Wlodek was born before the war in a Polish prison. Mother– a Jewess — was an active communist and named her son for Lenin. Father — probably also a Jew — fell in some military action before or during the war. The Russians, when they entered Poland, deported her and the child to Central Asia and there she stopped being a communist. By profession she was a nurse and when she protested that Uzbeks and Kazakhs were injected one after another with one unsterilized needle, she got the reply: “They are animals. Nothing will happen to them.” She wrote a protest to Moscow and was told “We washed the windows with your protest. Shut your big mouth or you’ll go where nobody returns from ” They ended in Paris, mother a passionate anti-Communist and son — a Trotskyist. He would return home bloody from streetfights. He had a notable talent for painting but between ideology and a mother who handled it wrongly, nothing came of it. A group of French aristocrats became interested in his talent and even financed him for a period of time but they had a poor attitude to art and finally everything broke with politics. Wlodek was vegetating — tall and skinny, he looked like Don Quixote. Leaving Paris, I lost track of him.
#88 excerpt, 4 Portraits, July-August 2005