Words of love do not always have to be intended for a person. The poet and novelist Józef Wittlin often dedicated them to the city of a thousand names. Some know it as Lviv; others, like Lviv; but for the intellectual it was always Lwów, the place where he lived his childhood and adolescence and where he trained as a writer. He always remembered its inhabitants and its streets, even if these were not the ones where he was born.
Life, circumstances and the war forced him to leave that precious place. First, to Paris and then to the United States, from where, much to his chagrin, he never returned. “Anyway, the place he longed for no longer existed. But that did not prevent the pain from accompanying him throughout his life,” laments his daughter Elizabeth (Warsaw, 1932), who days ago visited Barcelona to present the Catalan translation of La meva Lwów (Editorial Minúscula), a love song in front of barbarism
Sitting in an armchair, Wittlin does not miss any detail of the majestic lounge of the hotel where she is staying and which evokes a distant era. The well-known set designer is precisely willing to talk about the past, and she is quick to recall how she experienced the Nazi occupation. A few months before everything exploded, the then girl saw a drawing of a man on the gallows in the newspaper.
“He represented my father and that is something that a seven-year-old should not have seen. But it is now that I understand the seriousness of the situation.” In view of what was to come, her mother, Halina, “a woman whose bravery and Aryan appearance saved us all,” sheltered her daughter in the mansion of the poet, Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz, a close friend of her father. she.
“The owners had fled for some time, so a group of women ended up taking care of me who were afraid that an officer would come to ask where I came from.” Meanwhile, her mother returned to Warsaw to get her most precious belongings. Before leaving, they merged in an embrace that Elizabeth still remembers today, because from that moment on she was haunted by the terrifying idea of ??abandoning her. A fear that “I still maintain today in other aspects of my life.”
Although they tried to appear strong, mother and daughter knew that there was a good chance they would never see each other again. Luckily, they did do so a few weeks later and began their final escape. First, to Berlin, as paradoxical as it may sound. Then to Brussels and France, to meet again with Wittlin and go to Spain and Lisbon, where they embarked for New York. A hectic trip in which he lost part of the manuscripts that were going to make it possible for The Salt of the Earth, one of his most outstanding works and for which he would end up competing for the Nobel Prize, to become a trilogy. It never came to be.
“I had a lot of papers stored in a suitcase and a soldier threw them into the sea” to reduce ballast and all the possible weight of that small boat with which they had to distance themselves from the Nazis, Elizabeth laments. A story that she already told in her memoir, From One Day to Another (Renaissance).
“My father became a grumpy man. More than he had ever been. I learned not to ask anything. I understood that it was like a Pandora’s box that was best left undisturbed. It is now, as an adult, that I am discovering many of the things that were going through both his and my mother’s minds. And I am sure that I will die having missed so many others.”
Józef Wittlin “died in the United States. Deep down, he knew that would happen and it weighed on him.” He never returned even in later years due to the hostility of the Polish People’s Republic. He “he went from being a well-known writer to not appearing in anthologies. “It is the worst thing they can do to an author, erase him from the map.”
Elizabeth and Halina had the opportunity to visit those lands again when he died, but they never returned to reside. They did return to Europe and Elizabeth chose Madrid to start from scratch. From there she writes and reflects on everything that happened. “A life out of a novel that I would have happily exchanged for something calmer and more peaceful.”
