape-ramshackle buildings huddling alongside the gingerbread Palace of Culture, charred ruins and empty spaces overgrown with weeds, peasant women in their shapeless clothing selling wormy-looking, though surprisingly tasty pears and plums (“A marvellous season, this,” I was told, “we haven’t had much fruit since before the war . . .”), drunks lurching through the streets at noontime, and the tense, exhausted faces of the ordinary Poles-these youths, mostly in their late twenties and thirties, stood out, refreshingly, with their vitality, intellectual curiosity, and dogged hope in the future.
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