The moustache still stood out, yet I was unsure because you don’t really expect history to stand in an airport queue carrying his own suitcase. No paraphernalia whatsoever. I told the guy next to him: “This gentleman looks exactly like Lech Walesa.” “How else should Lech Walesa look?” he quipped. We were at the Amsterdam airport, waiting for the boarding gate to open. As we got into the bus, I walked up to Walesa and introduced myself. I took his permission to take a selfie. On the plane, Walesa and I sat next to each other in the front row. Language barrier stood between us, but the man who was instrumental in lifting the iron curtain that divided Europe for decades was graceful, and polite.
I woke up after a short nap, hearing the pilot’s announcement: “In a few minutes, we will land at Lech Walesa International Airport in Gdansk”. I looked at the man after whom the airport is named. He sat there, expressionless.
Lech Walesa is not the only global figure and Nobel Laureate to emerge from Gdansk. Gunter Grass, the great German writer, was also born and raised in the city. Several of his works were set in this city, including the ‘Danzig Trilogy’ (Germans used to call the city Danzig and still emotionally claim it as their own) that included his first and, arguably, best novel The Tin Drum. Grass is a writer adored by both Poles and Germans.
When I visited the home in which the writer spent his early years, I googled his Nobel acceptance speech and read it again. “I had the irreparable loss of my birthplace. If by telling tales I could not recapture a city both lost and destroyed, I could at least re-conjure it. And this obsession kept me going…my lost Danzig was for me (like his lost Bombay for Rushdie) both resource and refuse pit, point of departure and navel of the world.”
