Charity in America
Here’s my latest column from Dziennik Zwiazkowy, the Polish Daily News. It’s about the people who helped us when we first came to America as refugees in 1951.
Please leave a comment at the paper if you like the piece. The link is below following the English version. The Polish version is at the site.
To read more about our experiences as refugees please see my book Echoes of Tattered Tongues.
To read more about our experiences as refugees please see my book Echoes of Tattered Tongues.
CHARITY IN AMERICA
When we first arrived in Chicago in 1952, we were lost. My family had spent 6 years in the DP camps in Germany after the war and another year outside of Buffalo, NY, working for a farmer who paid our passage over to America.
But now we were in Chicago, and we were lost. We had nothing, just the things we brought with us from Germany. I remember years later asking my mother what we had brought to America in the wooden trunk my father built. She shrugged and went through the list: some plates, a crucifix, a wooden comb, some goose down pillows, a frying pan, and letters from a friend in America.
In Chicago we lived in dark rooms in small apartments in that we shared sometimes with two or three other DP families from the camps in Germany. We were all people who had lost so much and had left so much behind, our mothers and fathers, our grandparents, our brothers and sisters.
We were alone and didn’t know where anything in this new world was. I remember one time my father was going out looking for a store where he could buy some Polish sausage, and my mom stopped him and said, ”Maybe they don’t have kielbasa here.”
I was 4 years old that first winter in America, and I remember staring out a window at the snow falling on the buses moving slowly up and down Milwaukee Avenue, and begging my father to take us back to the refugee camps in Germany. I said it was too hard for us here.
We were lost in America — but sometimes people helped us.
We didn’t know who they were or what their names were or why they helped us. But they did.
I remember one time two women who came to our apartment. They didn’t speak Polish, and the only English my parents knew was “Thank you, Missus.” These two women came and brought a dress for my mother, rubber boots for my dad, cans of pork and beans and loaves of bread for all of us, and for my sister and me, they brought some comic books, a hard rubber toy, a doll and a red truck with a missing tire.
We didn’t know who these two women were or how they found us. We didn’t even know their real names, so we gave them names. We called one woman “dobra,” and the other one “fajna.”
We knew what these two words meant.
These were “good” and “fine” women.
_____
Here's the link to the Dziennik Zwiazkowy site where the article appeared
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