THE POLISH RIP VAN WINKLE

1 Rip Van Winkle was a character in a short by the American writer Washington Irving. In the story, Rip lived in a little town in the Hudson Valley, in New York, in the 1770s, around the time of the American Revolution. Rip went out hunting one day, took a nap under a tree, and fell asleep. He work up 20 years later to find himself a citizens of a brand-new country-the United States of America.

2.Similarly, in the movie Goodbye Lenin, Kathrin Sass, an East German woman, who dedicated her life to the perpetuation of Communist Party ideology, slips into a coma just before the fall of the Berlin Wall. When she wakes up eight months later, she is a member of a capitalist society. While she has been "asleep," governments have tumbled, barriers have fallen, and a whole new tide of Western goods and values has come flooding eastward to an eagerly awaiting public. Her loving son, Alex fears that the shock of finding such a radically changed world will lead to a heart attack. So he prepares an elaborate plan to protect her from the truth and to make her believe that the world she lives in now is the same as it used to be.

3.However, the story of Polish railway worker Jan Grzebski, 65, is not from a work of fiction, but is a real-life one. Grzebski went into a coma after he was hit by a train in 1988. He work up 19 years later in April 2007, into a world that had transformed itself from a Communist regime where food lines were common to a world of Big Macs and cell phones.
4."When I went into a coma, there was only tea and vinegar in the shops, meat was rationed, and there were long lines of cars at gas stations. Now there are so many goods in the shops it makes my head spin. What amazes me today is that all these people walk around with their cell phones and never stop complaining. I have nothing to complain about," said Grzebski.
5.At the time of the accident, Grzebski's doctor didn't give him long to live, but they were wrong. He survived thanks to the devoted care of his wife, Gertruda. She refused to believe the doctors and moved her husband's body  every  hour to prevent bed sores. :It was Gertruda that saved me, and I'll never forget it," said Grzebski.
6.Now he's getting to know his family, which has grown considerably since his accident. His four children are all married and have provided him with 11 grandchildren.