Humour that brings people together: the actor, director, and screenwriter Monika Anna Wojtyllo

Monika Wojtyllo did not come to acting; acting came to her: in 1977, she was born into a theatre family in Wrocław, her parents’ first and last child. Her mother, Aleksandra Kuźmińska, worked as a housewife and did some acting on the side. Her father, Ryszard Wojtyłło from Lwów (Lviv), was a full-time director, actor, and author. In 1944, his family had been driven out of Lwów to Baborów as part of the forced repatriation campaign. Later, they moved to a suburb of Wrocław. Monika Wojtyllo was just four years old when she first stood on the stage. Her politically active parents presented some of their plays as children’s entertainment in order to get around the censors with their politically critical content. Little Monika didn’t fully understand what she was saying in her role, but it made the audience laugh, and that made her feel good. She also remembers that she observed the audience through a hole in the curtain, watching them come in and take their seats. Some were unsure of themselves, others were silent. Above all, though, they were no more than strangers to each other. “After the performance, they were much more relaxed,” she says. “They had laughed, they had cried, they had felt seen and understood. And they had bonded with each other.” Even now, Monika Wojtyllo still sees this as the driving force in her work. She wants to help people overcome their loneliness, to remind them that they can be a community. “None of us knows where we come from,” she explains. “We are born from an unknown place and go somewhere or other when we die. In the short space of time that we have here, we should stick together instead of being blinded by power and excess.”

Monika Wojtyllo was not even six when her parents were “cordially” asked by the state security services whether they might like to travel abroad. The small family were given passports and one month to leave the country – on condition that they spoke to no-one about it. So it was that one night, the Wojtyłłos packed the 23 hp Fiat, their Maluch, with as much as they could fit in. And off they went. As Monika remembers, the baggage loaded onto the roof of the car was almost as high as the car itself. She also recalls that the car was so tightly packed that she had to leave one of her rubber boots there. No-one knew about their departure – not even the neighbours. The only person who must have guessed what was happening was her mother’s brother. The Wojtyłłos had transferred the rights to their 50-square-metre flat in a typical socialist Polish apartment block to him in order to prevent the state from snatching it away.

They needed to obtain the necessary papers to enable them to cross the Polish state border. These included a written invitation by Monika’s godfather, Manfred Paul, a teacher from Hamburg, whom her parents had met on holiday. It is likely that someone in government had helped a little with the process of releasing the documents needed to leave the country. Today, Monika Wojtyllo is still unsure of what strings were being pulled behind the scenes. However, as she herself says, she can remember a “horrifying” amount of detail about the escape itself. She can still recall that she wore a little red woollen bag around her neck that contained British pound notes, a ring that she had inherited, her first tooth and other similar items. These were not things that you took with you on a short visit. Her parents had explained to her that she was not allowed to be frisked at the East German border crossing. Instead, she should look sleepy and cute. They told her to hug her toy dog, Belfik, very tightly, and to make a bit of a fuss if the border guards tried to take him away from her. “It was probably the greatest role of my life,” she says in retrospect. The family still has the little bag and its contents in their possession today.