Agnieszka Lessmann. Writing as necessity

Warsaw, November 1968. A four-year-old girl is standing with her parents at Dworzec Gdański railway station. She knows that she has to leave her homeland, along with her beloved grandmother and great-grandmother in Łódź. Today, a plaque at Gdańsk station in Warsaw commemorates the Jews who were deported from there in special trains. At that time, few people in Polish society overall were interested in remembering the fate of the Jews. Antisemitism was widespread and encouraged by the government. Finally, it came to a head in the form of a campaign by the ruling Communist Party, in which hundreds of Jewish doctors, academics, artists, journalists, generals and officials were forced out of their jobs. As a result, Jewish Poles were no longer able to earn a living and had to leave their homeland. The non-Jewish population remained largely silent in the face of this cruelty.

On leaving the country, the Lessmanns were forced to give up their citizenship, and became stateless. They were only permitted to take seven dollars each with them – 21 dollars in total. The train took them to Vienna, where there was a reception camp. In Vienna, Bolesław Lessmann went to the Israeli embassy, which issued the family with passports and plane tickets to Israel. Agnieszka Lessmann has blurred memories of her arrival in Arad, Israel. There, she went to preschool while her parents attended a language course. Her father quickly realised that he would not be able to learn enough Hebrew to work as a journalist in the country. When he was offered a post at a Polish-language radio station in Germany, he therefore decided to take it. In the spring of 1969, the small family moved to Germany – specifically, to Hanover. However, there was one caveat to the job: the station was Radio Free Europe, which was regarded in at least Eastern Europe and Russia as a mouthpiece for US propaganda. As Agnieszka Lessmann recalls: “My mother’s younger sister had remained in Poland. And my parents were afraid that she would not be allowed to take her higher school-leaving exam if her brother-in-law worked for a western propaganda station.”

The Lessmanns were at least given German citizenship, and with it, their name in its present form, after the original version, Lesman, was altered to Lessmann by the German authorities. From a writer’s perspective, this is of practical use: the short “e” and “a” vowels in the new version of the name convey the correct pronunciation for German readers and listeners. Also, the family’s German ancestors used “Lessmann” as their surname. Agnieszka Lessmann is not aware of any family connection with the famous Polish poet Bolesław Leśmian/Lesman (1877–1937).