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Kazimierz Brandys's Warsaw Diaries
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2008
Extract
An older friend of mine, a man of outstanding intelligence and great novelistic talent, asked me a rather curious question: ‘Did you notice that out there in the street everybody is acting abnormally? The salesman is pretending to sell, the bricklayer is building imaginary homes, newspapers don't have any news, the children's traffic warden is waving his lollipop like crazy, but there isn't really any traffic […].’ This friend of mine remembered the pre-war years, but I later realised that even people who had never seen anything other than the People's Republic of Poland had the same kind of feeling.
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References
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15 Ibid., 70–4.
16 Ibid., 87.
17 Ibid., 76.
18 Ibid., 17–18.
19 Ibid., 158–9.
20 Ibid., 153.
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26 Ibid., 42.
27 Ibid., 25–6.
28 Ibid., 42.
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30 Ibid., 43.
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33 Paris, New York: 1982–84, 32–3.
34 Warsaw Diary: 1978–81, 123.
35 Ibid., 226.
36 Ibid., 253.
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