BarcelonaIt was September 6, 2021. In the stands of the small San Marino stadium, a man was crying. Every now and then someone would hug him, but he couldn’t stop crying with emotion. It was Krzysztof Zalewski. On the pitch, his 19-year-old son Nicola made his debut with the Polish national football team, alongside players like Lewandowski. Then few people could understand the tears of that man. A few months later it was Nicola himself who explained it: his father was sick, he had terminal cancer. And, before he died, he was able to see his son play with the team of a land he had fled.
The story of Nicola Zalewski, the young 20-year-old Roma footballer, already a starter with José Mourinho at the Italian club and with the Polish national team playing on the wing, had begun in 1988. That year, in a small flat in the town of Lomza, a letter arrived. It was a different time, with gray walls and colors. Lomza was not far from Poland’s border with the Soviet Union. And the fate of Poland was still controlled by what was happening in Moscow. The Zalewskis lived in Lomza’s flat and the letter said that Krzysztof had to report to an army office to begin the mandatory two years of military service. But he didn’t want to. Catholic and democrat, Krzysztof sympathized with the Solidarity trade union (Solidarność), the first independent trade union in the Soviet bloc, led by Lech Walesa. He did not want to be part of the army, he did not sympathize with the Soviets. So he made a painful decision. With his girlfriend, Ewa, and with the support of the family, they fled Poland using a network that took out Polish citizens. They chose to go to Italy, a country that made them dream. They wanted to go to Rome, because Pope John Paul II was Polish. They had many dreams.
The father who cleaned car windows
Life in Rome was hard. But they were able to make their dreams come true. In fact, in 1989 they were already married by the Pope himself, who always welcomed the Poles who came to the Vatican. Krzysztof worked for many months on the streets, cleaning windows. He waited at the traffic lights and when they turned red he ran the cloth over the windows of the cars. Many ignored him, some insulted him and some gave him a few lire with which he returned to a flat where they lived as best they could, with the help of an NGO. Fate would eventually lead them to Poli, where they found an apartment and a job washing dishes in the only restaurant in that town of 2000 inhabitants perched on the hills east of Rome, a beautiful area of woods and vineyards. The Zalewskis started a new life and their two children, Jessica and Nicola, were born there. The flat was right above the village football pitch, where all the children wore Roma shirts. So little Nicola became a fan of this team, needless to say, while he was the youngest boy playing among young men who took his head off. The father, on the other hand, had joined Inter thanks to a work colleague, the first to offer him a contract at the restaurant in Poli. It was a happy childhood, despite the lack of money. Ewa could go out on the balcony of her flat to call her son to go to dinner and he could hear her from the middle of the pitch. It was in this field that Stefano Palmieri, a scout working for Roma, discovered him. The meeting where little Zalewski signed his contract to go to Rome took place at a table in the restaurant where his father had washed dishes.
And it was in these negotiations over some red and white checked tablecloths that Rome offered to give the father a job, because he wanted to go live in Rome to be close to his son. The town of Poli was two hours away from the sports city of Rome, in Trigoria, so it was not practical for the boy to continue living with his parents. In the first few months, the father spent many hours driving to take his son to training. It was not feasible. The solution was that father and son rented an apartment near the sports city. And Krzysztof was hired by Roma as a gardener and warehouse assistant. Father and son entered the sports city and crossed paths with Totti and Danielle de Rossi. In addition, a Roma legend, Bruno Conti, world champion in 1982, looked after young Nicola. When doubts arose about whether he should stay at the club because he was so small, Conti defended him. “He’s talented, he’s what it takes, he’ll grow,” he said. Said and done. At 13, he already signed a contract with Nike. And always, without leaving the studies, as the father wanted.
“I am Italian, I feel Italian. But my father always told me that we are Polish. He spoke to me in Polish, he didn’t want me to forget this language,” explains Nicola, who speaks with a strong Roman accent. In fact, when the Polish federation discovered that there was a 15-year-old boy who was the son of Poles in Rome, a proposal came to go international with them. Nicola, who admits it would have been normal to wait for the call from the Italian federation, accepted the Polish proposal once he saw his father’s eyes. It was his tribute. In fact, by then Krzysztof was already ill.
When Nicola made his senior international debut in San Marino in 2021, Krzysztof was able to make the short trip to the tiny state tucked away in Italy to watch his son make his debut for Poland. There was some crying in the stands. Nicola also cried at the end of the game. They knew they had little time left, but that man who had fled a dictatorship had been able to see an image he would have hardly imagined, in 1988, when a letter arrived at his home: his son singing the Polish national anthem. Krzysztof Zalewski died soon after at the age of 54. On the day of the funeral, Jessica, the footballer’s older sister, remembers her brother telling her that Roma would surely send a representative to the funeral in the small town of Poli. What he didn’t expect when he arrived at the church was to find José Mourinho and all the first team players. Now Jessica, Ewa and grandmother Teresa, who was able to join the family in the 90s, are in Doha cheering on their son. And Ewa has it with a photo of her husband in her hands.
