Zdzisław Nardelli

Nardelli received a huge number of prizes and awards for his radio work in Poland and abroad (including the Golden Microphone 1971). His most famous initiative as a director was the radio serial Matysiakowie [The Matysiak Family], which was broadcast between 1956 and 1978. He was awarded the Order of Polonia Restituta. Nardelli wrote four autobiographical tales: Pasztet z ojczyzny [A Pie from my Homeland] – an epic about September 1939; Otchłań ptaków [The Birds’ Hell] – a description of Hell in Nazi prison camps (including a mention of a meeting with Messiaen in the Görlitz camp); Płaskorzeźby dyletanta [The Bas-relief of a Dilettante] – a report on his passion at work as an organiser, also as a later radio adaptation recorded in Kraków in 1945. The fourth book with the title Sprzedawca śniegu [The Snow Salesman] has never been published.

Nardelli took part in cultural life in Warsaw until his death. He spent his summers writing in Orzechowo on the Narew. It was here that he experienced the tragic death of his nephew, the talented Polish actor, Andrzej Nardelli, in 1972. Nardelli died on 21. May 2006 and was laid to rest in the Evangelical-Augsburg Cemetery in Warsaw.

Polish soldiers were mobilised on 31. August, just one day before the invasion of the German forces in September 1939. After Nardelli bade farewell to his mother in Cieszyn he joined the fighting as a reserve cadet, pyrotechnician and commander of the Independent Fortification Artillery with the 3. Podhale Defence Regiment, belonging to the 21. Mountain Infantry Division stationed in the barracks at Bielsko. A few years previously in 1934/35, he had completed his training as a reserve cadet in Vłodymyr Vołyński. In a fragment from his story Pasztet z ojczyzny [A Pie from my Homeland] Nardelli accurately described the aimlessness and the tragic fate of the soldiers. The tale also gives a vivid outline of society in Cieszyn shortly before the outbreak of war and during its bloody course: part of this is written in Cieszyn Silesian dialect.

„… Oh divine Alighieri, in what circle of wandering hell have our senses landed, sated with the odour of burning bodies, the roasting of human fat, the sickening smell of persons and animals who have been massacred and ripped to pieces, the stink of swollen bellies.. In the first circle. For hasn’t it just begun?

The fire from destroyed vehicles has just been quenched, swarms of flies are buzzing around ominously. The one-sided murder of people was terrifying. Where were the scouts? Did this twisted bicycle stuck in a blood-soaked tree belong to one of them? Did the military cap hanging on the bushes belong to a torn off head? “Where are you, boys?” he wanted to cry. Semi-educated peasant slaves have fallen upon us, have-nots laden with complexes, insignificant sluggards, suckers and despicable creatures whose only identity consists of a swastika and a megalomaniac joy in bestiality – and all this as a result of an absurd substantive: Übermensch. An obsessive idiot has paralysed millions of people with washed out historical phrases. Who fell for them? Crooked intellectuals. People deprived of any imagination. Average unexceptional people and degenerate types who were bequeathed a divine power in exchange for blind obedience …”