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Yet, the May Day celebration was not a home holiday at all.
First, you had to walk a long way by the road going down past the Block’s corner building and there, at the foot of the Gorka upland, to keep walking on and on. Not alone though, there were lots of people going the same way, both adults and children. People greeted each other cheerfully, in their hands they carried bunches of balloons or pliant twigs with handmade leaves of green tissue paper fixed by black threads spun fast and profusely, or long pieces of red cloth with big white letters spanned between 2 poles, and also portraits of different men, both bold and not too much so, set upon stubby separate sticks.
Like almost all the children, I had a short square pennant in my hands, on a thin—like a pencil, only a tad bit longer—rod. In the red pennant, the yellow circle crisscrossed with yellow grid stood for the globe, and a yellow dove soared above it, yet not as high as the capture of yellow letters: “Peace be to the World!” Of course, I couldn’t read at that time but those pennants remained unchangeable year after year for decades, they abode for latecomers and slow learners as well.
And while we all walked on, in the distance ahead of us, there emerged music. The nearer the louder it sounded and made us walk quicker and drop idle talks, and then we passed by 2 rows of soldier-musicians with shining trumpets and booming drum, and past a tall red balcony with people standing still upon it in their forage caps but, strangely, that balcony had no house behind it…
After one of the May Days, I felt like drawing a holiday so Grandma gave me a sheet of ruled paper and a pencil… In the center of the sheet, I drew a large balloon on a string going down to the bottom edge of the sheet. It looked good, so big and festive. However, I wanted more than that, I wanted the holiday be all over the world and, to the right from the balloon, I drew a stretch of blind wood fencing behind which there lived not ours but Germans and other enemies from the newsreels in the House of Officers, only all of them invisible, of course, because of the fencing.
Okay, Germans, let it be a holiday even for you! And I drew another balloon on the string rising from behind the fence. Lastly, to make it clear who is who and who is celebrating where, I added a fat cross in the enemies’ balloon.
The masterpiece accomplished, I briefly admired my work of art and then ran to share it, for a starter, with Grandma… At first, she couldn’t figure out what is what, and I had to explain to her the picture. But when I got to the point that let even Germans have a holiday—we are not meanies, right?—she stopped me sharply and vented severe criticism. I should have learned since long, said she, that because of my those cross-adorned balloons the “black raven” vehicle would stop by our house and take my Dad away arrested, and she asked if that was what I wanted.