The Deluge: 25 Years Later

I occasionally semi-jokingly mention ‘antediluvian times’. Though there is a humorous element to it, there is also a reference to an actual event: the Millennium Flood of July 1997, which I consider the greatest watershed in my life to date.

Though I consider Tarnów to be my home town, I was born in Silesia, and I lived with my parents in Koźle (a part of the city of Kędzierzyn-Koźle since 1975) until the summer of 1997. Our flat was on the ground floor of one of the blocks owned by the military authorities.

In the spring of that year, my father retired from the army after 20 years of service. Soon after the school year ended (I finished my fifth grade), my parents brought me and my sister to our maternal grandparents, who lived some 35 km north of Tarnów, as they usually would do, and went back to stay in our flat with our younger brother, who was just a few months old.

When July came, the media (at the time, I used to watch news on TV with my grandparents) started reporting on heavy rain in Czech Republic and Polish Sudetes, the wave on the Oder, and more and more flooded towns and villages.

If I remember the date correctly, the flood wave reached Kędzierzyn-Koźle in the morning hours of July 9th. My parents have told me that Mum took my brother and went to a neighbour on one of the higher floors very early on. At that time, Dad was busy trying to secure our possessions. In the flat, the water was about 1 m deep. In some news broadcast, I even saw our part of the town—I remember seeing a delivery van standing there with only its uppermost part peeking out of the water.

The water in the Vistula was rising as well, and my grandparents lived below its confluence with the Dunajec. Mum even remembered witnessing a flood there as a young child (1960), and was afraid that the area might get flooded again. So I provided some help to my grandfather in securing the farm (I remember putting some planks on top of barriers in the cowshed, so the cattle could stand on dry floor in case the building had been flooded), and then my sister and I went to our aunt, living just outside Tarnów. We were picked by a cousin of ours.

Fortunately, there was no flood where my grandparents lived. I did not see the flood itself (except what was shown in the media) or the destruction it had brought. My parents, however, decided they could not live in fear of the flood anymore, and took steps to move. They found a different flat, this time in Tarnów, in a block situated atop a hill, and also on the tenth floor.

I started school year 1997–98 in Tarnów. In many aspects, this was a new beginning. Even though my Mum's family lived in Tarnów and the nearby area, this was a new place to live, new school, new fellow students. I have not experienced a similar change in my life so far.

Should anyone be interested, a regional newspaper has published photos from the time on their website.

^{Photo by Lichen99, CC BY-SA 3.0 PL
Source: Wikimedia Commons}