Childhood and Youth
Miller comes from a poor, working-class family: His father was a tailor and his mother a needlewoman. His parents broke up when Leszek was six months old; his father, Florian, left the family and Leszek has never maintained any contact with him. His mother brought him up in a religious spirit – following her wish, he was even, for some time, an altar-boy. Due to hard life conditions, after graduation from vocational school, 17-year-old Leszek got a job in the Textile Linen Plant in Żyrardów, while continuing his education in the evenings at the Vocational Secondary School of Electric Power Engineering. He soon completed his military service on the ORP Bielik submarine.
In 1969, Miller married Aleksandra, three years his junior, in church. The Millers have a son, Leszek, and a granddaughter, Monika.
Read more about this topic: Leszek Miller
Famous quotes containing the words childhood and youth, childhood and, childhood and/or youth:
“When you have really exhausted an experience you always reverence and love it. The two things that nearly all of us have thoroughly and really been through are childhood and youth. And though we would not have them back again on any account, we feel that they are both beautiful, because we have drunk them dry.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)
“Toddlerhood resembles adolescence because of the rapidity of physical growth and because of the impulse to break loose of parental boundaries. At both ages, the struggle for independence exists hand in hand with the often hidden wish to be contained and protected while striving to move forward in the world. How parents and toddlers negotiate their differences sets the stage for their ability to remain partners during childhood and through the rebellions of the teenage years.”
—Alicia F. Lieberman (20th century)
“Adolescence is a tough time for parent and child alike. It is a time between: between childhood and maturity, between parental protection and personal responsibility, between life stage- managed by grown-ups and life privately held.”
—Anna Quindlen (20th century)
“But could youth last, and love still breed,
Had joys no date, nor age no need,
Then these delights my mind might move
To live with thee and be thy Love.”
—Sir Walter Raleigh (1552?–1618)