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2021

2020 was the year of the virus. 2021 was the year of the vaccine …and the virus, obviously, but still it felt like the year we fought back. With science!

Whenever someone writes and shares one of these year-end retrospectives the result is, by its very nature, personal. These last two years are different though. We all still have our own personal perspectives, but we also all share a collective experience of The Ongoing Situation.

Like, I can point to three pivotal events in 2021 and I bet you could point to the same three for you:

getting my first vaccine shot in March,
getting my second vaccine shot in June, and
getting my booster shot in December.

So while on the one hand we’re entering 2022 in a depressingly similar way to how we entered 2021 with COVID-19 running rampant, on the other hand, the odds have changed. We can calculate risk. We’ve got more information. And most of all, we’ve got these fantastic vaccines.

I summed up last year in terms of all the things I didn’t do. I could do the same for 2021, but there’s only one important thing that didn’t happen—I didn’t catch a novel coronavirus.

It’s not like I didn’t take some risks. While I was mostly a homebody, I did make excursions to Zürich and Lisbon. One long weekend in London was particurly risky.

At the end of the year, right as The Omicron Variant was ramping up, Jessica and I travelled to Ireland to see my mother, and then travelled to the States to see her family. We managed to dodge the Covid bullets both times, for which I am extremely grateful. My greatest fear throughout The Situation hasn’t been so much about catching Covid myself, but passing it on to others. If I were to give it to a family member or someone more vulnerable than me, I don’t think I could forgive myself.

Now that we’ve seen our families (after a two-year break!), I’m feeling more sanguine about this next stage. I’ll be hunkering down for the next while to ride out this wave, but if I still end up getting infected, at least I won’t have any travel plans to cancel.

But this is meant to be a look back at the year that’s just finished, not a battle plan for 2022.

There were some milestones in 2021:

This means that my websites are ²/_5ths of my own age. In ten years time, my websites will be ¹/₂ of my own age.

Most of my work activities were necessarily online, though I did manage the aforementioned trips to Switzerland and Portugal to speak at honest-to-goodness real live in-person events. The major projects were:

Publishing season two of the Clearleft podcast in February,
Speaking at An Event Apart Online in April,
Hosting UX Fest in June,
Publishing season three of the Clearleft podcast in September, and
Writing a course on responsive design in November.

Outside of work, my highlights of 2021 mostly involved getting to play music with other people—something that didn’t happen much in 2020. Band practice with Salter Cane resumed in late 2021, as did some Irish music sessions. Both are now under an Omicron hiatus but this too shall pass.

Another 2021 highlight was a visit by Tantek in the summer. He was willing to undergo quarantine to get to Brighton, which I really appreciate. It was lovely hanging out with him, even if all our social activities were by necessity outdoors.

But, like I said, the main achievement in 2021 was not catching COVID-19, and more importantly, not passing it on to anyone else. Time will tell whether or not that winning streak will be sustainable in 2022. But at least I feel somewhat prepared for it now, thanks to those magnificent vaccines.

2021 was a shitty year for a lot of people. I feel fortunate that for me, it was merely uneventful. If my only complaint is that I didn’t get to travel and speak as much I’d like, well boo-fucking-hoo, I’ll take it. I’ve got my health. My family members have their health. I don’t take that for granted.

Maybe 2022 will turn out to be similar—shitty for a lot of people, and mostly unenventful for me. Or perhaps 2022 will be a year filled with joyful in-person activities, like conferences and musical gatherings. Either way, I’m ready.

The Gęsiówka Story

While I was in Warsaw for a conference last week, I sought out a commerative plaque in a residential neighbourhood. The English translation reads:

On 5th August 1944 “Zośka” the scouts’ battalion of the “Radosław” unit Armia Krajowa captured the German concentration camp “Gęsiówka” and liberated 348 Jewish prisoners, citizens of various European countries, many of whom later fought and fell in the Warsaw Uprising.

I knew about the plaque—and the incredible events it commemorates—thanks to a piece of writing called The Gęsiówka Story by Edward Kossoy, a relative of mine.

My ancestral lineage is an unusual mix. I’ve got generations of Irish on my mother’s side, and generations of Eastern European jews on my father’s side.

Edward wasn’t closely related to me. He was my grandfather’s cousin. My father’s father (from whom I got my middle name, Ivan) was driving ambulances in London during the war. Meanwhile his cousin Edward in Poland was trying desperately to get his family out. Separated from his wife and daughter, he was arrested by the Russians in Ukraine and sentenced to hard labour in a gulag. He survived. His wife and child were did not. They were murdered by the nazis during Operation Harvest Festival.

Edward was a lawyer. He spent the rest of his life fighting for reparations for victims of the Holocaust. He represented tens of thousands of jews, Poles, and Roma. He lived in Tel Aviv, Munich, and finally Geneva. That was where he met the Polish war hero Wacław Micuta who first told him about what happened at Gęsiówka. What he heard sounded implausible, but when he found Gęsiówka survivors among his own clientelle, Edward was able to corrobarate Micuta’s story.

(Micuta, by the way, had much to discuss with Edward’s second wife Sonia. She fought in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, escaping by being smuggled out in a suitcase.)

As well as being a lawyer, Edward was also an author. In 2004 he wrote The Gęsiówka Story for the journal Yad Vashem Studies. I came across it in PDF form while I was searching for more details of Edward’s life and legacy. I was completely astonished by what I read—if it were a Hollywood film, you would think it too far-fetched to be true.

I decided to transfer the story into a more durable format. I’ve marked it up, styled it, and published it here:

gesiowka.adactio.com

The subheading of The Gęsiówka Story is “A Little Known Page of Jewish Fighting History.” I certainly think it’s a piece of history that deserves to be more widely known. That’s why I’ve turned it into a web page.

When we talk about documents on the web, we usually use the word “document” as a noun. But working on The Gęsiówka Story, I came to think of the word “document” as a verb. And I think the web is well-suited to documenting the stories and experiences of our forebears.

Edward died six years ago, just one year shy of a hundred. I never got to meet him in person, which is something I very much regret. But by taking his words and working with them while trying my best to treat them with respect, I’ve come to feel a bit closer to this great man.

This was a little labour of love for me. I hope I did his words justice. And I hope you’ll read The Gęsiówka Story.