2. The Motherland

Let me tell you how I spent my summer vacation…

What event in a young life makes the difference? For me, it was an ordinary tourist trip. It was 1970, and my father took me to Poland, just the two of us, father and daughter.     

As I peer back through the prism of the decades of my life, I now realize the significance of this vacation, but at sixteen, I was lost in a haze of teenage angst. I was overly self-conscious of my parents’ accents and striving to measure up to my mother’s unspoken expectations. The girl in the plaid pants who longed to belong was now an adolescent who itched to escape Smalltown forever. There was always a push and pull, between home and how I wanted to see myself, familiar sentiments for anyone first- or second-generation, especially a teenager.

What excited me about the month-long trip wasn’t the novelty of being on a plane for the first time or the chance to skip out of school two weeks before the end of the year. It was purely escape—even a boring vacation with my father offered that.

It would be the first time my father set foot in the country of his birth—the motherland—in twenty-five years. It was his first travel anywhere, except for the occasional short business trip or weekend visit to friends. It might also have been the initial instance he felt financially secure enough to afford overseas travel. With no grandparents or relatives in Canada, my parents had no one to leave us with, so they never did. There was no discussion about who would stay home with my two younger sisters. So I was the lucky travel companion.

We touched down at Okęcie Airport in the early morning and entered a small, austere terminal building with low ceilings and concrete walls—my introduction to Soviet Brutalist architecture. The only passengers in the terminal seemed to be those who got off our LOT charter flight, and our group trudged silently down the long corridor past large windows that framed a low, grey sky and a scattering of small aircraft sitting out on the tarmac. 

We reached a single kiosk where a customs official sat in a grey uniform, under an oversized peaked hat embellished with a gold Polish eagle emblem. After what felt like a lengthy consideration, he stamped and initialled the Polish visas that we had in our newly-minted Canadian passports. I did not know then that the Soviet regime had stripped the Polish eagle of its crown.

We stayed with Krystyna, or Krysia, as almost everyone called her, following the endearing Polish custom of using diminutive names. She was the girlfriend my father said goodbye to in 1944, just before the resistance fighters made their last push in Warsaw. At sixteen, I didn’t understand that this had been an important first love for him, and I knew nothing about the resistance.

All I knew was that Krystyna was a close friend from before the war. Throughout my childhood, her cheerful, newsy letters had arrived regularly with contributions to my dad’s stamp collection, which always pleased him.  

Krystyna had married in her forties and lived with her husband in a sparsely furnished two-room apartment, a third-floor walk-up in a bleak pre-war building on Linneusza Street on the east bank of the Wisła River—the section of Warsaw spared German bombs. To my adolescent Canadian eyes, two decades before the end of communism, Warsaw might as well have been on a drab dystopian planet. We had left Toronto in 1970 and arrived in Poland several hours later in an earlier era. Even the colour photographs I still have, taken with my new little Kodak camera, look black and white and shades of beige.

There wasn’t much room for the dozen dresses I had crammed into my suitcase, an early lesson in the hazards of overpacking. Krystyna oohed and aahed as I extracted them one by one and hung them in the six inches of closet space she had created for me. I don’t think I ever wore them. Nor did I bother with the makeup I routinely applied as part of my daily ritual back home. In Warsaw, where access to anything fashionable was scarce, even for those who could afford it, my dresses and makeup felt conspicuously out of place.

Krystyna and her husband were welcoming, with formal old-world manners that my parents and their Polish friends had, for the most part, abandoned. She loved books and history, expressing her opinion on current events and just about everything else in a breathless voice as if she were perpetually excited. Tall and lanky, she had fine, mouse-brown hair tinged with grey that looked as though she cut it herself. Her self-confidence matched my father’s, and I found myself drawn to her immediately.

My father was eager to show me Warsaw, but he discovered he was a tourist in his own city—a place that had become unfamiliar to him. The Second World War had erased the familiar landmarks of his youth, leaving only street names as a tenuous link to his past. The subsequent reconstruction had transformed the city, rendering it largely unrecognizable to him.

We walked with Krystyna along Mirowski Square, the street of my dad’s childhood home, and stood where the entrance had once been to what he described as an attractive apartment building. Looking up, we faced a utilitarian Soviet-style block of three storeys with small shops on the main level. Across from the apartment building was a square, as there had been before the war, but nothing about the new Mirowski Square was familiar to my dad. As we walked a few paces farther, Krystyna motioned with a wave of her hand and remarked, “This is where the entrance to the Jewish ghetto was.”

Jewish ghetto? That meant nothing to me, and it would be four decades before the city of Warsaw would officially mark the boundaries of the ghetto with commemorative plaques and five decades before I would give the location of Mirowski Square any further thought.

Within days, we were off on a road trip with Krystyna and her husband in their tiny orange Volkswagen Karmann Ghia, an unusual sight in a country of grey Soviet-made Ladas. The men sat in the front, and Krystyna and I squeezed into a back seat hardly spacious enough for a couple of suitcases.

Our four- or five-day trip followed the typical tourist itinerary, with one exception: a brief detour to the nondescript village of Łambinowice. At sixteen, too preoccupied with appearing cool, I couldn't fathom why anyone would want to visit such a place, and I recall not wanting to get out of the car.

Today, as I write about my recollections, I know the village was once called Lamsdorf and was the location of the POW camp where my father had been interned after the Warsaw Uprising.

During our road trip, finding restaurants and places to stop overnight was a complicated task that required careful planning. After each restaurant meal, Krystyna carefully packed every leftover on the table into paper napkins—from bread to the smallest speck of butter—and tucked them into her handbag. I was embarrassed. I had never been deprived of food and had no idea people were required to use ration cards. Eventually, I understood her resourcefulness and gave her a hand.

In the car, my father and Krystyna chatted incessantly, catching up on their lives, one year at a time. Speaking Polish at home and on Saturday mornings at Polish school meant I could follow the conversation if I wanted to. By the time we arrived back in Warsaw, they were reminiscing about 1963 and almost up to speed on their lives and the friends they had before the war.

There were some hushed words exchanged about my dad’s younger sister, who had left Warsaw permanently for a provincial town in northern Poland, but I wasn’t paying attention as they were chatting about people I didn’t know. There was no awkwardness between them. I search my memory as I write today about the trip but find no hints or references that they were once romantically involved. They seemed to be good friends, reuniting after a long separation and filling in the gaps. But perhaps I was oblivious.

The next leg of our journey—undertaken by my father and me alone—was to a small town near the village where my mother was born. It was a visit to my mother’s family—the three siblings she never mentioned. We were reunited with babcia, my grandmother, who had once lived with us for five years, arriving in Canada when I was six.

Memories of my grandmother in Canada are of an elderly babushka, like someone Central Casting would send over to a movie set to play the elderly Polish woman character. She seemed ancient to me; her deeply lined face made her seem much older than sixty, the age she was when she arrived. She never got used to life in Canada. She never learned a word of English.

After five years, babcia declared that she had ten grandchildren back home who needed her more than we did, and she returned to Poland. The more probable reason for her departure was the chasm separating her life from my mother's new one in Canada. The tension and dynamic between my mother and grandmother, which I had witnessed as a young child, made sense in Poland. The distance my mother had travelled from that small village to Canada was now obvious. But I didn’t realize yet how far she had come.

Here was babcia directing our warm welcome with the confidence of a ruling matriarch, a stark departure from my memories of her. During our whirlwind thirty-six-hour stay, which my father justified by saying he had so much to show me in Poland, we visited each of my mother’s siblings.

I remember Coke bottles lined up in a perfect pyramid on a sideboard, like a champagne tower at a wedding. The soft drink had recently made its debut in Poland, and for the family, it was a status symbol indicating to their "new-world" relatives that they could indulge in life’s finer luxuries. To my sixteen-year-old eyes, it all appeared tacky, and I found myself uncharitably judgmental.

Food was more abundant in the countryside, where people cultivated vegetable gardens and kept chickens and pigs. My aunts and uncles joked that the pigs in Poland went straight to Moscow and bypassed the tables in Warsaw. They were right. Buying food in Warsaw was complicated, and the shelves were often empty.

With barely a day back in Warsaw to catch our breaths, my father and I left for the port city of Gdańsk. We travelled by train from Warsaw, and on our way north, we stopped to visit his sister in the town of Morąg. My Aunt Jadwiga—Jadzia as she was referred to—a soft-spoken but determined woman, lived far from the cosmopolitan life she had known in Warsaw before the war. She had married a hard-drinking, rough man from Morąg, and they had two children. While that was part of the reason she remained in this small, grimy industrial town, the other part was something I would unravel much later only when I understood what had transpired during and after the war.

Back in Warsaw, I was assigned to the care of Krystyna’s niece, Elżbieta, or Ela, to family and friends, who was twenty-one then. I felt grown up hanging out with her, her boyfriend, and their friends. Through Ela, I got a close-up view of the hardships of everyday life behind the Iron Curtain. Plans could change because we spotted toilet paper in a shop and had to rush back to mobilize family members to hurry over and claim their quota of one or two rolls of the scratchy stuff. We queued in long lines at the baker and butcher, where the selections were limited. Buying food, I soon learned, was easier if you had connections and sometimes took place at the back of the shop like a clandestine drug deal. Ration cards and empty store shelves were a fact of life, as was a thriving black market where anything could be procured for exorbitant prices and US dollars.

Two topics dominated discussions during most meals and social gatherings: the war, specifically wartime scarcities and survival, and the current trials of living in a Communist state. Moods turned sour when subjects like meatless Mondays, imitation coffee, rising prices, stifling bureaucracy and the Gomulka government were raised. There were whispers about the prying eyes of the secret police and admissions about the potential benefits of joining the Communist Party, seen as the sole path to career advancement and securing better housing and food for one’s family. People understood the reasons for becoming a party member, and there was a sense of eye-rolling acceptance that they had no choice but to collaborate with the enemy.

Every mealtime discussion with people my father’s age opened my eyes to the reality of the war’s impact. The memories were vivid, the emotional wounds still raw, and the events people had lived through continued to consume them. I reasoned that my father’s life in Canada had allowed him to move on in a way that his friends and family who had remained in Poland could not. This, I thought, might explain why my parents never spoke about the war.

Most people had sidelines, which helped them survive in the Soviet system. Ela’s boyfriend, who had studied graphic art, changed the dates on his friends’ student identity cards, making sure that they remained students eternally, with access to student discounts for public transportation and other services. People struggled but also helped one another, and everyone knew who the enemy was. The end justified the means, and the most important end was to beat a system stacked against them. Most of the time, they didn’t, they just collected their minimum fare in a food line and tried their best to help family members. Their allegiance was to their loved ones, not to the Soviet regime. It all seemed quite foreign to me.

On my last night in Warsaw, I walked around the centre of the city with Ela and her friends, and we stopped at a newly built hotel. It was modern and luxurious compared to every other building I had seen in 1970 Warsaw and stood out like a shiny penny. We explored it like we owned the place, joking and laughing boisterously as I did with my friends back home. Ela turned quiet, and I asked her if anything was wrong.

“One day, you will be able to stay at a hotel like this, but in a million years, I won’t be able to afford it.”

While I was careful not to flaunt how different life was in Canada, I knew Ela’s words were true. We had many decent hotels, even in Smalltown, Ontario.

Fast forward. Today, with all Soviet shackles cast off, Warsaw is a very European city. There is nothing dystopian about it.

The lives of my friends and family have changed with the city. Ela travels and posts photos of her vacations on her social media feeds, just like everyone I know. We formed a bond on that first trip and have remained friends. Over the next decades, our lives continued to intersect at significant junctures—fate and circumstances before we were born brought us together.

What has not changed is the Polish survival ethos and determination. It was present all around me on my first trip to Poland. I have since learned it is part of my DNA. But at sixteen, I had no inkling of this.

And I was oblivious that this seemingly ordinary trip would one day have an impact on the course of my life.