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The boy who succeeded with his notebook at 89

2020-10-25T02:45:14.274Z


The school newspaper that the Polish Michal Skibinski wrote in 1939 becomes one of the most celebrated European illustrated books of the season eight decades later.


Double page of Michal Skibinski's diary with Spanish translations.

In July 1939, Michal Skibinski was an eight-year-old boy who hunted wasps with his glass, played ping-pong with his brother Rafal, walked with his grandmother and had ice cream in the casino in Anin (Poland).

Once a day, he would sit down at a ruled notebook and write a single, simple sentence that described something that had happened to him.

"There has been a horrible storm" and things like that.

Just a school assignment: write down a sentence to improve your penmanship.

On September 1, he noted: "The war has begun."

Everything that happened to the notebook and to the child since then has a story.

The end.

In 2019 the notebook is published in Poland with the drawings by Ala Bankroft, the artistic pseudonym of Helena Stiasny, a student of the Faculty of Graphics at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw.

In 2020 he received a mention at the Bologna Fair, the most important for the illustrated book universe, as the best first film.

I've seen a woodpecker

is translated into several languages, including Spanish (by Katarzyna Moloniewicz and Abel Murcia) at the Fulgencio Pimentel publishing house.

Its author is now 89 years old, with severe diabetes that forces him to inject insulin several times a day and a sense of humor that sneaks into the rigidities of an email interview where three linguistic somersaults have been taken (Spanish, English and Polish).

Yet one perceives that Skibinski has an innocent irony, infinite piety and prudence highly trained by dint of decades of officiating as a priest in a communist country.

First, the notebook.

“It survived from 1939 thanks to the care of my mother.

At the beginning of the war she went to our house, in ruins, and brought documents and souvenirs, including two red folders with the inscriptions "Michal" and "Rafal".

Neither my brother nor I had any idea of ​​the existence of these files.

It was only when she died in 1974 that we sorted the documents, found the folders, and my notebook appeared.

That it has been published now is a great joy for me ”, revives the man who one day in the summer of 39 wrote“ my nanny came to see me ”without knowing that this would be the last sentence of the old normality before it disappeared for the historic sinkhole.

Since 1974 the notebook has been spared from Skibinski's successive moves and his temptation to get rid of it.

He eventually gave it to his brother Rafal who, in turn, ended up giving it to his son, Marcin.

Skibinski's nephew is the culprit that today you can read

I have seen a woodpecker

.

And Ala Bankroft is the architect of the metamorphosis: from a calligraphy notebook to an illustrated album that is the same for a reader of eight as another of eighty.

“A book of these characteristics does not understand ages.

Michal's diary tells us about an imminent tragedy as much as it talks about the fullness of now, and he does so in a way that is as simple as it is mysterious, ”says its Spanish editor, César Sánchez.

Now, Skibinski.

In the summer of 1939, while Hitler was planning the invasion of Poland, the brothers Michal and Rafal finished school in Warsaw and settled in Anin with a nanny and their grandmother.

Big events: visits to the train station, caterpillar hunting, ballooning in the sky.

On August 29: "Daddy came to see me."

And he did not come back.

Dad, an aviator and commander of a bomber crew, crashed in a plane crash on September 9.

By then Michal already knew there was a war and was writing short sentences about bombs, cannon shots, grenades and rationed bread.

“Thinking about it now, it strikes me that the Nazis, five days after occupying Milanowek, have already organized rationing.

Besides, I played a small role that September 13.

While walking with my brother, we found a German soldier talking to a woman.

I interpreted for them and translated that he was looking for bread. "

To evoke that childhood in 1936 in images, an editor at Dwie Siostr — where Michal's nephew had offered the notebook — thought of a look at the height.

The cartoonist he knew best was his daughter Helena, who was wandering around with an animated film to present at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw.

“He asked me if I could paint landscapes like the ones we visited when I was a child.

So I put down the animated film I was editing and drew with acrylics the landscape of trees lit by the sun that I remembered from my summers, ”Stiasny recalls by email.

In the book, he adds, “there are two childish perceptions.

One is that of Michal from then and another that of my memories as a child ”.

Thanks to this fusion, some pages are born where horror is something underlying, nothing that still defeats the light.

“The war is something close, but it has not yet arrived.

The trees and the land of childhood still remain as a refuge for the child ”, reflects the illustrator, who traced sensations in her memories and in a poem (

By The Peonies

) by Czesław Miłosz.

The same author who said: "You can only write poetry in the language of childhood."

After finishing high school, Skibinski entered the seminary.

Starting in 1958, he specialized as a priest for the deaf.

He used sign language against the social atmosphere: “It was believed that sign language should be banned because it was thought that if deaf people stopped using it, they would end up learning to speak.

But it was a failure. "

He was aware of the lack of freedom in communist Poland - they tried to circumvent censorship by listening to "free Europe" stations - but he did not have great moments of fear until December 1981, when martial law was declared, and several soldiers entered the church of Anin.

“I thought they were coming to arrest the parish priest.

What are you looking for? I asked them.

Would he have a copy of the bible?

I gave them the first one I found ”.

Apart from this bearable shock, Skibinski did not have major upheavals with the regime: "My experience of communist surveillance was minimal. In the last year of the seminar I was summoned for an interview at the security office, but they taught us what to say: interested in religion, in the sacraments and how to help people, I have no interest in politics ”.

A training session that he takes advantage of to escape the turbulent politics of Poland today: “I don't want to comment on anything.

We are so horribly divided as a society that every sentence could help deepen this division. "

Skibinski does not even dare to describe today with a naive phrase like the ones in his calligraphy notebook.

Source: elparis

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