I Always Confused Jan Pieńkowski With Jan Pieńkowski

 

 "I don't like shrill noises, I think. Because I've blotted out the screams. You know, I can remember terrible things happening, and people being killed, and so on, but I don't remember the noise. The noise has been obliterated somehow. But it's there inside me. And so I feel terribly unhappy with screaming, and all that sort of thing. And people panicking, trampling, screaming. That is what scares me."

 

 

 

 "The surviving population were marched to a depot were trains are mended. There are sort of pits between the tracks, so the mechanics can get underneath the trains, and so we slept in those pits. It was all this atmosphere of panic, fear. It was very unpleasant. And then we were put on open top cattle trucks and taken down to the Reich... Fortunately my father had relations in Krakow who helped us, and then my father got a job on a farm in Vienna. You see, there were so few men left in Germany by then."

 

 "We grew the flax. We put the flax in the pond. Come the Autumn, fished it out, dried it out. And there was a special medieval device for getting the husks off. Then that was combed. Then that was given to the spinsters to spin. Then it was given to the weaver to weave. By this time it was Spring. Then it was pinned out on the meadow in the sunshine, to bleach by the sun. And then it was made into sheets, shirts, whatever it was."

 "What about food?"

 "We were allowed to kill one pig a year. If you did more than that, that was punishable by death."

 "We met in a pub in the King's Road. We just hit it off. And I went off on the back of his scooter and that was the beginnning of that."

 I had just finished re-reading The Kingdom Under The Sea and thought, well hang on, if Jan Pieńkowski is the name of the artist who does these beautiful silhouettes against spilled ink, what's the name of the artist who did the pop-up books that look nothing like this? So I looked it up and discovered that I'd not only indeed seen the name on both as I was growing up, but also on all the "Meg" books as well. I suppose as an infant you learn what a word means by the pictures it appears beneath, and the words "Jan Pieńkowski" –  instantly recognisable and unlike any other I'd seen – had appeared beneath simply too many completely disparate images for me to register the precise extent of his work until this year. I didn't even know he was a "he" until this year. So I'm glad I finally did a little research. The extraordinary quotes above about Pieńkowski's life as a Polish immigrant come from his appearence on Desert Island Discs, as does the nice picture of him and his dog. You will not regret listening to it and it's here.