Here's a not-your-average Christmas story. I should know. I was there. The crackling strains of Silent Night filled the room from the antiquated radio. It was a German recording of Silent Night, very close to the original score that had been composed by Franz Xavier Gruber in December 1818. ‘Could you turn it louder?’ I [...]
Here’s a true-story Advent Tale with a difference. The sky was gradually darkening. She sat on the deep window sill in her bedroom, hawk-like in her vigilant perch. Sometimes it seemed to her that from this position she could view the entire world. Clusters of young stars were popping into existence, their neon dust [...]
It all happened one Halloween night, when the silver steeples and pinnacles of Kraków gleamed in the light of the full moon, and the stars shivered from on high. In the midst of this chilly world sat my Uncle Dariusz, huddled in the twelfth-century tower atop St Mary’s church, getting ready to open the window [...]
CHRISTMAS EVE 1992 Kraków, Poland “We’re closed.” That’s what I said to the woman as the chimes by the front door announced her entrance. I didn’t even bother preceding it with a ‘sorry’. It was quarter to two on Christmas Eve and I was just about to lock up shop and go home. Who can [...]
I want to fly backwards in time, and head for my old Art Nouveau apartment – the one my children and I used to share with our newly opened school. It was right in the historic heart of Kraków, within earshot of the quarter-hourly chimes that drifted from an aortic plethora of medieval churches and [...]
It’s Halloween, the end of the half-term holiday, so their huge Art Nouveau flat is not infested with the usual chaos and commotion of their new private school. Just her two children and her husband. She’s looking forward to seeing all three of them again, after her weekend away in the Tatra mountains. Forgiveness is still rife [...]
I’ve just come back home from a minor operation, and the memory of the surgeon’s knife cutting through flesh, sinews and bones has set my brain neurons hurtling all asunder. Of course I didn’t feel any pain during the actual operation itself, thanks to the sweet liberation of anesthesia. But the very mention of the [...]
Wendy Skorupski 