September 4 1988 was a day like any other in late Soviet-era Poland. Weary queues formed outside grocery stores. General Wojciech Jaruzelski, the head of state who attempted to crush the anti-communist Solidarity movement, led a debate on the theme ”sincerity for sincerity”. Thousands of kilometres away in Britain, Who Framed Roger Rabbit was breaking box office records as Phil Collins reached number one with Groovy Kind of Love.
And at the station yard in Dzialdowo, a picturesque town 160km north of Warsaw, railway worker Jan Grzebski (46) slipped and fell in front of a train.
Grzebski’s apparent awakening from a coma this month — 19 years after that accident — has prompted comparisons to the film Good Bye Lenin! in which relatives of a rampantly pro-communist East German teacher try to shore up her belief that the fallen Soviet empire is still intact after she emerges from a long coma.
Locked inside his own head for almost two decades, the railway worker began to speak and jerkily move his limbs.
The tale of a real-life Rip Van Winkle flashed across the world, with Grzebski’s observations on contemporary life held up as a fable on the ills of progress.
”Things were simpler back in 1988,” he told the Guardian at the two-room apartment he shares with his wife, Gertruda. ”There wasn’t much except pickles in the shops and cocoa was rationed. Now everything is colourful and everyone talks constantly on their mobile phone and moans, even a three-year-old child.”
Grzebski said visiting a supermarket without using kartki — ration cards — had baffled him. ”I was amazed to see my wife lifting products off the shelves and loading them into a big basket on wheels. I said, ‘What are you doing? You’ll get caught and go to prison.”’
But while Grzebski’s thoughts — spoken in a slurred whisper — are fascinating from a man who was last on the streets before the fall of the Berlin wall, the story of his fairy-tale awakening is not quite what it first appeared.
His head was crushed by the buffers between two carriages and he was lucky to survive. For two weeks he continued to go to work. Then one day he fainted with a massive blood clot in his head and was rushed to hospital where doctors told his wife he was effectively dead.
But while early reports said Grzebski, now 65, was in a coma, he was in fact conscious throughout his ordeal, albeit immobile, bedridden and unable to talk. Doctors say he was paralysed and suffering from aphasia, a loss of ability to produce or comprehend language.
However, although he was not in a comatose state it seems Grzebski’s isolation from society beyond his immediate family was absolute.
He could not be taken out in a wheelchair because he could not stop his head lolling or his limbs flopping about. His wife fed him with a spoon and turned him three times a day to prevent bed sores. She propped him in front of the television but it is unclear how much he absorbed.
”I talked to him all the time but I didn’t know if he understood, although once I thought he did because he began to cry when I cried,” said Grzebski.
Her husband says he could hear, but not respond — ”the worst feeling in the world”.
Only in September last year when he got pneumonia and was seen by doctors did a rehabilitation specialist decide to attempt treatment. Within weeks he could form simple sentences, raise his arms, flex his toes and sit straight in his wheelchair.
The extent of Grzebski’s seclusion meant he got a shock when his wife took him outside in his wheelchair. Poland threw off the Soviet grasp with its first semi-free elections in summer 1989, months after he lost contact with the outside world. ”Everything is new,” he said. ”The clothes are much better. When I had my accident the only cars on the streets were Syrenas and Warszawas” — boxy Soviet models.
Now he wants to spend more time talking to his 11 grandchildren: ”Every one of them was laid on my chest after their birth but I couldn’t touch them or speak.”
His dearest wish, however, is to learn to use his legs. ”My wife is the best you could imagine,” he said. ”For 19 years I’ve dreamed of taking her for a walk in the park. And now I will.” – Guardian Unlimited Â