13. What Do We Talk About At The End of Our Lives?

My heart sank the moment I stepped into the room. There was my dad, slumped motionless in his wheelchair, head bent to his chest, eyes closed. For a split second I froze, panic gripped me. Was he breathing? Should I call for help?

Lying open and face-down on his lap was his constant companion—his book of daily prayers. Frail hands, mottled with age spots and purple blotches, rested on the book. His reading glasses were under the crook of one finger.

A dark thought crossed my mind that he had peacefully slipped away, spared living out his final days in this long-term care facility with other old people institutionalized at the end of their lives. Ninety-six years is a long life. Despite his physical challenges and loss of autonomy, my father was mercifully spared the mental decline that so commonly accompanies old age. His joyful spirit remained intact. I didn't want to see him diminished or suffering. This would have been the kind of death he had prayed for.

My eyes scanned the small room. The TV was muted, broadcasting the noontime weather update. Familiar family photos and a framed watercolour with red poppies had been hung on the walls—mementos from my dad's previous life. On the dresser sat a photo of my parents on their wedding day—Maria smiling with a large bouquet, Edward sporting tortoise-shell glasses. A few binders of stamps stood sentinel—as they had done in every home he ever lived in—on a shelf beside the television. At the end of the hospital bed, a neatly folded and familiar blanket softened the institutional harshness, no doubt placed there to make the room as homey as possible.

I tiptoed across the carpet and put my arms around my father’s bony shoulders. Shallow, rhythmic breaths confirmed that he was alive, and I kissed the top of his mostly bald head, resisting the urge to smooth down the remaining white wisps that looked like bits of milkweed fluff. He opened his eyes and gave me a smile that lit up his face.

"You're here!" he exclaimed in his familiar, heavily accented English, throwing his arms out to embrace me. "How was your trip?"

After a brief exchange about the flight from Montreal, my questions about how he was adjusting to his new situation and his about my children, I settled into his favourite blue upholstered recliner—the sole piece of furniture we'd brought from his previous apartment—and watched as he maneuvered his wheelchair to face me. I hoped we would find something interesting to talk about beyond what he ate for lunch, if it might rain, or whether my sisters had called (which they always did). I was planning to spend more time with him, and we would have to find something to talk about to fill the hours.

Conversations about the political chaos in Trump's America or Brexit were off the table because my father had decided there wasn’t any “good news” and had stopped watching the nightly newscast. Certain topics like abortion were also best avoided, given his firm Catholic views. Memories seemed to be a safe topic.

“Do you remember the day the Germans bombed Warsaw?”

It was just a casual question to start a conversation. We had never talked about the war, and I wasn't particularly interested. Little did I know where this offhand question would lead.

At first, he brushed the it away. "You should have asked me that when my memory was sharper."

But I could see by the look of concentration on his face—the narrowing of his eyes as he brought his fingertips to his forehead—that he was searching through old folders stored long ago in an existential filing cabinet to find something for me.

Until that moment, my knowledge of my father's past could be summarized in just a few sentences: born in Warsaw, he had fought against the German occupation during the 1944 Warsaw Uprising and was taken as a prisoner of war. After the war, he immigrated to Canada and married my mother.

I also knew lighthearted facts, like how my mother never served potatoes because my father joked that he had eaten enough during the war—a lifetime quota. Much later in life, as he became increasingly frail, he would dismiss my entreaties for him to walk and stay limber with a wave of the hand and the words "Dosyć się nachodziłem" —I have walked enough. I knew it was a reference to the war.

These were the bare bones I knew about his past before we began our conversation on my first visit. That day I was not expecting anything like the story he pulled out of his mental filing cabinet. It was a story he had kept to himself for over half a lifetime—or at least one kept from me. Neither did I think the conversation we began that day would continue each time I came back to visit until the day before his death three years later.

As we sat together that afternoon, my father didn’t answer my question about what he remembered about the day the war started. He wanted to tell me about a specific event that began on January 20, 1945, after he'd been a prisoner of war for a little over three and a half months. That winter day, the German guards started emptying Lamsdorf, the POW camp.

“Rumours had circulated for weeks that they would evacuate us to a permanent labour camp,” my father said. “Maybe it would be worse there. Or we thought they would use us as leverage in some future peace deal. No one knew what was happening.”

In the last months of the war, as the Allied forces closed in on Berlin, the Nazis began evacuating prisoners from their POW, concentration, and extermination camps. In some instances, before leaving the camps, the Nazis burned the meticulous records they had kept. Precious evidence, a few grim black-and-white details of a person's existence—a name, a city of origin, a birth date, or a list of the few personal items carried into the camp (and that were confiscated)—were erased.

On the morning of the evacuation, Edward—the 24-year-old who would become my father less than ten years later—woke up earlier than usual. He rose from the upper bunk where he slept alongside six other Polish men, all fellow resistance fighters from the Warsaw Uprising. The bunk had no mattress, and a couple of wooden support planks were missing—burned in the small wood stove at the center of their quarters during the previous days, a desperate measure to keep warm. He had already packed a small sack with his few belongings, including a letter and a family photograph. Other men had already been moved out of the camp, so Edward knew to be prepared.

As Edward’s group of POWs left the camp that grey winter morning, the Nazi flag hung defiantly at the front gate beside the lookout tower. “I looked back at the flag and the walls with razor wire, said a Hail Mary, and started walking. I had no idea where we were going.”

Nine hours later, the weary POW group finally reached a village. The last remnants of winter daylight had faded two hours earlier, and the night sky stretched out like an abyss devoid of stars. The exhausted men crumpled onto the hay-strewn floor of a barn. I asked my father how far they walked.

“We walked about twenty-five kilometres without winter boots or warm clothing. We had just the clothing we had come to the camp with in October.” I later determined the temperature that day was bone-chilling and well below freezing.

Every day was the same. The cold cut through their skin like a sharp knife as they marched single file, zigzagging on country roads that ran beside ice-solid, barren fields. As he trudged along, he was unaware that similar evacuations involving thousands were taking place from other Nazi camps.

“If the artillery from the east got louder, they moved us to the west. If there was artillery fire from the west, we walked east.”

The men walked through villages but avoided the larger towns so as not to draw attention. Edward walked with his head down, sometimes thinking about bread or a meal and sometimes despairing about when or how the gruelling ordeal would end. Every day, one of the guards was dispatched ahead on a bicycle to commandeer accommodation with the village burgomaster or a local farmer and to scrounge whatever food might be available.

Potatoes were the main fare, sometimes eaten raw. At one farm in Sudetenland (a region Germany annexed from Czechoslovakia in 1938), the farmer's wife was Polish and spent the night making pot after pot of thin soup and bringing it out to the POWs in the barn. Sometimes, local villagers would leave a bit of food at the side of the road, but the POWs risked being shot or beaten with the butt of a rifle if they stepped out of the long column to grab it.

Many men had blisters on their toes and feet that became infected. Edward found it impossible to take his boots off. He didn't remove them, except for once, during the ordeal. Nor did he change his clothes. Lice were a persistent problem for everyone.

Those who couldn't keep up with the main column were left behind and shot by the guards. Many died of the bitter cold, disease, or exhaustion. Every day, bodies were abandoned at the roadside or tossed in ditches.

Ninety-four days later, near the farm village of Oberzall in Bavaria, the Nazi guards deserted. In the middle of the night, the POWs realized their captors had vanished. They quickly set up lookout posts on the perimeter of the farm where they had billeted for the night in the barn. Edward and one other POW guarded the main entrance. Before dawn, the US Army troops arrived, almost mistaking them for Germans.

“Jesteśmy Polakami,” Edward shouted. We are Polish. He repeated it in German.

One of the liberators, perhaps a soldier whose parents or grandparents spoke Polish back home, recognized the language and shouted to the other Americans not to shoot.

General Patton's Third United States Army quietly liberated Edward and the other exhausted men on April 24, 1945. The US Army immediately transferred the men who had survived the brutal ordeal to German Army barracks they had seized in the small town of Langwasser near Nuremberg, about two hours from Oberzall.

"I finally could take off my boots. My socks had disintegrated. They gave us clean clothes. I took a shower, and we slept and slept in clean bunks. The Americans told us to eat slowly for the first few days. But we had all the coffee we wanted."

When my father finished his astonishing story, I asked him how many men had been in his group when he left the camp.

"Two hundred."

"And how many were you when the Americans liberated you?"

"About thirty."

“Amazing,” I replied, and meant it.

At this point in the conversation, my father closed his eyes. I couldn't tell if he was thinking of the liberation, how luxurious the clean clothes and shower had felt, or his comrades who had perished. Perhaps he was just tired.

We had talked for nearly two hours.

"Let’s go and get a coffee, Dad,” I said. “Maybe when we get back, we can check Google Maps and see if we can figure out how far you walked.”

I pushed my father’s wheelchair to the Tim Hortons in the lobby of the rehabilitation hospital adjacent to the long-term care residence. In the coffee shop, we settled at a table by the window to view the activities outside—people walking by and cars and medical transport vans pulling up to the entrance. I ordered a coffee for myself, the apple juice requested by my father, and we agreed to split a large cookie. The story he had just told me had not yet fully registered.

Our conversation drifted to banalities. We revisited my trip from Montreal—the travel time, the subway from Union Station, and my terrifying experience with turbulence while landing at Toronto Island airport. My dad smiled, saying it reminded him of some of his own plane trips.

Returning to his floor, we settled in the sunny lounge area and opened the computer available for all residents. Using Google Maps, we traced an approximate route from the POW camp in Łambinowice (renamed Lamsdorf by the Germans) in western Poland. The route took them through the Sudetenland, and south of Dresden and Nuremberg. We calculated that Edward had walked at least 800 kilometres on this 95-day journey.

At the end of the afternoon, it was time for me to catch the train back home. After my morning experience with turbulence, I was happy to return to Montreal on solid steel rail tracks. I hugged my father goodbye, leaving him at the computer playing solitaire until it was time for dinner. I told him I would be back to visit in a couple of weeks and I’d phone him every day until then. Ever the gallant gentleman, he took my hand and kissed it.

I had five hours on the train back to Montreal to contemplate his astonishing story and wonder what other stories he still had to share. The story he relayed that day opened a door into his past and events I knew nothing about. I had long held the belief that my father’s unwavering optimism found its roots in the opportunity to start over in Canada and achieve his version of the immigrant success story. But perhaps overcoming such an ordeal had more to do with it.

Why had my father never talked about the forced evacuation from the POW camp, the cruel and inhuman winter march, or his liberation?

Back at home in Montreal, I discovered that January and February 1945 were the coldest months ever recorded to date in Europe. I also learned that Edward’s group had likely been considerably larger than he thought. Historians estimate there were approximately 15,000 POWs interned in Lamsdorf at the start of 1945, and the Germans divided them into groups of five hundred or more when they began the weeks of evacuation. But my father’s statement that only thirty men survived the ordeal was probably accurate.

And finally, I discovered that the evacuation and trek for hundreds of kilometres was appropriately termed a death march. My father was one among tens of thousands subjected to this horrific ordeal. It had not crossed my mind that non-Jewish people and thousands of Allied POWs had also suffered this fate.

That first conversation marked a shift in how I would come to view my own life's story. Imperceptible at first. I would come to understand how my story was embedded in my father’s. What I didn’t yet know was that this would lead me to my mother’s story and her silence around it. But first, I need to finish telling you Edward’s story.