I've been thinking a lot about two movements that have begun to gain momentum as 2012 winds down. It would be a joyful irony if real progress was made on these issues at the exact time when the world was apparently supposed to end according to the Mayan calender.
"The Idle No More" and the brave actions of Chief Teresa Spence to address the disastrous state of Aboriginal health and living conditions on First Nations reserves.
Progress on gun control in the US.
These two issues seem almost to have no solution and yet I am reminded that those of us who grew us with the Cuban Missile Crisis, imminent Nuclear Annihilation, the Cold War, and the Iron Curtain never felt that situation would change and yet the "Wall" came tumbling down.
It is the season of miracles.
Our own personal miracle, our son, came out of a visit to a family behind the Iron Curtain and to the Nazi death camp, Auschwitz.
I wrote a story about it when I was doing my Masters degree in the early 90's.
Passport Control - by Janice Sexton
An old passport of mine is stamped numerous times from a country I have never set foot in and that no longer exists. In 1976 we had only a transit visa to pass through East Germany by train to our destination in Poland. I do not have any stamp in this passport from Spain although we spent a couple of weeks in this country in 1972. We entered Spain from Biarittz in the south of France on the Atlantic coast. The Spanish border officials were enjoying lunch. The procedure was to slow down and wave your passports out the window. They nodded and raised their wine glasses to us. It was a warm invitation to enjoy their country and we encountered many such warm invitations during our stay.
Some countries do not invite one so warmly. Taking the Orient Express route to Poland from Paris, one had to enter East Germany, then leave East Germany, then enter West Berlin, then leave West Berlin to enter East Berlin and East Germany again. A part of ancient history now. Intimidation seemed to be the name of the game as our passports were verified and stamped numerous times. We went through Berlin in the middle of the night and were rudely awakened by “passport control” shining flashlights in our eyes. Scrutinizing our real faces and the representations on the passports many times.
We began to get nervous as we had false information on our visas. Glancing out the window to see guards with machine guns didn’t provide much encouragement. The false information seemed so harmless when we were in Nice at the apartment of the representative of the Polish government that arranged for the visas. We were spending five months in France before doing a year’s graduate work at the University of Oregon. We were heady from the wine, the sun, the people...the myriad of sensations that make up the south of France.
Our friend, Marian, was a professor of French at the University of Katowice and had invited us to spend a couple of weeks with his family in Poland. We had met at a summer course in Cannes and had enjoyed each other’s company so much we cancelled our plans to go to Italy for our last two weeks to take advantage of this opportunity. We reasoned that we could always get to Italy but getting to an “Iron Curtain” country with a family was a once in a lifetime opportunity.
Our friend had convinced us to claim we were “family” so that we only needed to exchange $2.00 a day at the official exchange rate, otherwise we would need to exchange $10.00 a day. This would allow us to exchange more money on the blackmarket, which meant three to four times the official exchange rate. He patiently explained the system in Poland. Basically, this meant that the system didn’t work so everything had to be done on the sly...on the blackmarket, the unofficial way. It was an accepted fact. For example, to buy a car you had to have the price in full then wait three to four years. Except if you could produce currency from the West, then you got it immediately. This worked for most things.
We expressed concerns about ending up in the Polish equivalent of Siberia. He assured us Polish officials “s’enfichaient litteralement”...i.e. “no one gives a damn”. He forgot to mention about East German officials who really seemed to be caring who went through their country.
The next morning we were still in East Germany and the train stopped inexplicably for over two hours. Our compartment companions assured us this was quite normal. At least, that was the message we picked up. Our companions who had begun the 32 hour journey with us in Paris were Polish and were returning home. We didn’t speak Polish and they didn’t speak either French or English but we felt like long time friends when we parted. Initially, we spoke French because we had been speaking French for so many months and they spoke Polish. After a while we figured we might as well speak English since the actual words weren’t being understood anyway. It was surprising how much was understood.
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 and I was in agony. We hadn’t booked a sleeper to save money. 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 after slag heap and raging furnaces intensified the pain of the tooth. I thought this must be what Hell is like.
So many images of those weeks in Poland come to mind. The instant acceptance of our friend’s family and their friends. The layer of soot every morning on the windowsill in our bedroom. Angele, Marian’s wife, cleaned it up every day, but the next day the same layer of soot was there. Because of the pollution, their children, Agathe and Simon, were small for their age with respiratory problems and had to be sent to the mountains in the 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 to make us feel at home since we came from Canada. Perhaps they thought everyone in Canada 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, 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 and lack of nationalistic feeling puzzled them.
One of the days we visited Auschwitz the Nazi death camp where over 4 million Jews had been murdered. 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 relate to such atrocity?
At the end there was a chapel. People lay down fresh flowers and knelt. The hallway leading to the chapel had photos of inmates from the prison within the camp. A prison within a prison. Friends and relatives had lain flowers on some of these photos. The shouting stopped. We knelt as well and felt a real communion with the people who had lost their lives in this place. Jim and I talked about it later. It was something about the fresh flowers placed by the living on the portraits of the dead that lead to being so deeply touched.
We felt so affected by this experience and 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 with this family and we were all thrilled when we could reunite in Paris in 1987. They met our son, the child we might well not have had if we hadn’t met them. A year later, their daughter wrote to tell us her father had died from a massive heart attack. We felt a profound loss.
