It took place on October 23 premiere book “The First Lady. Jolanta Kwaśniewska in conversation with Emilia Padoł”. On its pages Jolanta Kwaśniewska she touched on extremely personal topics, including a traumatic childbirth and the painful death of her mother. But that's not all. Wife Aleksander Kwaśniewski shared another devastating fact. Her father would experience a horror that he hid from his family for many years.
Jolanta Kwaśniewska told her father's macabre story. “He saw it as a fifteen-year-old boy.”
Jolanta Kwaśniewska tried to write a book three times, in which she decided to include the difficult story of her life. Her father, Julian Konty, who was a colonel of the Border Protection Forces, also appeared in the publication. As a teenager, he and his family lived in the Borszczówka colony. In 1943, a German unit entered the area together with the Ukrainian police – most of the farms there were set on fire and their inhabitants were burned alive. Kwaśniewska's father then experienced an incredible tragedy. His sister was among the victims of the massacre. – One of my father's sisters died along with her husband and four-year-old daughter, whom a German grabbed by the legs and smashed her head against the corner of the building – Kwaśniewska confessed in an interview with Emilia Padoł. It turned out that her father was a witness to the macabre act. – Dad saw all this as a fifteen-year-old boyc – she added.
Julian Konte managed to survive. Kwaśniewska observed his trauma
However, the blood-curdling story raises the question of how Kwaśniewska's father managed to survive. – One of the Germans caught him and told him to chase the cattle. (…) Fortunately, he found a drainage pipe and hid in it. He ran away and returned to the house, which was on the outskirts of the village, she confessed. He was given shelter by a priest in Ostrog, where he arrived together with his siblings, with whom he was carried on a stretcher from the door for over thirty kilometers they were carrying my seriously ill grandmother. He told his family his difficult story only years later. – When I think about what my dad must have seen with the 2nd Army… He only recalled that they ate crackers and groats all the time. He hated groats, Kwaśniewska recalled. The father's difficult experiences also had an impact on the home atmosphere when his daughters were already born. – I remember that at one stage he locked himself in his room. He smoked forty Flat cigarettes a day. Mother she then said: girls, be quiet, daddy is working. I remember this difficult atmosphere, she recalled. In later years, however, Kwaśniewska's father regained his joy of life, which was also visible in the way he spent his free time. – Dad loved the world, loved traveling, liked people, he was a person full of life – she concluded.