Studies and Personal Life
Tusk was born in Gdańsk. Tusk's father, also named Donald Tusk (1930–1972), was a carpenter. Donald Tusk's mother, Ewa Tusk (1934–2009), was a nurse. His uncle, Bronisław Tusk (1935–2000), was a sculptor from Gdańsk. His grandfather Józef Tusk (1907–1987) was a railway official who, as a former citizen of the Free City of Danzig, was compulsorily drafted by German Nazi authorities into the Wehrmacht on 2 August 1944. He deserted a few months later to join the Polish Army in the West on 24 November 1944.
Donald Tusk belongs to the Kashubian minority in Poland. In an interview with the Israeli newspaper Haaretz in December 2008, Tusk compared his own family history to the Jewish experience, describing the Kashubian minority as a people who, "like the Jews, are people who were born and live in border areas and were suspected by the Nazis and by the Communists of being disloyal".
Tusk graduated from the Mikołaj Kopernik (Nicolaus Copernicus) High School in Gdańsk in 1976. He then enrolled as a student of history at the University of Gdańsk, from which he graduated in 1980 under professor Roman Wapiński with an M.A. thesis on Józef Piłsudski.
Donald Tusk and his wife, Małgorzata, have two children: a son, Michał (b. 1982) and a daughter, Katarzyna (b. 1987). He also has one grandson, Mikołaj (b. 2009) by his son Michał. They reside in Sopot near Gdańsk.
Read more about this topic: Donald Tusk
Famous quotes containing the words studies, personal and/or life:
“The conduct of a man, who studies philosophy in this careless manner, is more truly sceptical than that of any one, who feeling in himself an inclination to it, is yet so over-whelm’d with doubts and scruples, as totally to reject it. A true sceptic will be diffident of his philosophical doubts, as well as of his philosophical conviction; and will never refuse any innocent satisfaction, which offers itself, upon account of either of them.”
—David Hume (1711–1776)
“The ingrained idea that, because there is no king and they despise titles, the Americans are a free people is pathetically untrue.... There is a perpetual interference with personal liberty over there that would not be tolerated in England for a week.”
—Margot Asquith (1864–1945)
“It might be seen by what tenure men held the earth. The smallest stream is mediterranean sea, a smaller ocean creek within the land, where men may steer by their farm bounds and cottage lights. For my own part, but for the geographers, I should hardly have known how large a portion of our globe is water, my life has chiefly passed within so deep a cove. Yet I have sometimes ventured as far as to the mouth of my Snug Harbor.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)