«Small-town Australia in the 1950s. I grew up knowing my parents came from a place called Poland. About Poland itself Iknew very little,  ignorance that remained unchanged until I was an adult.
From early on, I knew Poland was ‘‘behind the Iron Curtain’’, which  I actually conceived of as just that: one long curtain made of iron stretching right down from  Gdansk to  Trieste. (That’s a lot of curtain hooks, I know). Couldn’t get in. Couldn’t get out. Not the people; nor information about them. If I wondered at all about Poland, I came up with blanks every time. Truth is I didn’t know what I didn’t know until much later.
 Yet I’ve always had a strange sense of emptiness, of a prison without walls, of a sameness and greyness, a place of silence and stillness, of unkempt cemeteries, of places overgrown, a barren landscape locked out of time.
I’ve never lost that sense, nor sought to disconfirm it. And within a few pages of starting Berlin Syndrome, it was with me again.
Melanie Joosten’s haunting  debut novel is set in 2006 in the east of the once-divided German city.  Pretty quickly you pick up on the ambience – the peculiar character of life in an ex-Soviet satellite.
The Russians are gone. The wall is down, sold off in thousands of fragments. But a frisson of the old Iron Curtain remains…».

 Review – Ruth Wajnryb – The Sydney Morning Herald – September 24th, 2011.

 June 30^th, 2011 marks the 100^th  anniversary of the birth of Nobel Prize winning poet Czeslaw Milosz. Polish President Bronislaw Komorowski has inaugurated an International Centre of Dialogue in an estate in Krasnogruda, close to the Lithuanian border.  The ceremony was attended by the poet’s son, Anthony Milosz, and by representatives of Polish and Lithuanian governments. The house belonged to the family of the poet’s mother.

University of California

 Czeslaw Milosz was born in present-day Lithuania, to partly Polish, partly Lithuanian parents, and was brought up in the multinational milieu of Vilnius. He graduated from the University of Vilnius with a degree in law. In 1951, Milosz appealed for political asylum in Paris, then in 1960, he moved from France to the United States. He taught for many years at the University of California, Berkeley. After the fall of communism, the poet returned to Poland and spent the last years of his life in Krakow, where he died in 2004, at the age of 93.
 His best known work was The Captive Mind, which looked at the treatment of intellectuals under communist rule. His poetry was widely acclaimed internationally, but it was not until 1973 that his work was translated into English, allowing it to be appreciated by a wider audience.
 For Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaite laying a memorial plaque at Vilnius University the poet’s work is a testament to Polish-Lithuanian solidarity. The most important event of the Milosz Year was the Literary Festival, which took place in Krakow from May 9^th to May 15^th .

Milosz’s Year – Site.