Found

By Pawel Zastrzezynski

The protagonist of the book is a man in his forties – a Pole who grows up in post-communist times. His burning desire is to become a movie director. It is a turning point in his life – since then, his life is heading for a downfall, loss of identity and dignity.
Mother Teresa of Calcutta, who was friends with Dr Poltawska, used to say that a fallen man is like a gold bar that fell into mud. In order to make it gold again, one needs to take it out of the mud and clean it.
This is the story of Found. The story of a man who looking for a meaning in his movie career is trying to find himself. Even he himself is surprised with the ending of the story.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pawel Zastrzezynski
• Release date: Mar 8, 2016
• ISBN: 9781311038586

Book preview

FOUND

The story of Wanda Poltawska's guidance

All rights reserved.

Copyright ©Pawel Zastrzezynski

This book may not be reproduced in whole or part, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission. Making or distributing electronic copies of this book constitutes copyright infringement and could subject the infringer to criminal and civil liability.

For information address:

Pawel Zastrzezynski

ul. Flizaka 12, 34-600 Limanowa, Poland

http://www.jedenpokoj.pl

[e-mail]

Electronic edition: March, 2016

Version_1

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FOUND

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The story of

Wanda Poltawska's

guidance

Editing and graphic design:

Dr Wanda Poltawska

Magdalena Zastrzezynska

Cover design:

Dr Wanda Poltawska

Translated by:

Joanna Malinowska

For my wife,

Who else…

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Pope John Paul II

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dr Wanda Poltawska

Wanda Poltawska

Where did Pawel come from?

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I received a letter from a stranger written on 31st January 2007.

In the letter the man said he wants to make a movie about me. He wasn’t the first one to come out with such an offer, I’d already turned down a few. Anyway, there had already been a movie made (Duska directed by Wanda Rozycka).

I put away the letter from Pawel Z to a basket where I keep correspondence that is not urgent (since I receive an endless stream of letters). Later, however, I reply to them one by one, because, after all, I’m of the generation that regards not replying to a letter as a lack of manners. Therefore, finally, I did reply him and suggested a possible date for a meeting – 15th March 2007, 11 o’clock.

He came.

Not only that, he brought a finished script with him. He had neither known nor seen me before, but he had been reading my books and based his script on them.

He was a young man – he looked even younger than he actually was, as I later found out.

He had long dark tousled hair and behaved in a boyish manner.

I learned he was a director graduated from the National Film School in Lodz, and that the thought of making a movie about me had been with him all the time – that he simply had to do it.

I left him without any reply, telling him that first I need to read the script.

He left.

I read the script right away, since it fascinated me; it was excellent.

I showed it to Andrzej and a few other people.

Finally I wrote to Pawel one sentence: Do it then.

That’s how the work on the movie began.

However, it’s easy to say do it. It costs money. I could never fathom why such colossal sums of money are involved in movie production.

For the past 20 years, I’ve had a chance to meet people of good will, who wanted to start a Catholic television channel, make good movies. All of them went bankrupt, one by one.

Therefore, I couldn’t even imagine how that boy from Limanowa could accomplish that.

But my decision to give him the green light entailed meetings.

Meeting people has been my job ever since the beginning of my studies in 1945.

It has been both my passion and my profession.

I meet people and become friends with them.

Every human life is a series of seemingly accidental encounters. Priest Karol Wojtyla, however, claims there are no accidental encounters, but rather gifts from heaven in the form of another human being, of friendship.

In every stage of our life we meet new people and we can choose those who we want to become closer with. At the same time, however, such gifts come with responsibility, which Father Karol Wojtyla used to call ‘entrustment’.

God puts people in your way, entrusting you, as a chosen one, with that individual’s fate.

In such a way, parents are endowed with children as a task to fulfill.

Each encounter carries a responsibility, since it always leaves an imprint on the other person’s life, affecting it in a good or a bad way. Interacting with people writes our biographies.

There are encounters which have a short-lived impact on us, and there are those that change our lives.

Such was the case with Pawel. He entered my and my husband’s lives in our old age, becoming more than a friend.

Father Karol Wojtyla said that every stage of our lives brings new friends. For example, we have childhood friends since kindergarten, school, college, we have work colleagues, etc. While he was imprisoned in Komancza, Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski wrote in his diary: if you don’t have any friends, it’s your fault.

You can’t have friends if you don’t go out to people.

There are people like that, lonely and suffering because no one loves them. Friendship is the implementation of brotherly love. Nowadays, however, mankind has forgotten its immeasurable value.

Pawel became a gift for us – a gift from heaven, that’s how I see him.

We would meet to talk about the production of the movie ( I came up with the title One Room, since we always met in my place), and that's how I learned various facts from Pawel's life and discovered his incredible talents.

He can do anything. He has an incredible imagination and is able to come up with solutions that may seem impossible to others.

First of all, I wanted to know what he actually did for a living, so I asked him.

Everything, he answered.

But what exactly?

Well, for example I work on construction sites, install cameras, set up the electricity, set up the internet connection for a guy in the highlands, import computers from China, things like that. But later on August 2nd 2008, he wrote to me: I’m doing it not to sit idle, but I’m a little tired and thirsty for creative and intellectual work. I hope it will soon change, though.

He didn’t have any permanent job. He was always available for odd jobs, and if anyone needed something, he was ready to do it right away.

Our meetings with Pawel were sometimes funny. Once he came at the moment my husband found out that our washing machine broke down. It was old so it simply gave out. Pawel said, I’ll take care of it. I know a good store. Within three hours there was a new washing machine in our bathroom, and the old one was gone. It had to be carried up 90 steps of a historic building without an elevator.

A few days later, as Murphy’s law would have it, our fridge broke down. Pawel got us a new one in a store at a discount.

One day people from the building administration came and found that the vent holes in the bathroom are too small and we have to fix it.

It so happened that Pawel had just dropped in and overheard my husband talk to me about it. When I asked what we should do, Pawel cut in: just a moment, I’ll be right back. After a while, he returned with a toolbox and, literally, in a few minutes he drilled ventilation holes in the bathroom door.

There is no end to stories like that. Whatever we old people need and have difficulty arranging, Pawel will fix it all.

Back then I was discovering not only Pawel’s skills but also parts of his biography and receptivity of his mind.

He was greedy in a sense. He wanted to learn about the Holy Father John Paul II and would remember everything I or Andrzej said about the Pope’s teachings. He knew neither the teaching of the Church nor the philosophical thought of Karol Wojtyla.

But he wanted to learn.

And he wanted to make the movie very much.

But it was not easy.

However, he proved to be incredibly perseverant, one could even say stubborn.

At one point I suggested that he write his own biography.

He did – but it turned out that he is no writer. He is a director and sees the world through images. Instead of an autobiography, he wrote something like a movie script, describing scenes from his life – a fascinating one indeed.

Idea

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It was dr Wanda Poltawska who suggested, Pawel, write your own biography.

But I can’t write… so I simply relate the facts.

Pawel Zastrzezynski

Simply facts

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I was born on March 29th 1972 in a small town in the mountains called Limanowa, as the second child in the family. I have both older and younger siblings: Dariusz, Justyna and Lukasz.

I have a family, but… I always felt different.

When I was a child I was scared of waking up in the morning, since I had this strange recurring dream.

I felt as if a huge boulder had been rolling over me. It started from a small grain, which became larger and larger until it turned into a huge mass rolling over my body. I was terrified. I had that dream over and over again, but once while I was dreaming or perhaps half-asleep I caught that boulder, stopped it and then started to press on it until I squeezed it into a tiny ball.

I’ve always had colorful dreams that often leave a deep impression on me.

They are like symbols to me – back then I didn’t know yet what they signified, but I could feel they were meaningful.

I was always a good child. My mother would sit me in front of a radio, turn on some classical music and leave me like that for hours. I remember that another one of my favorite pastimes was sitting under a table and taking apart whatever could be taken apart. Curiosity to see what was inside got the upper hand, and I could spend hours doing that.

Wanda Poltawska

Childhood

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Pawel wrote 80 pages, but all describe scenes from different moments of his life.

So I told him to do it in a chronological order, to start from the beginning, from his earliest memory.

Everyone remembers something from their childhood. The earliest memories are images of the moments which were particularly significant in one’s life.

Nowadays psychologists tend to ascribe too great importance to those images from childhood, and interpret them in a way, which becomes a source of concern or even neurotic reactions. I meet a lot of people who claim they have been hurt because of some childhood trauma they had suffered.

Then those people become convinced that various behaviors can be explained by difficult childhood.

Of course, childhood experiences are significant, but they do not determine who we are. The human organism can regenerate, and just as any physical wounds one had suffered in childhood heal by themselves until all is left is just a small scar, which also fades with time, in a similar way the human mind can be healed by balancing the bad memories with all the goodness the world has to offer and good deeds. In a sense, one can make corrections to one’s childhood.

Naturally, the past cannot be changed, but what can be changed is the perception of events from one’s past. If one is persuaded by a psychologist to confess and analyze past events, it’s as if one took a razorblade and opened an old wound.

There are plenty of neurotic people in the world, especially women, dwelling on how they had been hurt and wronged. Sometimes it gives rise to family conflicts, especially conflicts with one’s parents, since, in the eyes of psychologists, it is parents’ mistakes that cause trauma and wounds in children.

But one has to look at it in another way, calmly reconsider things, and regard the past as gained experience. Let bygones be bygones. It happened a long time ago, no longer matters and should, in a way, be ignored, since one’s wounds are not the most important thing. What matters is what is now, what good one can do now that he or she knows how things should be.

Putting all the blame on parents does wrong not only to them, but also to the children themselves, as all baptized children have an obligation to obey the fourth Commandment. And even those who have not been baptized are not exempted, since everyone has a conscience which should tell them that love is good and hatred is bad.

From childhood memories, it is the good and beautiful ones that should be retrieved.

A child can remember individual scenes from as early as the age of three – some things stay in the memory forever and may have an impact on his or her future life.

That is why all children should be treated with loving care, so that their memories are full of joyful experiences.

It is obvious that this task falls to adults, who, however, nowadays fail to live up to it.

The fate of a child depends, in particular, on the times he or she was born in. During my professional career, I treated children who had experienced war, then communist regime. I treated children who had been prisoners and had been born in labor camps.

Although their lives were filled with hardships, it turned out that it was those children who had experienced difficult childhood, who showed remarkable spiritual growth. The question at issue is to process one’s experiences of hardships in the right way.

But the focus here is not on the overall analysis of the current reality, but on the history of one man.

Pawel remembers himself as being different – he played in a different way from other children and exhibited creative skills. From the earliest years his play involved inventing, manipulating any kind of material. Small children usually break their first toys, but, instead of destroying, Pawel wanted to create something, which he succeeded in.

Even as a small child, he could use and manipulate matter. One could even say, he could make something out of nothing, out of trash. The story about his childhood creativity is fascinating.

The world of my youth

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So what did my world of youth look like?

It was not ideal, there is no question about it. When I was young, I used to wonder why the reality that surrounds us is so bleak. ‘Do this or that and it will change’, I used to think. One has to remember these were the communist times. I still recall how I came up with the idea how to arrange it so that canned drinks can be sold at the greengrocer’s. I still have it etched it my mind how