My Mother and Her Ukrainian Neighbors

My Mother and Her Ukrainian Neighbors

Tens of thousands of Poles in Eastern Poland were killed between 1943 and 1944 by Ukrainian Nationalists working with the Germans.  July 11 was the day of the worst killing, a day when the Ukrainian Nationalists attacked 100 or so villages.  That was seventy-six years ago.

Much of my mother’s family was killed during this period by her Ukrainian neighbors.  Her mother was murdered, her sister was raped and killed, her sister's baby kicked to death.  My mother, a girl of 19 at the time, was able to survive by breaking through a window and running into a forest to hide.  She was found a couple days later by German soldiers.  They put my mother and a lot of the surviving Poles from her village in boxcars and shipped them to slave labor camps in Germany.  She spent the next 2 years in those camps.  After the war she was afraid to go back to her village. 

She was afraid that what happened to her brother who survived the war would happen to her.  When the war ended, he went back on a United Nations sponsored train to that section of Poland that had been taken over by the Russians and made a part of the Ukraine, and when he got off the train, there were Russian soldiers there who arrested him and put him on another train and sent him to a prison camp in Siberia.  He died there.

My mom and my dad made a trip to Poland in 1988.  They went back to her village to see if they could find the graves of her mom and sister and the sister's baby.  There were no graves.  The men who did the killing didn't take the time to dig graves and put up crosses or markers.  They probably just threw the Polish dead into a pit and shoveled dirt over them

During that trip, my mom actually made it to her old house, the one where the killing took place.  She knocked on the door and when someone answered her knocking, she introduced herself and told them that she had lived in this house when she was a girl, before the killings.

The person who answered the door, a Ukrainian fellow about my mom's age, said that he had been living in the house all his life and he didn't know her and didn't know what she was talking about.

My mom left and never went back.

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This is my latest column for the Dziennik Zwiazkowy, the oldest Polish newspaper in America.

https://dziennikzwiazkowy.com/felietony2/moja-mama-i-jej-ukrainscy-sasiedzi-my-mother-and-her-ukrainian-neighbors/

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A Letter to My Mother

A Letter to My Mother

Dear Mom,

I know you’ve been gone a long time now, almost 15 years, but I dreamt I was with you again last night.

It was in the old house in Chicago, the one on Potomac Avenue, the first one I remember the number for.

You planted flowers there in the backyard where there had never been flowers, watered them with the water that fell from the sky. The flowers were so red and yellow and blue that you loved to just sit on the porch and watch them.

You washed my hair with that water too. You said it would keep me young and help me grow tall and smart and loving. I was too young to know what all those words really meant, but I believed you.

Autumn came finally, and the rain fell grayer and harder, and then there was snow, so much snow, and you put the snow in a dishpan and melted it and washed my hair with it.

You said the water from snow was just as pure as the water from the rain.

Years later in your last house in Arizona, the one I still remember the number for, I washed your hair with water from the sink.  You didn’t complain.  You understood.  You knew that there was no rain in the desert, no snow either.

While you waited for your hair to dry, you told me stories you never told me before.  You told me about your sister and the time she visited Lvov, the candy she found on the seat of the train, about your pet pig Carolina and how much you loved just sitting with her in the forest and watching the leaves fall in the coolness that followed those long summers. You told me about the war too, about the day the Germans came to your home in the forest west of Lvov and killed your mother and your sister and your sister’s baby.  You told me too that the German soldiers did other things that you still could not tell me about even though I was a grown man and a university professor.

I listened to your stories that I had never heard before and knew you like I had never known you, and when you asked me again where the water came from, I told you that I had collected it from the clouds.

Alone

Alone

Here’s my most recent column for the Polish Daily News. It’s a piece on aloneness during the pandemic:

ALONE

This pandemic is like nothing I’ve ever experienced or seen before. I’ve lived through life in a refugee camp, blizzards, tornados, polio scares, hurricanes, atomic bomb drills, race riots, 9/11, blackouts that lasted for weeks, and the deaths of my parents and best friends. And none of that has prepared me for this.

For the last three weeks, I’ve been self-quarantined in my home here in Lynchburg, Virginia, with my wife and my daughter and my granddaughter. We’re all here waiting for something to end and not knowing really if it ever will.

And what do we do while we wait?

The number one thing is that we try to ignore that there is a pandemic.

We try to ignore the fact that the restaurants in town are closed except for curbside pickup, that the parks are closed or closing, that the churches and schools and libraries and museums are closed, that the number of confirmed cases of the coronavirus rises here and throughout the US by about 20%, that people are dying here and across the world from some kind of virus that no one has any understanding of.

We try to ignore the fact that we haven’t seen any of our friends in three weeks, that the people we used to get together with every weekend for some laughs and some wine and some talk are suddenly so far away in their own confinement.

We try to ignore the fact that we are alone.

I’ve been alone in the past. In my 20s, I loved to go hitchhiking and camping alone. I’d pack a backpack and stand on the side of a highway until I got a ride to some wilderness in Montana or Idaho where I would be alone for a week or two weeks, but that aloneness was nothing like this aloneness. I knew that there were other people in the wilderness with me, and I knew too that all I had to do if the aloneness got to be too much for me was walk out of the wilderness and stick my thumb out and catch a ride back home to my home in Chicago. I was alone, but the aloneness was an aloneness that was temporary. It was an aloneness I could put an end to pretty easily. It was an aloneness I welcomed into my life, and it was an aloneness I could say. “so long to.”

This aloneness that I’m feeling in this pandemic is nothing like that. It’s an aloneness surrounded by a mystery, an aloneness in a wilderness we can’t just walk out of when we get tired of being alone.

https://dziennikzwiazkowy.com/felietony2/samotnosc-alone/
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Ta pandemia jest czymś, czego nigdy wcześniej nie doświadczyłem ani nie widziałem. Przeszedłem w swoim życiu przez obóz uchodźców

Ta pandemia jest czymś, czego nigdy wcześniej nie doświadczyłem ani nie widziałem. Przeszedłem w swoim życiu przez obóz uchodźców