Over my many years of writing about books, there have been exceptional ones published that defy normal reviewing – books that are so poignant in reflecting a particular point in time through an individual’s experience that they are effectively beyond any critical comment. Once verified, they stand entirely on their own in what they communicate. Examples of such works are the Sarajevo diary of Zlata Filipović or the bird watching journals of Jonathan Trouern-Trend from his tours of duty during the U.S.-Iraq War. To these has been recently added Michal Skibinski’s summer holiday handwriting assignment from 1939, recently published under the title I Saw a Beautiful Woodpecker.
In 1939, the then eight-year-old Mr. Skibinski’s teacher set him an assignment to keep a journal, entering one sentence each day over the summer break from school. The fact that this summer break, and all the entries he made during it, occurred in his native Poland, a nation that the National Socialist government of Germany military forces invaded on the first day of September of that year, makes young Michal’s innocent observations of nature and other aspects of daily life astonishingly poignant.
Translated by Eliza Marciniak and thoroughly illustrated by Ala Bankroft, this very brief book speaks volumes about how transient the normal, seemingly insignificant small moments of life we all experience each day truly are, and how, at the whim of a egomaniacal madman raised to power by a benighted, bankrupted citizenry, they can be stripped away in the blink of an eye.
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