In the Black Bor settlement near Vilnius is the home of Józef Mackiewicz and his wife, Barbara Toporska. They lived here for almost 10 years, from the mid-1930s until their escape from the Red Army in the summer of 1944. A volume of reportage, Bunt rojstów , was written in Czarny Bór , and the village itself and its immediate surroundings were described in Mackiewicz's post-war novels, headed by Droga donikąd .

Letnisko Czarny Bór
A few kilometres south-west of the centre of Vilnius stretches a wooded range of hills called the Ponary Mountains. They are extended by sandy dunes overgrown with pine forest and stretching further south along a long strip along the marshy valley of the Vaka River, a tributary of the Neris.

At the end of the 19th century, this area was crossed by two railway lines - one leading through Grodno to Warsaw and the other through Lida to Baranovichi. Thanks to good communication with Vilnius, holiday homes began to appear more and more often among the dunes and wasteland. The first sub-Vilnius holiday colony was established at the beginning of the 20th century near the railway line to Lida, in the vicinity of the Czarny Bór manor. As it was initiated by Vladimir Reisler, director of the Polesie Railway, and a large part of the plots of land were bought up by railwaymen, the settlement was named Reislerowo. However, the name did not catch on and in the inter-war period the original name of Czarny Bór was returned.

At the end of the 1930s, the settlement comprised several dozen plots, scattered in the pine forest along a regular grid of streets, in line with the then popular idea of a garden city. The buildings mostly consisted of modest wooden houses with porches, decorated only with colourful shutters and wood-cut ornaments typical of the Vilnius region. The only major institution located in Černý Bór was the Ursuline nuns' convent, established in the 1920s, with a school, day-care centre and boarding school for girls.

At the time, Czarny Bor was a popular weekend or holiday destination for the middle-class bourgeoisie of Vilnius, mainly Jews. This provincial holiday resort, certainly not devoid of charm, was not in itself a tourist attraction against the backdrop of the rich Vilnius countryside and is hardly mentioned in guide books of that period.

Home of Józef Mackiewicz and Barbara Toporska
. After a period of turbulent youth and two failed relationships, in 1934. 32-year-old Józef Mackiewicz met 21-year-old Barbara Toporska, a Polish studies student and contributor to the Vilnius "Słowo". Shortly afterwards, the couple bought a house with a large plot of land in Czarny Bór.

For the writer, who loved nature and felt rather badly in a big city, this place became a safe haven for almost 10 years, until he left his home in the summer of 1944.

A number of Mackiewicz's pre-war reportages written for the Słowo daily were written in Czarny Bór, as well as his wartime journalism, both published in the official press and in underground publications.

During the war years, Mackiewicz wrote down his observations on an ongoing basis, which later became the leaven for two novels that were a panorama of the history of the Vilnius region in the period 1939-1944: Droga donikąd [The Road to Nowhere ] and Nie trzeba głośno mówić . As he himself recalled the period of the first Soviet occupation, "every night I would bring the manuscript to a starling's house with a specially opened roof. When the starlings arrived in March 1941, I had to stop writing. I finished under the German occupation".

Between 1941 and 1944, Mackiewicz heard the regular sounds of executions being carried out on Jews at the execution site of Ponary, a few kilometres away from Czarny Bor. In the autumn of 1943, while accidentally riding his bicycle near the railway station in Ponary, he witnessed the mass murder carried out by Germans and Lithuanians on a group of Jews driven to the death pits. He published a horrifying description of this massacre already in exile - first in 1945 in Italy (reportage Ponary - Baza ), and then repeated it in his novel Nie trzeba głośno mówić .

After the Mackiewicz family left Czarny Bor before the arrival of the Red Army in the summer of 1944, their house was used by other people for several decades. Over time, however, it was abandoned and fell into disrepair until it was in danger of being completely destroyed. In 2014. The Vilnius Foundation began renovation work in it, thanks to which the building was restored to its former glory. A cultural centre and creative work house will be built here in the near future.

Revolt of the royalists
Of the works that were created in Czarny Bor, the most noteworthy is Bunt rojstów . It is a selection of reportages from the north-eastern lands of the Second Polish Republic originally published in "Słowo", the editor of which was Józef's brother, Stanisław Cat-Mackiewicz.

The book was published in 1938, and its cover was designed by Jerzy Hoppen, a well-known painter and graphic artist from Vilnius and lecturer at the Faculty of Fine Arts at Stefan Batory University. It depicts a barefoot boy in a dawn coat, holding a cap in his hand, with his head bowed and his sad eyes directed at the ground. The boy looks as if he is receiving an order or listening to a reprimand from someone more important - a court bursar, a clerk, a policeman or a Jewish merchant. This cover perfectly reflects the content of the book, which is devoted to the problems of villages and small towns in the most backward areas of the Second Polish Republic - the Vilnius, Nowogródek, Polesie and Białystok voivodeships. In it, Mackiewicz describes above all the misery of the peasant from this Polish-Belarusian borderland - poor, uneducated, exploited by an inept administration and dishonest intermediaries.

One of the reportages is entitled A Szwarce Bor , which in Yiddish means Czarny Bór. In it, Mackiewicz describes the atmosphere of this settlement at the weekend, at the very peak of the summer season. "Summer visitors come from Vilnius, those, of course, who can afford a holiday season among the sun and pine trees. The Jews themselves. Alone, that is 97 per cent". In doing so, he points out the anomalies of the small-scale economy in the sub-Vilnius countryside, with the disproportionately important role of Jewish middlemen in the Belarussian countryside, and the related phenomenon of anti-Semitism, widespread especially in the suburbs of Vilnius and in working-class circles.

The reportage portrays Jews in a bad light, including a scene of a small Jewish merchant humiliating a Belorussian peasant employed to handle turpentine. Despite this, it is not anti-Semitic, but presents a true, painful picture of one of the most backward regions of Europe at the time, full of swollen social and national conflicts. Mackiewicz made no allowances for any of the professional or ethnic groups he described, and was perhaps most critical of the provincial Polish administration.

The Real End of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania
. Józef Mackiewicz is certainly one of the most outstanding Polish prose writers of the 20th century. He described nature in an unparalleled way, and was probably also the best Polish writer-battleman of the last century. His home country, today's Lithuanian-Byelorussian borderland, with its social and ethnic mosaic, occupied a central place in his work. The greatest tragedy for Mackiewicz was the progressive decay of the legacy of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania under the influence of 20th-century nationalisms.

Czesław Miłosz captured his silhouette perfectly in his essay The End of the Grand Duchy , published in 1989 in the Parisian Kultura. "I hardly knew Józef Mackiewicz in my Vilnius youth. He was a gregarious man, of those whose slightly crooked nose peeped into a glass, wearing a maciejówka cap, often samodi and long boots, and could be regarded as a grey-haired nobleman straight from the village. He liked to drink at night in Vilnius restaurants, like another colleague of the "Słowo", Jerzy Wyszomirski [...]. I would not be able to imagine him as a literary man of Warsaw or Krakow. He lived in a city which for him was still the capital of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and he was a patriot of that country. I think that even today it is difficult for younger generations to imagine what kind of loyalty was at stake here, and why people like him treated Polish patriots with equal dislike, as well as Lithuanian or Belorussian patriots".