Month: October 2022

Channeling my Polish Grandmother

~ kasia1965 ~ 3 Comments
My grandmother, my “Babcia”—Ludwika Kondra Bielawa—was born in Jaroslaw in 1900, a subject of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. She was a blond beauty known for her outspokenness and openness. I carry her smile–the one my dad inherited from her. I hope I also carry her courage and sense of advocacy. The language of instruction for pupils was German when Babcia attended grammar school. Despite an “official policy” of language tolerance, she was chastised as a teenager by an Austrian soldier for using Polish, her mother tongue, in a shop. She spoke her Polish, but kept German in her back pocket for another time.

World War I ended on November 11, 1918. Poland was reborn as an independent nation following 100+ years of partitioning by the Russian, Prussian and Austro-Hungarian Empires. Babcia married Wladyslaw from Przemysl and they moved to Turka, a market town in Poland’s frontier region which, at that time, encompassed parts of western Ukraine. My grandfather, a carpenter, built a beautiful family home overlooking the Bieszczady Mountains. My grandmother tended her gardens and fruit trees. She birthed a succession of babies–Helena, Mieczyslaw (my dad), Marysia, Stanislaw, Jancia, Genia, Wanda, Czeslaw and Bronia. Poles were a minority in a multi-ethnic town of Ukrainians, Jews, and smatterings of Russians, Belarusians and Czechs as self-identified in Lwow (Lviv) Regional Census data collected in 1931.

My grandparents’ lives were forever changed in September 1939, when Germany and the Soviet Union unleashed their Molotov-Ribbentrop Plan to invade, divide and conquer Poland, coordinating attacks from the West and East. Russian soldiers carrying propagandistic “promises of socialism” perplexed Turka’s residents as they cleaned out stores and sent enormous amounts of food and wristwatches to their families in Mother Russia. Were folks thriving under socialism as the propaganda trumpeted? We now know people in the USSR suffered enormously under Stalin. (When visiting Russia in 2018, I noted museum and monument references to WWII as “The Great Patriotic War, 1941-1945.” They neglected to mention Stalin’s alliance with Hitler that, actually, started WWII. Tyrants count on people not knowing or caring about the deeper history.

German occupation proved far more brutal. Germans rounded up and shot Turka’s Jews in a series of Aktions. Residents were terrorized; desperate hunger ensued as the Germans took what they wanted and forcibly quartered themselves. Hunger was rampant as food was rationed. Jews, hiding in the forest, emerged at night and knocked on my grandparents’ door for food. Somehow, they knew my grandparents could be trusted to share what they could and not turn them in, despite German-issued proclamations (see below), specifically for Poles, that promised death for helping, hiding or not reporting Jews.* This was not the case, for example, in Denmark, where the German occupiers viewed Danes as “fellow Aryans.”

At some point, during the German occupation, Babcia’s children desperately needed new clothes and there was no fabric to be had in stores. Babcia, dusted off her back-pocket German and mustered the courage to approach the German commandant overseeing Turka to seek a fabric coupon. She did this over the protestations of friends who feared for her safety. She explained her plight, a mother advocating for her children, in Polish-accented German, and was handed the coupon. History tells us the outcome could have been different.

By war’s end, my grandparents would lose three of their teenaged children to Germany as Forced Laborers and their infant son, Janek, to starvation. Two returned, one with a small child and no husband. My Dad, would never return to the family fold. My grandparents were forced to leave their beloved home overlooking the mountains when decisions made at Yalta—by Churchill, Stalin and FDR—annexed Turka to the USSR. Babcia packed up her remaining children and the 50 kg of household goods displaced families were allowed to take. They travelled west, by train, for weeks, three families to a cattle car, to Silesia. The Yalta Conference annexed this former German territory, heavily bombed by the Allies, to Poland. Marshall Plan dollars did not make their way to this corner of Europe to help with rebuilding. Stalin, likely, reveled in his expanded sphere of influence as Poland became caught behind the descending Iron Curtain of communism. That curtain would not lift until 1989.

I’m taking a bit of a career break to channel my Babcia as I dust off my back pocket Polish language skills to try to do some good. I start volunteering this week with Ukrainian refugee children living in Krakow to help them grow their speaking skills in Polish and English. My other task is to interview Poles, Ukrainians, and others from my perch in Krakow, to gather historical and contemporary stories—sharing happy, hopeful and sometimes sad observations from this beautiful, complex and deeply felt place. I’m also working with my favorite professor from undegrad to write a book that my heart tells me needs to be written.

Thank you for reading. Please be in touch as I invite you to follow my blog (https://presenttime.blog/).  I invite your questions, too!

*Resource from U.S. Holocaust Museum:

NAZI POLICY FOR POLES (aka “Untermenschen” = “Subhumans”) AIDING JEWS: https://www.ushmm.org/learn/timeline-of-events/1942-1945/german-poster-announces-death-penalty-for-aiding-jews

PC: Elizabeth Mayer

Poland keeps calling me

~ kasia1965 ~ 7 Comments

My parents left Poland amid war and political oppression. I’ve always been drawn to this place—the history, the architecture, the landscape, the people—a place my Mother and Father were forced to abandon.

When I was sixteen, I emptied my bank account of all but ten dollars–so the bank would not close the account—to buy a plane ticket to Warsaw. I weighed the decision carefully as I was saving earnings from my restaurant job for future college tuition, something my parents could not afford. I took the risk and the lens through which I viewed our world changed. I met aunts, uncles and most of my nearly forty cousins. I saw people who resembled me and could pronounce my “ethnic” last name. I visited palaces, parks, and cathedrals. I undertook emotional journeys to the memorials to Poland’s WWII citizens slaughtered, imprisoned, displaced and dehumanized by Nazi and, later, Soviet occupiers. I learned Poland lost six million citizens during WWII; three million were Polish Jews and three million non-Jewish Polish citizens. My Uncle Tomek’s father died at Auschwitz. My Uncle Mietek was captured in a street snare in which Germans kidnapped citizens to ship them to Germany for forced labor. He managed to escape, walking nearly one hundred kilometers to his village. He disguised himself by carrying a crop on his shoulder, appearing as a “local” as opposed to an “escapee.” My father spent over three years in Nazi Forced Labor Camps. My mother’s earliest memories are of German bombs falling from the sky.

I returned to Poland at nineteen on a Kosciuszko Foundation Study Abroad Scholarship, spending 1984-86 at Krakow’s Jagiellonian University. Ration cards, Black Market money exchanges and the Chernobyl Nuclear Accident flavored the experience as I dug deeply into my Polish history studies. I made lifelong friends in that magical medieval city.

I began my career and married. My husband accompanied me on “every few year” trips to visit family, hike Poland’s Carpathian Mountains and, occasionally, swim in the Baltic. A three-month Family Sabbatical in 2001 allowed me to volunteer in Poland’s first domestic violence prevention shelter while my husband took a break from corporate life and our daughter attended a Krakow preschool.

And so we visited, every few years, to maintain a connection. This post-pandemic trip brings me back to Krakow to conduct research for a writing project and volunteer. I plan to support some of the many Ukrainian refugees fleeing Russia’s attack on their homeland.

I do not look at the U.S. through rose colored glasses, nor do I do the same with Poland. Each country possesses a unique and complicated history. I’ve been fortunate to witness Poland’s waning years of communism, nascent return to capitalism, and acceptance to NATO and the European Union.

I return again to check the pulse of my parents’ homeland. How are people living? What are they saying? How has the substantial influx of Ukrainian refugees impacted society? What does the specter of threatened Russian aggression mean on this former Soviet Satellite nation?

I hope you will follow the images and stories I share from “on the ground” in my beloved Krakow. I invite you to follow my humble attempt to make sense of what I see and experience. Please send questions and observations my way. Poland keeps calling me.

I invite you to follow my blog, Present Time, at https://presenttime.blog.

Photo Credit: Mariusz Słonski, Source: Unsplash