10/8/2008 - White Boy in Africa

Mukiwa: A White Boy in Africa by Peter Godwin is a story of a boy becoming a young man in the middle of civil war. Below is the fragment of his conversation with Ramona Koval where he discovers the true past of his father:  Peter Godwin: It is one of those things where it all makes sense in retrospect, but what happened was that after this incident where he had this heart attack he actually recovered. He then hammered up this old sepia print on the wall, a framed picture on the wall of our sitting room, and when I had a look it was of three people I didn't recognise; a kind of young middle-aged couple and a little girl of about 11. It turned out that they were in fact his parents and his sister and that the secret that he was concealing was that, far from being this sort of pucker Brit that he was actually a Polish Jew and that his family had perished in the Holocaust. He had survived really quite by chance, that his father had decided...his father was a great admirer of Churchill and decided that...my father's family lived, by the way, in Warsaw in Poland, and they decided that English was going to be the language of international commerce in the future and that Dad would spend a summer at a kind of language crammer on the Sussex coast of England.

So off he went to do that and it was the summer of 1939 and my father was about 14, and on the 1st of September Hitler invaded Poland and Dad never got back and his family never got out. My father joined the Free Polish Army ultimately and had a very active war fighting after D-day up through Normandy and everything but ultimately never getting back to Poland, which was obviously occupied by the Soviets. We later discovered that his mother and sister had died in Treblinka concentration camp and his father died shortly after the war. When he met my mother, she was from a very posh Anglo family from I think four generations of Church of England vicars, including the chaplain general of the fleet at one point. Her family was sort of appalled that she'd taken up with this Jew, and so she was ostracised and disinherited, and that was what persuaded them just to leave and go to Africa to try and get a new life.