Dr, Stanislav William Robert Faix

“When I was ordained (1963), the last thing I was thinking was that the Soviet Union would disappear in our lifetime. I never thought that, never. I thought the Iron Curtain was going to be a permanent feature of the political climate for the next 100 years. I was totally convinced of that. As regards to wars, this was in the 1960s, all the African countries were establishing independence, were leaving the imperial system – the French, the British, the Dutch… The colonies were becoming independent nations. It was an age of turmoil, it was anti-colonialism, there were massacres, there were terrible acts committed against a former colonial power. The civil rights movement in the US was gaining momentum, the Vietnamese war in the US, we finished the Corean war, then there was the war in Vietnam, there were riots and marches in the streets, marching on Washington. Nothing has really changed. What has changed is the technology that has developed in this time frame. The technology, the ability to communicate to all parts of the known world, just with a telephone, which is unthinkable. The rise of terrorism… There was terrorism, certainly, there were some troubled areas that are still troubled areas. It didn’t really change – it became more refined, if I can say, cruel. These drones – can you imagine, they don’t have to send anyone into space, and they can send a drone and destroy a village. These things… And I can say – when we heard about the atomic bomb in Nagasaki and Hiroshima, it was one of the most heartrending, fearful pieces of news that we lived in start fear that someone else is going to do the same to us. You know, life goes on and the malevolent streak in global cultures remains. We’re facing the same, but in a more refined level of destruction.”

“…a story that came down as a legend in our family. I have always noticed that my grandfather on Easter Sunday would fast. He would not really eat very much, and I always though it was strange – Easter Sunday is the big feast day, when there were no limits to what was put on the table, it is like Christmas, and even more so on Easter. When I was ordained a priest in 1963, my mother said to me: ‘Now I can tell you the reason for your grandfather's meager diet on Easter Sunday. He fasted on Easter Sunday so that there would be a priest in the family.’ She told me that on the day I was ordained a priest, on February 9th 1963, she told me that.”

“It was after the (Second World) War. I remember this enthusiasm, there was a sense of national pride that the war was over, that we (In the United States of America) were spared the bombings and the carnage… The television was just beginning to come in, and there was a footage of ruined cities and destruction – something which amazed me in 1970 and 1971 when I lived in Poland as a Fullbright scholar. There were some cities, like Wroclaw, where there were streets of piles of bricks. It was just ruined, there was very little work done sometimes, and in the outskirts, and even in the center of some cities. Krakow was not bombed, it was spared. But I remember it was dark, cloudy, because the Polish people’s republic established a circle of plants and there were belching out smoke. Cloudy. The fabric of inner city was corroding. Warsaw was completely, they say 87 % of the city was destroyed during the war. When I was there in the 1970s, there were still streets, where only the façade of the building was left, with wooden support, so it would not fall into the street. It was rather grim. But something at that time was the smell of oxide. A strong, pungent, odor of something that never seemed to go away, even it was a nice day, you still had that cloud. So, my first recollections of Poland within 25 years after the War, was that it was still in working to move out of that phase of the war. Reconstruction seemed to be endless.”