In the summer of 1914, shortly after World War I started and the Tsarist army approached the family farm located in the village of Soroki in the eastern part of Austria, my parents escaped to Vienna, the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. There I was born in 1915. The farm did not move, but the borders moved many times. The family estate found itself under no less than seven different regimes: Austria, Poland, Petlura’s Ukraine, Romania, again Poland, USSR, Nazi Germany, USSR, and currently Ukrainian Republic.

My father, a graduate of the Vienna Agricultural University, started Ph.D. studies in Halle/Saal, Germany in 1898 but after 1 year returned home to manage a 4000 acres estate, Kamionki Wielkie near Kolomyja, owned by my grandfather. Around 1900, the estate was sold and the smaller farm, Soroki, was purchased. My father considered himself a Pole of Jewish creed. My mother, born in Zagreb, Croatia, was an accomplished pianist and a linguist, fluent in German, English, French, Italian, and Serbo-Croatian. My siblings, Alfred, 6 years older, and Karla Bronia, 5 years older, spoke only Polish with my father and only German with my mother. I grew up into this system, not realizing that it was not usual for everyone to speak only Polish to one’s father and only German to one’s mother. I grew up bilingual and only realized this clearly when I left home and started writing letters to my parents—my thoughts were in Polish when I addressed my father, and German toward my mother, and I had to write not one, but two letters during my studies in Warsaw. I was often asked how my parents spoke to each other. They spoke German because, despite the great language skills of my mother, she could not speak Polish without an accent, and it was, unfortunately, customary in Poland to make fun of everybody who mispronounced Polish words. My mother used Polish only when she went shopping or when she spoke with people who helped at home, but never with friends or visitors.