June 22, 1926

Tadeusz Konwicki, (June 22, 1926 to January 7, 2015) a Polish writer and film maker, in his youth was a resistance fighter against both the Wehmacht and the Soviet armies. A recent New Yorker article says:

...His great novel “The Polish Complex” begins like this: “I was standing in line in front of a state-owned liquor store. I was twenty-third in line.” The book was written in the late nineteen-seventies, in a Poland behind the Iron Curtain and two decades removed from the brave, foolish, and short-lived Poznan Uprising against Soviet domination, in 1956. The entire novel takes place in line on Christmas Eve. Standing in that line, waiting to buy goods that never arrive, is Konwicki himself. Just behind him is a Polish man who has been waiting for an opportunity to kill Konwicki since the Second World War. “I owe you a bullet,” the man says to Konwicki. “A slug in the back of the head.” “I know,” responds Konwicki. “I betrayed the old faith for the new one. Then the new one for the old. But I never wanted to betray anything or anybody.

Here is a photo of the author with his cat Ivan. I don't know when it was taken, but presumably before 1989.



In his Guardian obituary we learn:


Konwicki used to say that he lived in Warsaw only temporarily. Yet he was resident there for more than 60 years, in the same flat, with a view of the Palace of Culture, daily frequenting the same coffee shop, and contemplating the essence of the memory that makes us, and of the power that can destroy us.

Danuta, [his wife] a book illustrator, died in 1999. Konwicki is survived by his daughter Maria; his other daughter, Anna, died in 2008.

The link is to a very interesting obituary.