Poland

Poland is the formative setting of Viktor Kowalski’s early life: the place where war takes his parents, draws him into armed resistance, and first makes violence part of his survival. His later flight westward begins amid the upheaval that follows the arrival of Soviet forces.

Invasion and Family Loss

When German forces invaded Poland, Kowalski was twelve. A year later, his parents were taken away in a dark van. He was also old enough to understand that his sister was going to a large hotel behind the cathedral, occupied by the Germans and visited by their officers. His parents were so disturbed by this that they protested to the military governor’s office; the account does not specify what happened to his sister there.

Partisans and the Soviet Arrival

Kowalski joined the partisans and killed his first German at fifteen. At seventeen, he faced another rupture when the Russians arrived. His parents had hated and feared them, and had told him terrible stories about what they did to Poles. He therefore left the partisans, who were later executed on a commissar’s orders, and headed west toward Czechoslovakia like a hunted animal.

A Lasting Point of Origin

Poland remains crucial to Kowalski’s history even after he leaves it. The loss of his parents, his early exposure to killing, and his decision to flee rather than remain with the partisans establish the violent, displaced childhood behind the hardened legionnaire he becomes. Much later, news that little Sylvie is seriously ill reaches him through an account of her blood being wrong; the thought of his daughter’s illness troubles him deeply, showing that family can still reach a man shaped by Poland’s successive upheavals.