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.
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.
≡ 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.
≡ 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 —
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.
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“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
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