BACK in the 1970s, Andrzej Klimowski and Danusia Schejbal travelled to Poland on British scholarships to further their postgraduate art education in their parents’ country of origin. 

Hardly a surprising choice, given the then enviable reputation of Polish art practice and teaching.The fact that the country was ideologically an anathema did not appear to bother them and, as they spoke Polish, assimilation was easy.

Klimowski blossomed under the legendary poster designer Henryk Tomaszewski while Schejbal cut her teeth in theatre costume design, benefitting from the tutelage of Jozef Szajna.

Those experiences are the substance of the family-album style narrative of this book, arranged into day-to-day — and occasionally humorous — vignettes which focus mainly on the creative ferment and freedom afforded to the arts at the time. That reality was clearly a factor in their spending eight years in the country.

The account is interwoven, at times unexpectedly, with dreamlike sequences based on parental recollections of the Warsaw uprising and the post-WWII political upheavals and, while some of the anecdote and truncated narrative threads will be of limited interest in Britain, the Polish edition should do famously.

The end of the couple’s sojourn coincides with a critical impasse in socialist development and a struggle for its renewal, which was later to be defeated by right-oriented and religiously conservative regimes. That’s reflected here, with a recurrent “drawing to the post-Solidarnosc gallery,” stemming from a manifest reluctance to connect the 1960s and 1970s Polish governments to the many positives of its cultural and educational policies— which both authors benefited from so abundantly.

Even so, although the book’s wrapped in a scathing cover, it mercifully steers clear of sanctimonious political homilies and both authors’ distinct drawing styles make for a graphically fluent and agreeable monochrome narrative.

Klimowski and Schejbal pack in everything but the kitchen sink and the book concludes with their return to Britain just as martial law is being declared in 1981.

Little could they have known that a generation later millions of Poles would follow in their wake, driven out by the economic irresponsibility of post-Solidarnosc regimes. That’s a story waiting to be told which would certainly strike a chord with the many Polish emigres currently resident in Britain.

Review by Michal Boncza