The Poles and Death
In their tragic, heroic history the Poles have become accustomed to walking hand-in-hand with death. For them, there is no avoiding the issue, no looking away, no concealment. For weeks before All Saints Day, celebrated as a public holiday (and, of course, a Holy Day of Obligation, and always on the 1st of November), they thoroughly clean and tidy their family graves. In the last days of October, the graves are decorated with flowers, and beautifully coloured plastic lamps are placed on them, as can be seen in the first three pictures below.
The main visit to the cemetery is on 1st November, but family members of all ages gather in graveyards in November: in the evening on weekdays, and during the day as well on Saturdays and Sundays, to pray for their dead relatives and friends. They are not remotely mournful about it. This evening as I took the first three pictures, a mother and her two children, who were in their twenties, asked me pleasantly (knowing full well the answer) why I was taking photographs. We talked for a bit in the dark, and the son then asked, "Have you bought a grave for yourself yet?" Utterly practical.
I took the picture below today at the Franciscan Cemetery in Brodnica. The black tablets record the names of some of those murdered by the occupying germans, either for some infringement of their vile laws, or in retaliation for the death of an occupying soldier. Normally between fifty and a hundred, men, women, and children as young as fourteen, were driven to the forest by bus to be shot, having first dug their own graves.
The detail below is particularly poignant for me, because I know the family of Paweł Nass. Before the war he had been a rising amateur boxing star, but was denounced to the occupiers by a neighbour for having a radio, just an ordinary domestic one. This was enough to have him shot at the age of 19.
