Today, if we decided to go on a 12,000-plus kilometer journey, we would either take a 15-hour flight or drive a car for 153 hours. If we chose to cover this distance by foot, it would take 2,300 hours, an approximately 100 day march, non-stop. Such a journey was made by the Pisek family in over three years, from August 1939 to December 1942. They left home and they arrived home. They were supposed to only leave for a short time and go not too far away, but the turmoil of the war drove them into the unknown, across Europe, Asia and the Middle East.
It was not an easy journey. And it wasn’t easy to talk about it. Irena Pisek did so — in pictures and in words -— only a few decades after the end of the war. A series of her pastels and her handwritten memoirs in Polish gave rise to this exhibition.
