What My Father Taught Me
First, let me say there’s a lot that my dad didn’t teach me.
He didn’t teach me how to read and write or how to tie my shoes or how to ride a bicycle. He didn’t teach me anything about sports either. He didn’t show me how to swing a bat or toss a basketball. He never even explained to me which teams I should follow. He didn’t say, “Now, you got to root for the Chicago Cubs because you’ve grown up on the North Side of Chicago and those guys on that team are like your brothers.”
He didn’t teach me that stuff because he didn’t know that stuff himself. He had grown up an orphan on his aunt and uncle’s small farm north of Poznan, Poland. He knew the kinds of things you needed to know to live on a farm. He knew how to feed chickens and milk cows and plant crops in the spring and how to harvest them in the fall. His family was poor, and he never attended any kind of school. After the Germans invaded Poland in 1939, he was taken to Buchenwald Concentration Camp and put to work as a slave laborer there. My father used to joke that Buchenwald was his college and his university.
So what did my father learn growing up as an orphan and a slave laborer that he was able to pass on to me?
One of the first things he taught me was patience. He spent 4 years in the concentration camp waiting for liberation, and what he learned about patience showed itself in everything he did. I remember one time we had a problem with a big pipe in the apartment building my parents owned. He didn’t know a thing about plumbing, but he would try to fix it anyway, and when that repair didn’t work, he tried another and another and another. He worked on it for 3 months before he finally fixed it. During all that time, he never gave up, never called in a plumber. He worked on it till he discovered what the problem was.
Another thing he taught me was the value of a sense of humor. Instead of getting angry or frustrated when things went wrong, he would try to make a little joke about it. His favorite expression when things were bad was “the world’s coming to an end.” If the TV tube burned out or the back porch was set ablaze by one of the gangs terrorizing our old neighborhood, he’d shake his head and smile and say, “The world’s coming to an end.” Then he’d get up and try to fix the problem or clean up the disaster.
But probably the most important lesson my father taught me was to help other people. I think he learned this in the concentration camp too where he saw people suffering and dying every day. My father knew life is hard, and he believed we should try to help each other. He used to say that if you see someone on a cross you should try to lift him, even if only for a moment, even though you know that lifting won’t save him.
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This is my latest column for the Dziennik Zwiazkowy, the oldest Polish daily newspaper in America!
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