The Hardest Working Man in America

 

LABOR DAY

Here's an old column I wrote for the Dziennik Zwiazkowy. It's about my Polish father and how hard he worked when he came to America as a Displaced Person in 1951.

THE HARDEST WORKING MAN IN AMERICA

My father was probably the hardest working man I knew.

When I was a kid he would work double shifts, 2 8-hour shifts a days, and some years he wouldn’t take the scheduled one or two week vacations because the bosses at the factory where he worked would pay him double time if he worked through his vacations. That’s right. The bosses would give my dad his vacation pay, and then they would give him the week’s salary on top of that. They would tell him he was being paid double time.

Double time. It was one of the first phrases he learned when we came to Chicago from the DP camps in Germany in 1951. He loved earning double time. He’d laugh and say it was one of the best things about America. Like getting something for nothing.

It hadn’t always been that way, of course. He had spent 4 and a half years in Germany as a slave laborer working 16 or 18 hours a day in the German fields and factories. Even though he was working those kinds of hours, he would never get paid a nickel. Once, when he complained about the work, the guard clubbed him unconscious. When my dad woke up, he was blind in one eye.

When my dad wasn’t working at the factory in Chicago, he was working around the house. Five years after coming to America, my parents bought a 5-unit apartment building on Potomac Avenue, just east of Humboldt Park. It wasn’t any kind of great place, but my dad and mom both were proud to be able to say they were landlords. And 9 years after coming to America, they sold that one and bought a bigger and better apartment building a couple blocks away on Evergreen Street.

My dad–and my mom–were always working on these buildings to maintain them and spruce them up. They plastered ceilings, painted walls, and stripped and varnished floors. When he wasn’t doing that kind of work, he would be outside chopping wood to feed the massive furnace we had in the basement, or he’d be in one of the apartments with his pliers and hammer working on a leak. He didn’t know a thing about pipes, but he was sure that sweat and hard work could fix anything. He was always like this.

Toward the end of his life, after he retired to Sun City, Arizona, he was always hauling new orange trees — with their roots bundled up in burlap — into the back yard and trying to plant them. Even when he knew he was dying of cancer, he was still working like this.

But sometimes, he just couldn’t do the work anymore. He didn’t have the strength to stand up, and he would ask me to help. He’d sit on a chair in the backyard, struggling to breathe and pointing to a spot where he had lugged the orange tree. ”Plant it there, Johnny,” he’d say in Polish. „Plant it there.”

Sometimes, he’d have so little breath that the words would be a whisper.

You know what I mean.

(You can read more about my parents in my book Echoes of Tattered Tongues -- available at Amazon.)

83rd anniversary of the start of WWII

 

The 83rd Anniversary of the Start of World War II 

My mother didn’t like to talk about the war. When I was a kid, I would ask her, and she would just wave me away. If I kept asking, she would only say, “If they give you bread, eat it. If they beat you, run away.” 

She would say this, and then she would walk away. It wasn’t until I was in my late 50s that she started to share her experiences in the war with me.

One of the first stories she told me was about the day German soldiers came to her village in eastern Poland in the fall of 1942. The story was brutal, and my mother told it staring into my eyes and talking slowly as if she wanted to make sure I understood every word she said. 

She told me of the day the soldiers came to my grandmother’s house. They shot my grandmother in the face, and then they kicked my mother’s sister’s baby to death. When they saw my mother, they didn’t care that she was just a teenager. They raped her so she couldn’t stand up, couldn’t talk. They broke her teeth when they shoved her dress into her mouth to stop her crying. 

When they were done, they dragged my mother into a boxcar that was filled with other young people from her village that were being taken to Germany to be slave laborers. The trip to Germany took a week. 

My mother cried all that week, first in the boxcars then in the camps. Her friends said, “Tekla, don’t cry, the Germans will shoot you and leave you in the field,” but my mother couldn’t stop. Even when she had no more tears, she cried, cried the way a dog will gulp for air when it’s choking on a stick or some bone it’s dug up in a garden and swallowed. 

 My mother finally stopped crying when the woman guard in charge gave her a cold look and knocked my mother down with her fist, and then told her if she didn’t stop crying she would shoot her. 

 My mother never thought she’d survive that first winter in the slave labor camp. She had no coat, no hat, no gloves, just what she was wearing when the Germans came to her house and killed my grandmother and took my mom to the camps. A soldier saved her life there. He saw her struggling to dig beets in the frozen earth with her hands, and he asked her if she could milk a cow. She nodded, “Yes,” and he took her to the barn where the cows were kept and raped her. Later, the cows kept her from freezing and gave her milk to drink.

Two and a half years later, the war ended, but it didn’t really end, not for her. The war was always with her. For my mother, like for so many of the Poles who survived, the war never ended. It was always with them.