Bronisław Kunat was buried close to Krasnogruda, in Sejny; Zygmunt, however, was buried in Świętobrość, Kiejdany county [now Kėdainiai, Lithuania – transl.]. When he travelled to Kowno [LIT: Kaunas], the capital of the independent Lithuania, to settle some matters in the local offices he found his name helpful, sounding sort of indigenous, kuna in Lithuanian stands for “body” or “power.” In fact, it was only a testimony to the fact that the Yotvingian tribes spoke some Baltic tongue, something between Prussian and Lithuanian; according to the family tradition the Kunats hailed from Yotvingia. Their roots are thus, where the greatest number of excavations testify to the Yotvingian presence, i.e. Suwałki region. But how it happened that they were exterminated during the Middle Ages, I really do not know. They never went beyond the type of organization of the American Indians, i.e. they never united as a state, is it not, then, true that one big battle concluded with carnage was enough to put an end to their existence? And that one captive child, a son of a chieftain, was to be raised as a Pole and receive the Topór as his coat-of-arms ? Somehow it smells of the history writing typical for Romanticism.
For a few hundred years the land between the estates of the Teutonic Knights and Lithuania stretched a deserted wilderness, only later arrived the Polish settlers from the south and the Lithuanian ones from the north. Where was the abode of the nobilitated Kunats? There was Stanisław Kunat’s library in Krasnogruda, he was an economist and after the November Uprising emigrated to France and became professor of École de Batignolles. He was born in Michaliszki, near Krasnogruda, Mariampol county.
In the Sopot Catholic cemetery, there are graves of the heiresses of Krasnogruda, Bronisław’s daughters, my cousins, Ela and Nina; also Ela’s husband, Władysław Lipski and, symbolically, their son’s Zygmunt who perished in a German concentration camp. Buried there is also Weronika, Zygmunt’s daughter, my mother. Her sister Maria is buried, however, in Olsztyn. That was some dry data we carry with ourselves though civilization seems to favour less and less the memory of the hazy tribal affairs.
The extract is an entry inMilosz's Alphabet, quoted after the Collected Works edition (Kraków 2001).