Square Sun – Book "The Square Sun" 1956 edition

QUADRATIC SUN AND TERMINATION

My story does not begin in a cell, but in the sunshine of Biłgoraj, although this prison gave my life the final shape. I was born in 1921 to a family that has always been on the market with the official current of life in Poland. My father, who returned from America to marry my mother against the will of his grandparents, was a man of violent liberal views, which in a small religious Biłgoraj made us almost outcasts. I remember that as a child I lived in strong unity with nature – it was there, among forests and rivers, that I felt safer than at school or church. These rivers were my element; I built miniature mills on them, obsessing about the mechanisms that were to sow gravel from the sand. Maybe that's where I was born into the nature of an engineer who later helped me survive.

But before the war came, my life shared between the fascination of technology and Barbara – my childhood love, the adopted, sensitive girl with whom we shared all the secrets in the shadow of our families' dislike. I continued my technical education in Lviv, in an electrotechnical gymnasium, which was an innovative combination of classical and practical sciences. I loved those workshops, the kitchens and the labs. When the Russians entered in September 1939, their appearance was almost amusing for us 18-year-olds. The Russians had great respect for machines, and our well-equipped laboratory impressed them.

However, school life has changed beyond recognition. Student committees were established, dominated by Ukrainian extremists, to whom Soviet politics favoured at the expense of Poles. Discipline became loose and teachers who died or disappeared during the September campaign were replaced by less qualified staff. The most absurd element of this new reality was "propaganda matura" – suddenly everyone could enter off the street and receive a certificate, which would show how the Soviet Union makes education available to the masses. Although lubricating with bright colors of giant maps of the world and slogans about "freedom of education" made me happy as a future artist, inside I felt growing anxiety.

At the time my parents were in Biłgoraj, in the German zone. I had important papers to get there, and most of all I missed Barbara. Together with a colleague who had interests in Warsaw, we decided to cross the green border. The first passage to the German side took place in the snow aura and was not as dangerous as expected. I spent a week with my aunt, I saw Barbara, but I knew I had to go back to school in Lviv.

The way back became my first descent to hell. We stayed at the home of Ukrainian peasants, hoping to wait the day out. The hosts betrayed us. The Germans arrested us almost immediately and dragged us to a school in a village that served as their quarters. Interrogation began with violent beating. When we tried to explain that we were students, the Germans went into a frenzy – for Nazi propaganda Polish "subhuman" did not have the right to aspire to education. We were put against the wall and executed. I heard the jaws of the gun, closed my eyes, paralyzed by fear. Then suddenly the laughter broke out. The Germans thought it was a great joke.

That same night a colleague was taken to another building. I heard gunshots and was told he was dead. They let me go, maybe because my name was German. I moved through the fields, crossing roads full of troops. At one point, in the dark, I came across a single German soldier. He took my money and told me to open the case. He noticed in it a cake made by my aunt. When he kicked his suitcase into the snow, a piece of cake landed right on his shoe – this image is still in my eyes today. The soldier told me to enter the ditch. I saw him load four rounds into a rifle. I felt a blow to the temple and a bang – I fell, thinking, "So that's how it feels to be dead." It was only after a moment that I realized that he only hit me, and then he kicked and left.

I spent the night in a burnt truck, praying not to freeze. The next day, after a series of risky escapes in front of German sleighs full of singing soldiers, I reached Tarnogrod, and from there on the cart with wood I returned to my aunt. To my surprise, my colleague also survived, but he was so terrified that he refused to try again to return to the Soviet side. But I had to go back.

I joined the group with Mrs. Kubasiewicz, the widow of the architect, and her frail companion. It was exhausting. Mrs. Kubasiewicz was a powerful woman, she carried two small but incredibly heavy suitcases, and we had to overcome barbed wire wires. Passing through the Soviet side of the border was a masterpiece of pain – the widow kept falling into coils of wire, cutting her legs to blood, and finally forced me to come back for her purse, which fell into the middle of a barbed goose.

We were spotted in the clearing. A Russian on a horse threw a grenade – not at us, but close enough to stun us and alert others. Dogs, trained to three types of commands, the worst of which sounded Biri blizzards (take with meat), they cornered us. We went to Rawa Ruska, to makeshift prison in the former Polish barracks. There, we were fed soup made of vermin peas, which remained after supplies for the post pigeons stationed there once.

I felt like I had to run. I've seen hundreds of names scratched on walls, testimonies of people whose system has already ground. One night, during transport to the railway station, when we had to move in a tiring quack position (which would prevent sudden running), one of the prisoners rushed to escape. In the confusion, under the hail of bullets aimed at that unfortunate, I jumped over the fence and disappeared in the dark.

I returned to Lviv in December. The city was cold, hungry, full of portraits of Stalin. I rented a little room without heating. I tried to save myself technically: I borrowed a thousand-watt bulb from college that I put under my bed to keep me warm from below. The system worked until the mattress dealt with fire – it was the end of my private central heating.

The final act of my "free" life occurred just after Christmas, which the Russians did not officially recognise. I was coming back from school with books under my arm when suddenly the street I turned to was blocked from both sides by a truck. The NKWD picked everyone up without exception – women with children, old people, students. They kept us on trucks all night until the street was "cleaned." That's how I got to Brigidek, the famous Lviv prison. They threw us, eighty men, into a cell full of pre-war criminals. The stench was indescribable. My associates, some proud of having a Communist party card, were banging on the door screaming about a mistake. The guard just looked through the viewfinder and left without saying a word. There, in the shadow of the concrete walls, for the first time I saw the sun filtered through the bars. It was square. My life as a free man has just come to an end, and the murderous school of survival began, in which my only weapon was to become a piece of chewed bread.

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RECORD FOR CHERSON AND DISCONTINUATION RIES

Staying in Brigidki was a period which in my memory enrolled as the most filthy, perhaps because I was still too close to a fresh memory of freedom. In cell number 80, where we were crowded with professional criminals, the stench was almost a material barrier. It was there that I first heard the desperate cry of a French prisoner: "Messieurs, pissez comme les femmes!" which was to prevent the defiling of the uncleanness from overflowing with "sap" on the people lying on the floor. After two months of this vegetation, one night, we began to be hailed in a specific way – not by name, but by the first letter, so as not to tell anyone who was inside the system.

The march to the station in Lviv took place early in the morning. We were driven in a quack position to prevent sudden escape – this system was always used by the Russians in transport through inhabited areas. We were walking past the exit of the alley where I lived before the war. I saw my landlady standing on the corner with a shopping cart, but in a crowd of fifteen hundred people, she had no chance to recognize me. Fifteen cattle wagons were waiting at the station – standard transport capacity.

There was chaos in my car. Men and women mingled on the bunks. There was a woman under my bunk, and opposite two others, one of whom was holding an infant. The baby was so tiny that it could have been born on the first night of transport. The trip lasted a month. The door opened for the first time after two days, somewhere north of the border. When women begged for milk, the guards laughed and shouted, "Go to Russia, there is enough milk! " Every night the guards would come in with wooden hammers on long handles and hit every board of the wagon, checking to see if it was over sawn. We were counted by touching every prisoner with our hand – it was an iron rule that even an illiterate guard should not make a mistake.

The tragedy of the child occurred a week later. The infant died of cold and hunger. Mother, she went crazy in pain, and for five days, she wouldn't let her body be taken away by holding it to her chest. When she finally decided to donate her child to her soup, there was a scene that forever broke the remains of our illusions about the Russian soul. The infant slipped out of the guard's hand and fell into the soup boiler. The guard, without a trace of emotion, put a dead body on the bayonet and threw it back in the wagon. No one touched the food that night. A few days later, the mother, showing inhuman, icy force, tried to push the body through a small window with bars. The baby's head was too big – I saw one of the ears, dry as parchment, fall off and stay on the bar.

We've reached Chersonia. Prison, an old factory or a converted church, welcomed us with a ritual of identity stripping. During the medical examination, the hug on the stomach checked the amount of fat – the only criterion of our suitability for work. Then there was a haircut. Girls in white wickets, violently giggling, operated on machines. My thick, curly hair, unroared for months, resisted – the first machine broke. Eventually, I was left with half my head sharpened to the skin and a big quilt on the other side.

That's how they took my photo for the papers. The photographer, having no space for the plaque, painted my prison number – 290O7 – with a bitumen directly on his chest. The last digit, "7", did not fit on the chest, so I was told to push my arm to my side, and the tail of the seven went vertically down my shoulder.

The cell in Kherson housed 260 people. The light burned 24 hours a day, and we slept on bare boards, turning on the command everyone side by side to save space. This is where my "art of bread" was born. My neighbor, a professional thief with a tiny head (he escaped from prison, pushing through bars), taught me a prison craft. We chewed bread until the jaws were numb, forming a plastic mass that, after drying, hardened like an ebonite. I used to make buttons, chess, and even cigarette portraits in which the pipe's head was a faithful model of the owner's head.

We used everything to dye: soot from candles stolen from guards (black), lime from walls (white), broth from onions (yellow) and blood. Blood was obtained by pricking his hand and spinning his hand at a tremendous speed to force the centrifugal force to push the fluid through the pores of the skin. I also became the main tattooist. I tattooed lions, snakes, and female acts using fish bones needles and soot ink mixed with sugar that "bited" the skin, perpetuating the dye.

Once upon a time, during a search, my bread figurines were found. I was accused of "sabotaging by destroying food" and thrown into a "carcer" – a dungeon in the ground of five feet high, where it could neither stand nor lie down, and water dripped from the ceiling on my head. But after another search, fate changed. A high official said I was an artist. Instead of punishment, I got a double portion of bread I shared with the most needy.

The culmination of his stay in Kherson was to read the sentences. There was no court, just "Court of Outside Hearing". A little dark clerk at the table with bad paper read names. When we heard penalties – always 3, 5, 8, 10 or 12 years – the cell burst with hysterical laughter. The sentences were absurd: Communists who were waiting for Russians ideally received 12 years, while police officers were leaving with three. I got five years for "mind infected with capitalist ideas."

As the clerk was finishing, the warden came in. He gave a speech about the "cultural centers" of labor camps, to add brutally at the end: "You will go to Siberia and you will swing there on the nucleus of the polar bear." We were taken outside. That was the last time I saw the sun through the bars. It was square—the sun of captivity, rising in the sky to the rhythm of our steps toward the Arctic north.

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TASHMA – ARCHITECTURE OF FISH AND ARCTIC SWITCH

Our journey to the north ended in a place that at first glance seemed nothing but emptiness in an immeasurable, harsh forest. The guard approached the thickest tree he could find, chopped off a piece of bark and wrote the figure "1" on it with red crayon. This was our home, although the camp did not exist yet. We were given a speech, which made sense of one violent sentence from paragraph 18 of the Stalin Constitution: "He who does not work does not eat".

The first days were a vague range of exhaustion and helplessness. The prisoners split into two groups: those who wanted to strike, believing that the lack of work would force the system to improve conditions, and those more practical to which I, too, belonged, knowing that the only way to survive was to move. Those who refused to work disappeared first, dying one by one from starvation and cold.

Construction of Tashma Camp was a lesson in primitive engineering. We didn't have any saws or nails. We raised everything from green, freshly cut wood, using only axes and sharpened pieces of wire that served as nails. The barracks housed 160–180 people, and our beds were hard, unheded boards, from which fresh shoots of plants grew throughout the winter. The camp was surrounded prohibited zone – barbed wire line, behind which guards from observation towers fired without warning.

The days were ruled by ‘standards’. For the average prisoner, the norm meant to be thrown away. 12 cubic meters of sand A day. Making 100% of the norm gave the right to 800 grams of black bread and soup, which in fact was just a brew from oats intended for horses. The drop in productivity below 33% meant a reduction in rations to half a pound of bread and overnight accommodation in ‘carcers’ – a hole dug in frozen ground, where few people survived more than three nights.

Winter in the Arctic forest was a spectacle of horror and beauty. To dig ourselves to the frozen earth, we spent days cutting down trees and stacking them 25 feet high. In the evening these pyramids were set on fire, and the sight of burning piles dragging miles through the white landscape was the most exciting thing I've ever seen. The next morning, the earth was warm enough to dig and fill the railway embankments.

The coexistence in the camp, among hundreds of people of different nationalities and professions, from ministers to illiterates, exposed the deepest layers of human psyche. The worst plague was "dust blindness", caused by lack of vitamins. As soon as dark fell, 80% of the camp became completely blind. We had to turn the ropes from the tree bark so that the blind could find their way to the latrines, and yet there were tragic accidents when people collided with heads and lost consciousness, freezing to death.

Frost also caused widespread bladder problems. The need to urinate appeared every five minutes, which in winter led to an uprising outside the barracks' door giant ice prisms. The cross-section of this ice has changed in all colors – from bile to orange to blood red, creating a gruesome mosaic of our biological misery.

The violence of the guards was sudden and final. I remember the prisoner by name Folks (Fuchs). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . during Christmas. He was thrown naked into the snow, where his limbs first became red, then yellow-green from the frost, until he was finally struck with a shot in the head by a special brigade. Another time a guard shot in a crowd of prisoners because he felt their response to the morning call was not loud enough; one person was killed, two were injured.

My survival is largely due to art. When my body was nearing final exhaustion, I began to simulate diseases and draw portraits. Nurse Le Pomcha"Medical Supervisor of the camp, she took pity on me after I drew her face. She bandaged my head, pretending to be a severe trauma, which gave me a month's rest. During this time I painted propaganda slogans on boards: "One cubic metre of land is one killed Germany". I used cotton sheets from the infirmary and colored pencils to make portraits Stachanists – leaders of the work, who usually broke down completely after a week of such effort.

I also received a short time as a magazineman, which was the best position in the camp. The bread that came to us was the currency – the highest currency. In winter, loafers contained more ice than flour because bakers added water to increase weight; I had to use wood sawsto share frozen portions.

The main task of the camp was to build a railway line which was to allow the transfer of heavy industry behind Ural. We also built "Children's Corners" – settlements for war orphans and children of prisoners who were to become the birthplace of a new Arctic population. As a builder, I constructed roofs with wooden chips, which gave me a sense of creative commitment even in such an inhuman place.

During this period, my memory began to fail me because of my hunger; I could not even remember my parents' names. Life became simple: from a piece of bread to a piece of bread.

Until September 1941. A group of about 30 people were unexpectedly summoned and we were announced that from now on we were Free citizens of the Soviet Union. We were thrown out of the gate without food or money, right into Arctic deafness. This liberation was so unbelievable that none of us enjoyed it; you became mummies who lost faith in everything. The first night on the loose, sitting by the fire near the tracks, I saw a freight train with curtains on the windows from which people in blue uniforms looked. They were British Hurricane mechanics who looked at us like we were coming from Mars. It was our first proof that the world outside the camp still existed and that the nightmare had just begun to crumble like ice on the river in Biłgoraj.

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THULACK, ALSATIC CREAM AND BRITISH SWITCH

The moment of liberation, in September 1941, was not a scene from the patriotic opera. There were no joyful cries or tears of emotion. It was just a blunt shock. A group of thirty of us were presented with paper plates – the same on which our prison profiles from Chersonia were displayed – and it was announced that we were free citizens of the Soviet Union. We were thrown out of the camp gate without a piece of bread, without a kopecka, in the middle of an arctic depth, where the only civilization was the Gulag Archipelago extending for hundreds of miles. We became mummies who regained their freedom, but lost faith in its existence.

Our first "free" dinner was roots dug in the woods. That same night, at the tracks, we saw a phenomenon from another world: a passenger train with curtains, guarded by Soviet sailors with automatics. When one of the blinds went up, we saw the faces of people in blue uniforms. They were British Hurricane mechanics, sent to help Stalin. They looked at us with a mixture of horror and disbelief; to them we were no longer human but biological artifacts from another planet. It was from them that we learned that France had fallen a year earlier and that Polish aviation was created in England. This information became my new "standard" – a goal I had to reach at all costs.

The journey south was a lesson of survival on the axis of trains. Russian freight wagons, huge 60-ton monsters, had axes about five feet apart. We constructed primitive platforms from the boards, put them directly on rotating axes and lay there in pairs, feeling the rhythm de-de-dee, de-de-dee Invading our bones. The speed of the air, the smell of grease and the sight of the ground running beneath us through the spinning wheels were hypnotizing. Every few hundred miles, the axles burned the boards, so we had to steal new fences from the stations to avoid falling right under the train wheels.

In Moscow, stunned by Byzantine domes and monumental architecture, I survived one of the most gruesome episodes. Trying to get food, I broke into the station manager's henhouse. The shot was fired, the dog started pulling my leg, and I ran into the darkness, clutching in my hand the only spoil that I could pull out—a cut off cock's leg. It was our only prey that night.

On the way to Buzułuk, where the Polish Army was formed, I stopped for ten days in the collective farm. There, to my surprise, I became a teacher of drawing and mathematics. The school was a propaganda tube; every story about fish or trees had to have a political message in line with Stalin's doctrine. Children at the age of eight had already worked in the field, and for the smallest offense they were threatened with sentence for "goliganism". It was there that I first saw people drinking cologne for lack of vodka – a phenomenon so common that the whole village smelled like a cheap barbershop.

When I finally reached Polish command, my dream of being an officer collided with bureaucratic absurdity. I was assigned to the planning department, where I drew circles representing soldiers marching "fours" – Polish contribution to military aesthetics, different from British and Russian "threes". My staff career ended violently when I lost two of the twelve pins that an old captain counted every day. I answered his accusation with a manosine, "I didn't eat them, sir," which was considered an unworthy response from a soldier.

Winter 1941/42 in Kazakhstan was a period of slow dying in the shadow of the typhoid epidemic. As a cadet, I buried the dead on a sandy hill, using a torn stable door as a stretcher. Dead bodies in morgues lay eight feet - piles of skeletons whose death was ahead of our shovels. The most shocking sight of our commander's grave, whose corpse was desecrated at night to steal his British boots with uppers; as the body stiffened, thieves simply chopped off their legs in their knees.

The hunger pushed us to the last resort. My friend Antek and I planned to steal a dog from a guard at the station. As the train was moving, I cut off the alsatin's leash and jumped on the roof of the car under a hail of bullets. All the way to the next station, I crawled up the roofs with a dead animal tied to the belt, trembling with fear that the viaduct would take me off the wagon. This dog saved the life of thirty starving children in our transport; the Alsatin stew I enjoyed better then than any fancy dish I ate later in London. To confuse the chase at the next station, we turned the remains of meat into jelly using soap, and our friend with gold teeth – which he covered with yellow paper – sold the remains of the bones at the market as a "jaggon".

The evacuation through the Caspian Sea to Krasnowodzka was a farewell to the "square sun". The last image from the USSR was a man who tried to jump on our drifting ship, but was pushed bayonet by a guard and fell into a black gap between the side and the wharf.

Persia greeted us with an abundance that terrified us. After eating 24 eggs and two cans of Spam I lost consciousness – the body could not take on so much life at once. However, the shock was a "color bar" introduced by the British authorities: the ban on fraternization with black soldiers building our tents and the sight of a white sergeant beating them with a bamboo stick. The West we dreamed of in the camps proved to be a world full of its own flaws and hypocrisy, where a police officer stole soap from us in the baths, and corruption was as common as dust on the roads to Tehran.

My way to England was through Bombay, where I watched women wear cement on heads and Indian "doctors" cutting prints with cow horns. When I finally landed in Glasgow, in a wave of phlegmatic British fog, I felt that the biggest disappointment was silence. We were forbidden to speak of what we saw in Russia, because the USSR was now a "brave ally". The truth was sacrificed on the altar of political purpose, and we, the failed messengers of freedom, had to become mute witnesses to our own fate.

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NEW DIMENSION – FROM SPITFIRE TO NORTH

The end of training at Fayid was not the end of my adventure, but the beginning of the most intense period of my military life. Though I dreamed of the Far East, fate threw me back to Italy. On December 9, 1944, I joined a squadron in Forli. However, my ministry was not a mere air struggle. I was selected for special assignments because of my visual abilities, which I proved by painting female acts on the walls of my commander's barracks.

Visual School of War

Flying Spitfire for reconnaissance missions was almost an exercise in my painting composition. Flying low above enemy territory, I had to learn to analyze the landscape, read the value of colors, and see the "real image" hidden under camouflage. I learned to judge the height of the tree by the shape of its top and guess what is hidden in the shadow, examining the density of darkness. It was there, in the cockpit, that my new perspective was born: from an altitude of 40,000 feet I realized that state borders are only fiction, and the earth is an indivisible whole that cannot be cut into ideological pieces.

In Forla, the war mixed with culture in a surreal way. I was on an operating flight this morning, going to the opera at noon to listen. RigolettaAnd in the afternoon, I went up again with Verdi's aria still in my ears. This combination of music and danger gave me a state of poetic clarity of mind.

I also had my worst moment in the air there. After the anti-aircraft artillery hit, my engine failed at 6,000 feet. I tried to jump out with a parachute, but three times something blocked my way out as I hung my head down in the air rush. In the end, I managed to crash into a smoke machine, miraculously bypassing the church tower and other planes on the runway. My commander, seeing my crazy look and his oak hair, immediately sent me to rest.

My last war flight was over the Alps along Brenner Pass. I went through clouds in narrow valleys, feeling a claustrophobic fear of the summits around me. When I landed, the mechanics who had to physically hold my wings so I wouldn't shoot the belt told me the war was over.

London: Disappointment by Victory

Going back to London to the Victory Parade was a moment of deep humiliation and mortification for me. While the crowds were celebrating, I felt that the great war had been won without solving mankind's most important problems. Poland was left in the "Soviet tomb", and I, the recent "superman" in blue uniform, suddenly became for the British society a "drift", an unnecessary burden for the taxpayer.

That's when the metaphor of the Square Sun was born. When I tried to talk about my experiences in Russia, people smiled tolerantly, recognizing it as propaganda. I said ironically, "You know, there's a square sun." It was the sun seen by prison bars, the only truth I knew, and the free world refused to accept for political reasons.

Slade School and Root Mania

Rozpocząłem studia w Central School of Arts, a później w Slade School. Mój umysł był jednak wciąż polem bitwy między powojenną traumą a crowed imagination (zatłoczoną wyobraźnią). Moje pierwsze obrazy były pełne horroru: zapadnięte twarze głodujących ludzi, dzieci żujący zwłoki.

W poszukiwaniu własnego języka wpadłem w trwającą miesiące obsesję na punkcie form organicznych. Godzinami wędrowałem po londyńskich parkach, szukając korzeni drzew o najbardziej skomplikowanych kształtach. Stałem się niemal przestępcą, kradnąc w mgliste dni Suitcase’y pełne drewna, które piłowałem, chowając piłę w rękawie munduru. Najsłynniejszym z nich był gigantyczny korzeń wiązu z Kenwood, który musiałem „łowić” z jeziora, gdzie wrzuciły go dzieci, a potem wieźć autobusem numer 24, z którego wyrzucono mnie z powodu potwornego smoru gnijącego drewna. Te formy natury były dla mnie ćwiczeniem wyobraźni, uwalniającym napięcie w podświadomości.

Przełom: Izolacja w Chelsea

Punktem zwrotnym był rok 1950. Wynająłem studio w Chelsea, ale nie miałem pieniędzy na meble. Zacząłem je tworzyć z gałęzi i znalezionych kawałków drewna. Tak powstała moja lampa ze spalonego wiązu, do której potrzebowałem idealnie sferycznego klosza. Metodą prób i błędów, używając kuchennych naczyń i klejów, wynalazłem transparentne, kuliste klosze, które sprzedałem za sporą sumę pieniędzy.

Te pieniądze pozwoliły mi na „najmądrzejszą decyzję mojego życia”: zamknąłem się w pracowni na osiemnaście miesięcy absolutnej samotności. Przestałem się golić, odciąłem kontakty towarzyskie, a jedzenie zamawiałem pod drzwi. W tym czasie wypracowałem dwie kluczowe dla mnie rzeczy:

1. Technikę transparentnego oleju: Farba olejna, która zachowuje się jak akwarela, pozwalając na nałożenie siedmiu warstw koloru, z których każda jest widoczna przez następną.
2. Teorię „Kręgosłupa i Balastu” (Spine and Ballast): Uznałem, że figura ludzka (podobnie jak zwierzę czy drzewo) składa się z linii prostej – kręgosłupa, oznaczającego ruch i charakter, oraz bryły – balastu, reprezentującego przestrzeń zajmowaną przez byt.

Climax: Prawo do życia

Moja droga artystyczna doprowadziła mnie do symbolizmu. Wojna nauczyła mnie, że „zewnętrzne ubranie” człowieka jest bez znaczenia. Pod wpływem głodu pies nie był już przyjacielem, lecz „mięsem i kaloriami”, a drzewo nie było pięknem, lecz „opałem”. To brutalne sprowadzenie świata do jego funkcji zmusiło mnie do poszukiwania esencji, a nie podobieństwa.

Jesienią 1953 roku osiągnąłem swój szczyt. Zrozumiałem, że wolę namalować mały, przeciętny obraz, który jest całkowicie mój, niż odnieść sukces, pożyczając styl od innych. To było uczucie znalezienia samego siebie, silniejsze niż cierpienie w Rosji czy ból mojej matki. Poczułem, że mam prawo do życia i tworzenia na własnych warunkach.

Książka ta powstała jako wypełnienie obowiązku przemówienia w imieniu milionów, które zginęły w milczeniu. Przez lata żyłem z zamkniętymi ustami, tak jak w łagrach. Teraz, gdy opowiedziałem tę historię, mogę powrócić do mojej samotnej pracy w pracowni. To, co przysiągłem zrobić, zostało dokonane. Teraz znów będę milczeć.

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