We did not visit Poland often. Only when someone died. I have not been able to bring part of my mother’s ashes to Poland yet because of the pandemic. They sit in my living room, waiting to join my other dead relatives in her village of Bedoń.
I live in California, 3,000 miles away from where I grew up, and when my mother couldn’t sleep she’d call me. I always picked up.
“I think I know how I got sick,” she said once.
My mother had an aversion to being sick and to anyone knowing about it. Her father had tuberculosis and had to be sent to a sanatorium to recover. My mother, her brother, and my grandmother would visit him as he was quarantined. No one in her village would play with her or her brother afterward. They would taunt them that they were sick too. To be sick, my mother learned, was a humiliation. When she became sick this final time, she isolated herself so much that she stopped seeing or talking to her friends, except for a handful of emails I found. Her business associates didn’t even know she was sick. I had to tell them she was dead and listen to their shock and grief. She had worked until a week before she died. 99.6 pounds.
On the phone, late that night, she recounted how her father was vigilant against things like bedbugs. She whispered to me that he would come into her room and spray everything down with DDT. She said he’d even spray down her pillows and sheets. She recounted, with wonder, how the spray looked in the morning light.
“Or maybe I got sick because they made us get X-rays when I was in puberty. To make sure I didn’t have tuberculosis too,” my mother countered.
How would I know for sure? Now that she's gone, I would never know anything at all. There was no finding the truth. There were just stories.
When I asked my mother why my grandfather was orphaned she told me his mother had died when he was young and his father had remarried a woman who didn’t want him or his two sisters. They were shipped off to different orphanages. Later, in his early twenties, he reunited with one of his sisters and even rekindled a relationship with his father. My mother told me that my grandfather had said that at a wedding for his half-sibling after the war, the entire family was poisoned by black market vodka, which my grandfather had taken only a few sips of. They all died except my grandfather. He was left with no one again.
These were the stories of Poland that I grew up with. Fantastical, breathtaking. When I asked my mother why she was so tough — really, a hard-ass — she said that it was because the family had a car. There were maybe only a few other families with cars; they only had one thanks to my grandfather’s job as a mechanic. But the village boys thought my mother, just in elementary school then, was putting on airs. They were all poor but my mother didn’t want to be. So each day they followed her home and harassed her. She learned to run, to take different streets. And she balled up her fists and learned to fight. No one would ever get anything over her, she said. She glared at me. As if I made her remember something painful that she had been intent on forgetting. But I wanted more. I’ll never get to hear more now, at least from her.
My mother hated dwelling on the past: “There was too much sadness there.” And so she concentrated on the future. Except, in the years before her death, she’d started calling me to say things like: “I don’t think we should have left Poland after all.”
This was a shocking admission from a woman who loved America more than anyone I knew. Who believed it was the one country you could build yourself into whoever you wanted to be. A place that accepted a family who had no money, no recognizable name, no understanding of the language, and allowed them to work to be someone else. That didn’t mean it wasn’t difficult or that, in her waning days, my mother perhaps thought it wasn’t quite worth it.
“If I had known that Communism would fall 10 years after we left, I would not have left,” she said. “We just believed it would go on forever.”
My parents were graduate students when they decided to leave. Or rather, the situation had become so untenable that they had to leave. They felt like the country would always be one of food rations and lack of opportunity. So they sewed our birth certificates, their school diplomas, and other important papers into the lining of their suitcases and we left. They only told their parents the night before for fear of someone turning them in.
Twenty-five years after we left Poland as political refugees, we returned, to bury my grandfather, and retrace our steps of leaving the country. My parents, my sister, my brother, and I went through a border crossing in Chałupki, Poland. As my father handed over our American passports, I saw him become more and more agitated, as if he had been plunged into the memory of the time before, when my parents pretended to be going on vacation in order to leave and beg for political asylum in Vienna. The tension and fear was still present in his muscle memory. He only spoke English to the border guard, who insulted him by saying my brother, who had been born in the US, was the only real American of any of us as he returned our passports 30 minutes later.
We crossed into the Czech Republic and then, with ease, into Austria, where I noted the marked difference between the landscape of formerly Communist countries and the verdant hills of this one. The difference felt like a cliché. Bright flowers bloomed outside gingerbread houses, a stark contrast to the gray Eastern bloc apartments that had ruined the landscape of where we had just been. The kind of industrial apartments where I’d been born.
Our destination was the town of Traiskirchen, and the refugee camp that we had been sent to after my father had followed the instructions he was given by people who had previously fled and asked for political asylum at a police station in Vienna. My family and I stood outside the walls of the refugee camp and I couldn’t believe it was still operational. I looked at the armed guards at the gates, at the razor wire lining the top of the redbrick fence. I looked at the long underwear drying outside a window as my parents wept.
“You chased a boy for bread,” my mother said. “You were always hungry.”
We left those memories behind and went to Klam, Austria, a small village where my parents had taken us when we were allowed out of the refugee camp and where we had lived for a few months in a family-run bed and breakfast, paid for by the Austrian government and the United Nations Refugee Agency. The owner remembered my parents. He was their age, and recalled how his father had let us stay there years before. I used to stare at old photos of my sister and I looking at the sky in similarly patterned dresses, or the two of us naked and staring at the ground with our hands cupped, hoping for what? I don’t know.
My parents walked us to the parking lot where those pictures were taken. They took us to other markers from photos I’d spent my life since staring at, trying to piece together where I came from.