Witamy! Welcome to my writer’s blog
Witamy! is the Polish word for Welcome!
[image error](Above: Town Square, or Rynek, of Bolesławiec, world renown for its beautiful Polish pottery. This is a setting for a scene in my second book, Chasing The Winter’s Wind.)
So, Welcome! to my writer’s blog. I have now published two novels telling the story of the aspirations and tribulations of my character Stanley Wisniewski. At the opening of my first novel – The Willow’s Bend – Stanley is a 70-year-old retiree of the CIA. He is called in by a defense firm, with whom he has worked previously in his days as an agent, to uncover the truth about the death of one of their executives. So, the stories take off from there, not just in the modern day murder investigation, but in Stanley’s past, which is slowly revealed in this novel, and its prequel/sequel – Chasing The Winter’s Wind.
Why do I write at all? Writing novels ties together my love of history, travel, and storytelling. Like Stanley, I am retired from a long career. My own area of specialization has been in the Defense and Aeronautics industries. Between my career and my personal travels, I have wandered across the globe and visited many countries and cultures. It was after my first vacation to Poland, visiting Warsaw, Kraków, and Oświęcim that I came up with the basic story for The Willow’s Bend.
Oświęcim, as many of you likely know, is the Polish name of the town that the Nazi’s called Auschwitz. The Nazi death camps of Auschwitz I and Birkenau (Auschwitz II) represent the darkest aspects of human nature. I am an avid reader of the author Joseph Conrad, and his classic tome, Heart of Darkness, highlights the depths that souls can sink to after the moral constraints of society are abandoned. I find it ironic, that Conrad, Polish by birth, seemingly predicts the very curse of National Socialism that was to tear Europe and the world apart in World War II. The curse of the Nazi’s aggression would not only begin that war on Polish soil at Westerplatte (outside Gdańsk) but also bear its darkest stain at the death camps of Auschwitz, Treblinka and other sites.
The more redemptive side of the humanity in this period has also been movingly depicted in literature and cinema of those who risked everything to save precious human lives. In my second book, Stanley meets and recruits the beautiful Agnieszka Danuska, who he calls his Sarenka (Polish for fawn). In the history of the Second World War, the real Sarenka was a magnificent young Polish Jewish woman named Rachela Zylberberg, who intentionally allowed herself to be interned in the Warsaw Ghetto. She wanted to assure word of the Nazi atrocities to Jews that she personally had witnessed was reaching this community. In 1943, she played a critical role in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising that would claim her life. Rachel was only 23-years-old and gave her vibrant existence fighting the evil of her time. She left behind her own 2-year-old daughter, Maya.
I am a firm believer that throughout history there has been an ongoing battle between good and evil. I attempt not only to capture these conflicts in my story-lines but also to highlight the historical facts that frame them. The Willow’s Bend has a very dominant historical theme of the terror of World War II, as Stanley recalls the story of his father surviving Auschwitz, as well as the 1944 Polish Uprising in Warsaw. In Chasing The Winter’s Wind, the historical themes revisit World War II in the telling of the massacre by Stalin in 1940 of 22,000 Polish Army Officers in the forests at Katyń, as well as the Soviet suppression of Poland during the Cold War. The tale is told of the 1980 strikes in the shipyards of Gdańsk that formed Solidarność (The Solidarity Trade Union and later Social Movement), which eventually imploded the USSR itself.
I am currently writing my third novel, entitled War of The Nocturne’s Widow. As Chasing The Winter’s Wind picked up at the end of The Willow’s Bend, so War of The Nocturne’s Widow continues the tale of Winter’s Wind. As the sparks of freedom chiseled from the Communist State by Solidarność in Poland ignites the Soviet satellite states, including the incredibly repressive Stasi secret police of East Germany.
If you picked up a theme in my titles, it is, of course, that of Frédéric Chopin. The Willow’s Bend is, of course, a reference to the cover image of the monument of Chopin under the willow tree in Warsaw’s Łazienki Park. With this tree being the iconic image of the Polish culture’s resilience, I could not resist. Chasing The Winter’s Wind is a play on Chopin’s Etude Opus 25 no. 11 in A minor, known commonly as Winter Wind. Again I could not resist, as Stanley is chased across Europe by the CIA through the deepening days of fall leading to winter. War of The Nocturne’s Widow follow’s as the conclusion of my “Chopin Trilogy”.
Why so much emphasis on Chopin? Is it because his music captures the essence of the Polish soul? That his longing for his native Poland from his exile in France translates to the tenderness and expressiveness of his music? Is it because of the tragedy of his life cut short by heartbreak and disease?
Yes to all the above. More simply, it is the music I listen to when I write…
David Trawinski
October 23, 2017
