Around the World in 80 Days

203 days to go.

Time to get my act together and look forward to the Round the World Trip next February. If Albina, for all her poor health, is being positive, if all my friends and people in the know are being envious, then I had better start to be positive too. Just as positive and reckless as we were when we first made the booking so far forward on March 12 2021.

Albina and I decided then to book an 80 day cruise around the world. It is to commemorate the 150th anniersary of Jules Verne's "Around the World in 80 Da ys". It was one of my favourite books when I was a kid, and Phileas Fogg was a model character for me to emulate. It was expensive, but we were prepared to have a once in a lifetime experience, brought on by the fact that during the covid pandemic we were prevented from traveling anywhere at all.

The journey will take place on the Fred Olsen liner called the "Borealis" and here are the details.

Thursday 23rd February - sail from Southampton.

Sunday 26th February - Lisbon

2nd March - Brindisi

5th March - Port Said

7th March - Safaga (Egypt) - chance to visit Luxor

14th March - Mumbai - chance to visit Taj Mahal

15th March - Goa

16th March - Kochi, Kerala

21st March - Singapore

23rd March - Nha Trang, Vietnam

25th March - Hong Kong

28th March - Shanghai

30th March - Hakata, Japan

1st April - Osaka

2nd April - Nagoya

3rd April - Tokyo

10th April - Honolulu

11th April - Lahaina, Hawaii

12th April - Hilo, Hawaii

17th April - San Francisco

19th April - San Diego

23rd April - Acapulco

26th April - Puerto Caldera, Costa Rica

28th April - Panama Canal

29th April - Cartagena

30th April - Santa Marta, Colombia

2nd May - Tortola

3rd May - Basseterre, St Kitts

9th May - Azores

13th May - Southampton again.

That amounts to a total 24,000 cruise miles with 79 nights. We have our own cabin with a private terrace for sunbathing. A chauffer collects us from home and delivers us again after the tour. The vessel has 1360 passengers and 336 crew.

Will I survive this? Or will I actually enjoy it? It had better be the latter, at least for Albina's sake. 

Bartek's farewell and Oskar's dystopia

 Was a busy week last week. Because of a colleague's illness I went to work on Monday, Tuesday and Thursday, instead of just the first 2 days of the week. On Wednesday I took Albina to Hammersmith Hospital to have her metal stitches removed after her double operation on her kidneys.

On Friday, a sad and extraordinary event, as I attended the funeral of 28 year old Bartek Wlodarczyk-Sroka, who died suddenly at Berkely, California, as a result of an epileptic fit. Didn't know him personally, but have cooperated for a couple of years with his mother, Magda Wlodarczyk, one of the leading actresses of the Polish Stage Company. It was a sublime event with over 400 attending, mostly young people who knew him from his Polish background or his amateur dramatics as a child, but also his university colleagues, and those who shared his music. The cemetery in Sewardstone Park, near Waltham Abbey, was set in beautiful rolling countryside, surrounded by meadows and forests, which was reached after a long 15 minute drive through a dirt track, surrounded by fields and trees. The cemetery is so new it is not marked on any map, and all its current occupants appear to lie under beautifully carved wooden headstones. Bartek's ashes were laid to rest to the accompaniment of poetry, music and reminiscenses from his professor and his colleagues. Then we had a wake at the King Oak hostelry set in the Epping Forest and reached only by narrow roads under the darkened canopies of Epping's majestic trees. 

An then on Saturday at the invitation of the indefatigable Joanna Dudzinska I attended a cultural event at the ActOne cinema in Acton. It was the site of the former Acton Reference Library. She had laid on a talk by George Szlachetko about his mother who was in the Warsaw Uprising as a girl. Then we saw the singular sculpture by Oskar Krajewski, who makes extraordinary mobile sculptures from recycled materials, and particulary from plastic and electronic gadgets. It is lit up by LED lights and puctuated by sound effects. I felt that I was looking at a dystopian future in which the nightmare in our hallucinating brain is detached from its umbilical cord and allowed to float up into a reality we can all share.  

The countdown to Round the World Voyage continues

 

.

205 days to go before embarkation

My company, the London Chamber of Commerce and Industry, has now been informed of the details of my holiday, and has made an offer to extend my contract till September 2023 and to extend my current holiday allowances to cover the extended period. 

Albina seems quite resolved to enjoy the voyage and to delay any celebration of our fiftieth wedding anniversary from August 7th this year to February 28th 2023.  That is her pretend 75th birthday date. I say pretend because she is actually a classic leap year baby, born February 29th 1948. But I still intend to celebrate this anniversary on Sunday, come what may.

We still need to prepare visas through CIBT from October this year and to warn our doctors and our clinic to ensure the right supply of medicines for that period and the right inoculations. I note that we will need visas for Egypt, India, Vietnam, China and USA. Our last journey to the United States was in 2012, so we will probably need a new 10 year visa.

We will have to stack up our finances so that we can spend what we will need to enjoy the trip to the full and save money everywhere else. So no holidays in the meantime. Just as well, in view of the chaos at the airports.

At night I hallucinate, in the day I grapple with reality

 29th July 2022 London

At night I hallucinate and shudder in fear. I wake after a nightmare while I walk  at night across a bridge without an exit. The only bus is not going my way. I am still overwhelmed by worry over some unresovable problem that I cannot formulate but it is eating into my soul.

In the day I grapple with a grim reality of frustration so much is unresolves while I feel less and les competent to solve it.

Ahead of me, Albina and I face wanting to celebrate our fiftieth anniversary with friends, but Albina still feels too weak to celebrate following her fourth (double) kidney operation as well as the covid that followed that caught us both in the 40 degree heat haze that laid us both low.

I wait too for half a year now for the result of my Wikipedia application as I shudder to think how my biography will be shredded, or perhaps not even appear at all. The history of my career and my life's work lies buried while the researchers grapple with numerous references to me in books whci they consider unreliable records. How can I show my sceptical son and younger people that I know who or what I was.

But most of all I fear the Round the World Trip from February next year, to which we foolishly signed up last year at the height of pandemic, and to which we have paid a substantial deposit. It is now only 207 days away. I have little sense of the positive anticipation we both felt when we first booked it in early 2021. It followed repeated cancellations of planned trips to Poland, to Mauritius, wherever. With this horrendous commitment to a journey of 80 days, I fear for the survival of our relationship, as are expectations are so different. For me it is an opportunity to lead an active social life and record my experiences for posterity. Fo Albina it is an opportunity for rest and for anonymity. Even more, I fear for my sanity, living in a cramped cabin, with all sense of responsibility gone, other than than our survival and our sustaining the discipline of our daily medicine intake. We will feel uprooted not only geographically, but also because our sense of time will be in flux, as we systemically cross longitude after longitude and time zone after time zone, constantly adjusting the timeclock on our phones, and losing hours from our day.

What can keep me sane? Writing a journal and contact with friends. Only they can save us. But will Albina tolerate my writing? Will I have the strength of purpose to continue it? Yet without that journal I feel that the whole journey would be just an empty vacuum in a hitherto busy life, a journey without a compass, without an end destination, other to return again to the beginning. 

Nuremberg 2.0

 

Dear Editor,

On reading Andrew Roth’s report that “Fears grow of Russian show trials as pretext for invasion” (28.05.22), I remembered how the lead American prosecutor at the earlier Nuremberg trials, Robert H. Jackson, believed that Russian participation in those trials nearly undermined their overall credibility. After all, the Soviet Union had been responsible for as many, if not more, mass murders than Nazi Germany, albeit over a much longer period. It did not help that the Soviet judge and chief prosecutor had played critical roles in Stalin’s infamous show trials of the 1930s. In particular, one remembers the cynical attempt by the Soviet prosecutor to introduce the Soviet massacre of Polish officers in Katyn as a German crime. Ultimately, because of the participation of Western jurists in dissecting the well documented and appalling Nazi German crimes, particularly those committed in Russia and Poland, the Nuremberg trial verdicts were justified and vindicated by history.

The threatened reactivation of a “Nuremberg 2.0”, however, run solely by Russian judges, would be seen as a mockery of justice, even if some genuine excesses by Ukrainian soldiers were to be revealed. I believe that it is up to the United Nations General Assembly to authorize an international tribunal on crimes committed in Ukraine when the war is over, and both Russian and Ukrainian prosecutors could then be given the chance to bring their evidence of real and alleged war crimes to the court, even if most of the accused would be tried “in absentia”.  In the meantime, the courageous Mariupol survivors should be exchanged with Russian prisoners held by the Ukrainians, and not tried as criminals in a tendentious show trial.

Yours faithfully,

Wiktor Moszczynski

Letter sent to The Guardian 28.05.2022

96,296 Polish electors in London and 55 Polish candidates

 

                                                            P R E S S       R E L E A S E

There are currently 96,296 Polish citizens on the electoral roll in the 33 London Boroughs who are eligible to vote in the local elections on Thursday May 5th. This constitutes 1.57% of the total electorate of 6,116,260 in Greater London (ONS statistics - December 2020). The Federation of Poles in Great Britain CIO, which is an umbrella structure for Polish organizations in Great Britain and has served as the voice of the Polish community in this country since 1946, is urging as many UK citizens of Polish origin, as well as Polish citizens resident in the UK, to take an active part in the local elections in London and elsewhere in the United Kingdom. 

The various Polish communities throughout London have been in the forefront in the massive generous relief effort for Ukrainian refugees, since the first day of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24th. Polish community centres in London and elsewhere have acted as the first hub in their local area for financial and material donations to assist Ukraine and its refugees. Polish voters in London will want to see that local council candidates support continuing the relief effort for Ukrainians, and they have been critical of the administrative delays in offering Ukrainian refugees asylum in Britain. 

There is also considerable concern, already voiced by Dr Włodzimierz Mier-Jędrzejowicz, President of the Federation of Poles, in his letter on 24th June 2021 to the Prime Minister, at delays and mistakes in granting full settled status to so many Polish and other EU citizens. 

There has been more coverage of these elections than previously in the Polish London media, both in printed magazines and on Polish websites. Our member organizations have been appealing to their members to ensure they are registered to vote and to participate actively in the local elections. For instance, Polish Migrants Organize for Change (POMOC) is campaigning to maximize the number of Polish female voters, and are prioritizing registration drives for all potential Polish electors in Ealing, Hounslow, Lewisham and Waltham Cross.  

 

The attached statistical table indicates a further gradual reduction in the total number of Polish electors in London. This was foreseeable in view of decisions by some Polish families to return to Poland following uncertainties over settled status, while others have opted to apply for UK citizenship and consequently no longer appear as Polish citizens on the electoral roll. In fact, there is a 3.7% drop in the number of Polish electors in relation to the previous year and a 12.6% reduction in comparison to 2018, when the Polish electorate statistics had finally peaked in the immediate aftermath of the Brexit Referendum. 

As usual, the largest concentrations of Polish electors are in Ealing (12377) and Hounslow (7570), and then Brent (5274), Croydon (5029), Barnet (4594), Haringey (4537), Merton (4608) and Hillingdon (4501). 

A total of 55 candidates in London appear to be of Polish extraction. They are on the lists of 19 of the London Boroughs. These candidates include 27 Conservatives (18 of them in Hackney and 4 in Haringey), 7 Labour, 8 Liberal Democrats, 11 Greens and 2 from other parties (see below).

Wiktor Moszczynski,

Research Officer

Federation of Poles in Great Britain, 238-240 King Street, London W6 0RF,

List of Borough Council candidates in Greater London of Polish extraction

Borough             Ward                                Name                                                            Party

Bexley                Kelsey & Eden Park        John Paul Gorski                         Lib Democrat

Camden              Fortune Green                Richard Olszewski                        Labour

Croydon             Park Hill & Whitgift        Szymon Zaborski                        Lib Democrat

Ealing                 Greenford Broadway    Jan Andrew Gaca                           Green

                            Hanger Hill                       Michal Solski                            Green

                            Northolt West End         Natalia Kubica                             Green

                            Walpole                            Monika Williams                Conservative

Enfield                Bowes                              Daniel Szymon Stachow            Green

                            Edmonton Green           Peter Krakowiak                           Green

Hackney             Brownswood                  Joanna Zolnierzak                    Conservative

                            Clissold                             Diana Mikolajewska            Conservative

                            Clissold                             Monika Nierzejewska          Conservative

                            Clissold                             Julia Zolnierzak                   Conservative

                            Hackney Central             Stefan Liberadzki                      Green

                            Hackney Downs              Agnieszka Cuellar-Bridy      Conservative

                            Hackney Downs              Nikodem Mikolajewski         Conservative

                            Hackney Downs              Joanna Wojciechowska         Conservative

                            Hackney Wick                 Piotr Lipinski                        Conservative

                            Hackney Wick                 Piotr Pietrzyk                        Conservative

                            Hackney Wick                 Anna Socha                           Conservative

                            Haggerston                      Karolina Bugaric                   Conservative

                            Lea Bridge                        Marzena Sterner                  Conservative

                            Lea Bridge                        Sally Zlotovitz                          Green

                            Shacklewell                     Andrzej Krajewski                Conservative

                            Springfield                       Simche Steinberger              Conservative

                            Stoke Newington            Anna Chomicz                       Conservative

                            Stoke Newington            Weronika Zolnierzak             Conservative

                            Victoria                            Monika Hoppe                      Conservative

                            Woodbury Down           Agnieszka Wypych                 Conservative

Haringey            Bruce Castle                    Agnieszka Bielecka               Conservative

                            Tottenham Central        Agnieszka Adrjanowicz          Conservative

                            Tottenham Hale             Peter Gorski                           Conservative

                            West Green                     Richard Siemicki                  Lib Democrat

                            White Hart Lane             Jeremy Krynicki                   Conservative

Harrow               Pinner South                   Zbigniew Kowalczyk                Reform UK

                            West Harrow                  Monika Sobiecki                       Green

Havering            Goosehays                      Emilia Kukielka                         Conservative

                            Harold Wood                  Krystyna Koseda                       Labour

                            St Edwards                      Karen Kruzycka                       Green

Hounslow          Osterley & Springrove   Judith Kowalczyk                       Lib Democrat

Islington             Junction                           Stefan Krawczyk                      Lib Democrat

Kensington & Chelsea Colville                    Alex Nowak                            Lib Democrat

                            Dalgarno                          Theodore Karpinski                Conservative

Kingston   St Marks &Seething Wells       Deborah Olszewski        Womens Equality

Lambeth            Vauxhall                           Liam Jarnecki                           Labour

Lewisham          Evelyn                               Tim Reczek                             Conservative

                          Catford South                 Eva Stamirowski                      Labour

                          Hither Green                   Jane Alaszewska                      Lib Democrat

                          Lee Green                        Miki Jablkowska                     Green

                          Rushey Green                 Louise Krupski                         Labour

Merton               Lavender Fields              Slawek Szczepanski                Labour

Newham            Forest Gate South          Olenka Gradosielska                Conservative

Southwark         Peckham Rye                   Renata Hamvas                      Labour

Wandsworth     Thamesfield                    Penny Staniaszek                     Green

                         Tooting Broadway         Stephen Bieniek                Lib Democrat         

Totals:  55 candidates

Of which:   Conservative  27       Labour 7             Lib Dems 8         Green 11                Others 2

                                         

                                                                                     

UK and Polish "useful idiots"

 From Wiktor Moszczynski,

Dear Sirs,

I was intrigued by the description of Boris Johnson as the suggested mediator between Germany and Poland in their contrasting response to the war in Ukraine. Patrick Wintour seems to approve Jonson's credentials in his piece "Johnson is an unlikely bridge builder" (Guardian 07.04.2022), but the poisoned relationship between Germany and the current Polish leadership will remain. While it is true that the UK and Poland still see eye to eye on a strong commitment to supply arms and material support to Ukraine, and are more determined then Germany and France in pressing for stronger sanctions, they are also united by their consistent negativity towards Brussels and to the current French and German leadership, even to the extent of publicly sniping at Macron as he desperately battles the pro-Putin nationalist forces which challenge his presidency next week. 

In the past Lenin mocked European politicians and writers who sympathised with Soviet Russia as "useful idiots". Now Boris Johnson and Polish prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki have both played the role of "useful idiots" to the Putin political agenda in the last 5 years as they have sought to undermine the liberal principles and the unity of the European Union, which Putin and his more overt European allies (Orban, LePen, Farage) are determined to destroy. In fact, Brussels and Berlin suspect that despite the hostility of UK and Poland to Putin, their temporarily concealed anti-European agenda remains in place, as they await the triumphant return of the arch "useful idiot", President Trump in 2024.

Yours faithfully,

Wiktor Moszczynski

Sent to the Guardian   07.04.2022

ReplyForward

Russian tradition of mass executions

 Dear Editor,

Michael Day is right to draw on the past history of mass executions by Russia when referring to the killings in Ukraine "Russia's sheer brutality an all-too-familiar trait" "i" 05.04.2022). It is not just the executions with hands tied behind their backs and a bullet in the back of the head that link up Bucha, Grozny and the mass executions of 22,000 Polish officers and civic leaders in 1940 in the Katyn Forest and other sites in Russia. There is also the persistence of denial and lies that go with it. The truth about the Katyn atrocities was denied by successive Russian governments until 1990. Russia has an unenviable record both of massacre and mendacity that goes back more than a century.

Yours faithfully,

Wiktor Moszczynski

Spokesman

Federation of Poles in Great Britain

Sent to "i"                     on 4th April