Lulla La Polaca

Andrzej Szwan, also known as »Lulla La Polaca«, was born in 1938 into a Jewish family in Warsaw, where he survived the Warsaw Ghetto and the Uprising in 1944. As a witness of these times, Andrzej often speaks about his experiences as a child in Warsaw during the Second World War and is an advocate of collective memory and commemoration. Andrzej always dreamed of studying theater, which he was not able to pursue professionally at the time. In the period of the Polish People's Republic, Andrzej performed in cross-dress in private spaces around friends and community where the persona Lulla was born, inspired by Polish pop cultural icons, such as Hanna Banaszak or Irena Santor.

After the fall of the Iron Curtain, the term »drag« started to appear in Poland - something associated generally with the opening towards »the West« and its cultural legacies. A key figure in that history (among various others) is the artist and activist Kim Lee. Lulla and Kim befriended each other in 2008 and it is Kim that brought Lulla to the drag stage in 2012. In recent years, media attention has risen intensively around Lulla and her performance, and this is why today she is widely known as the oldest drag queen of Poland and considered an icon of pop culture, who speaks openly against repression and violence against the LGBTQIA+ Community. Lulla has been the main character of the documentary Boylesque (2022) by director Bogna Kowalczyk and has recently also published a book about her life, Lulla La Polaca, written by Wiktor Krajewski.