I’m not sure how typical my experience was, but growing up half-Polish, half-British during the ‘70s and ‘80s, I had very little personal experience of Polish culture.
The political landscape, the cost and some interesting family dynamics meant we didn’t visit Poland as a family until the 1990s, and my grandparents rarely visited us either, and, even when they did, as I had not learnt Polish as a child, I could not communicate with them. For that reason, I viewed them as an ‘exotic otherness’ that occasionally descended on my home and to whom I felt a limited connection.
Add to this the oppressive government of the ‘communist’ state in the 1960s, which resulted in most family members of my mother’s generation leaving (or fleeing) to take up citizenship in other European countries; the result is that now there are few family members left alive in Poland and those that are there are strangers to me.
Thinking about this as an adult, this chain of events stands as a stark reminder
