Donald Tusk place of birth Gdańsk
Early life
Tusk was born in Gdańsk in northern Poland. He has Polish, German (maternal grandmother) and Kashubian ancestry. His father, also named Donald Tusk (1930–1972), was a carpenter, and his mother, Ewa (née Dawidowska) Tusk (1934–2009), was a nurse. The family's language was Danzig German. His grandfather, Józef Tusk (1907–1987), was a railway official who was imprisoned at the Neuengamme concentration camp; later, as a former citizen of the Free City of Danzig, he was apparently conscripted by German authorities into the Wehrmacht. Later on, he was successful in joining the Polish Armed Forces in the West.Tusk has described the city of his youth as "a typical frontier town" with "many borders ... between ethnicities". This, together with his Kashubian ethnic ancestry and multilingual family, meant that he grew up with an awareness that "nothing is simple in life or in history", which informed his adult political view that it is "best to be immune to every kind of orthodoxy, of ideology and most importantly, nationalism". He has described his young life under communism as "so hopeless" due to the boredom and monotony, with "no hope for anything to change". His young self was a "typical hooligan" who often got into fights – "we would roam the streets, you know, cruising for a bruising."Tusk credits his interest in politics to watching clashes between striking workers and riot police when he was a teenager. He enrolled at the University of Gdańsk to study history, and graduated in 1980. While studying, he was active in the Student Committee of Solidarity, a group that opposed Poland's communist rule at the time.
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