Page 5 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

PREFACE:
A CONVERSATION

When I was a teenager, my maternal grandfather, a Catholic Pole who had lived in England since the

Second World War, asked me to write his memoirs. I willingly sat down with him and, over a tape

recorder, we talked about his memories of growing up in Poland between the wars. At that time, I

knew little of Polish history, but I dutifully recorded the story of his childhood and youth, from his

birth in the Russian empire in 1913 through his adventurous trek across Europe as an officer in the

Polish army following the dual invasion by Germany and the Soviet Union in September 1939. One

image was particularly striking to my fifteen-year-old self. After the new Polish state was officially

declared in 1918, his father—my great-grandfather—had been put in charge of the bridge and the old

customs house on the river Vistula in Sczucin, a small town in southern Poland. It had been here,

prior to 1914, that the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires had met one another across the river.

For my grandfather, however, the river’s significance went far deeper than the official divide

between two now-defunct empires. When he had to choose between visiting the town of Pacanów, a

settlement on the former Russian side, and Tarnów, a town that had been part of prewar Austria, he

had always opted for the latter. The level of civilization, he told me, was higher there.

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