Before we finally left East Germany, officials came on the train and searched every nook and cranny for stowaways. It was a relief to be in Poland except that an abscess tooth began to bother me. It was night as we journeyed through Silesia, the heavy industrial part of Poland, on our way to Katowice. I had never experienced such an area...slag heap afer slag heap and raging furnaces intensified the pain of the tooth. I thought this must be what Hell is like.
So many images of that week in Poland come to mind. The instant acceptance of our friend’s family and their friends. The soot every morning on the windowsill in our bedroom. Our friend’s children were small for their age and suffered from respiratory problems due to the pollution. The government sent them to the mountains every summer for their health. The empty shelves in the food stores and the lineups whenever a truck appeared out of nowhere with some food for sale. The paradox that food actually seemed plentiful in people’s homes but little seemed to be distributed officially. The blackmarket. The system didn’t work. No one expected it to anymore. People adjusted.
We were invited to another home where the people had a backyard. They had built a campfire outside for us as a special treat and we roasted polish saucage. This was to make us feel at home since we came from Canada. Perhaps they thought we were cowboys. I was asked whether I had Indian blood since I had such dark hair. For a brief moment I was tempted to say yes and talk about my people, the Haida, who lived in the rainforest. It seemed so exotic to be part Indian so far from home! I resisted the temptation.
They took us to Krakow and the university they both had attended, the university where Copernicus studied. They showed us a memorial to commemorate the time Poland had been annexed completely by other countries and didn’t exist at all. That night they played nationalistic music and tried to explain the history of Poland. They mentioned they knew that North Americans liked to make Polish jokes. You could sense their hurt and confusion about why people did this. Our indifference to our own country puzzled them.
We became quite interested in the posters we saw and our friend took us to someone he knew who worked in poster design and she offered us copies. We ended up coming home with a couple of dozen of these posters, some of which we still have. One that Richard treasures and has is of the flag of the Polish Communist Party. Our friend was convinced we would never be able to take this poster into Canada even though we explained the Communist Party was legal in Canada.
One of the days we visited Auchswitz, the Nazi death camp where over 4 million Jews had been murdered. I didn’t want to go since I felt I had seen enough of this horror already but our friends felt it was important to see this and to pay our respects. Since it is a memorial it is very quiet but the exhibits are shouting at you all the time. The gigantic rooms full of shoes, of eye glasses, of children’s toys...the Nazi’s saved everything and didn’t have time to destroy it all before the Allied Forces arrived. The shouting was so overwhelming. How could one truly understand such atrocity?
At the end there was a chapel. People lay down fresh flowers and knelt. The hallway leading to this room had pictures of inmates from the prison within the camp. A prison within a prison. Friends and relatives had lain flowers on some of these pictures. The shouting stopped. We knelt as well and felt communion with the people who had lost their lives in this place. Jim and I talked about it later. It was something about the flowers on the portraits that lead to this experience of understanding with our entire bodies.
We felt so warmed by this family that we decided to finally take the plunge and have a child. We had been discussing the pros and cons for 10 years. In the end it was a completely emotional decision. We kept in correspondence and we were all thrilled when we could reunite in Paris in 1987. The met our son, the child they were partially responsible for. Last year the daughter wrote to tell us her father had died from a massive heart attack. We felt a profound loss.
Jim and I in Krakow. Our friend, Marian, took this picture and it is the best of the lot!
This very blurred picture is the only one I have of the family. I don't know why I didn't take more pictures.
Jim, Angele, Marian, the Grandmother, and the two children, Agathe and Simon
One of many lineups for food
Monument to when Poland didn't exist as a country
Sign for the Polish Communist Party
Streetcar pulled by horses. Most streetcars were powered but some were horsepowered.
