AW80W

Around the World with Eighty Women: Kasia’s Story (Poland)

One woman’s inherited experience of post-war Poland

Photo by Andriyko Podilnyk on Unsplash

Content warning: Discussion of war (non-graphic). The name Kasia is a pseudonym to retain participant confidentiality. To learn about the AW80W project, read the introduction here.

Any narratives coming out of Poland, even today, will likely be marked with experiences of conflict. This is the case when I speak with Kasia, who notes generations of Polish families have been touched by war:

‘If you speak to anyone born in Poland during or before the 1980s, they’ll have grown up with stories about World War II, Communism under the Soviet Union, or the period of Marshall Law between 1981 and 1983. Every Polish person will have relatives — past or present — involved in some form of conflict.’

This statement is all the more pertinent since Russian troops invaded Poland’s neighbour Ukraine in 2022, leaving the country — quite literally — on the edge of war once again: ‘Polish soldiers, including my brother, have been guarding the border with Ukraine ever since and it’s a worrying situation.’

The tendency for Polish citizens to worry about invasion is not an overreaction, since German and Russian troops invaded Poland during World War…