Imagined depiction of Jerzy Diatłowicki – standing far to the right – among the children he was playing with in Kazakhstan in the mid-1940s.
In the short film Syberyjski diament [Siberian Diamond] from 2016, created on the basis of an oral history interview with Jerzy Diatłowicki (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgxK-5rEiRU) the artwork is used to intercut with the words: "I spend my childhood among Kazakhstan, Russian, partly Korean, Tatar children."
One of the most significant threads in Diatłowicki’s report is that dealing with identity. As a child he was not initially aware of the differences. Spending his time among children of different nationalities, he understood only that his parents and grandparents came from Poland. When he was 4, while having a childish fight with a friend (a Russian girl named Lubka, pictured in another drawing), she called him Eврей (yevriey – Rus. "Jew"). Since then he had started thinking about his background. Hearing that word, which was meant to offend him, for the first time from Lubka’s mouth, he did not know what it meant. He ran straight to his parents to find out. Jerzy Diatłowicki stresses in his report that, even after the explanations he got from his mother, as a young boy he still was not able to relate himself to Jewishness in any way.
We could look at this story as an evidence of the strong assimilation of many Polish-Jewish families; however, in the first place, it tells us about the complexity and multiplicity of the ways to perceive one’s identity – which depends also on external features. For such a young child growing up in exile, surrounded by different ethnicities, to understand the concept of himself being not only Polish but also Jewish could be difficult. That child was lacking cultural reference. He could not associate the term with the community he would be able to identify with.
Diatłowicki recalls that he felt Jewish for the first time in his life only in the face of the events of March ’68. As a student of the University of Warsaw (simultaneously at the department of philosophy and sociology), he became involved with the Student Strike Committee. He joined it then became its delegate. Shortly after he was accused of "irresponsible behaviour towards Military Study" [Polish: Studium Wojskowe], on which grounds Jerzy was expelled from the University and called up for military service. In the next decades Jerzy Diatłowicki was engaged in social and journalistic activities.
Marta Frączkiewicz
