- The Observer,
- Sunday June 3, 2007
Jan Grzebski, 65, was hit by a train in 1988 and was given only two years to live by doctors. But his wife Gertruda continued to care for him, and never lost hope that he would recover consciousness.
The extraordinary real-life story resembles the plot of the popular film Goodbye Lenin! in which Alex Kerner, played by Daniel Brühl, tries to hide the demise of communism in East Germany to prevent his mother Christiane, (Katrin Sass), dying from shock after recovering from a coma.
Grzebski, a father of four from Dzialdowo, northern Poland, who remains confined to a wheelchair, was in his mid-forties living under a regime of food shortages when he slipped into the coma. Now that he has regained consciousness, however, he has observed that the dramatic transformation of the Polish economy and the invention of modern technologies such as the mobile phone appears to have done little to cheer his countrymen up. He had been living under President Wojciech Jaruzelski's regime of food shortages, and queues for petrol in a country which was almost completely cut off from the west by the Iron Curtain.
'When I went into a coma there was only tea and vinegar in the shops, meat was rationed and huge petrol queues were everywhere,' he told the Polish news channel TVN24.
'Now I see people on the streets with cell phones and there are so many goods in the shops it makes my head spin. What amazes me is all these people who walk around with their mobile phones and never stop moaning - I've got nothing to complain about.'
Since he fell into his coma, Grzebski's children have all grown up, married and together have given him 11 grandchildren, whom he saw for the first time when he awoke. He told family members that he had vague memories of family gatherings with his close relatives talking to him.
His most lavish praise was reserved for his wife, who had for 19 years tended his every need, turning her husband in his bed every hour to prevent sores. 'It was Gertruda who saved me, and I'll never forget it,' added Grzebska.
Polish doctors who had been monitoring his progress agreed. Dr Boguslaw Poniatowski said: 'For 19 years Mrs Grzebska did the job of an experienced intensive care team, changing her comatose husband's position every hour to prevent bed-sore infections.' Gertruda said: 'I cried a lot, and I prayed a lot. Those who came to see us kept asking: "When is he going to die?" But he's not dead.'
The ending of the fictional film is not such a happy one, however. At the end of the Wolfgang Becker cinematic tragicomedy, when Christiane discovers the Berlin Wall has fallen she reveals that her support of the former communist regime had been a sham all along.
