I asked my grandfather to come with me to Hobie’s funeral. After all, he was the one who’d sent us to Nadia with Hobie’s poems. He was very frail, but he agreed to come when I promised him lunch at the Polish restaurant in Chapel Street. He almost never got out.
‘They were martyrs for Poland,’ he said when I told him Hobie’s story. ‘Hardly any of the soldiers of the Home Army survived. There were no second chances, no trials, just a bullet through the head or a knife through the guts. The fact that he survived Warsaw and made it to Australia is almost miraculous.’
‘He was a clever man, Dziadek,’ I said. ‘He survived as a guerrilla fighter, writing his subversive poetry for at least four years before the uprising. He must have learnt ways to hide his identity.’
Dziadek just nodded.
‘Wha
