| Both sides previous revisionPrevious revisionNext revision | Previous revision |
| transcripts:jolanta-kutereba-interview-transcript [2025/01/05 01:02] – Wprowadzono formatowanie zgodne z konwencją Wojtek | transcripts:jolanta-kutereba-interview-transcript [2025/01/21 21:58] (current) – Wojtek |
|---|
| ====== Transcript of the interview with Jolanta Kutereba ====== | ====== Jolanta Kutereba interview transcript ====== |
| |
| This is a full text transcript of [[:stories:pfsl:jolanta-kutereba-interview]] with polish summaries every paragraph. | This is a full text transcript of [[:stories:pfsl:jolanta-kutereba-interview]]. |
| |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| | Oral history recording transcript |
| | Duration: 1 hour 42 minutes |
| | ---- |
| | Chapters |
| | 01 Family Roots and Parents’ Wartime Stories |
| | 02 Life in Abbey Wood and Growing Up Between Two Cultures |
| | 03 The Birth of Karolinka: Passion and Determination of Jolanta’s Mother |
| | 04 Polish Schools and Cultivating Identity |
| | 05 The Value of Community and Contemporary Challenges |
| | 06 Polishness as a Part of Life |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| ==== Wprowadzenie do wywiadu ==== | |
| |
| 🕑 //00:00:00// | 🕑 //00:00:00// |
| |
| **Barbara Furmanowicz**: Today is the 28th of March 2021, my name is Barbara Furmanowicz, I'm interviewing Jolanta Kutereba. Jola, I would like to ask the question that goes to the very beginning for you. I would like to ask you how did your parents meet and how did they settle in England? | **Barbara Furmanowicz**: Today is the 28th of March 2021, my name is Barbara Furmanowicz, I'm interviewing Jolanta Kutereba. Jola, I would like to ask the question that goes to the very beginning for you. I would like to ask you how did your parents meet and how did they settle in England? |
| |
| ==== Początki rodziny Kuterebów ==== | |
| |
| 🕑 //00:00:28// | 🕑 //00:00:28// |
| |
| **Jolanta Kutereba**: OK, OK, a long time ago. So, my parents’ meeting... So, at the very beginning of the war, my parents were taken out of Poland. They were told to leave their houses and they were taken by cattle truck, if you like, or trains, as it was then, cattle trains, to Siberia. They took a journey that many Poles took at the beginning of the war when they were taken out of their houses, when they were told to leave their houses. My dad, travelling from Lwów, which is now in the Ukraine, and my mum from Wilno, which is now part of Lithuania, and they were taken east into Russia, into Siberia, and eventually found their way down south through Tehran, Iran, all down that way down to Persia. My mum found herself in Africa with her family and my dad found himself in India. That's quite a quick story. But along the way, my dad with his family, my dad was orphaned during the war and he then travelled to an orphanage that took him and a huge amount of children, along with his sister, to India. And he was settled there in the Maharajah's Palace. The name of the place was, you know, I remembered it earlier on and I can't remember, I'm going to try and think about it again... Jamnagar. That's right, Jamnagar. He settled into Maharajah's Palace, which was then given over to orphans from the war, and he spent possibly something like five to six years there before he then..., actually about five years, before he then travelled with his sister by boat all the way down south, as you can imagine, all the way round to England in about 1945. | **Jolanta Kutereba**: OK, OK, a long time ago. So, my parents’ meeting... So, at the very beginning of the war, my parents were taken out of Poland. They were told to leave their houses and they were taken by cattle truck, if you like, or trains, as it was then, cattle trains, to Siberia. They took a journey that many Poles took at the beginning of the war when they were taken out of their houses, when they were told to leave their houses. My dad, travelling from Lwów, which is now in the Ukraine, and my mum from Wilno, which is now part of Lithuania, and they were taken east into Russia, into Siberia, and eventually found their way down south through Tehran, Iran, all down that way down to Persia. My mum found herself in Africa with her family and my dad found himself in India. That's quite a quick story. But along the way, my dad with his family, my dad was orphaned during the war and he then travelled to an orphanage that took him and a huge amount of children, along with his sister, to India. And he was settled there in the Maharajah's Palace. The name of the place was, you know, I remembered it earlier on and I can't remember, I'm going to try and think about it again... Jamnagar. That's right, Jamnagar. He settled into Maharajah's Palace, which was then given over to orphans from the war, and he spent possibly something like five to six years there before he then..., actually about five years, before he then travelled with his sister by boat all the way down south, as you can imagine, all the way round to England in about 1945. |
| |
| ==== Historia ojca ==== | |
| |
| 🕑 //00:02:23// | 🕑 //00:02:23// |
| |
| My mother, on the other hand, who was about three years younger than my dad, so she was about three when she was evacuated... well, not evacuated, when they were torn from their homes, and she found herself with her family in Africa. She remembered a little bit less about her journey. So we have fewer stories of my mum's story, of my mum's experience. But she also then... Her father was in the army, in the Polish army, and he worked as a mechanic. And she, with his family, was then given the choice after the war had ended to go to... The Poles had a number of choices because they were the allies: America, Canada, Argentina, France, England. And my mum's parents chose England and they found themselves in the UK after the war. | My mother, on the other hand, who was about three years younger than my dad, so she was about three when she was evacuated... well, not evacuated, when they were torn from their homes, and she found herself with her family in Africa. She remembered a little bit less about her journey. So we have fewer stories of my mum's story, of my mum's experience. But she also then... Her father was in the army, in the Polish army, and he worked as a mechanic. And she, with his family, was then given the choice after the war had ended to go to... The Poles had a number of choices because they were the allies: America, Canada, Argentina, France, England. And my mum's parents chose England and they found themselves in the UK after the war. |
| |
| ==== Historia matki ==== | |
| |
| 🕑 //00:03:14// | 🕑 //00:03:14// |
| |
| Both my father and my mother were then settled in the Midlands, where there were a number of camps for the Poles, and they settled into the different schools and the camps there, and initially were in two completely different places, but I can't tell you where exactly. Certainly my mum's family settled in Birmingham, so it would have been in the Midlands there somewhere. And eventually what happened was that they met through activities that the Polish communities then started to create, where young people would come together and they were educated in Polish because they were thinking that the Poles would end up returning to Poland. But when Poland became a communist country, there was no possibility for them to return or the decision was made for them that they wouldn't return. Or perhaps they made the decision not to return. I don't think it would have been easy. And they settled in England. And what happened after that was that both my parents finished their education in England, studied for a degree, so went to study further and became teachers. | Both my father and my mother were then settled in the Midlands, where there were a number of camps for the Poles, and they settled into the different schools and the camps there, and initially were in two completely different places, but I can't tell you where exactly. Certainly my mum's family settled in Birmingham, so it would have been in the Midlands there somewhere. And eventually what happened was that they met through activities that the Polish communities then started to create, where young people would come together and they were educated in Polish because they were thinking that the Poles would end up returning to Poland. But when Poland became a communist country, there was no possibility for them to return or the decision was made for them that they wouldn't return. Or perhaps they made the decision not to return. I don't think it would have been easy. And they settled in England. And what happened after that was that both my parents finished their education in England, studied for a degree, so went to study further and became teachers. |
| |
| ==== Historia poznania się rodziców ==== | |
| |
| 🕑 //00:04:25// | 🕑 //00:04:25// |
| And before they became teachers, if I could just go back a little bit, when the communities were then mixing and joining together, my parents would meet. My parents would meet when those communities got together and my dad remembered seeing my mum for the first time when her school was doing a gymnastics display in one of these community meetings outdoors. And she had a ball and they were doing... If you think back to the 1950s and the sort of gymnastics displays that young people would do then as part of their school PE curriculum, my mum had a ball and she'd be throwing it and the girls would be catching it and then be doing it in unison. And my mum dropped the ball. [laughter] And my dad remembered looking at her and watched her drop the ball, and he was always a bit of a joker and I think she was 14 at the time. And my mom said that it took her a while to come around to liking my dad because whilst he was this big joker and probably gave her quite a lot of attention, she wasn't interested because she thought he was a bit of a show off. But I think ultimately, being the dancer and the performer that my mum was, and the performer and the sort of sportsman that my dad was, it was a bit of a, sort of, match made in heaven. I think they basically sort of migrated towards each other and got together. I think then it must have been when my mom was 15 or 16, actually. | And before they became teachers, if I could just go back a little bit, when the communities were then mixing and joining together, my parents would meet. My parents would meet when those communities got together and my dad remembered seeing my mum for the first time when her school was doing a gymnastics display in one of these community meetings outdoors. And she had a ball and they were doing... If you think back to the 1950s and the sort of gymnastics displays that young people would do then as part of their school PE curriculum, my mum had a ball and she'd be throwing it and the girls would be catching it and then be doing it in unison. And my mum dropped the ball. [laughter] And my dad remembered looking at her and watched her drop the ball, and he was always a bit of a joker and I think she was 14 at the time. And my mom said that it took her a while to come around to liking my dad because whilst he was this big joker and probably gave her quite a lot of attention, she wasn't interested because she thought he was a bit of a show off. But I think ultimately, being the dancer and the performer that my mum was, and the performer and the sort of sportsman that my dad was, it was a bit of a, sort of, match made in heaven. I think they basically sort of migrated towards each other and got together. I think then it must have been when my mom was 15 or 16, actually. |
| |
| 🕑 //00:05:55// | Password access wall |
| | |
| And eventually when they finished their studies and they both qualified as teachers, they travelled to London because they wanted to... I think like many people, they would want to make their own lives away from their parents perhaps than at the time, and they travelled to London where the possibilities were huge, and that's how they met in the community schools that the Poles had created in the Midlands. | |
| | |
| **BF**: Right. So where did they settle, in which area in London? | |
| | |
| ==== Życie rodziców w Londynie ==== | |
| | |
| 🕑 //00:06:26// | |
| | |
| **JK**: My parents came to London and they settled... So this would have been after their wedding. So, they got married in 1959 and then they came to... they were already living in London around that time I think, but first of all they settled in Sidcup, which is sort of Kent, south east London. Actually Canterbury Avenue, I remember it because it was very close to my secondary school and they settled in... they rented accommodation there. And eventually, as time passed and they carried on working, they worked very hard, my parents would always say that they were very keen... non-smokers, they didn't drink, they didn't smoke, they didn't go out. They saved all their money as teachers, didn't go on expensive holidays and save the money, and eventually bought a house in a place called Abbey Wood, which is opposite a beautiful park, Abbey Lessness Park. And it was a house that... a large Victorian semi, which I don't mind telling you, at the time they paid four thousand pounds for, if you can imagine that, a house that they had all their lives. And in fact, it's still our family home in many ways. We still have access to it. And some of their granddaughters are living there now. So we have very fond memories of Abbey Wood, a huge house that was the scene of many parties and many family events, like many people have. But certainly we didn't move around. So we were all born there. I was even born in the living room. So for me, especially, sort of sentimental and special place for me. So south east London in Abbey Wood is where they eventually settled and lived their whole lives. | |
| | |
| **BF**: Right. So how was it like to grow up in this area for you? Did you feel like you are growing up in England or you're growing up in a Polish island? | |
| | |
| ==== Dorastanie w Abbey Wood ==== | |
| | |
| 🕑 //00:08:22// | |
| | |
| **JK**: Well, it is quite interesting, isn't it? Because, of course, my parents had three children. I've got two older brothers and I'm the youngest girl. And it was... I've got to say, actually, the Abbey Wood was quite far removed from the Polish parish that we eventually joined and the Polish parish where I am now active. So it was quite removed from there. A good 20 minutes to half an hour by car to Forest Hill Parish and a good 35 minutes plus from the South Norwood Parish, which all comes a little bit later. But certainly as a young girl, in fact all my life at home, I remember that my parents spoke to us in Polish and it was very important from my parents that we all speak Polish. And it wasn't without its challenges, of course, because as I found out since, because I've got three children of my own, what happens is that you want to speak in Polish to your children, like my parents wanted to speak with us, my dad worked full time, my mom worked full time from what I can remember, because I was the third born, so we didn't see our parents during the day if we were at school and we would see them after school through the evening and at weekends and during holidays. So my parents spoke to us all the time in Polish and, of course, we went to Polish school, and I have to say that when I was a teenager I was rebellious, [laughter] like all teenagers are, and I didn't want to, actually didn’t want to speak Polish. And I sort of thought, well, I'll be quiet then, if I'm not going to speak it, I don't want to. And it was quite difficult for a teenager to speak Polish because it's a different language. Polish is difficult. Polish really is difficult. And when you're making mistakes, it makes you really self-conscious. So sometimes you don't say anything at all. But they did. They persevered. | |
| | |
| ==== Tradycje i język polski ==== | |
| | |
| 🕑 //00:10:17// | |
| | |
| And, you know, our life was very Polish, I would say. We followed all the Polish customs, as in... every time Wielkanoc, Easter, which is coming up now, Wigilia at Christmas, every religious date in the calendar we would be celebrating that, too, because, of course, we were part of the Catholic Church and the Polish Catholic Parish in Forest Hill, Brockley, Forest Hill. And so we attended all the masses there on Sundays and all the holy days of obligation. And everything that we did, I use the word dictated, it was structured, let's just say, by the Catholic calendar, I would say. Because… Polish people who are, you know, who are Catholic, it is a Catholic nation now and it was, and we were a Catholic community and we were very much part of that, that we would celebrate the Polish calendar and whatever came along. | |
| | |
| ==== Wspomnienia z lat młodości ==== | |
| | |
| 🕑 //00:11:15// | |
| | |
| So as well as that sort of life, what was it like at home? All our meals were Polish meals. Well, generally, they were all Polish males, anything from kotlety to… less with the pierogi, actually, but a bit sort of meat and two veg, which is what Polish meals are like. Not that I didn't like them, I did. I remember the meals we had very fondly. I remember the sorts of baked things that my mum would bake or that my babcia would bake and we'd eat those. And it was very much Polish cuisine in our house. I never thought any different, it never bothered me. It was just part of our life. We spoke Polish, we were eating Polish food, we were celebrating all the customs that you would and all the traditions, all the Polish traditions. So I would say that my life was very Polish. I would say that when I went to school, and secondary school especially as a teenager, I wanted to be very much part of the youth and what teenagers would do at the time. And we did have a few [laughter] uncomfortable moments at home where I would want to do these things and my mom didn't want me to do these things. Now I look back on it, it's not really a big deal. It was just going to the local youth club and where they had discos and I wanted to be part of that. But my mum wasn't so keen, probably just because she wanted it and she wanted to bring us all up in the Polish way of life. I completely understand it and I understand how important it was to them, because, of course, they were ripped from their family homes when they were very young. And my parents always talked about how important it was to have family, almost especially for my dad, because he had been orphaned in the war. He had a couple of brothers that were no longer there with him in England. One was in Argentina that just recently..., actually, the story goes on, that we just recently found out that he had died in 1950. He had two children who had gone on to have a child of their own. She has just got in contact with me via Facebook and that's all exploded now, so she and I are creating this relationship. But that's..., that's life just going on and new people being born into families and it's just mind blowing. | |
| | |
| 🕑 //00:13:37// | |
| | |
| But back to the family situation. We attended the church every Sunday. We went to Polish school. Polish school on Saturdays. All of these things we did without question, and of course, my mom created karolinka and she liked it... Well, she was a dancer anyway, so she would teach her children, her three children to dance Polish dances, dress them up in costume. She was quite an adept seamstress. In fact, very, very much so in her later years. I remember making all the costumes for the dance company, but she would make costumes for us and we would dance at special events, representing Polish culture, representing our family, representing the community. Got a number of pictures here, actually from the very early days. And let me know Basia if you want me to hold them up now or whether we can do that later. | |
| | |
| ==== Historia grupy tanecznej Karolinka ==== | |
| | |
| 🕑 //00:14:32// | |
| | |
| So very much… everything in the Polish way of life. It was OK when we were very young, of course, and then when you get to your teenage years, so I would say anywhere from about the age of 15, maybe 14, 15, up to the time when you leave school, about 18, I would say around 18... Because after 18, if you go to study, then you work on your own identity and you start working things out, but those perhaps three or four years, that can be quite difficult. I remember there's a really good word in Polish, się buntowałam - I didn't want to necessarily... not be Polish, but I wanted other things as well. I didn't want just my Polish upbringing. I wanted to be part of what England was offering me and what being British was offering me. | |
| | |
| 🕑 //00:15:24// | |
| | |
| And it wasn't really until I started studying that I look back on my identity and, interestingly, have been looking through photographs just recently and saw a picture of my room at university covered in pictures: posters from Poland, Polish dance companies and things that I really liked. So I obviously was identifying with being Polish. And around that time, at about 16, 17, my mum, whilst Karolinka, the dance company that she'd created, which I know we'll talk about a little bit later, this dance company that she created... She'd sent a number of us on a Polish dance course. And I remember this Polish dance course gave me the opportunity to have Polish pen pals and pen friends and I wrote a lot of letters in Polish with a friend of mine. And it was when I was on this course, I started thinking, well, it's not so bad - speaking a second language, this language that’s quite difficult. And writing with this friend of mine and speaking with this friend of mine and suddenly realising, of course, that having another language is everything it's cracked up to be. | |
| | |
| 🕑 //00:16:30// | |
| | |
| I would say that being bilingual then was very special. I would say that by being bilingual now is actually pretty ordinary and being multilingual is my field of work at the moment. So I know that being multilingual, trilingual is really nothing unusual. People have lots of languages coming out of them all over the place now because we're so integrated. And so, yeah, very much the Polish my life, I would say. I would say that my English is better than my Polish. I would say that my Polish is pretty good. But if I don't practise, I start to sort of trip up over my tongue. Then I can't quite remember the words I need to remember. But certainly it depends on where you live and how much you use that language, because when I was about 23, 24, I travelled to Poland and I lived for a whole year in Poland. I worked and lived in Poland, in Zakopane, in the south of Poland. And my Polish then was, I would say, pretty good. Pretty good to the extent that people thought that I was from Zakopane. That was a bit of a funny story about that, about someone saying to me, you know, they thought that I was from Zakopane because my accent was like someone from Zakopane. So I know that it's ups and downs. You go through ups and downs. The more you speak it, the better it becomes. If you get someone that you can speak to in Polish, then I always grab that chance. But because I live my life in England, I use my English a lot, of course. My English, I would say, is more advanced, which would be the case for most of my generation and generations either side. If you're born here... and I understand Polish parents right now who have children that are born here, those children right now are going to... I'm what they will become. I'm one of the sort of people that they might become. Educated here, contributing to English society, to British society and speaking in two languages. So, yeah, very Polish upbringing, very integrated in the British, English way of life. | |
| | |
| **BF**: So you actually were in the two worlds at the same time, especially when you were growing up, it was not just Polish, but the English society influenced you as well. About the pictures, I wanted to tell you that if you tell the story about something and you just have the picture in front of you and you feel like to show it, that will illustrate what you're saying, just feel free to show us... | |
| | |
| **JK**: Just just before you ask the next question. Let me just show you, this is what my mom would have us do. | |
| | |
| **BF**: [laughter] | |
| | |
| 🕑 //00:19:17// | |
| | |
| **JK**: That's me already dancing a solo, and my brother and my friend at the back there. So my mum would put us in costume and we would be dancing there for the parish, as you can see. I've got to show you also this particular photograph, where, still before being part of the dance company, very much part of the community, there I am with my brother, with his back to us. And here in the picture here is pan Szkopiak, pan Kaczmarek, pan Jankowski - figures that were very well known in our parish, actually. And here on the right, here on the back, I don't know which side you can see, I think it's on the right for you, yes, it might be... There are people in Karolinka, older people in Karolinka. Some of those people, yes, I do still recognise some of the people actually married within the group. So as you can see, community promotes those relationships between young people. And I'm very young there. I can't be more than about six, maybe six, so not yet joining the group, but wearing costume and representing, I'm very much representing, representing the community then. And so certainly that was my growing up there. | |
| | |
| **BF**: So do you remember in which year your mom created tha dancing group? And if I know, it wasn't called Karolinka yet? | |
| | |
| ==== Założenie zespołu Karolinka ==== | |
| | |
| 🕑 //00:20:49// | |
| | |
| **JK**: That's right. I’ll hold the pictures in a minute. So, my mum... Here's my mum when she was older, she was in her 60s, 70s. That's pani Maura, as you can see if I hold it this way, there's less glare... That's pani Maura. So Maura Kutereba was the co-founder of Karolinka. Now, Karolinka was also founded by... I'll show you these pictures a little bit early... by Jurek Pokert, you can see there with the moustache. That happens to be the 10th anniversary of Karolinka’s existence. And that's ksiądz Gajecki here on this side, ksiądz Dembski on this side. Because we spanned the parishes, you see, and that was the 10th anniversary concert. Pictures that were created, that were then hung in the parishes, that's why there are two of them. | |
| | |
| 🕑 //00:21:47// | |
| | |
| So pani Maura had been... When we were at polska szkoła, Polish school, pani Maura had been involved... My mum had been involved with the public school. And this was the one in Brockley at the time. And because she was a teacher and because she taught dance, it must have been then ksiądz Wróbel, who happens to be in this picture. Ksiądz Wróbel, here. This is ksiądz Wróbel, I'm in there at the end of the table here sitting. So this is a community event. So ksiądz Wróbel and I think ksiądz Dembski had been talking to my mum about creating a group of people together to perhaps sing and dance. And my mum had been speaking to Jurek Pokert, George Pokert, about creating a group of young people or bringing a group of young people together to start singing and dancing po polsku, in Polish. The dance company looked a little bit like this to start with. Now, it wasn't called Karolinka. It wasn't called Karolinka at the time when we were just singing, it was called Niemen because we were a singing company. Now, if I show you this one. This is a little bit more what it would have looked like, because the one I showed you just a moment ago, I was in it already and I was only about 11 when I joined the company. We were called Niemen because... actually, I don't know why we were called Niemen. | |
| | |
| **BF**: But definitely it’s the name of the singer. | |
| | |
| 🕑 //00:23:33// | |
| | |
| **JK**: Maybe. Or maybe because of the river. I'm not too sure. It could have been either, I'm not sure. But the thing is, I think maybe it was just a name that had been grabbed from nowhere particularly or someone had suggested it. And we did a lot of singing. George was educated. I mean, he went to Trinity College, and he was a young composer, and he played the organ and he was really very accomplished. So he led this choir and we did a lot of singing. And then we started doing a little bit of dancing. So it was, I think, when we started dancing that I started to get interested in this. And I'll show you this picture again. I know I've just shown it to you, but you can see me there, the smallest one. I'm the smallest one in that picture. And you can see our hotchpotch of costumes there. It's very much what it was like. I have a colour one of that as well, actually... A hotchpotch of costumes, and we would do a little bit of dancing and a little bit of singing. And as we started to do more and more, we started to be representative of our community, we took more and more songs from the repertoire of Mazowsze and Śląsk. Mazowsze and Śląsk are two state dance companies that exist in Polska, in Poland, right now. I'd say they're rivals, yeah, possibly they're rivals. One is a little more authentic, the other is a little more stylised. Certainly their music... We were brought up on their music, we would listen to it quite a lot. George would take a number of tunes, break them down and teach them in parts to Niemen, the choir, as we were then. It wasn't until we happened upon a song, Karolinka, Poszła karolinka do Gogolina..., it wasn't until we sang that song that it became something of a sort of a theme tune for us. And soon after we started performing that regularly, we made a decision to create..., to choose a new name for ourselves. It wasn't the name that I was keenest on, but I was at that time this young girl in the picture, very young and very small. I didn't think I had a very strong voice, in the sense I didn't have one that was outspoken. But eventually we voted, the whole zespół, the whole group voted on the name Karolinka and we became Karolinka. And I'll just show you that one of our earliest... one of our earliest designs was this. This is back to front, I understand, but you can see that it's the sort of folk element of the font, it is rather folky. | |
| | |
| ==== Dalszy rozwój Karolinki ==== | |
| | |
| 🕑 //00:26:17// | |
| | |
| So we became Karolinka and this became part of our... you know, it was very significant, demonstrative of who we were and what we looked like and what we presented. And we started singing, dancing more and more. So from the early beginnings of looking a little bit dishevelled in our costumes, I would say, what my mum did was then she brought the whole community together. So usually parents of the young people that belong to the group. She would bring them together and we would sew costumes. I did have a picture of us all sewing the costumes somewhere in the middle of the hall because we would do it together. But ultimately, from the beginnings that looked a bit dishevelled, these were some of our first costumes. I'm still very young in here. I must be about 15, 16 in there, certainly I wasn't at university yet. I must have been about 15 because one of my school friends is in that picture. These are stroje cieszyńskie. So you can see that we start to look.... I'm now a little bit taller, so I fit in a bit better. And we start looking really quite presentable and we do a number of events, you know, where they'll be VIPs, we’ll be representing polskość, everything to do with Polishness, everything to do with culture, with tradition. And we will take part in these special events, meet dignitaries, mayors, cardinals. We sang for the Pope, for example, when he came over in the 1980s, we went to Crystal Palace. And the group started to really grow. It started to really grow. Why? Because actually it became very active and people, lots of young people, were pulled together to sing and dance. Not always just because they wanted to, but because my mom started to pull people in. And not only did she work with the adults, but she started working with the children, too. So I am in this one. This is a little bit earlier. But as you can see, she would do these things. Sew all these costumes for these young people so that they could perform and she carried on doing that, she just carried on sewing, carried on making things. And the more things we had, the more and more adventurous we would become and the more events we would attend. And in its heyday, I would say, I must have joined when I was about just before I turned 12 and through my secondary years and around 16, 17, I started going on dance courses and it was about... In my late teens and my early 20s the whole dance company really exploded. So I would have been... When would that have been? ‘86, in the mid ‘80s and late ‘80s, I would say. We were making costumes, we were inviting dance instructors over, we were creating new pieces of work and the singing and dancing in our company was vying for time, actually, I would say. Lots of us wanted to dance, lots of us wanted to sing. And it was always... We never had enough time to do what we needed to do, especially since we were performing, I would say, a couple of times a month in different places. Places like Balham, White Eagle Club, places like POSK at the time, places like Ognisko in Kensington. | |
| | |
| 🕑 //00:29:37// | |
| | |
| We started travelling. We started travelling abroad. So I would say we will take big groups where we will travel abroad. I just want to show you this picture here only because it's got a sign here. This is Karolinka travelling abroad [inaudible], I think you might see in one of the posters in the back. So we would be invited abroad through contacts and networking that my mum had done when we were on the dance course in the summer because we were going on this dance course to Lublin in Poland. There's so much that we did. So much. What did we not do?! It was a huge part of our upbringing. It was a huge part of our community and it's a huge part of our memories and how we view our community. Even now, all... Lots of my peers, and I was one of the youngest in my peer group, lots of our peers all know each other because you either belong to a dance company or a Polish community somehow, or part of Harcerstwo, which was the Scout movement. So, very often parents, or people, had to choose between belonging to a dance company and the Scout movement or the Scout group. It was rare that you would belong to both because it was quite demanding. But certainly in those Polish communities you knew people here, there and everywhere. And those friendships have lasted right through till now. These are my closest friends. Anyone that was in the community then and part of my Polish peer group, they're my closest friends. I have close English friends, but I have a lot of close Polish friends and memories of all those times. So, yes, Karolinka was Niemen, first of all, then it looked for a new name and we picked Karolinka. I seem to remember Polskie Słowiki was in the running, but it didn't make it and Karolinka became the name. And since that time we were Karolinka for many years. We still are Karolinka, but because we travel and we perform abroad a lot... I'll show you this picture because this happens to be one of the festivals that we travel and take part in quite a lot. This is Karolinka now, in the 2000s, I would say, in the new millennium. We would travel to... As we developed more, we travelled more and more abroad, and we travelled a lot Polska, in Poland, and we performed a lot in Poland and the more we travelled to Poland, the more we travelled abroad, and the more we travelled to Poland, we would find out that other groups had started to call themselves Karolinka. And we thought, “Really?”. There were so many names out there. Why is someone else choosing the name Karolinka, it is so specific and why would someone choose that? So, we eventually became, and have become, still Karolinka, but Karolinka London, we call ourselves very often. So on Facebook and on Instagram, we call ourselves Karolinka London. And when we go to Polska, when we get to Rzeszów and take part in festivals, festivals abroad, if there's another Karolinka, we often say that we are Karolinka London. Which is very fortunate because of course London is such an amazing place. So, it's not really a problem to call ourselves Karolinka London. It's actually... it's quite fancy, I think it's quite nice. I like it. And so, yes, that's how our name has developed. | |
| | |
| **BF**: When you told me about the story, how your mum created the dancing group, I actually, I have this reflection which puzzles me: I imagine that, you know, your mum had the education in England, wasn’t educated really in Polish folk, really in Polish music or in Polish design... and she created this Polish group. And I just can't think how did she manage to turn... in the Polish music? I know she had the Polish background and a lot of the songs she knew, but she had to build from scratch. You already mentioned she was taking some examples from Mazowsze or other Polish and groups that were already dancing. But tell me, how did she cope with this? Or, for example, how did you manage to make people sewing the costumes in England? You know, how did she do that? | |
| | |
| ==== Historia szycia kostiumów ==== | |
| | |
| 🕑 //00:34:06// | |
| | |
| **JK**: Yeah. Oh, my goodness. How did she... Well, she was a dance teacher anyway, so let's go even further back. So, when she was... When my parents met in those camps in the Midlands, one of the things that people did and this is one photograph that I don't have that I should be able to share with you, I'd have to I'd have to go away and find it and come back. In fact I’ve got in on my telephone… I've got a picture of my parents dancing and… | |
| | |
| **BF**: And she couldn't travel to Poland for a long time, I guess, am I right? | |
| | |
| **JK**: That's right, they couldn't. So, the communist area really stopped us travelling there. Let me just show you a picture of my parents and how they would have looked when they were dancing together, because there is a really good one here. I'd have to... We'd have to stop recording. I'd have to go and get it because it's in a different book and... Do you want me to do that? You want me to get that picture of them dancing together? It was a really long time ago, in costume. | |
| | |
| **BF**: OK, will it be quick? | |
| | |
| **JK**: Yes, it will be, it’s in the kitchen, it’s on the table. | |
| | |
| **BF**: OK. It's OK. | |
| | |
| **JK**: You can either pause or I'll be back in one minute to get it. | |
| | |
| 🕑 //00:35:48// | |
| | |
| OK, so... This is what my parents would do, so that's my parents when they got married there. But this is how my parents... This is the sort of activity that my parents would do when they got together as those teenagers, as well, in those camps in the Midlands. So they would bring these people together and they would... they would then dance together, just like we're doing now. They were doing it then in the 1950s, late ‘40s and 1950s, they were doing that and they were... I don't know who would have taught them. I can't remember who my mum said would have taught her. So, she would have had some knowledge, just like I might have done if I'd remembered what I was doing here, you know, then I'd take a little bit of this I suppose, and I would sew some costumes for my children and I would get them dancing something that I could remember. And you can probably get some sort of kujawiaczek or something. In fact, I remember very clearly dancing to czerwone jabłuszko. That's what I used to dance my solo to. And my brothers used to do a little bit... Then we used to do trojak, zasiali górale... that's what we used to do. Those basics we would remember. So, it wasn't until... It was more that we used the songs of Śląsk or Mazowsze as a choire when Niemen started. I wasn't part of Niemen. So, I think choosing the music and singing would have been easier. Then mama would… my mum would have started creating these costumes and we would have been dancing, probably trojak, probably some simple stuff that she could remember. And then when... in the 80s, she started going on a kurs, a course for instructors of Polish dance groups. She started travelling to Lublin in Poland to go on this course. The course lasted three years. Three years? Four years? Three years it was then and that's when she started networking. That's when she started getting more educated in different regions. And she started meeting people that were experts instructors and experts in their region. And it was around that time in the eighties that she would invite... I mean, I can't tell you who we didn't have in our house. I got pictures of these people as well. Experts in their regions and they would be invited to our house. My mum would host them and she would have them teach us in workshops and they would stay with us for ages. Honestly, for really weeks and weeks. I remember sharing our house, you know, I'd be this young teenager in my room and the room downstairs in the middle of the house would be given over to whichever guest we were having, whichever experts from Poland. So they would come and they would teach us singing and dancing workshops. And my mum would pick their brains about costumes. And I remember that certainly some of these costumes here that she started to make would have been when she had started to go on the course and she started developing an interest in these things. | |
| | |
| 🕑 //00:38:45// | |
| | |
| Usually the costumes that we had were... I mean, I’ll show you something a bit more recent, but she would make all the children's costumes because she had knowledge of that region through the contacts that she'd made and the networking that she had done. So there were a number of costumes from rzeszowskie costumes that we had, cieszyńskie costumes that we had and many that followed that, that she would find in books in Polska, so it wasn't just the people that she networked with, but she found these things, these books, and she would buy them and they would help her sew. And she was interested in sewing, so, of course, that helped. And how did she get the parents to help? She was really good at talking people into this sort of stuff. [laughter] I'm not so good as my mum. My mum would really talk a lot of people into supporting, but not forgetting that if... You know, it's always somebody's child who is dancing, so she can always appeal to the person who is dancing if they are older and more capable, if they are already an adult and they can sew their own costume and bead their own costume, or she can talk to the parents whose children are part of the group and whose parents loved it, that these kids, these young teenagers were all part of of Karolinka because, of course, it was it was part of their heritage. | |
| | |
| 🕑 //00:40:03// | |
| | |
| It was Polish. It was all Polish, so they loved it and their children were involved. So then my mum would host the sort of sewing parties at people's houses. She would cut everything out. And by this time, if you can imagine, I mean, this is already a lot of people, isn't it? That's already a lot of people. And we continue to expand, you know, the little the... You know, the kids group, my mum was still around when we organised the children's group, look how many of them. All those costumes designed by my mum and by helpers and these costumes, for example, this is a beautiful photograph in Polska in a skansen, in a village, a sort of a unique village, old fashioned village. So all those costumes would have been sewn. She would just get people together and say, well, “This is for you and you're going to be wearing these things so, you know, help, please”. And people just did it. Probably because we all did it together. However, she did a lot of sewing late at night, into the night, and I never understood why she was always tired until much later in my life, when I knew that she had always gone to bed at 2 or 3 in the morning before a concert. Sometimes she didn't sleep because she'd be sewing costumes. That's why she was always tired, because she didn't sit and watch TV in the evening, she went and she sewed in the other room. It's a labour of love that... rzadko spotykana, really rarely met these days, a labour of love that absolutely she dedicated her whole life to and always, as any group, we have no money. We were non-profit, completely, we have very little money. We don't have the support of any organisation. So, of course, doing it yourself is this is all you can do. | |
| | |
| 🕑 //00:41:50// | |
| | |
| And also, I should think... I daren’t imagine how much money my parents spent on Karolinka because in fact a lot of it came from their pockets and not from anybody else's. So a labour of love... I can't even think of a stronger phrase than that, but at its most extreme, that's what it was. But that's what mama did. You know, she... She learnt as she went along, she used her teaching skills to teach everyone what little she knew. She used her sewing skills to create costumes “in the style of”, and I come back to this picture because those pictures, the costumes that I'm wearing, the smallest girls that are wearing those costumes there that happen to be what's called jurgowskie stroje... we now have jurgowskie stroje that would blow your mind right now. Most of the photographs now are no longer [inaudible], but they're on Facebook. We've got lots of photographs on Facebook on the Karolinka London Facebook page, so many photographs. And our jurgowskie stroje... We now have a jurgowska suita so we no longer do trojak, we no longer do things like trojak, which would have been something mama had remembered. We actually do dances... Mama was really big on being authentic in the dance company. So we were as authentic as we possibly could be. That's a lot of learning, so even when I went on the course, we have to be as authentic as we possibly can be. Stylised from the point of view that we are on stage and appealing to an audience, but certainly we try to keep certain dance elements in the dances that they are attributed to or where they come from. So that's what my mom was all about. The more she learnt, the more she could inject into the group and the more it grew and became bigger. And we have so many costumes that we don't really know where to put them. [laughter] We always struggle for space. | |
| | |
| **BF**: And then the moment came when you became a teacher and the leader of the group. | |
| | |
| ==== Przejmowanie roli instruktora ==== | |
| | |
| 🕑 //00:43:45// | |
| | |
| **JK**: Yes, very much so. When I was... Oh, my goodness... So I started dancing when I was 11. I really just badgered my mom to let me join the group. She didn't want to. She thought I was too young. And then when I was just about 12, she let me, so I must have been going to secondary school and she thought maybe that was time. And no one wanted to dance with me [laughter] because I was a child. No one, no one wanted to dance with me, but, you know, never phased me. It just didn't bother me at all because my love of singing and dancing is much bigger than worrying about people who didn't want to dance with me [laughter]. So that was 11, 12 at 16, so what's that? Five years later... five years later I attended the course for the first time because she sent a whole bunch of us on this course and we went as a big group to Lublin on this course we had... They are the best times of our lives. We will all talk about it when we get together. It was just... and we will say that if we all go to an old people's home together when we're all older, that's all we will talk about, all our memories from those years. Anyway, so a lot of us went because we love dancing. I was slightly more ambitious or differently ambitious, let's say, in the sense that I just... I wanted to dance for a living. That's what I wanted to do. I wanted to hone my skills. I started the course when I was about 16, 17, and when I was about 19 and I'd started studying, I said to mama, I said, “Look, why don't I take some of the people that are struggling with the basic steps or who are new, who are learning the basic steps, why don't I create a group so that I can teach them?”. And off I went. And so some of us in the group were dancing twice a week, three times for three hours, twice a week, and we would have this little group, up to about ten people. Whoever wanted to come would study all the steps that we were learning to do. And as I became an instructor and the years passed, when I kept going on the course, I became more knowledgeable about what I was teaching, what I could and couldn't do, I tried a few bits of choreography, some which was slated that I had to learn from and then create again. So some pieces we took to Poland, then they weren't liked very much over there and we had to rethink them and be more authentic in what we presented. | |
| | |
| 🕑 //00:46:06// | |
| | |
| And from about the age of 19 I was teaching. Then when I started studying, I went and studied, I did a dance degree. So, I mean, you know, dancing, choreography, technique in England. So that would have been contemporary dance and choreography. But choreography crosses over into all forms of dance. And I started wanting to practise my skills more on Karolinka. So I did that. I started teaching the children's group, not the maluchy, the really little ones. My mum used to like the pre-school kids and she used to teach them on a Sunday, but on a Wednesday would also do slightly older children and I would teach those. Eventually when I hit 30 and we had the 20th anniversary, 25th anniversary, we always have one of these events where we all get together and we were in sala malinowa at the time and my mum was giving this speech and she said, “Oh, and now, you know, I'm, you know, I can give Karolinka over into safe hands” and she was talking about me and she said that I could start leading it properly and I think at the time then she would have been, what, 60? So she might have not wanted to be jumping around as much, but I was just getting going. So I then started running the group from the age of about 30, even though I'd been for the 10 years before that I'd been teaching bits and pieces and choreographing already. So now we've just had our 40th anniversary. So that's 20 years behind me as well. She was always supportive. She was always supportive and she was always there to support with the questions because that's something I didn't do. And that's one thing I don't understand how she managed to find all that time. It's so time consuming. She worked full time. She was a full time teacher. But teaching, I think, was different a little bit then. Now it's all so consuming, so all consuming that you can't possibly have a hobby. But then mama would... I mean, how did she do it? She worked full time. She had three children. She ran this dance company. She worked in polska szkoła on a Saturday. I don't know, I don't know how she did it. I just don't know how she did it. Anyone now would just... their head would explode with all this commitment. But certainly I think it was a bit of a bonus for her that I wanted to do that so much. And in fact my whole education was geared in that direction, which is a little bit unfair [laughter] in the sense that, you know, I made no money from it. I make no money from it. I run it as a labour of love, too, in my own way. And I think potentially what I brought to the group... and I think if you speak to people that belong to the group and have been taught by me, and I think potentially they would say that on a technical level, in terms of dancing, we would have jumped up several notches. And I do believe that, as technically as we are orientated, I think that we... We do very well. | |
| | |
| 🕑 //00:49:13// | |
| | |
| Costume wise, we now have to resort to different means. We have lots of costumes that my mum obviously left us. We have to repair them. Some of them now we try to buy, but it's very difficult. Some we continue to sew, but they'll never be the same person who will sit every night in the kitchen getting through... I can't tell you how many sewing machines my mum must have got through, certainly when we were clearing out her house after she's been dead for about six years now... In fact, it's her anniversary very soon and my tata, my dad is in a care home, so I spent the last few years clearing out the house. And some of what when I cleared out the attic... I can't tell you, I've lost count of how many sewing machines we had to throw away. So many sewing machines that she used and used up and then stopped working. Really quite admirable. More than that. No, I can't... I can't find the words to explain how, you know, there should be a statue of her more [laughter] seriously. So much time she spent on it. I think if she'd only been running the group and not sewing the costumes, it would have been different. Maybe, but because she did everything, everything, she just didn't give up on it and had the support of my dad who was... who just did whatever she wanted, basically supported her with whatever she wanted to do. So I'm just looking down here all the time because her picture’s here. So I keep looking at her picture and I just think... nie mieści mi się w głowie, just doesn't fit in my head how much she did. | |
| | |
| **BF**: Say it's not the everything that your parents were doing for Poland or for Polish people was one more thing that I heard about... | |
| | |
| 🕑 //00:50:56// | |
| | |
| **JK**: Ok, oh my god, well, there are several actually, let me see, so... In my mid teens they had a Polish deli in Peckham, in Peckham Rye. There we go. That lasted about five years through my late teenage years and certainly when I was studying because I used to take food packages with me back to [laughter], back to university. Anyway, they also then in 1991… correct me if I'm wrong, Basia, if you're thinking of something else, in 1991, they bought a big house in Zakopane. You thinking about that one? The water... Oh, ok. They bought the house, you can tell me if there's something else… In 1991, they bought a house in Zakopane and they created like a pansjonat, a small hotel, like a B&B. And they ran that for 15 years. 15 years in their retirement they ran that and then they sold it. Thank goodness. And then sort of stayed home and really rested, I suppose. What else were you thinking about, Basia? What are you thinking? | |
| | |
| **BF**: I think I think I got from you what I wanted [laughter]. | |
| | |
| **JK**: Oh, those things there were the extra things that I did. Certainly the Villa Maura in Zakopane hosted a number of events there. So a group like this, for example, the kids group that was really taking off at the time, they were their first experience of all being together on a trip with Karolinka was I think in Villa Maura. So she took them all over there and they had some sort of workshops and they spent some time together. And those young children, because that picture was from quite some time ago, they were my wychowanki, they were the people that I then taught to dance and then danced for many, many years. I mean, lots of these people start dancing when they're about 4 or 4 and stop dancing when they're about 30. I mean, my goodness, how many years of dancing is that for all these people? They've not outdone me yet. I'm the one who's lasted the longest. [laughter] So even though I joined at 10, I'm still going. [laughter] | |
| | |
| **BF**: Jola, there's no doubt that this folk company built or preserved Polish identity amongst Polish people, but we need to leave this subject a little bit and I would like to ask you what else in Polish community, from your experience, was preserving this polskość? | |
| | |
| 🕑 //00:53:38// | |
| | |
| **JK**: OK, so what else? I think polska szkoła has the biggest deal here and polskie parafie, Polish parishes and Polish communities around the parishes. So certainly those two things. As part of the parish... Well, the parish led everything, the parish dictated everything. So whether it's Brockley and Forest Hill, or whether when we then took the move to South London because we moved over there as a dance company, I'm saying, but certainly the Polish schools were the ones that promoted Polish heritage, identity, Polish heritage, cultures, traditions, helping young people to establish their identity through the teaching of language, history, geography and religion, actually. And these were the places where language especially was the forerunner. Language especially was teaching these young children and young teenagers from preschool age all the way up to A level. At the time when I took my GCSE, it was called O level, but at GCSE level O level or GCSE level and then A level. So polskie szkoły were huge, were huge contributors to every community. They ran very much together with the parish. So in my experience, for a very, very long time, the priest would always be the dyrektor szkoły, he would be the director of the school and very often parents would be the teachers. And it would be a bonus if any of the parents were teachers by profession. When my parents started teaching the most, I think it was when we were in South Norwood, actually. So my parents became teachers, regular teachers, in the polska szkoła at South Norwood. And I say that because when we were growing up, I think probably with a young family that had enough on their plates, but when we had grown up and left home, they then had time to contribute more to the polska szkoła at South Norwood. So they started teaching at the polska szkoła in South Norwood and they taught there until they retired potentially closer to 70... 65, 70. They were there for absolutely ages. In fact, they were there until my youngest was about 10, meaning that was in... Oh, my goodness, yes, it must have been in their ‘60s, when they're well into their ‘60s and then they retired. I remember tata contributed to A level teaching because he used to always have, you know, books like Chłopi and Popiół i Diament at home and he’d always be talking about things like that. Mama would contribute to teaching primary aged children because that was part of her profession. That's who she taught. So tata was secondary school educated and mama was primary school educated. | |
| | |
| 🕑 //00:56:50// | |
| | |
| Then I got married when I was about 30 and I had three children and all my children went to polska szkoła, so the cycle begins again. There was a slightly different cycle, I would say, because when you are then born to someone who's already been born here, your Polish isn't as good, so... I have an English husband and we speak in English at home and most of my peer group speak in English at home. They might have married someone from Polonia, someone from their parish or from another parish, from the Polish community. And some people married English people because we're living here and we meet lots of different sorts of people, don’t we, and we can't control who we fall in love with. And all those of us who had children inevitably started bringing them to polska szkoła, started bringing them to the dance group. But polska szkoła was a place where originally, I suppose, the onus was on trying to help learn Polish. This changed a little bit when the new wave of immigration started and started to come over to England. And by no means am I complaining because this is just the way that life evolves. So what happened was with the new immigration, the standard of Polish in polskie szkoły, in Polish schools on Saturday suddenly jumped up a level and continued... Actually, it was the jump in the level that was the challenge and then started moving like this. And so for people like my children or my friends' children who were born here, Polish was being taught as obcy język, as a foreign language, as an additional language, not as your home language necessarily. Although it's difficult, isn’t it, because all my children spoke Polish in their very young years, the minute they started to get into English school, that overtook. So we kept taking them to polska szkoła, but as with many young people at the time, it's interesting, not just mine, and mine didn't complain so much, I don't think really, there were lots of tears because the young children started to say, “We don't understand, we don't understand”. And so it was very difficult to keep these young children at these polskie szkoły. Lots of them left and I thought to myself, “Oh, my God, all my children's friends have left. How am I going to keep them at polska szkoła if their friends don't want to go?”. So whilst my parents continued working at polska szkoła, this was fine, because if they were in babcia’s class, which my eldest was, it was all right. But then when my parents left, it got a little bit challenging and the children didn't want to go because my parents used to take the children to polska szkoła on Saturdays. They used to come and pick them up, take them in their big old, you know, big old 7-seater car and they would take them to polska szkoła. And eventually what happened was that I started looking for a tutor for my for my children, so that they can continue learning Polish, because by that time, English had taken off so much that I wasn't prepared to sacrifice my relationship with my children by making them speak Polish, when in fact I was speaking to my husband in English. I didn't want to just turn around and say, you know, say it in Polish or I'm not or not at all, which is reminiscent a little bit of when I was younger. So it changes your aims a little bit as a parent. It doesn't have to be perfect Polish anymore, but it has to be an appreciation and has to contribute to your heritage and to your... and to your identity. So I looked for tutors to teach my children. | |
| | |
| ==== Prowadzenie szkoły piątkowej ==== | |
| | |
| 🕑 //01:00:28// | |
| | |
| And then what happened eventually was that I set up what's called szkoła piątkowa, polska szkoła piątkowa and it was a little bit of a branch from the polska szkoła sobotnia, the Saturday school, but it was polska szkoła piątkowa [laughter] and I did what my mum did probably with Karolinka, but I did. I phoned up all my peers and my friends who had children who had left polska szkoła on a Saturday and I said, “Hi, how about you... would you like your child, who's now a teenager...?” Bearing in mind that I had been... My studies, I also became a teacher, I did a PGCE and I was a secondary school teacher. So I used those... They didn't scare me, teenagers, as much as some people do. Sometimes they do. And I say to my friends, “Why don't you bring them? Let's do this, polska szkoła piątkowa“ and we created polska szkoła piątkowa that ran alongside polska szkoła sobotnia and we ran it for, oh my goodness, a long time, nine years before I stopped doing that, before I was overcome with the amount of responsibility I taken on, I couldn't cope with it any longer. But the point is that this school then took children from preschool age and taught them all the way through to GCSE and not A level, GCSE so they could pass their GCSE. And all my children, my three children who I wouldn't say are fluent in Polish, they're not, they don't speak like me in Polish, but they all passed their GCSE because they can speak Polish enough to get on with things. And if they go to Polska, they can speak there. | |
| | |
| 🕑 //01:02:04// | |
| | |
| It's such a part of their identity that they are… they see themselves as Polish. If you quiz them, they'll be very fair and they'll say I'm half English, half Polish because my husband is English. But if you catch them unawares and when you hear them, when you listen to them talking, they talk about being Polish. That's what they talk, they talk about being Polish because of one, two, three, four, five, six reasons - whichever ones that they give. I leave that up to them. That's up to them. If I've given them a start in Polish, if they want to pursue that later, that's up to them. And that’s the thing that's different between me and mama. For mama... Her life sort of depended on it, that we were all brought up in the Polish way. For me, for my children it's a choice, because they're both Polish and they’re English, it's up to them. | |
| | |
| 🕑 //01:02:57// | |
| | |
| But Polish schools obviously contribute to this. And because I thought that the Saturday school... You see, I don't want to... I don't I don't feel, I don't feel like I want to criticise it, it's not... it's not how I feel, I don't work that way. If polska szkoła wasn't quite able to provide for my kids, for my children, I think to myself, “OK, well, what can I do? Let me think.” And I start thinking things and I think, “OK, well, we'll just create another group then, OK? It can be part of the polska szkoła, but we'll just take all the children that find it difficult to speak Polish.” And we had a huge amount. At most we had 50 on a Friday evening, at least we had about 30. And these little groups, classes of five, six children all learning with the teacher and I brought in all my peers, [laughter] all my friends to come and teach them. My brother, my best friend, someone else from Karolinka, and because of my contacts in Karolinka… And then we had two people that came into Karolinka from Polska that met each other in Karolinka. They were learning English, but they spoke Polish. And I said, well, why don't you come along, you come and teach a class. So I had people there for two years, maybe before they moved on, or I'd find someone else. And some of us were there right from the beginning to the end. | |
| | |
| 🕑 //01:04:11// | |
| | |
| So Polish schools are huge, huge in promoting Polish culture and traditions because they also follow the Catholic calendar. They also celebrate the 3rd of May and the 11th of November. They also celebrate Święty Mikołaj. They celebrate Wielkanoc, pisanki, you know, painting eggs. They celebrate everything in the Polish calendar. These days, I would say politically it's a little more touchy in what polskie szkoły do. Some of them have removed themselves from religion, religious teaching altogether. And some of them just want to concentrate on language, history and geography. Piątkowa szkoła concentrated just on language. It was enough, just on language. We travelled to Poland. My God, we took language trips four times, I think it was. We went four times. I think so... Four times we took a group of 20 children with us on language courses to Polska, which I organised. In fact, I sometimes can't believe I've done all this. Sometimes I think to myself... So I'd apply for funding from a number of charitable people, groups, organisations like SPK, I applied to the embassy (not always... not always successful), but certainly the smaller places like SPK, Grabowski Fund, Zjednoczenie Polek actually were very supportive under pani Helena Miźniak. And all these people that used to teach me as a child or were involved in my community... I say pani Hela Miźniak, she was huge and she was, you know, she was always there as part of polska szkoła. She was there as a leader of the Zjednoczenie Polek for many, many years and was mama's peer. So these people were supporting the next group of people, developing their identity and celebrating their heritage and becoming Polacy. | |
| | |
| ==== Znaczenie szkół polonijnych ==== | |
| | |
| 🕑 //01:06:05// | |
| | |
| Always, really, really... Always really important for the people of my mom's generation, something that I really wanted to contribute to as well, I didn't realise I felt quite like mama did... If I look back on how I thought as a 15 year old, I didn't... I didn't think that I would be in this position. And actually I've got to say, for all the efforts that mama made and even for some of the efforts I've made so far, there's been recognition. There have been odznaczenia that have been, you know, little... You know, the embassy has recognised my mum. She got the equivalent of an MBE, you know, a medal, and was honoured by the embassy. I've got these little spinki, these little badges being honoured for some of the work that I've done, things like Polka 100, which celebrate influential Polish women and the things that they do, and both mama got that and I got that. These things are... they're nice. They're nice, but your work doesn't stop at that point, when you've been recognised. You just carry on doing the work that you're doing. | |
| | |
| 🕑 //01:07:23// | |
| | |
| So yes, and communities, of course, one thing that I remember talking about in an interview with Marta is that communities then bring communities together. Communities then bring people together by doing things like tea and coffee, tea and cake. Tea, coffee and cake after mass on Sunday. I remember as a child, as part of the parafia, for every Christmas and from every Easter and every summer, we would have a sort of bazaar, like a... What’s it called, like a summer festival bazaar sort of thing, or Easter Festival bazaar where everyone would contribute. My mum would bake a cake. We would all go to church. The cake would be in my hands. We would be travelling there. After mass we would all go next door into the church hall and we would all wander around talking to everyone, having tea, having coffee, buying things off the stalls. This still continues. I seem to remember it was a big deal when I was younger. I have witnessed it trailing off a little bit in the last few years, which is a real shame. There are lots of reasons for this. One of my biggest aims is always to try and unite the new wave of immigration with all the children that are born here or indeed born here or born in Polska and then continuing their education in their lives here. Trying to find some sort of way of developing a relationship between Polonia, who has been here for a really long time, and the new Polacy who have just come over and trying to bridge that gap a little bit because we're actually all about the same thing. But we're all... but we’ve all come at it from a different point of view, but we're all about the same thing. So I don't know why there's not more linking together. They should be. There is. It's not that there isn't. It's just that there's all this sort of... “Well, we are this person and we are this sort of person”. I think it doesn’t matter, [laughter] you know, we're all Polacy, we all want to speak Polish, we all want to celebrate the Polish calendar. We all want to celebrate our heritage and Polish traditions, eat Polish food and everything that's being Polish... Travel to Poland, see family in Poland, see family in England, even if they're Polish, including if they are Polish. So it's about joining people together. So, yes, certainly Polish schools have a lot to answer for and play a huge role, a huge role. They really shouldn't be disbanded. They should continue for what they are and everyone should accept them for what they are, rather than thinking that they can contribute to some greater education of preparing children to go back to Poland and to continue their education. That is not possible. You've got three hours on a Saturday morning, four hours at best, three hours really, to go through so much... So: very important, demanding, time consuming, but really, really, really very important. | |
| | |
| **BF**: Few times you mention the Church was playing an important part in the Polish life. And I want to ask how much actually Polish Church in Poland was helpful in keeping the Polish identity. | |
| | |
| **JK**: Here? | |
| | |
| **BF**: Yes. | |
| | |
| ==== Rola kościoła ==== | |
| | |
| 🕑 //01:10:35// | |
| | |
| **JK**: How important was it? Well, yeah, it was very important. For me as a young child, for me as a young child it was something like this... Looking back and remembering the events, where as a child, you would sit there and all these older people were sitting around you and you'd be thinking, who's that? And eventually you get to know that it's, you know, pani Mźiniak or it might be pani Makulska or pan Mikulski or... The oldest person in our parish in Forest Hill I remember was pan Major. I'm not sure if his name was pan Major, maybe that he'd been in the army and therefore, you know, pan Major. I remember him dying. I remember... I remember all the points of the calendar and going to mass all the time. In fact, it's a bit of a bone of contention in our house because it's very difficult to get young people to go to church these days. Certainly during lockdown, you know, things have completely changed and we haven't been going regularly at all, if at all. Now that my children are older it’s different and they're teenagers and they make their own decisions. But the thing is that I remember there was no option. Similar to my husband actually, as well from an English point of view, because his dad was a Catholic. So we share this experience in that... We went to church every Sunday. It superseded everything else. You couldn't do anything else on a Sunday because we always went to mass on Sunday. And every date in the Polish calendar superseded everything else. So Wigilia, of course, really important, family gets together. I remember my English friends always went to the pub on that night and they would always say, why don't you come to the pub and be like - it’s Wigilia. I think there was only probably twice where I must have thought, “I really would like to go”, but otherwise, Wigilia was Wigilia and that's what we did. But going back to the church… This is a good picture. | |
| | |
| **BF**: Do you think it was kind of a ground that church was giving, like a space, you know, something you could build on. We give you that ground and you, Polish people, can build on it our identity. | |
| | |
| 🕑 //01:12:51// | |
| | |
| **JK**: Erm, yes... Although how dancing and singing came out of that, I'm not too sure. How polska szkoła came out of it, I'm not sure. But I think it's because the priest would always be na czele, he'd be the one making decisions. So he would obviously decide that a school is a good thing, isn't it? We've got lots of young people, let’s school the young people! And if you had a really good priest and most of the priests that I have met, most of them, I would say, not all of them, but most of them, see the value of młodzież, of young people and the need to educate, help them and develop their identity, celebrate their identity, celebrate their nationality. And nationality is probably the wrong word. Their identity always has to be... and heritage, celebrate their heritage. So we had things like this. This polska, this is my first… moja pierwsza komunia święta, it was a really big deal for most people. Very few people there, and yet a big deal. And that was in Forest Hill. So these are things... And my bierzmowanie, I've got pictures of that downstairs I found recently. That's confirmation. So these things were really important. And you would pass through all the points, wouldn't you? So you'd be baptised and you got First Holy Communion, then you've got confirmation. Then after that well confession somewhere comes along there, sacraments, you know, all the sacraments. And then if you get married and you decide to get married in the church, then you've got your marriage. So you've got everything. You've got to go through all these phases to be able to get to the next one. And your parents are the ones that make sure that you get through all those phases. You don't know it at the time. You don't know until you become an adult yourself. And even then you don't know it until you've passed through these signposts, all these, you know, posts, and then you realise that you can move on to the next one. Should you want to. Should you want to. And that's the big deal now. Should you want to. I don't think I had much of a choice [laughter] when I was a child and most of my peers would say that we didn't have a choice. It wasn't a choice we made. It was something that our parents wanted for us. But the Polish parishes, yeah, a really big deal and ksiądz would always be this huge figure, really important figure. And people always talk about ksiądz. Felt a little bit like... like I imagine it would have felt like for my tata, in his village. Ksiądz would have been an important figure in the village. And that's how I sort of see it. I sort of imagined that our Polish communities now, if you could lift them, transport them, drop them, and they would be an automatic village in Poland with everyone living in an old house of some sort. So they are self-contained. | |
| | |
| 🕑 //01:15:36// | |
| | |
| Are they exclusive? In the worst sense, are they exclusive? Well, no one he doesn't speak would want to come to a Polish Polish church. We had people marrying into Polish families and they would if they chose to. And yet, of course, everyone had a job in England, speaking in English. So everyone spoke English. So I think everyone... I think everyone contributed to society in England. Everyone contributed. If I think about my parents, they did. And I think about... There's enough room to… and enough time to contribute to the place where you live, England, and your heritage, your Polish heritage and the customs that you want to... As long as you don’t play them off against each other too much because they're both important. And that's what I think. They're both important. | |
| | |
| 🕑 //01:16:31// | |
| | |
| Yes. I think that the parish is a big deal. And I would say that I have witnessed... This is one of those things that is a little bit touchy. When the parish is not so supportive of the community. So a parish isn't just its religious community, it's not just the religious community. Otherwise life would be bland and nothing else would be happening. A parish is the religious community and everything that you can do to bring people into that religious community, should you wish to, should they want to be, or as an outreach programme. So I see Karolinka as a little bit of an outreach programme. You know, let's bring the młodzież in, because what it does is it creates a place for people who are like minded. And these people who are like minded can find solace and can find support amongst people who are like minded. So when you feel out of it elsewhere, you'll find more comfort and understanding there, so you can go out and experiment and try something else and work elsewhere. But if you want comfort and emotional support, you'll find it at home, within your parish and within your community. So it's about drawing everything to there. And I suppose because everything came from the religious calendar, I suppose you're right. It does... You probably can look at it as not just the chicken and the egg, but perhaps the very beginning and that things expand from there and are always held together by that. | |
| | |
| 🕑 //01:18:00// | |
| | |
| Maybe that's why things fall apart a little bit these days. That link isn't as strong as it used to be. It's just not as strong as friendships are. The young people creating the group, they're part of different relationships and friendships. So people have friendships in the group and then in all their English groups as well. Is that bad? No. It's just... it's just what it is. So, yeah, I do think that the Polish church played a big part in it, but, you know, Catholicism has got such a bit of a rough deal at the moment, hasn't it? It's not... not the faith... the most popular thing, is it? So I think I would like to see more support from the parish for the things that happen within the parish. Polska szkoła, dance groups, choirs, Koło Pań, there's a drama group, whatever other groups. The Polish parishes could do sometimes a little bit more to bring those places together and make sure they stay within. But, you know, that's... that’s a whole other discussion, I think. | |
| | |
| **BF**: Can you go back with your memories and tell me about your Christmas, Christmas Eve, I guess more than Christmas Day. | |
| | |
| **JK**: OK | |
| | |
| **BF**: Any of the traditions and the house, how did it look like? Just a little bit of memories. | |
| | |
| ==== Wigilia i tradycje rodzinne ==== | |
| | |
| 🕑 //01:19:27// | |
| | |
| **JK**: So when I was a child, we never spent Wigilia, Christmas Eve... We never spent Wigilia at our house. We always travelled to my grandmother's house on my mum's side to my babcia’s house, which was in Birmingham. So back to where my parents came from, when my mom came from, where she was brought up, and that's where we would have Wigilia. So actually, that's... We travel to a house there. Usually a couple of days before or a day before, depending on when my parents finish their term, and we would sit at this big table on Christmas Eve waiting forever to start the food because, of course, present opening was after Wigilia. And we would sit there trying to get through food generally that we didn't like, you know, fish, herring, pierogi, you know, lots of things with fish. You know, as a young child, people tended... you know, young children tend to like fish very much. We'd have things like bigos there, bigos was on the second day, actually, but lots of things that we had to get through before we could open the presents. So certainly babcia would always... my babcia would always bake and I remember that very clearly. Always... in fact, I remember it so clearly that every time we went there, she baked cakes. It was either apple cakes, szarlotka, jabłecznik as we called it, we didn't call it szarlotka. Jabłecznik, or a cheesecake, sernik, or she'd make a piernik, which is a sort of... What's that? I don't even know what that is in English… What is that? | |
| | |
| **BF**: Gingerbread. | |
| | |
| 🕑 //01:21:21// | |
| | |
| **JK**: Oh, gingerbread! There we go. Faworki, she would make faworki at Easter. And I remember she cooked so much that one year she'd forgotten to bake a cake or she just hadn't baked a cake and we went to the shop to buy cakes and I couldn't understand why we would do that. I thought, why is that? And we ate the cakes and I actually thought they were horrible. I thought, that's really horrible. I don't want to eat shop bought cake. They just don't taste very nice and I was very young, I think. So we spent all our... all our Christmases there, Wigilia. And usually on that day we would then travel to my dad's sisters, my ciocia, because she lived about half an hour's drive away from there. And we would spend drugi dzień świąt, second day of Christmas, Boxing Day, we would spend at my ciocia’s. She had three children, a bit older than us, but then we'd spend some time there. So it was all about visiting family, eating traditional foods and waiting for presents to be opened after Wigilia in the evening. Late nights, later, when we were a little bit older, drinking wódka and shots with dziadek. So we had that and eventually it changed. And we started doing Wigilia at our house because my babcia died and my dziadek got remarried. And we then... it just changed. And the house got sold. My grandparents’ house got sold, so there was nowhere to go, actually. We didn't have any of the guests who actually had to be at my parents' house, but it was always something that you would always do. You'd never not be part of it. There was only one year I remember my parents were in Polska at that time and we went to my ciocia’s for Wigilia, but still, generally speaking, we were always all together and it just continued, continued like that when we had children as well. So Wigilia was a very special time. | |
| | |
| 🕑 //01:23:00// | |
| | |
| And everyone, everyone knows how Wigilia is special. To the extent when I took my family about five years ago, we went to Polska, to Kraków, to have Wigilia. Maybe it wasn't that long ago, four years ago maybe. And we had Wigilia there and we went to Wierzynek to have a meal. But when we came out of Wierzynek, which is on Kraków Square, the streets were empty. And this was not lockdown. This was like four years ago, streets empty at Wigilia time. Everyone is at home with their family. And I certainly know that when we are with our family, when we sit down, I say, “OK, everyone, everyone, every Polak is doing this at the same time”, depending on time zones. And everyone's having Wigilia this time of night. So it's... it's very special. And I think some of the Polish traditions are so wonderful. We've got one coming up, haven’t we? Wielkanoc. Pisanki, malowanie pisanek. That's fantastic. So I remember doing that my whole life. I never didn't do it ever in my whole life as a teenager. Not as in my early twenties. I just always painted eggs [laughter] on Easter Saturday. Every, every year. I've never, ever not done it. So, yeah, Polish traditions in that sense are really... And I know my kids love it. I know my children now love it. You know, they're born here and they're half English, half Polish and they love Polish traditions and they could tell you about them. And polska szkoła is what has taught them about it as well, because it's not just at home, because actually it's being part of polska szkoła. So it comes into polska szkoła and what you teach at polska szkoła, so it’s just there, it’s just there, promoted all the time. | |
| | |
| **BF**: Jola, you dedicated yourself so much to dancing company and also to Polish school when you were teaching. You put yourself really into it and now I want you to think, do you remember any stories, something you saw that made you think “it was worth it”. Something maybe you heard the young dancers were doing or you saw them doing something or the situation that made you think “It was worth it, to do it”, to give them yourself and to teach. | |
| | |
| 🕑 //01:25:34// | |
| | |
| **JK**: Probably many things. It's always worth it. It's worth it because my children think they’re Polish, that's that for me and I don't even have to tell them “You will do it, you will do it”. That's not it, so that's worth it for me already. That's that's something that's already there. And I'm wondering if you're thinking about any specific story, because last time I spoke to Marta perhaps it was… I might have talked about a number of other things, this is something specific, Basia, that you're thinking of or generally? | |
| | |
| **BF**: I don't know, because they never told me. I'm just curious. | |
| | |
| 🕑 //01:26:08// | |
| | |
| **JK**: Anything in particular, let me think. Well... Moments, emotional moments, sometimes. I have moments where I'm involved in doing what I'm doing and promoting Polish culture and folklore, and I do... I do have moments where I sit there and I'm overwhelmed by it and I think to myself, you know, “Flipping heck, this is just... this is amazing”. This is all happening because everyone wants to do it. So sometimes I get those moments and I do sit back and I think this is an amazing thing that everyone... and I feel the energy of people coming together and wanting to do these things. But many things have happened. I mean, there are times when people in the dance group have gotten together and they get married. We've got lots of małżeństwa, there are lots of marriages, unions from the dance companies, not just our company. Every dance company has that because you're working so closely together that, you know, you like coming together. When my children take part in things like this and talk about what they like doing, when it's Polish and when it's to do with the dance company or polska szkoła or they reminisce about polska szkoła, I think that's amazing. I remember when my mum died and a few weeks after we carried on doing rehearsals and we were preparing for her funeral and I wanted Karolinka to sing at the funeral. So I was leading the group and I got a friend of mine, Nina [inaudible], who helps us with singing, she's musically talented. She came along to help with the singing and I remember listening to everyone singing a song, and it was really moving for me. It was in rehearsal in this dingy south north parafialna sala, and they were singing this beautiful hymn that they were going to sing when the coffin was going to be carried out of the church. And I remember thinking then, “We wouldn't be here doing this if mama hadn't done this this group, you know, if she hadn't created this” and this is where it's come to. That even when you're dying, and when even when you've died, and even at your funeral, and even the crematorium, Karolinka is singing, you know, in costume, people are representing, people are remembering. So... I do. I do think about that, more when I'm in the moment, when we go abroad and we are in a festival situation, I do stand there and watch lots of people coming together and I like it that they are all friends. These people are all friends and they have found unity and understanding in each other because it is different, when you've lived your life having Wigilia, Wielkanoc going to church. When you go to school, of course, you've got your friends at school or English school, but they don't quite understand as much as your Polish friend does. So you'll always have that different understanding from that Polish friend. Is it a bad thing, is it a good thing? I mean, it's both. Has some bad moments, has some good moments. When I was a teenager, one of my English friends came and belonged to Karolinka for five years. She was English and she went through everything that we did together. She's one of my closest friends, she understands everything that we've been through. | |
| | |
| 🕑 //01:29:40// | |
| | |
| So... not any one particular moment, but many moments and constantly. All the time. All the time. I think, for example, just recently, just recently, pani Hela Miźniak just recently lost her daughter to cancer. And pani Hela Miźniak for me was this really big figure, you know, authority figure, she was part of the community with polska szkoła when I was a child. She was a bit of a scary woman then, I remember. And then she was na czele, the prezes, of Zjednoczenie Polek, someone that I applied to for funding when I ran my courses. And it's when those people, like pani Hela, when she asks me to... when she shows admiration for what I've done, I just think, “Oh, oh”, I become a child again. And I think, that's like, you know, getting patted on the head. And that's really nice. I mean, I don't do it for that reason, but I think that it's a big achievement when that sort of thing happens. I remember... When I hear people like that talking about szkoła piątkowa and what a good idea that was. And I don't ask these people to come and talk to me, of course I don't. And I didn't start a conversation and say to them, “You know what I've done? Guess what I've done!” I would just be... minding my own business and perhaps a grandparent of a child from szkoła piątkowa or a grandparent of a child in Karolinka will come up to me and say, you know, “You've done this great thing” and I think to myself, “Well, I'm just following on from what my mum did”, you know, and no one does it for... most people do it for the love of it, don't they, really? You do it for the love of it, not because you want recognition for it. Recognition is nice because it raises the profile of what you do, not because it raises your profile, because it raises the profile. That’s something that we lack a little bit today, raising profiles of something huge that we do community orientated. I can't tell you what I think of young people being involved in this community endeavour and how important it is for them. I don't think everyone understands. It's okay when you're an adult, adults can take care of themselves with young people who are still working out who they are. These teenagers, you know, coming into teenagehood, coming out of teenagehood, being a student, working at your identity, and perhaps coming back into Karolinka, coming back into the community, contributing to the community. That's what keeps things going. | |
| | |
| 🕑 //01:32:16// | |
| | |
| Another thing that makes me think about how important it is, is a couple of friends of mine who used to be in Karolinka, who decided to move out of London and pursue their life with their young children outside London and I remember once not understanding that and thinking to myself, “Why’d you do that?”. You know, “Aren’t you going to bring them to Karolinka? Aren't you going to bring them to polska szkoła? Aren't you going to do everything that we've been doing?”. And my friend's response was, “Well, we don't have to do everything that our parents did”. And I thought to myself, “Yeah, you're actually right. We don't have to do everything that our parents did”. It's a choice we make, isn't it? It's a choice we make. And some people give themselves a hard time for that choice that they're making. I don't like that either. I think to myself, “Your choices are affected by where you are in life”. So it might be that if my husband hadn't been so positive and so supportive and taking such an interest in Polish history, that we wouldn't be able to pursue the whole Polish thing. But my family absolutely adopted him into our family, and therefore he did. Wielkanoc, Wigilia, all the church trips, trips to Poland, he did it all with us. So he understands it. He's English, but he understands everything that I do. And I just think to myself, “He had the opportunity to do it, I had the support of my parents”. Some people choose not to go there. Some people think that it was so restrictive and so... so prescriptive that they didn't want anything to do with that for their own families. They wanted to move away from it. That's also a choice people make. You know, some of the family situations of my peers and slightly older people that had, you know, that had that come over after the war, that had experienced things to do with the Second World War and then who either wanted to create the family, found it very difficult to be close and personal with their family. My parents were younger during the war. So they were different. But people that were older, people that were older than me, some of their family związki, some of the family relationships were really quite difficult, as there is throughout life. You know, not everyone has an easy ride with the family, do they? I'm always thinking, honestly, I'm an analytical person, I'm always thinking about how I got to where I am today, how I should continue it, who's going to continue after me? Do I want someone to continue after me? It's such a hard job to do it. Do I just let go and let people do what they want to do with their lives? Because I don't want to be someone who says “You must do that or else”. It’s different. It's different now, I feel. I constantly think of how lucky I've been and what's moulded my life and those feelings that I had as a teenager, how I didn't... I didn't wanna... “Stop speaking to me in Polish! I don't wanna speak Polish!” and have that suddenly turned around and, of course, I'm grateful. Of course I am. Of course I am. | |
| | |
| **BF**: So perhaps the last question, because the time is quite late, but I'm actually curious, I have to ask you this question. There is a Polish word, polskość, I don't know how to translate this word to English, but I want to ask you what polskość means to you? | |
| | |
| ==== Polskość w sercu ==== | |
| | |
| 🕑 //01:35:58// | |
| | |
| **JK**: Oh, I think I'll cry if you ask me that, because it's... it's an intricate part of my life and I've often thought to myself that and if I thought too hard about what my parents went through when they had to leave their homes, if I thought too hard about Polish allied troops, that something that upsets me a lot, actually, if I thought about what people went through to where we are now, in fact, this is probably very pertinent... it’s a great question you've asked, actually. It's very pertinent. It’s… it’s... it's very difficult to explain, isn't it? It's a feeling that I cannot explain to you. If I think too much about those things that I just said, I get very moved by it. I get very emotional about it because it's something that... that... It sort of exudes from me and I feel is important and it has to be through family and through family support and all the experiences that I had in my younger life. | |
| | |
| 🕑 //01:37:03// | |
| | |
| Polskość for me is broader than just being part of Polonia. Or if you've come from Polska and you call yourself Polak, Polacy. Polonia - Polacy, I know that some people don't like the word Polonia. I think it's a fantastic word because eventually Polacy, who are here, are going to be part of Polonia and their children who are born here are part of Polonia. And Polonia is mega important. Hugely, hugely inclusive. It extends and just lends its hand to anyone who wants to be part of it. And it just says, “Would you like to come on, come join in. Come on, have a go”. It’s difficult sometimes to get people just to have a go, and be wanting to have a go, because there's a bit of a barrier. So polskość for me is anything to do with living the experiences of being Polish, so anything to do with celebrating the calendar, that's the biggest thing. In fact, everyone in villages many, many years ago with the calendar, the religious calendar would have predicted, have dictated everything, wouldn't it? To be part of that, to understand it is to do with polskość. It doesn't matter... It's potentially controversial: you don't have to speak Polish beautifully, perfectly and so well that people think that you are from Poland. It's about understanding the heart of Polska and about the culture, the practises. The regular practises that you are part of and that you contribute to, so you bring something to it and you take the experience from it. | |
| | |
| 🕑 //01:39:01// | |
| | |
| That's what polskość is, trying to be part of that, trying to speak Polish, learning some of the basics... learning some of those things and having having some sort of link which many Polacy do, whether it's half a link or quarter of a link, a babcia, a dziadek, a ciocia, a trip to Poland. If you enter into it, you have to enter into it willingly. And if you enter into it willingly, then it becomes part of you. It's nothing I can extricate for myself, and it's not even part of dressing up in costume. That’s not it. In fact, it's not it. That's my love for dance. But it's celebrating the traditions and speaking and trying to be educated in these things and giving that information further to your children, to the next to the next generation. That's what's important, because it's not just to do with language speaking. It just isn't. That's not it. It’s part of it, but it's not the only thing. So I think that's... that's what it is. I don't think I was clear there at all. [laughter] Many things, many things, wanting... wanting to take part in all those things that are offered. That's what I think is. I think. [laughter] | |
| | |
| **BF**: Jola, thank you very much for all of these great words you told us. | |
| | |
| **JK**: No problem. | |
| | |
| **BF**: This was like a great trip to be taken to your world and to see this with your eyes. | |
| | |
| **JK**: Yeah, thank you. | |
| | |
| **BF**: So is there anything that I didn't ask you and you wanted to tell us? | |
| | |
| ==== Zakończenie ==== | |
| | |
| 🕑 //01:40:42// | |
| | |
| **JK**: No, not really. I mean, there's so much, I suppose, part of my personal life that also contributes to this and how I wanted to be… how I wanted to be Polish, how I wanted to be like that. There's so much else that in my life I wanted to go, had my life going in a different direction, it still would have been in a Polish direction if I think of some of the things that I wanted to do. So really, it's about… being where you are, accepting where you are, isn't it, and reflecting on where you are, on how it is that you've come there. Perhaps missed opportunities have brought you to where you are and not to regret missed opportunities. I don't do regret very, very much. Not really. There's no point. You can't change things in the past. I suppose I'm very grateful that I get the chance to talk about it. I never get the chance to talk about this. No one wants to hear about this [laughter] if I talk about it, so I'm grateful that I've had the chance to, so thank you. | |
| | |
| **BF**: Thank you very much. | |
| |
