ABSTRACT
On a fine summer evening in the early 1960s, I found myself in a bewildered state of mind, sitting on a bench in the Poiudnie Park in the Polish city of Wrociaw. The sun was about to set, some well-nourished swans were effortlessly crossing the little lake, a cuckoo was calling, and rows of pansies—a flower that is to the Poles what the shamrock is to the Irish—were in bloom. I had not lost my way, in fact had once known almost every path in this splendid park. A few hundred yards to the north was the primary school that I had attended, beyond the railway line to the south was the sports club to which I had belonged. I could even recall having once sat on this very bench and listened to what might have been the grandparent of that cuckoo. But then it had been the Sudpark in the German city of Breslau. Now beyond the confines of the park almost everything seemed different, the new hotel (Novotel), the Soviet war cemetery, the streets and the houses. The city I had known had disappeared like Herculaneum and Pompeii, or, as some might prefer, like Sodom and Gomorrah. Certain landmarks were still the same, the river Oder still flowed through town, and in the center of the city quite a few streets and buildings looked exactly as I remembered them. They had either not been destroyed in the war or had been rebuilt as before. But then I had had parents, acquaintances, friends, in this city, and now I did not know a soul. The character of the city had basically changed, the new people about talked a language that I could understand only in part and with great difficulty when they talked slowly. I felt like the hero of H. G. Wells’s Time Machine. The combination of the déjà vu with the totally unexpected was most confusing; it would have been easier to accept if the city had disappeared altogether.
