Comatose man wakes up. . . after 19 years
Jan Grzebski regained consciousness after 19 years to find his country was a democracy
A POLISH railway worker has awoken after 19 years in a coma to discover that his world has changed beyond recognition - though people still moan as much as before.
"When I went into a coma there was only tea and vinegar in the shops," Jan Grzebski, now 65, said. "Meat was rationed and there were huge petrol queues everywhere." Mr Grzebski lost consciousness in 1988 after he was hit by a train, and doctors gave him only two or three years to live.
But due to the tireless care of his wife Gertruda, who moved him every hour to prevent bedsore infections, he remained in good health though completely removed from the dramatic changes going on all around.
After regaining consciousness, he told members of his family that he had vague memories of family gatherings and of his relatives talking to him, trying to provoke a response.
There was plenty for them to tell him about, if they had wished to startle him with amazing news.
When he went under in 1988, another Polish working man, the electrician Lech Walesa, recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983, was back at work after years under house arrest, but still under close surveillance by the communist authorities.
Within two years communism had collapsed and Walesa was elected President of Poland with 75pc of the vote.
But Walesa was a flop as president, and when he stood again in 2000, only one percent of the electorate voted for him. By then, Poland had a market economy, communism was receding rapidly, but the injured railwayman was still dead to the world.
The one thing that has struck Mr Grzebski, since waking in this new world, is the fact that people complain just as much as during the communist years.
"Now I see people on the streets with cellphones and there are so many goods in the shops it makes my head spin," he confessed. "What amazes me is all these people who walk around with their mobile phones and never stop moaning."
His saintly wife, who was said by Mr Grzebski's doctor to have "done the job of an entire intensive care team", continued to change his position every hour.
"I cried a lot, and prayed a lot," she said of those long and lonely years.
"Those who came to see us kept asking, 'When is he going to die?' But he's not dead," she said.
Mr Grzebski's remarkable story is a real life version of the film "Good Bye, Lenin!" in which an East Berliner suffers a heart attack and slips into a coma in 1989.
- Peter Popham
