14. The Man From Mirowski Square

"I'm just an ordinary person," my 96-year-old father declared from his wheelchair before I had a chance to say anything, "but I've lived a wonderful life."

The simple statement brought a smile to my face. After our previous conversation, it was evident his life was far from ordinary. It was my second visit since he had moved to the long-term care residence, and as the warm afternoon light filtered through the window, we settled in to chat. My father’s room lacked a chair, so I perched on the edge of the small seat that folded down from his unused walker. He kept the walker as a symbol of hope—a reminder that miracles were possible and he might walk again.

With no specific agenda and no desire to push my father to speak about the war unless he wanted to, I was content to let the conversation meander. But I was also aware that time was slipping away, and I knew practically nothing about his life before fatherhood. November 3, 1920—his birthdate—was the only detail I knew with certainty.

I opened with an easy question: "Were you born in a hospital?"

"Yes, in the Szpital na Karowej," he replied. "It had a long official name, but nobody used it."

The hospital on Karowa Street was familiar to me.

"Wow," I exclaimed. "Your granddaughter was born there!"

I quickly scrolled through photos on my cellphone and showed him one of Alexandra, our daughter adopted from Poland, beaming at the entrance of the hospital during her recent visit to Warsaw. It struck me as remarkable that they had been born in the same hospital, seventy-three years apart.

“I don’t recognize it,” he said, shrugging. “Everything’s changed. But Alex looks very happy. Maybe because she was born in the best city.”

“What about your mother, Julianna? Was she born in the best city?”

“No, no, she was born in a small village called Jedlina, not far from Warsaw.”

A quick Google search indicated the population was approximately 3000.

"Was it larger then?" I asked.

"Noooo, smaller," my father replied, stretching out the word for emphasis.

"Is that where she met your father?"

He nodded.

During the First World War, Julianna worked on a large farm estate near her village, owned by a wealthy Warsaw judge named Jaruzelski. At the war's end, his Polish father, Piotr—a soldier in the Russian Army—was making the long journey on foot back to his home in Lwów (now Lviv). Poland didn't exist during that war, having been partitioned for 123 years between the Russian, Prussian, and Austro-Hungarian empires.

Piotr stopped at the Jaruzelski estate, seeking shelter for the night. The judge, facing a shortage of farmhands in the war's aftermath, offered him work. Piotr accepted. There he met Julianna, fell in love, and never made it back to Lwów.

Piotr and Julianna soon married and, by 1919, had moved to Warsaw, where Judge Jeruzelski found Piotr a clerical position at the courthouse on Leszno Street, delivering court summons, scheduling hearings, and writing up transcripts of the proceedings.

The period after World War I was one of significant change for Poland. The country regained independence in 1918, ending the long years of partition. In those years, Poland faced serious social and economic challenges and a vast discrepancy between rural and urban areas, but it was finally free, sovereign, and once again in charge of its destiny.

In 1923, the young couple, now with a toddler—my father, Edward—and expecting their second child, moved to a larger apartment at 16 Mirowski Square. On a pre-war map of Warsaw, if you were to draw a circle around the city, Mirowski Square, or Plac Mirowski in Polish, would lie at its very centre—the bull's-eye of what was then considered one of Europe's grand capitals.

Warsaw, in the interwar period, was a vibrant capital. It boasted wide boulevards, beautiful parks, cultural venues, and fashionable cafes. On summer weekends, people flocked to the banks of the Wisła River to sunbathe and swim. Mirowski Square featured a mix of neoclassical and modern buildings built after the First World War, with the elegant Lubomirski Palace at one end and St. Andrew the Apostle Church at the other. There was a top university within walking distance of the Switocz family home.

A short block from the apartment, in the centre of the square, was the city’s vast central market, Hala Mirowska. A couple of streets to the east was the entrance to the Ogród Saski, the Saxon Garden, the oldest park in the city, with impressive fountains and Baroque statues—a serene escape from the surrounding crowded streets. The tramcar line was a two-minute walk from Mirowski Square. It was an ordinary urban, bustling, and congested neighbourhood.

“We had two rooms on the top floor plus a kitchen and a bathroom. My mother bought fruits and vegetables from the peddlers who had stalls in the square. And she shopped in the Hala Mirowska almost every day because we didn’t have a refrigerator.”

The Switocz family—Julianna, Piotr, and their children Edward and Jadzia—belonged to the upwardly mobile working class of Warsaw. In Apartment 76, the living space transformed into sleeping quarters each night as the beds were made up, and heavy green brocade curtains were drawn to keep out the cold in winter and heat in summer.

The type of apartment they lived in was called a kamienica, which translates directly to "tenement apartment." However, it was not a tenement in the sense we usually understand. A typical kamienica featured spacious rooms with high ceilings, often boasting wide hardwood floors in a herringbone pattern and large double-casement windows. The Switocz family's residence reflected the modest yet respectable standard of living attainable for industrious working-class families in the interwar Polish capital.

Mirowski Square was the epicentre of the family's life. Piotr's workplace at the courthouse was just two blocks away on Leszno Street, allowing him to quickly arrive for the home-cooked meals they shared each evening. The radio, which broadcast music and children's programs throughout the day, provided entertainment. Every Sunday, they walked together to St. Andrew's the Apostle Church. Julianna's shopping spots were within easy reach, and Edward ventured beyond the neighbourhood mainly to attend school a few tram stops away or meet up with friends.

I marvelled at my elderly father's ability to recall details as he eagerly recounted childhood experiences from nine decades prior. With each resurfaced memory, a warm expression of pleasure crossed his face, as if he were a contestant on a TV game show, and each recollection earned him the chance to open the next door, revealing another moment he hadn't thought of in decades. So the memories kept coming.

“Every summer, my mother, my sister, and I would visit my grandmother in her village for a few weeks. We travelled for several hours in a wagon pulled by horses, and my father came by train on the weekends.”

“What did you do there?”

“Oh, Alinka, it was boring,” he said, looking upwards and rolling his eyes. “Just chickens and cows.”

As he described the meals his grandmother served, his face scrunched up like he had tasted something disgusting or bitter: endless eggs from the chickens in the yard, potatoes with sour milk, and the occasional actual chicken, killed and plucked by his grandmother. I loved listening to these mundane details of daily life.

“Returning to Warsaw and school,” he said, “was a relief.”

---

After his maternal grandmother died, the family continued the tradition of summer holidays in the rolling hills outside Warsaw to escape the heat. They rented small cabins in different villages and stayed for July and August, with his father commuting on weekends.

It was during one summer vacation—the summer of 1937, when he was sixteen—that Edward fell in love. The family had rented a small cabin in the village of Tłuszcz in the Masovian countryside outside Warsaw. As the long, lazy summer days stretched ahead with certain boredom, a welcome diversion arrived when Krystyna and her Warsaw family rented a nearby cabin. Krystyna was the same age as Edward, and her younger brother, Jan, was the same age as Edward's sister, Jadzia. The four city dwellers quickly became inseparable friends. Ela, my lifelong friend who I met on my first trip to Poland, is Jan's youngest daughter and the niece of Krystyna.

I hoped that, just maybe, my dad was ready to share more about Krystyna, the woman I had also met on my first trip to Poland when I was sixteen. But I was disappointed with the details he chose to reveal that day. "She was a firecracker," he said. Spirited and fun, tall and lanky, attractive but not in the conventional sense, was how he described her.

"Tłuszcz? Doesn't that translate into 'Fat'? Odd name for a village," I commented.

I immediately did a quick Google search and found little. "Let's just say its only claim to fame is that it's where you met Krystyna," I informed my father, acknowledging that this was the first time he had mentioned anything about the relationship.

Back in Warsaw that autumn, Edward and Krystyna remained inseparable. She attended a nearby girls' school, and they saw each other every weekend. Edward was a student at Gimnazjum Władysława IV, one of Warsaw's elite boys' high schools and today the highest-ranked school in the city. Though his parents were working class, they sent their children to the best schools possible. It was in high school that Edward's stamp-collecting hobby began.

All students had to join at least one school club, so Edward joined the stamp club because he was impressed by the collection of his chemistry teacher. The only other stamp club member was Chaim Nagelberg—just the two of them. Chaim's father was an elementary school teacher, and the two boys became good friends.

Chaim and Edward’s friendship was not unusual. Warsaw was home to the largest Jewish community in Europe at the time, with Jews having lived in Poland for nearly a millennium. The city's Jewish population, comprising about 30% of Warsaw's residents, ranged from deeply religious to thoroughly secular.

Many Jewish families might have spoken Yiddish at home but sent their children to either Polish state or private schools. During my next visit, we searched online for Chaim, but he had disappeared off the face of the earth along with six million other Jews. I later contacted Yad Vashem, the Holocaust remembrance centre in Jerusalem, hoping to discover some news to share with my father, but there was no trace of Chaim there either. Like many other Jews who perished during the Holocaust, not even his name remains.

"I was a stamp club member for only one year. I was also involved in track and field. But I failed Latin, which meant I had to repeat the whole year. My father wasn't happy, and I couldn't do both. I chose track."

Edward competed in 100-metre races and became a city champion. He described receiving his first and only pair of black leather track shoes, a gift from his father, after winning an important competition. As he spoke about the shoes, he gestured with his hand as if running it over their supple surface.

"They had the softest leather. I loved them," he said, his eyes brightening at the memory.

Although there were ominous signs of impending war—neighbourhood air raid sirens and drills, newspaper stories, and stored armaments—for seventeen- and eighteen-year-old Edward, other matters occupied his mind. In his life on Mirowski Square, everything unfolded routinely: eating breakfast, embracing his mother before leaving for school, gathering with friends for coffee and gossip after class, pondering where he would continue his studies, and the happiness of seeing Krystyna, particularly at the finish line of his track races. Life was normal; he was happy, and it would be a couple more years before the war started and before Krystyna announced that she would marry someone else.

After we'd chatted for an hour and a half, I sensed my father could use a change of scenery. With nowhere else to go, I pushed his wheelchair to the Tim Hortons in the lobby.

"I wasn't always like this," he said from his wheelchair as we rolled down the corridor. "Once, I could run a hundred metres in eleven seconds."

During our break and over what would become our usual order—coffee, apple juice, and a cookie to share—my father described the process of writing the day-long entrance exams for a prestigious chemistry liceum. This is the school he wanted to attend after graduating from Władysława IV. Each day, over a week-long period, a new group of applicants sat the exam.

"I returned two days later to check the results," he said. "On the outside of the building, they posted the names of those who wrote the exam on the same day that I did and passed. As I got close to the building, I could see the list had only one name on it. Lucky guy to have made it,' I thought. Then I read my name."

I chuckled to myself; here was something else I didn’t know about my father. At least this story was pleasant.

---

And what happened to Krystyna?

Several months later, during another visit and conversation, I learned more. Her father, an employee of the tram car company, had a serious, dour personality and did not approve of Edward. He found the handsome young man brash, too self-confident and opinionated—his energetic nature was not to his taste.

Edward wasn’t interested in marrying Krystyna. He was focused on continuing his studies. Under pressure from her disapproving father, nineteen-year-old Krystyna married a man of his choosing. He was a small, balding, pin-headed man, meek and slightly older who turned out to have a serious gambling problem, and soon it was known he was collaborating with the Nazis as well. Two years later, after returning home from her clerical job at a dairy plant, she discovered their furniture and wedding gifts had been pawned to cover his gambling debts. Her brother helped press charges against this gambler husband, who was subsequently prosecuted and jailed. After serving his sentence, it was rumoured that he disappeared with Nazi assistance.

She left the gambler. With war raging around them, Krystyna and Edward reunited. It is likely that they had always remained in contact and shared the same circle of friends. She realized what a poor judge of character she and her father had been when her marriage crumbled.

Although Edward did not return to Krystyna after the war, they remained in touch and turned their relationship into a lifelong friendship, and that’s all I ever sensed between them. I called her Ciocia Krysia—Auntie Krysia—and visited her on my subsequent trips to Poland. My parents stayed with her and her second husband on trips they made together in the 1980s and 90s. Her family became mine, replacing my Polish aunts, uncles, and cousins whom I had not sought out.

My father never spoke about Krystyna in a serious romantic context. By this point in our conversation, she had already been dead for a few years, her life ending tragically at ninety. She had just withdrawn money from an ATM and was heading back to her fourth-floor walk-up on Linneusza Street—the same apartment where my father and I had visited her in 1970. As she approached the locked front entrance, she noticed a young man behind her. Assuming he was a neighbour who had forgotten his key, she held the door open for him. It was a fatal mistake. He had followed her from the bank, and upon entry, he mugged her, throwing her violently to the ground.

My parents had a strong partnership that spanned five decades. To me, their relationship didn’t seem particularly romantic. But I was their child, and I didn’t need them to be romantic. I needed them to be rock-solid, which is what they were. But Krystyna always told her family that the man from Mirowski Square was the love of her life.