Ela married Władysław Lipski, an engineer who had studied in Karlsruhe, Germany. They had one child, Zygmunt’s son, whom they called Zaza. Nina took the surname Niementowska after her husband, the marriage, however, was a short-term one, her husband never visited Krasnogruda. When I came here, for holidays, Ela and Nina’s mother, Florentyna nee Grzegorzewska were still alive. The estate, though quite sizeable, did not produce enough profit. The person in charge of the farm was Nina. She used to wear tall boots and was an ardent horse rider. In 1919-20, she served as a private in an Uhlan regiment. Ela managed the household, i.e. the rooms for holidaymakers, mostly Warsaw intelligentsia. Władek [diminutive of Władysław - transl] did not have any permanent function to perform, except for transporting the visitors from Sejny, the coach's end station, and entertaining them, he would often sit at the piano in the living room and play music for dancing. Zaza was brought up and educated in the manor. I do not remember whether he, eventually, went to secondary school. He was a very sensitive and musical person. Together with his father, he was taken in 1939, or in the beginning of 1940, to Sachsenhausen. He was just 15 then. They included him in the group of prisoners whose task was checking the durability of footwear under increasing weight - he died in the camp after a few years. His father was of athletic posture and spoke German fluently, perhaps these were the reasons why he survived.
At the beginning of the Nazi occupation Nina worked as a courier crossing the border of the neighbouring Lithuania. I am not sure whether it had something to do with Władek's and Zaza’s arrest, I do not think so. Their arrest was according to the general action against the Polish intelligentsia on the territories that the Nazis incorporated into the Reich. After Władysław's and Zaza’s arrest the estate came under the German management, Nina and Ela got to Warsaw and there, I suppose, survived the Uprising. After the war, they settled with Władek who returned from the concentration camp, in Sopot, in a villa registered at my name. The villa was haunted, the family of a German doctor committed suicide there, in a group, taking cyanide while sitting at the table. Miron Białoszewski, in one of his poems, described the ghosts haunting the house.
When in America I tried to help my family, sending them parcels. Later they swapped the villa for a flat in a block of flats.
Ela died in 1962, Nina in 1977 and Władek in 1978.
All three are buried in the Catholic cemetery in Sopot, there is also a symbolic tombstone of Zaza, and in the same block also the grave of my mother who died of typhoid in the village of Drewnica, near Gdańsk, during the so called repatriation of Vilnius in 1945.
The text dictated by Czesław Miłosz in Krakow on 16-30 April 2003 and written down by Agnieszka Kosińska who sent it in a letter to Borderland.