THE DEATH OF THE POLISH CAPTAIN

The Death of the Polish Captain

When I was a little kid back in the 1950s, we lived in an apartment building east of Humboldt Park. The building wasn’t much: three units, each with four tiny rooms, and no central heating! But we had some great neighbors, and probably the most interesting was Pan Kaminski.

Like us, he was a Polish Displaced Person, a refugee, but he was like no one else in the neighborhood. He knew everything. While most of us struggled with English and living in America, he understood English and America perfectly. When neighbors had questions about America, they would bring them to him.

One of the things I personally loved about Pan Kaminski was that he had been a captain in the Polish cavalry during World War II and had fought at Monte Cassino. Whenever I saw him, I would salute him.

Like I said, I knew this man when I was a kid, but I didn’t know what happened to him or his wife and his family. So one day years later, while visiting my mother, I asked about Pan Kaminski.

What she told me became the following poem in my book about my parents, Echoes of Tattered Tongues:

The Death of the Polish Captain of Lancers

His wife loved the captain for his wounds,

The red shrapnel scars across his chest,

The fingers broken by the Germans,

The way he looked down at his hands

As he listened to Chopin or talked of those

Who died around him at Monte Cassino

When the Poles finally moved toward

The abbey’s fallen bricks and ruined walls.

She listened with her fingers across her lips

When he told her who the fallen men were,

The orphan from Poznan who loved Poland

As if it were his mother. The mandolin player,

Older than the others, who played the songs

A boy from Beaumont, Texas taught him,

The corporal who left Poland before the war

And came back because everything was lost,

And the others, men who needed to take

Monte Cassino the way hungry men dreamed

Of bread and needed to feel it in their hands.

She listened to the stories a hundred times,

Every time he’d come home from the bars

On Division street where Poles would still

Sing the song the survivors sang about the battle.

The song’s words were simple, about red poppies

Growing among the fallen walls and bricks

Getting their blood from the blood of those

Who fell where crosses would later stand.

She loved the captain for the way he always

Cried for Poland, but she didn’t love the drinking,

The cognac he’d take straight from the bottle

When he thought nothing could make him sadder

And he needed it more than some needed bread.

And finally when she found him drunk

And crying and singing about the poppies

Growing red with the blood of Polish boys

She forced the bottle into his mouth, saying

“If you want to drink so much, drink” and held

That position until he choked to death.

—

My latest column from Chicago’s Polish Daily News