Nigel Osborne’s extraordinary journeys have, at first reading, a kind of magical realism, yet they are all too graphically real. In this chapter he recounts his travels from Poland, as Eastern Europe fought the Soviet threat, via Russia and Czechoslovakia to Bosnia, at the height of the Balkan conflict, and to the very corridors of the United Nations in New York as the tragedy played out. Throughout, he draws us into his burning desire to ‘be there’. Like John Barber in his work with refugees, Osborne finds his rewards in the darkness of places of intense human experience. The writing and the life are a kind of song.

Music and Opposition – Poland

One autumn morning, as the 1960s were ending, I ran away from my British education and from rock ‘n’ roll. I boarded a train crossing Europe, travelling overnight through the old East Germany and a grey, windswept Alexanderplatz to a pastel morning painted by Repin. After a second day, and a journey through a gold and silver sea of birch trees, I reached Warsaw.

I had managed to get a Polish government scholarship to study composition, and signed up to work with Witold Rudziński at the Państwowa Wyższa Szkoła Muzyczna. I learnt a lot from Rudziński. He approached my work with the same sympathetic musicality as my former teacher, Kenneth Leighton, guided me through techniques of Polish modernism, and inspired me with his Renaissance man’s approach to rhythm, quantity and prosody. He was one of the few leading artists and intellectuals in Poland at the time to be a committed (if critical) Communist. I believe he used his influence in the Party to protect me on more than one occasion.

I also started to work at the Polish Radio Experimental Studio. The studio had been created in 1956, when Nikita Khrushchev and Władisław Gomułka, First Secretary of the Polish Communist Party, cut a deal to end the Poznań insurrection, the Polish precursor to the Hungarian Revolution. Part of the deal was a loosening of controls over the church and the arts. Włodzimierz Sokorski, Stalinist Minister of Culture (who, among other things, had terrorised modernist composers and banned the performance of jazz), was fired and put in charge of Polish Radio.