Letter to the Father
July 28, 2008 by grzegorz.piechota
Writing letters to fathers served as a national therapy for Poles. What a burden people bear, as they write to the newspaper: ”Thank you for the oppportunity to make a confession”?
In May 2008 Poland’s Gazeta Wyborcza published ”Letter to the Father”, a book inspired by a social campaign ”Dad’s come back” launched in November 2007. We were examining roots of Polish fathers’ retreat from family duties and showing men who had tried to get back to their roles of the fathers.
The book is based on 140 real life stories of our readers. We invited them to write personal letters to their fathers and to try to express things they had never told. Readers in fact faced their whole lives and evaluated it. They wrote about their fears, hopes, happiness, anger, compassion, hatred and love.
We got letters from youngsters: “Do not think that I do not love my father at all. I love him, but this feeling is limited as much as it is possible”.
We got letters from young adult women: “I am 26 years old and my life has tumbled down on my head. I blame you, father, for this”.
We got letters from 35-years-old men: “I am coming back from my mother’s funeral. I know that you have been calling me, but I don’t want to talk to you. It is too late, father, too late for 30 years.”
We got letters from mature women: “When I was 45, my son and your grandson asked me to give you the last chance. I do not regret it! You are now, for the first time in my life, the best and beloved father!”
We got letters from old men: “I am 69. And when I am standing at my father’s grave, I can’t stop thinking that his whole simple, decent life is a heroism”.
Those people really faced their lives. They decribed their fears, hopes, sadness, compassion, joy, anger, emptiness, jealousness, gratitude, nostalgia, hatred and of course love. There was a lot of love in those letters. One woman wrote: “I am writting about my dad, because I have never told him that I loved him so much”.
What’s positive is that in majority of these letters we found the faith that there was no too late for the come back.
These all were heart-breaking stories that showed the whole complexity of the term “a father”.
Jerzy Wojcik and Grzegorz Piechota, special projects editors at Gazeta, compiled and edited the letters and wrote the introduction:
We learned from these letters that sometimes it was easier to shout one’s pain or to confess one’s love in hundreds of thousands copies than to do the same in a private letter to a single recipient.
We hope this book will help many people to change their relationships with fathers, or if they are fathers themselves – to get better.
If you have never dared to talk honestly with your father, maybe it is a high time. If have never written such a letter to your father, please do write – even if you do it just for yourself. There are empty pages for you at the end of this book. And if you are a father, please consider which letter you would like to get one day from your children.
Wojcik and Piechota edit daily features’ section ”Welcome to Poland” and run awarded multimedia editorial projects like ”Migration to the EU”, ”Save the River”, ”Polish for Poles” and ”Humane Dying”.
Their book has been featured in German leading daily newspaper Die Welt, Polish most popular TV channels like TVP and TVN and nation-wide radio stations like RMF FM. It has reached the Top 50 list of bestselling titles at the Polish online bookstore Merlin.pl.
Tagged: book, feature, letters, newspaper, user-generated-content
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[...] We got over 1400 letters in total. In May 2008 we published a selection of these letters in a book ”Letter to the Father”. Read more about this book. [...]