Our First Christmases after the
We had Christmas in the refugee camps in Germany after the war. I don’t remember them, of course. I was just a baby and a toddler then. But we had Christmas. I know because somewhere my parents found someone who had a camera, and they took pictures of our Christmases in the camps. In one of them, I’m a naked baby, lying on my tummy underneath a ragged Christmas tree and smiling a big beautiful baby smile. The following year, my parents took a photo of my sister Danusha and me sitting in front of a tree holding what looks like a rubber ball. In the last photo I have from that time, I’m sitting on a rocking horse my dad made for me on my third Christmas. I’m looking very very pleased.
My fourth Christmas wasn’t as happy. It took place on a farm outside of Buffalo, New York, where my parents were working to pay off their passage to America from the refugee camps. There’s not much I remember about that Christmas, only the cold and the snow and my mother’s complaints about both of them. She hated the cold. It reminded her of the winters in Germany during the war when she was a slave laborer. She said that their winters broke the souls of old people and left children frozen like wheat stalks in the fields, hollow reeds that the winds and ice blew through. The cold in Buffalo was just as bad, she said. She talked about the wooden shoes she wore in the work camps in Germany and how cold the frozen ground was on her skin as she dug for beets. She knew nothing about America but thought that maybe farther west in Chicago there wouldn’t be so much snow.
She was wrong about the snow in Chicago. That first winter in Chicago, I remember standing on a street corner on Milwaukee Avenue with my father. We watched cars struggling in the street to get around a green bus that was sunk into white hill as tall as a cow.
But the snow and cold in Chicago really didn’t matter that much because my parents found Polish friends there who we could celebrate Christmas with just as they did in Poland. I remember that first Christmas in Chicago. We were living in a small apartment near the Congress Theater on Christmas Eve, and my parents were preparing us for bed when they heard a knock on the door. My father opened it and laughed and shouted to my sister Danusha and me to come quickly. There was someone there to see us.
We ran to the door and there was a big man with a white beard and a fat belly and a red stocking cap on his head, and across his shoulder and down his back was an enormous blue bag filled with presents.
And that wasn’t all.
Behind him were laughing children and their smiling parents carrying pots and bowls of food and a dish with oplatek on it.
Somehow Poland had found us in America.
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This was my column this week in the Dziennik Zwiazkowy, the oldest Polish newspaper in America.
https://dziennikzwiazkowy.com/felietony2/nasze-pierwsze-swieta-w-ameryce-our-first-christmases-in-america/
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