Tony’s List: From Poland With Love

Fascinating People Fascinating Places

Daniel Mainwaring

Documentary, Society & Culture:documentary, History, Society & Culture

5 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 19 August 2022

⏱️ 25 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Episode 2 of 3 As the Cold War was winding down, a group of 11 East European teenagers — barely known to each other — appeared on the playground at St. Mary’s Roman Catholic School in Bishop’s Stortford, a quiet town 30 miles from London. How would the town, and their new classmates react to their arrival? And why had they come? In this peculiar three-part story, I recount a tale of daredevil escape, a fake passport, war, the end of communism, and the remarkable story of these 11 people. Music: Pixabay Featured Guests: Kazik Bem, Neil Rodrigues, Marta Kazmierska-Skupinska, Tony Wood — Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/daniel-mainwaring5/message

Transcript

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0:00.0	Fascinating people, fascinating places.
0:03.0	G'd a and welcome to the Dan Mainwearing podcast.
0:07.0	This is where we talk to and about the famous and the infamous,
0:11.0	the celebrated and the obscure, the well-known and the undiscovered,
0:16.0	interviews, articles and discussion from around the globe.
0:19.0	In the last episode, we learned how on a scene reminiscent of the sound of music
0:24.9	They're gone!
0:26.9	Tony Wood made a daring escape from the clutches of Saddam's Iraqi forces by assuming a false identity legitimized by a consular card given to him by Polish officials.
0:38.0	But that is not the end of the story.
0:41.0	This is not the end. The main component of the story is a
0:44.3	it is not even the beginning of the end but it is perhaps the end of the
0:50.9	beginning. The main component of this story is a surprising appearance of 11 East European kids
0:59.0	from behind the fractured Iron Curtain.
1:02.0	Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.
1:06.2	On a playground in Bishop Stawford in the autumn of 1990. The newly freed Tony Wood and his wife Judy were the people who made this happen.
1:21.6	As he recovered from his harrowing ordeal alongside his Polish
1:25.3	colleagues, Tony had a sudden epiphany. I realize that quite a few of them had
1:32.0	children who were at these Kuwaiti English schools.
1:36.0	I understood that they had exams coming up.
1:39.0	When I go back to the UK, we had this idea if we could get the schools to help out to take on a number of pupils.
1:48.9	Hannah, Martin and Krestof were among the students taking English A levels in Kuwait, exams that ultimately
1:56.4	determine which university you go to.
	...

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