Danuta Haczyńska de Nobrega was born in Warsaw in 1929. Her father was Feliks Tadeusz Haczyński, a diplomat and journalist who worked as a press attache in the Polish embassy in Moscow, and that is where Danuta Haczyńska spent her childhood years.
She spent the summer holidays of 1939 in Druskininkai, and it was from there that she and her mother took the last train to Moscow in late August. After a few weeks, the Haczyński family embarked on a long journey through Finland, Sweden, the Netherlands, Belgium, and all the way to France, where they arrived in late 1939. Danuta Haczyńska de Nobrega attended a French school for a few months, but in 1940, she boarded a ship bound for Brazil with her parents.
Her father worked in the Polish legation and as an English teacher. Her mother worked in the Red Cross and helped organise the Polish Church in Brazil.
Danuta Haczyńska de Nobrega has lived in Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Minas Gerais and Montevideo. She teaches French and English at a university.
She was interviewed by Aleksandra Pluta on 7 May 2015 in Rio de Janeiro.
The way the war broke out was, we would always go to Druskininkai on holiday. And we would return a little earlier since the school always started on September 1, you see. And besides, the situation was not really nice at all. As far as I know, a friend of my parents’ who was in the military called my mother and said: Lucyna, pack your things and go. Take your child and go to Moscow. Unless you want to be separated from your husband for a long time. What happened? – I can’t tell you what is going to happen, but pack your things. – I won’t be able to pack tonight. – I will send Zosia to you. Zosia was his wife, a doctor. She was my doctor when I was a child, yes, she was a paediatrician. I will send Zosia to help you pack. So Zosia came and I packed my things. The next day, mother called Zosia. – Zosia, Zuzia has appendicitis. – What do you mean, appendicitis? They had given me a lot of chocolate as a farewell gift and my stomach started to hurt. – Ah, her right side hurts. – Go to the station, I’ll come and examine her on the train. She said it was just a regular stomach-ache. You’re travelling first class so just ask someone to cook her some chicken, give her this medicine and off you go. And that’s how we went to Moscow. That was the last train going in that direction. That was three days before the war. All seemed normal, just like always. Only later did mother find out that that was the last train going in that direction. All other trains were being sent towards Germany, transporting soldiers.
I remember it being Sunday, I think. I don’t know if it was Sunday or not. And mother suddenly says: we’re going to see daddy at the embassy. The table was laid with warm cocoa and everything and she just left it. And I saw her take her fur and the cape from the fur. Why is mummy dressing so strange? Then I noticed some suitcases. And she says: take your doll so that you have something to play with. And a book. Come on, we have to hurry. We also had a dog, Witek, it stayed. And we went to the embassy, never to return. They considered us to be Germans and we were imprisoned in the embassy. Because they had entered Poland. And it was a lot of negotiating to have them let us out. Because they did no want to let us out. But the diplomatic corps was [0:01:18.0 unintelligible], who had German ancestry and believed that defeated enemies should be treated with respect and that we should be let out. And since the Germans had an agreement with the Russians, a new one, they listened and let us out. But they harassed us till the very end. I was very small and I was being sheltered from all those bad things, yes. I only found out later. We eventually got our own room and, after some time, even more people came from other consulates. The salons in the embassy were beautiful, like you only see in the movies, like those old Russian palaces. They put beds in there, I mean mattresses. One salon was for women, another was for men. And it stayed like that for almost 3 weeks, I believe. Or maybe even more.
- Paris impressed me because it was a place full of life, of motion. It was a happy city actually, despite the war.
- But you could see the war progressing?
- Indeed you could, as it was dark everywhere at night. You were not allowed to have any lights on and they were either covered with this blue paper or there were curtains in the windows. And the streets were dark. But life in Paris was normal. Like during the first war, we had to wear masks to school in case they would deploy gas. Bringing a mask to school was mandatory, like bringing your bag. Our stay in Paris was very short. When we arrived, it was already autumn, late autumn, 1939. And in June next year, France fell, in 1940. So our stay was very short. I remember it being very interesting how our school sent almost all of its children from common classes to the countryside because of the war, they were afraid Paris would be bombarded, which never happened in the end. They only made reconnaissance flights and we had to go to a bomb shelter. And I remember the school was divided into parts. The common part was closed and only the children whose parents did not want to go to the countryside stayed, they made a special class for them. It was secondary school, so that they could have a place to go. And in that classroom, there was a map of South America on the wall, and the teacher said: take a look here. It’s Rio de Janeiro, the most beautiful capital in the world. And she would tell us all the time, take this opportunity that you are in an older class and learn it. And I would say: why does she keep mentioning Rio de Janeiro? It has got to be interesting, the most beautiful district in the world. Paris is so beautiful, it did seem very beautiful to me. We lived in [unintelligible], [0:02:42.1 unintelligible] was nearby, everything was. I would go there to play. What could be more beautiful? It was late May, early June. And by August, I had already arrived in Brazil.
He wanted to go to America because he had friends there, but she did not speak English, how would that work out? France was afraid to do anything. She would constantly say that whenever there would be a convoy bound for the embassy, it was attacked. Bordeaux was constantly under attack. And it was back to the shelter for us every time. And he found one of his good friends in that shelter, a man who was part of the presidential corps, I think. And he asked: why so depressed? I can’t get a visa, what should I do? I have family in the South, I must take them away from here, France is falling. And he said: Why won’t you come to my country? And he whipped out a piece of paper and gave him a visa to Brazil. And that’s when father thought to go, we spent a month in [unintelligible], a few weeks. He was afraid we would be torpedoed, you see. The Germans would sometimes stop ships and arrest the people on board. So there had been some famous exhibition, a famous exhibition held in Lisbon and a special Brazilian ambassador had been there. And he was aboard a ship with two flags: Brazilian and Portuguese. It was a Portuguese ship, but it had a Brazilian ambassador on board. And my father, who belonged to an international association of journalists, got a ticket to board the ship. And we sailed on that ship, I remember its name, [unintelligible]. That ship [unintelligible] to Rio de Janeiro. It was a ship where many different parties would be thrown, both for the children and the adults. It was a ship for everybody. But my parents had a hard time, I remember my mother had had to sell off her sable cape to buy the tickets.
It was a very fancy ship. It was not a migrant ship. The only migrants were [unintelligible]. We left on 12 August and arrived on 29. It was a fast ship. It docked at Madera, which was very interesting back then. It interested me a lot. And later at Capo Verde. And it was a lot of fun. There was entertainment for children. I watched young people dancing Portuguese dances with the officers, typical. It was very interesting. I can still remember the melody and the dance. They would later go on to play tennis, the children played elsewhere. I remember the sea being very rough, see, and the people got a little seasick, so, since neither my father nor I were sick, he took me to the back of the ship where it rocked the most and said: look how the waves are rocking the ship. And they rocked us a great deal. Besides, father had bought me books, I can still remember, it was Robinson Crusoe and Livingstone’s uncharted island, so that I could read about sea adventures while travelling by sea. Treasure Island translated into Polish. It was a very interesting journey, a very joyful journey. There was a baptism at the equator, like crossing the equator. I remember the baptism, everyone was thrown into a pool. And they cut people’s hair with wooden scissors. The scissors were made of wood, they pretended to cut the hair. It was a very joyful journey, I mean, less so for my parents who were going into the unknown. But it was for me as a child. As a child I wasn’t, should I say, in need of such terrible experiences. I only remember the moment when the ship was leaving Portugal, the ambassador was leaving and there were fireworks, music and everything. And mother cried a lot because she was leaving Europe, because she was far away from Poland. I watched her wondering why she was crying. She never returned. It was the only shock of that kind. Because it was a journey into the unknown, actually.
It is wonderful, it is unforgettable. It was in the morning, between 5 and 6 in the morning, everyone had got up to witness our arrival in Rio de Janeiro. The arrival was like in a fairy tale. It was such a beautiful adventure. And such a beautiful approach before you arrive in the bay, I think that pirates had to hide there in the olden days. There were those nooks, and so many isles many when we were sailing in. You need to know where to go because it all looks so mysterious. It is all so beautiful, unforgettable. And later on, my parents obviously had a hard time here with settling in. A few weeks after our arrival, father gave a press interview on the war. And everything he said was true. My parents later moved into a small house, we lived in Copacabana. We lived a very modest life back then, but father was always in good spirits and would say to me: come on, get up, we’re going to the millionaire beach. Only millionaires come to that beach. He would always play with me. Come, we’re going to the millionaire beach. Really, that beach in Copacabana in the 40s was incredibly serene and beautiful. And clean. So it made an impression on me as a child, I would ask father, is it never cold here, nobody needs a warm coat? – no. – oh, how nice.
I can’t say I had an emigrant’s life. I married very early and entered a Brazilian family. I had a normal life without such problems. It was my mother who experienced that, she kept in touch with a club of Polish women. I would also go with her, but I would always be in some base far away, so I would go very rarely. From afar, really. Nowadays I go there more often because I’m back now. It’s because I immersed myself deep in Brazilian life. Besides, I had five children to raise. And I later started working. I started when they grew up a little. I started working when I came back from Montevideo. Even then, English cultures...[unintelligible].
- I went to Poland for the first time. We had gone to Europe, see. We were in Italy. I told my husband: we are so close to Poland, I’d like to go see it. And said: I don’t have the time, I have to go back. He had a job here and couldn’t, he had to go back to work. So I went alone. And I became terrified because I thought I was in Russia. When I saw the abject poverty, the sadness, the gloom, I thought I had returned to Russia as a 10 year old. The impression was terrifying.
-What year was that?
-1985. But I was happy because I found my childhood friend in Warsaw. It was the son of that officer who saved us from the war. I would play with him when I was little. And he helped me find my godmother in Żoliborz, who was still alive. She had unfortunately lost both of her sons in the Uprising. I stayed the night at her place, and she said: I’m not sure if I have to report having a visitor. It was a police matter. If you came here to spend the night, would I have to report it to the police or... well I never! So the times were tough, tough years. But after I came back, when he had a job at the embassy, it was totally different. My son later got a job at the embassy. It was 2000. The situation was different at that time. I like modern Poland a lot, progressing so quickly. I remember walking down Nowy Świat to Bliklego just like before the war.
She longed for Poland all her life. She even translated some things from Portuguese, various things about Poland written in Portuguese. She translated them into Polish. And she even wrote when John Paul II was elected. It made an impression on her. It really was a remarkable thing. All Poles were very touched by that. Mother was very energetic, she would help out, after she had got her life on track, she would help out a lot. She was very involved with the Polish club. She would help people in need a lot, she organised the Polish church here. It was a lot of work to found that church. It was her doing, she organised it, she raised the money for it. The curia had to be paid as well, she found the people who had the money, see. She and grandfather Aleksander took care of that. She was always immersed in the life of the community.
I once read a novel, which was based on real events. It was about an English officer in India in colonial times. He had lost his parents when he was little and had been brought up by an Indian nanny. The nanny was dying and she told him: go to the foreigners. That means, the British. Here, take this card. Give it to them and they will recognise you. And he was later brought up in Great Britain, but he had spent his early years in India, later in Great Britain, but he returned to India as an officer. And he once said, I am human, I have two personalities in one body. And that is how I feel. It is difficult. It is. I have two of them. And they live together. There are people who fully denationalise themselves. It happens a lot in America. I’ve seen their expatriate community. The people there denationalise themselves a lot. Less so here, I think. Though they do that a lot in the South. I can’t say that about myself, I am both.
