Imagine, I had to prepare a press release
immediately after Stalin's death.
It was a bit awkward to fall sick from one day to the next
and I was a little afraid that no one would believe that I was ill.
There wasn't any way I could excuse myself,
I didn't feel like saying what I was expected to say
but at the same time, I felt what can I do, I can't pretend that I haven't noticed that Stalin is dead.
In the end, it turned into a presentation which I spent the whole night preparing,
and which I delivered the way children recite Wyspiański's rhapsody
on Kazimierz the Great at their school performances:
here they come, bowed down by sorrow' and so on.
That's how I presented the press release.
While I was writing it, I was thinking, what else was there?
Katyń, there was Katyń where Stalin murdered,
or people following his orders, murdered thousands of Polish officers.
And I thought, perhaps this is what we could write here in this memorial press release –
Comrade Stalin showed particular concern for the welfare of the Polish soldier
who was able to find shelter on the welcoming Soviet soil following defeat in the September campaign.'
This was more or less the style in which it was written.
I felt very ambivalent about this
and was a bit afraid that I might have exaggerated,
yet I was embarrassed in case someone might take this literally
and then how would I look, and things wouldn't seem quite right.
At that point, Mrs Zatorska who was there then, came up to me and said,
it was the first and last time that she ever addressed me as 'Comrade',
she said, 'Comrade Lipski, hold on to this presentation, it mustn't get lost'.
When I was moving house just now, in all that jumble of files and so on,
I came across this presentation in one of the files.
I don't know, should I publish it in one of the samizdat publications?
