Not a Halloween Poem - On Emigrants' Pointless Regret

After years of making Halloween costumes for school parades and neighborhood parties, I'm finally free from that misguided celebration of fear and disgust, that ancient opening of the crack between our world and the astral sphere where evil spirits hide to pounce upon us when allowed... Parents and children try to hijack this dark night for some innocent fun — dressing a child as a Pippi Longstocking with her favorite monkey in a Halloween pumpkin suit, or as a pink Piglet with parents in outfits of Winnie the Pooh, the cheerful and stoic, pregnant Mom, and Tigger, the restless, energetic Dad.

When I first came to Montreal, Quebec, Canada, with my 8 year old son and an artist husband, we had no money to buy a costume or even the supplies to make one. So I dived into my closet and emerged with a white dress shirt, and white cotton summer pants. There were black garbage bags in the kitchen and black carboard for crafts on the table. So... my son became The Music Man. The black plastic was sturdy enough not to break off easily when I cut out large shapes of music notes and sowed them onto the shirt and the pants in random patterns. The cardboard was also cut into a mask with a round note and a stem. The boy had a small electronic keyboard from his grandparents, so that was tied onto a string and he could play melodies while walking in a school parade. He won the first place, of course. 

There were more costumes later  — a skier, an Arabian sheikh, a water nymph from Adam Mickiewicz's ballade "Switezianka," the cross-dressing lumberjack from Monty Python, the Queen of the Night from Mozart's "Magic Flute" — and, of course the various vampires and ghosts. Even a Swamp Monster, for which tons of colorful autumn leaves were sown onto a brown blanket for the cape, while the teen made his own mask of brown cardboard and leaves. That year, the  school janitor, sweeping the leaves that fell off the cape, was really mad and chased the monster with his broom... But real life in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, and later in La Crescenta, California, was far more scary than any Halloween parade...

Not a Halloween Poem

 

Silly, silly, silly me  — what am I

waiting for in this garden, with rusty

finches, golden orioles, and western bluebirds

taking a batch in my crystal bowl?

Year after year I drift further away

on my island of serenity from the solid

continent of my childhood,

from the tall horse chestnut trees

and shiny brown balls that made

armies of little people and herds of tiny

animals, joined by matchsticks —

 

So far away — so silly, silly, silly  —

I am all alone, speaking a foreign language

with a foreign accent — a Slavic

blue-eyed blonde, called here, by ill-willed

strangers — a white orchid —

Yes, silly, silly, silly — oh why, oh why

did I drift towards this land

of incomprehensible weirdness of goblins

ghouls and monsters — Halloween,

the satanic exaggeration of the hideousness

of death — rotten corpses, skeletons

and bloody eye candy — a simulacrum

of cannibalistic rituals. Soulless, hateful matter.

 

Silly, silly, silly me — so out of place

in this country of pretend horrors

and tasteless fun. I’m drifting through time

within an archipelago of lonely islands,

full of exiles, émigrés and D.P.s —

drifting away from my language,

from the skylark’s song above meadows

from the intense halo of candlelight

above each Polish cemetery —

full of chrysanthemum and asters

respect for the dead and nostalgia —

where we walked in the rain,

crunching fallen leaves underfoot

reflecting on mortality and the passing —

 

So — how about you?

Are  you silly, silly, silly, too?

 (c) 2024 by Maja Trochimczyk

What's so scary about the poem, then? When I read it (scribbled in the same morning, with the tea taken in lovely china in lovely, vibrant garden) during our Village Poets monthly gathering, ominous silence fell and the listeners looked at me with horror. I must have really scared them  — was it the "white orchid" insult that I had to bear from someone with a different skin tone and a much darker heart. Or was it the outspoken expression of displacement and alienation felt by someone who "drifted away from home" that's no longer there... https://chopinwithcherries.blogspot.com/2024/06/on-loss-and-homecoming-facsimile-of.html. 

One poet came over and said, "you must really want to go back home." She did not understand that there is no going back, no home... my childhood home was erased from existence when the street was widened by adding another lane and the fire station across was not to be moved, even though it was the only building surrounded by fields of potatoes. Instead a whole row of pretty little houses with their pretty little cherry trees, raspberry and currant bushes, narcissus and roses was mercilessly taken out. There is a bus stop there now, and a wide, cement sidewalk... though the alley through the neighborhood, much narrower than remembered, remains... and other residents kept their meticulously cared for gardens and homes.

Trzebieszow cemetery, May 2024. All the tall chestnuts and maples were cut down after one fell onto the roof of the chapel in the wind...

Orthodox cemetery in Warsaw, Wola district, tombstone for my parents, Henryka i Aleksy Trochimczyk

An angel kneels nearby...

Tombstone for my paternal grandparents, Wincenty and Nina Trochimczyk, with the name of my Dad added too, in good measure. Grodek Bialostocki cemetery. September 2024.

This year, when I went back to Poland twice (in the past I even had an eight-year gap, I do not go that often), I had a chance of visiting the graves of my extended family - my maternal grandparents and great grandma in May and my paternal grandparents, uncle and great grandparents in September. We even drove through the fields where my great grandparents lived and I found out from my cousins whom I did not see for 12 years that my great grandpa Andrei or Andrzej Niegierysz was Belorussian not Ukrainian and had two wives: the first died after giving birth to five children, so he remarried, left his estate near Ukrainian border to them and bought another 200 acres of land further north, in Mieleszki, leaving that farm to his five new children from his second wife, Maria. 

(So, my name was not only after my maternal grandma Maria, but also after my paternal great grandma, also Maria. I do not regret changing it to my nickname Maja after suffering the mispronunciation of this name as three-syllable "Ma-ri-ia" as if I was a heroine from Bernstein's West Side Story or the real Mary Mother of God... )

Tombstone of my great grandparents Andrzej and Maria Niegierysz 

My grandma Nina was the youngest of their five children and married a "local" man Wincenty who loved land and spent his time buying more until he owned 60 acres. But he loved hunting too much, and got a cold that turned into pneumonia and died in 1939... making my Grandma a young widow, raising two sons alone on her estate. 

Before visiting the cemetery, I walked on that sandy road leading to my great grandpa's house. I also visited the home of my Dad's cousin, daughter of his aunt, now in her 90s, happily spending time alone in a house stuck in the fields in the middle of nowhere... Only enormous sky above, fields and scattered bunches of birches and pines on the horizon...

Turn right and you'll visit my great grandparents homestead in Mieleszki, 

10 km from Belarussian border.

View from my Dad's cousin yard facing fields now planted with corn not rye, and copses of trees.

I went to my grandma's empty house, with overgrown yard of weeds, not kept in check by livestock, like sheep and geese, the latter were especially adept at trimming the lawns to desirable proportions.  The old linden tree was there... I have not written any poems yet, the emotions are too complex still... but some haiku will appear in the Southern Haiku Study Group anthology.  Here's just one that was not chosen.

Grandma's empty house - 

wind carries dry birch leaves, 

scattered, like family

Yet, my favorite, old linden tree, that was all buzzing with bees in July, the month of the blooming linden trees ("lipiec" from "lipa") was still there. I used to sit in its shade with my Uncle who was carving wooden boats from bark of nearby pine trees, lining the sandy road next to the house... 

The yard is full of weeds and bushes, the wooden fence covered with lichen... Yet the golden dome of the cerkiew still shines on the horizon, built on a hill in Grodek Bialostocki, in such a way that it is visible from every village from miles away... My phone camera was not good enough to capture its distant brilliance... 

a beacon of faith -

distant, gold church dome 

shines above rye fields

Actually, these are no longer rye but corn, and the characteristic haystacks with wooden roofs are also gone, replaced by ugly bales of hay wrapped in plastic. Yes, it was a lot more work to "make hay" so it would not get wet in the rain and dried properly for winter feed. But it was a lot more fun to play on hay inside the barn, so fragrant with clover and dried wildflowers... and the landscape was lovelier too. Not all progress is progress, really. Faster, bigger, richer  - and for what? 

The lichen-covered wooden gate...

The wooden beams interkocking without nails at the corner. 

Grandma used to lock the door and leave the key on one of these beams. You locked the door so it would not blow open in a gust of wind, everyone left their keys by the door - there were so few people around in these fields and forests...

Grandparents' wedding photo has tiny photos of Janek my cousin during his mandatory military service, and me in high school, still with short hair, stuck in the corner...

Sunset above the fields in Bielewicze. 

Poems from "The Rainy Bread" in Bialystok at "Generations Remember" Conference, September 2024

Reading from The Rainy Bread at the Kresy Syberia Foundation's conference 

Generations Remember, 20 September 2024, Sybir Memorial Museum, Bialystok

When Churchill and Roosevelt "sold" Eastern Europe, including Poland to Stalin, and the country lost 48% of its lands, cut off at the River Bug, as well as millions of residents were forcibly displaced, it was hard to guess that the consequences of this betrayal would last for so long and make such an indelible imprint on the collective memory of the nation, its demographics, and its fate. For 50 years Soviet troops were stationed in Poland. For 50 years nobody could publicly say in Poland that 22,000 Polish officers and leaders were murdered by Soviets in Katyn forest. For 50 years, the displaced persons, forcibly removed from their homes, and exiled or resettled into former homes of Germans moved to Federal Republic of Germany, were struggling to rebuild their lives and preserve the memory of the tragedy that impoverished them, cut off their Polish roots, destroyed traces of their homes in what has become Belarus and Ukraine. 

Pink - current borders, red outline - 1919 to 1039 borders, blue outline - one of the proposals for borders in 1945.

While my maternal grandparents and my mother narrowly escaped deportation and / or death in Baranowicze (now in Belarus) where my Mom was born in 1929, many members of the extended family were deported either during the war, or afterwards. Ciocia Tonia Antonina Glinska ended up in a settlement on the shores of the mighty Yenisey river in the middle of Siberia, and returned with one surviving son in the 1950s.  Ciocia Jadzia Jadwiga Hordziejewska was deported with her husband and children from their estate near the mythical lake of Switez to a cramped apartment in  Gdansk Oliva, a building pocked by bullets. Ciocia Irena de Belina and her brother went with Anders Army to Iran, Mexico and ended up in Chicago. ... 

After the death of my parents, I decided to transform fragmented memories of their stories into poems, since I forgot or distorted many details.  This gave rise to the book "Slicing the Bread" followed by "The Rainy Bread" 2016 and 2021 editions, and a Polish translation of selected poems "Deszczowy Chleb." I discussed these poems on my blog "Chopin with Cherries" https://chopinwithcherries.blogspot.com/2021/01/portraits-of-survivors-babcia-prababcia.html, posted selected poems from 2016 and 2021 versions on Moonrise Press Blog. 

https://moonrisepress.blogspot.com/2016/08/the-rainy-bread-poems-of-exile-of-poles.html (2016)

https://moonrisepress.blogspot.com/2021/04/the-rainy-bread-poems-from-exile-by.html (2021).

Then I  posted some original and translated poems on a recent Moonrise Press blog (2024): 

https://moonrisepress.blogspot.com/2024/08/deszczowy-chleb-polish-version-of-40.html

On 20 September 2024, I presented 12 poems from the second version of "The Rainy Bread" with Polish translations in the slides during the Generations Remember conference organized by the Kresy Syberia Foundation and the Sybir Memorial Museum in Bialystok, Poland. There were about 30 people at the reading, mostly children of the WWII-era deportees, who ended up in the U.K, , U.S, Canada or Australia.  My reading followed the keynote presentation by the Museum's director Professor Wojciech Śleszyński, and two other lectures, about children, Polish orphans saved from Sybir in 1920s by Paul Wojdak of Canada, and about reports on the Katyn murders by U.S. Captain Stewart that were ignored and swept under the rug by British government in the 1940s and 1950s, since the Soviet Union was Britain's ally.  

I started the reading from "What to Carry" - a lesson from my Mom, about escaping the war, since it could happen anytime to anyone... 

Picking leaves with Mom in the park. 1960s. 

≡ WHAT TO CARRY ≡

~ for my mother, Henryka Trochimczyk nee Wajszczuk (1929-2013) 

 

You never know when the war will come,

her mother said. You have to be ready.

Most things are unimportant.

You must take your gold, your family jewels.

Diamonds will buy you food. 

Gold will save your life. Forget silver, too heavy.

Take sturdy boots with two pairs of socks,

a warm, goose-down comforter on your back,

one picture, no books. Leave it all.

You will have to walk, sleep in a ditch, walk.

Pack lightly. What you carry, will protect you.

From starving, from freezing. That’s what matters.

Goose-down and gold. Hunger and snow.

 

She still has her goose-down coverlet,

useless in California. Her mother squished it

into a suitcase the first time she came to visit.

The down came from geese plucked decades ago

in Bielewicze, by her Grandma, Nina.

Diamonds? She sold her rings

to pay for the divorce, keep the house

with pomegranates and orange trees.

Her shoes are useless too —

a rainbow of high heels in the closet.

Another poem described the escape of my Grandfather Stanislaw with Grandma Maria Wajszczuk nee Wasiuk with my Mom and her brother Jerzy from Baranowicze on the even of New Year 1940, the last day of 1939. They took train towards the border, walked across snowy field, and were stopped on the other side. The person who robbed them actually was a German soldier who gave them a receipt for 295 gold coins and jewelry he took, Germany never honored this receipt after the war... The lesson from my mother at the end, though useful, was based on her false memory. She was just 10 years old when this traumatic escape took place.  No wonder she forgot details. The photo below is from Baranowicze in 1936 or so, a couple years earlier. 

≡ STARLIGHT ≡

 

The Soviets came in 1939.

They shot her uncle in the street,

and took his widow, Aunt Tonia,

with their two sons to Siberia. All in 24 hours.

 

Her father did not wait. He sold what he could.

They went through the “green border”

back to his family near Lublin.

Germans were not half as bad.

 

Two pairs — a parent, a child — walking quietly

in a single file through deep snow drifts.

Long shadows on the sparkling, midnight white.

The guide took them in a boat across the river Bug.

Smooth, black water between brilliant banks.

Twisted tree branches, turning.

 

The moon hid behind clouds.

Stars scattered.  On the other shore,

the guide told her to take off her coat.

He ripped out the lining, counted

the gold coins her mother had sown

into the seams.  He tore apart her teddy bear,

took the jewels from his belly.

 

I got frostbite on my cheeks and hands that night.

Look at the spots, she told her daughter. 

We had paid him already. You cannot trust

anyone, not anyone at all.

In addition to poems about lessons from my family history, I also wrote about some famous individuals, including Op-Art painter Julian Stanczak, who was deported to gulag, injured in the camp, released with Anders Army, in a displaced persons camp in Uganda, and ended up as a famous artist in America. 

With Stanczak's painting in the background.

≡ UNDER AFRICAN SKY ≡

     ~ for Julian Stanczak, gulag survivor, American painter (1928-2017)

 

—    amber and coral —

—    ruby and carnelian —

 

He looks at the brightness of the African sky.

The blazing sunset above the plains of Uganda

His eyes follow the pattern of light and shadow

on the savanna’s tall grass. Dark lines cut

into light on the flanks of a zebra —

he thinks of a donkey back home,

transformed by the extravagant, geometric

boldness of stripes, shining bright —

 

blinding his eyes, used to Siberian darkness

in dim interiors of musty prison huts —

he admires the play of gold and bronze inside

the tiger’s eye — a stone his teacher gave him

for protection and good luck. How it shifts

with each turn, different, yet the same —

lines upon lines of light.

 

The richness stays under his eyelids

as he twists and turns the tiger’s eye

in his one good hand, left — while the other,

a useless appendage, hangs limply

since the beating in a Soviet prison camp.

Shattered, like his dream of music,

the honey-rich tones of his cello.

 

He finds a different-flavored honey

in the richness of African sunsets,

the stripes of the tiger’s eye.  

 

He captures the undulating lines

and blazing hues on majestic canvas,

moving in the rhythm of wild planes

out of Africa, into fame.

 

— amber and topaz —

—              —   gold, bronze, and light —

                                                 —    so much light  —

 

 

Letters from Dachau to Trzebieszow, 1941-1945.

The reading concluded with the title poem "The Rainy Bread" written after I saw letters from Dachau written by my Mom's uncle, Father Feliks Wajszczuk to my Great Grandmother Jozefa Wajszczuk, including a recipe for the  best bread to be put into packages... 

≡ THE RAINY BREAD ≡

                          ~ for Grandma Nina and Grandma Maria,

because they baked delicious bread

 

Even if it softened, it fell into the mud

you need to rinse the slice. When it dries out —

it can be eaten.

 

And this round, fragrant loaf,

which Grandma baked with sourdough?

One bread loaf for a week — it was the best

with cream and sugar crystals.

 

And this moist, whole-rye bread baked with honey?

Delicious with butter and — more honey.

After each bite, take a sip of cold milk.

 

And the war bread, made from leftover, dirty flour?

Worms removed through a sieve. With bran,

sawdust — even a pebble can be found

among grains of sand. But, there it is.

 

Finally, the bread from the parcels sent

to Father Feliks, Mom’s uncle in Dachau.

It’s so ugly —- no one would steal it.

Whole rye flour, thick slices saturated with lard —

Today we know: microelements and calories,

A guarantee of surviving five years of torture.

 

Give us today our daily bread —

 

    the daily bread –

            the rainy bread –

                    the bread of life –

                                              bread

One more poem was read at the next session after lunch, before the panel discussion with the participation of dr Dmitryi Panto, whose family story inspired that poem.

≡ KAZAKHSTAN, 1936 ≡

 

~ for Dmitriy Panto and his Polish great grandparents

 

Expelled, deported, one day to pack. The Soviet rule.

Homes, orchard, farms, animals — all left behind.

It was not fair. Why did they hate us?  Why did they lie?

They told us: “There are no winters in hot Kazakhstan.”

They told us: “You do not need warm clothes in hot Kazakhstan.”

They told us: “There is no salt in hot Kazakhstan.”

 

We brought the wrong things.

 

Our friends were taken up north, to a small village.

Posiolki, we used to call them.

The Kazakhs were kind. They helped them out,

gave them wool, sheepskin, old gloves.

 

We had to build our huts in a wide-open steppe.

Dig wells for water. Make bricks of mud.

Dry bricks in the fire. We did not have wood

for the fire. There were no trees to stop the sharp spikes

of wind from piercing our bodies, to keep sand

from hurting our eyes.

 

Old folks and babies died first. We persevered. We labored hard.

 

Only the evenings with howling winds.

Only the night skies with different stars.

Only the foreign sounds seeping into our mouths,

lilting with melodies of a new language merging

with our Polish, strangely frozen in Kazakhstan.  

A Polish field, Trzebieszow, June 2024

With conference Moderator Anna Pacewicz and Stefan Wisniowski from Australia, Kresy Siberia Foundation.

Conference Program is below; the second day included screenings of four films, but I only saw two, so that's homework to do later... 

 

“GENERATIONS REMEMBER” 2024 in Białystok

 

Conference Program

with the Sybir Memorial Museum, Węglowa 1, Białystok

Friday	20 September
08:30 – 09:00	Registration, coffee and refreshments and Conference Welcome
09:00 – 09:30     09:30 – 10:30	Conference Welcome and an introduction to the Musuem’s new website, “Polish Cemeteries in Uzbekistan” - Professor Wojciech Śleszyński, Director of the Sybir Memorial Museum (Poland)   Session I: The Siberian Children of 1920, An Exploration of Memory – Paul Wojdak, Kresy-Siberia Member and author (Canada)
10:30 – 11:30	Session 2: A Short History of the Stewart & Van Vliet Jr MIS-X Code Letters Sent from Oflag 64 During 1943-44 – Dave Stewart, son of Captain D. Stewart (US)
11:30– 12:00	Session 3: Poems from Exile – Dr Maja Trochimczyk, Poet, Moonrise Press (USA)
12:00– 13:00	Lunch break: Restauracja Mozaika (note lunch is not included in the registration fee)
13:00 –14:30         14:30 –15:30	Session 4: International and inter-generational dimensions of history. The Muzeum as leader of International cooperation. – Professor Wojciech Śleszyński, Director of the Sybir Memorial Museum (Poland); Dr Dmitriy Panto, Museum of WWII (Poland); Stanley Urban, Kresy-Siberia Foundation (Poland). Moderated by Anna Pacewicz, Kresy-Siberia Foundation (Australia)   Session 5: How the Monument to the Fallen and Murdered in the East came to be – General Leon Komornicki, Former deputy chief of the General Staff of the Polish Armed Forces, Poland; Chairman of the Board of the Fallen and Murdered in the East Foundation. Co-creator of the Monument to the Fallen and Murdered in the East (Poland)
15:30 – 15:50	Break and refreshments (coffee, tea, biscuits)
15:50 – 16:50     16:50 – 18:00	Session 6: Return to Kresy (Osada Korsuny) from a one-way trip to Archangel – Stanley Urban, Kresy-Siberia Foundation (Poland)   Session 7: Myths and lies associated with the so-called "Repatriation. About the expulsion of Poles from the Borderlands during 1944-1946” – Thomas Kuba Kozłowski, Dom Spotkań z Historią (Poland)

 “Generations Remember” Conference and Reunion 2024 is organised by the Kresy-Siberia Foundation

with the support of the Sybir Memorial Museum, Białystok