This is an informal snapshot of me and my sister, Renata Tulli, nee Szwarc. I do not remember who took this picture. It was taken in Warsaw in the 1990s.
My sister, Renata, is two years older than me. Before the war we both went to the same elementary school. She completed this school and went on to a Polish public vocational school on Narutowicza Street. She was studying book-binding. In 1939 she finished this three-year vocational school.
For a short period of time after the war, my sister worked at a post-office in Lodz. She cheated about her school years the way I did, except that in her case it was a lie of greater scope.
She had finished only a vocational school. And she enrolled at the university without ever admitting that she was not a high school graduate. She told them her school documents were lost.
They said she must take the finals. She would have passed them in the humanities, no problem. I don’t know, however, how it would have been with math and science.
When she was in her second year of studies she became an assistant of Ossowski, who valued her very highly, and she confessed to him that she did not have the finals. [Stanislaw Ossowski (1897–1963):
great Polish sociologist and activist of the democratic opposition; enjoyed great respect and authority among the intelligentsia]
When she went to take the exams it turned out there was a document from Ossowski, which said that there is no need for her to take the exam, because she is an excellent student. This way she avoided taking the finals!
Later she worked at Lodz University, then at the INS [Institute of Social Science] in Warsaw, and finally, until her retirement, she worked at the Institute of Sociology and Philosophy, Polish Academy of Science.
She married an Italian. She had studied Italian before the war. Someone had talked her into joining a course. After the war there was a trip to Italy, she was sent as translator, and this is how she met Vico.
He fell in love with her and wanted her to move to Italy. She said this was out of the question, so he came here and they got married. And he stayed.
They have a daughter who is a writer, her name is Magdalena Tulli.
