Terrible Times: Experience, Ethnicity and Auto/Biography

Abstract

The terrible times referred to in this song are the events of 1940 when Soviet troops took over parts of Poland and transported any likely opposition to Siberia. The song was written by someone who had been made to leave everything they had. As such, it has resonance for many now living all over the world. Moreover, the events have formed part of a legacy for those who never actually experienced them. As a child growing up in a Polish community in Britain,I did not appreciate the significance of these events both for individuals and communities, those who had experienced them directly and those who had not. In this chapter, I discuss how I came to conceptualise what being Polish meant for me and for others. I point,in particular, to recent developments in auto/biography as valuable ways to approach questions of gender, ethnicity and class. I concentrate here on ethnicity, but argue that being Polish is different for women and men, and again is different for different women and men according to factors such as class and age. I do not abandon terms such as ‘Polish’, or ‘woman’ or ‘working class’, since they are used by people as ways of describing their connection to the social world. These ascriptions are, however, occasioned and purposeful and can be challenged.

We will remember the tenth of February.

When the Soviets came we were still sleeping

And they put our children onto sledges.

Us they took to the main station.

O terrible moment, O terrible hour…

(author’s translation)