​In this particular memory, I think I had just graduated from 8th grade. I was old enough to have “working papers” that allowed me to be part of farm labor with written parental consent. My mother was happy to sign the papers.

     Children picking berries to earn money was a common, even necessary occupation for children in Poland. She often told the story of how she and her siblings picked blueberries growing wild in the forests and sold enough baskets in order to be able to buy shoes for school in the fall.
      I’m not sure why my brothers didn’t join me this particular day as we usually picked together but I got up early, made a jelly and butter sandwich and walked the 3 miles to the Employment Office. There were other people already there not unlike myself – other immigrant kids, just kids wanting to earn some money and adults of Italian and Hispanic heritage.
     At 8 am the pick-up trucks start to pull up in front of the Employment Office. Everybody piles into the back of the nearest truck. Most have been fitted with planks of wood along the long sides to make a bench. The unspoken rule was that this was for the adults. Kids just sat down on the bed of the truck, squeezed in together like so many sardines.  Nobody checks our “papers.” Did we even know the name of our farmer?  Or where we were going? No. This is the early 60’s. A different world from today.
     We ride like this all the way across the county line into open farmlands with acres and acres of strawberry fields. We pile out of the trucks, walk towards a wooden table already set up with a tablet and money box.  There are mountains of square, wooden, one-quart baskets nearby and “flats,” - flat, rectangular boxes that would hold eight one-quart baskets at a time.  Already picking in the fields are migrant workers.  I don’t know what country they were from but they converse to one another in Spanish. The field boss (maybe the owner? who knew? I didn’t) assigns everyone a row. The women, dressed in old house dresses covered with even older aprons, chat together in Italian and choose rows close to one another. I’m assigned my own row.  I’m instructed to pick clean, not to leave ripe berries behind, but to look carefully under all the leaves.  I start filling up a one-quart basket.  The pay is 5 cents for every quart basket picked.  
      Some squat while picking, some bend over the rows. Eventually, you have to change it up because both positions are hard to maintain during the long, hot summer day. Sometimes you kneel alongside, sometimes you sit just in the narrow space between the rows but it’s awkward and hard to move along the row. 
     The strawberries are large. Much better than some farms where it’s second pickings and the strawberries are smaller, and it’s harder to fill a basket quickly. Another perk: we can eat as many strawberries as we want.   I take up flats of eight quarts to the table where someone logs my numbers. The sun rises higher.  Soon I wish I had a bandana across my forehead to catch the sweat like the migrant workers or a kerchief tied at the back of the neck like the Italian women. I’d forgotten my straw hat.  The sun is now beating down.  I have no one to talk to or complain to. Like immigrants have done throughout history, in factories and in farm labor, I put my head down and keep working. There is no other choice. The boss determines when the day is done and there’s no place to hide. There isn’t a tree in sight to catch some shade.
     In the meantime, my head fills with the sound of the Italian women and Spanish migrants talking. I don’t understand a word but there’s humor and laughter. There’s quiet murmuring.   I pick quart after quart and listen. Somewhere in that day I realized I was doing really well with the “pickin” and I told myself I was going to pick 100 quarts. A nice even number. A goal to reach. It motivated me when I was lagging.
     When I got home that day, I was bone tired. The teeth in my sunburnt face were whiter than white from (what I was later to learn) the malic/citric acid in all the berries I ate.  But I proudly handed my mother the five dollar bill I had earned that day. That’s how it was at our house. Rarely did we keep money earned. She took it to the bank and deposited it. She did the same when I brought money home from picking currants (paid by the pound) or grapes (paid by the crate) and later, waitressing (paid by the hour). When I was applying to nursing school, my mother pulled out our joint bank book and showed me my collective earnings which had amounted to something over the years.  There was money to pay for tuition, books and uniforms.

 Photo of me "pickin" ( but only a few quarts ) by Regina Hanchak. 

To this very day, when I hear Spanish being spoken, I’m back in the strawberry field picking 100 quarts to earn five dollars. Each time I buy strawberries at the grocery store I think of immigrant and migrant workers who have picked those berries in the hot sun, for a minimal wage.  I think of all this as I still try to pick my row clean these 60 years later at a U-Pick strawberry farm.  Our childhood experiences stay with us forever, frequently shaping our world view for the rest of our lives.

They're not as prevalent now as they used to be as in the late 50’s and early 60’s. Many have gone the same way as hula hoops and Queen For a Day but there was a time when all the churches held a big church festival, a Lawn Fete, to raise money to pay off the church mortgage, a new roof or outstanding bills. Ours had one, too, every July and it was a huge event held on the church grounds that encompassed practically a whole city block.

   The men in the Holy Name Society ran the beer tent, sold raffle tickets for baskets of cheer, organized the bingo game, the ring toss and other games of chance. Another hired the Ferris wheel and rides like the Bullet and Swings as well as a merry-go-round for the younger kids.  There was popcorn, cotton candy machine and candy apples, and on Sunday the Mother’s Club was in charge of the Ten Cent Supper.

    We kids were there when the carnival people showed up to drive in the stakes and haul up the tents. We watched Koch's, our local brewery, roll kegs down the ramp into the beer tent. We picked out the teddy bears we wanted to win, looked for lost money and were there early Saturday morning as a steady parade of women from the Mother’s Club began making their way to the back of the church to the steps that led down to the church kitchen. Some arrived on foot in their slippers wearing sleeveless housedresses, their hair in pin curls, dishtowels slung across a shoulder, carrying cakes and kettles from their homes just across the street. Others came by car, emptying trunks filled with potatoes and celery and bags of groceries in preparation for the Ten Cent Supper.

     If you think, as I did the first time I heard it, that you could buy a whole supper for ten cents, it wasn't that way at all. The way it worked was that each item purchased was priced at ten cents. One pig-in-a-blanket - ten cents. One scoop of mashed potatoes - ten cents. One dinner roll - ten cents. A square of pineapple upside down cake - ten cents. A cup of coffee was ten cents, too.  It seems a pittance now but back then it was still something.

      If the weather held, the supper was always held outside in the back of the church by the door that led down to the basement where a large kitchen accommodated dozens of women checking ovens, stirring pots and washing dishes.  The food line was set out on tables alongside the sidewalk that eventually led to the basement door. That way, it wasn't far to go when toting heavy pots up the basement stairs.  There was also a huge elm tree back there, one of a long line that ran along the length of the church.  Its leafy branches spread out far enough to shade the food line and the tables on the long driveway where supper-goers sat down and ate.
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Starting at about 4pm, garbed in Better Dresses, but sensibly covered with aprons fit for "company," and hair nicely curled, four or five of the mothers stood behind the food tables, ladling out mashed potatoes, gołąbki (the pig-in-a-blanket made of rice and meat wrapped in a cabbage leaf), meatballs or sausage, trying to strike a balance between generous and not overly so. No one wanted the word to circulate that the portions were "cheesy." 

     
​     Faces flushed and hair drooping from their exertions, the steaming food and the hot July day, the women kept up a steady stream of chatter with the patrons. The physician and his wife always came, as did the local bookie, lawyers and other pillars of the church. Parishioners that could afford supper out also came. Men in short sleeved white shirts with bow ties, their wives in purple dresses and rhinestone earrings moved along the supper line choosing this or that for their plate.   The women dishing out the food swatted away flies, quelled our antics with belligerent looks and kept on serving from the never-ending supply of turkey roasters and trays that kept emerging from the basement until the last of the stragglers had eaten and the supper hour officially ended. By that time the sun was setting, the sky casting shades of purple and blue across the sky.  The Ferris wheel turned on its lights, as did the merry-go-round, its music reaching even behind the church where it remained dark, with only the street lights shining through the branches of the elms.

      Under cover of dusk, the women slipped off their pumps, rubbed their feet and checked to see if they'd run their stockings.  The women who worked in the basement wandered up to sit with them and catch some air.  They'd fill cups of coffee or one of them went to the beer tent and brought back a round of highballs.  Sitting at tables still littered with crumpled napkins and half empty birch beer glasses, they'd review the food failures and successes.  Most who sat there in the evening dusk, watching us catch lightening bugs, were already probably thinking of the work that awaited them the next day, both at home, at their cleaning jobs or at the Van Raalte silk mill.

      I didn't know all the women. Mostly, they were the mothers of the kids that attended the school. Of the women who sat there, many had been born in America, daughters of immigrants. The Depression had caught many of them on the brink of womanhood. I knew enough of their stories to know that instead of the giddiness of adolescence, many were working steadily by the time they were fourteen. And if they mourned lost opportunities, they never said.  Unlike Queen for a Day, they didn't air their troubles and would have been ashamed to rate highest on the applause meter for worst situation ever.
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    I’ve often thought that the women were much like the trains that passed through the neighborhood, looking ahead, trying to stay on course, hoping that the tracks ahead were safe. Some husbands and fathers had left during the Depression to look for work and never came back.  Some husbands were lost in the war that followed. Some came home but were never themselves again, either physically or mentally. Children had to be raised and bills had to be paid. These women waited in the dark for the bus to take them to their jobs while their elderly mother or mother-in-law got the kids off to school.  They worked at the silk mill, streaming out by the hundreds at lunch time in their pink polka dot dresses or white blouses and skirts, looking as lovely as the hollyhocks that grew along the sides of the tracks. And yet, here they were, giving their Sunday and most likely the previous day, too, to cooking and baking to contribute to their church community.  These women were my role models. They were the women that showed me how to handle what life dished out, who taught me what a woman can do. You worked hard. You prayed.  You went on.  

    When the tables were cleared and the kitchen put to rights, the ladies freshened their lipstick, straightened the seam lines on their stockings and plunged into the bright lights of the festival, heading to the raffle booths where they spent their hard-earned dollars trying to win pillowcases that they had embroidered and the doilies they had crocheted. 


Photos from St.Hedwig's Jubilee Book 1952

​Wednesday, April 4th, 1945.
           
​ The time is somewhere between 6:19am and 7:44am.  Forty B-17’s belonging to the United States Eighth Air Force leave Molesworth, England with the objective of bombing the Nazi air base in Fassburg, Germany.  On approaching their target, the carriers encounter cloud cover.  Unable to complete their original mission, the aircraft took advantage of a nearby “target of opportunity,” and drop their bombs on an armament factory located in a nearby town called Unterluss. 

On the ground, the bombs are falling on my mother.
 
Sunday, May 30, 2004.

Today, I am standing on that same ground. I have traveled thousands of miles to stand on this ground in this small town in Germany.  U.S. military aerial views from that day confirm this location.  It was the place of her gehenna – the place where she lived and starved and suffered as a slave laborer during World War II.  Today it is a soccer field.  

I try to imagine what it must have been like – to hear the drone of the approaching airplanes, the whistling of bombs falling through the air, the explosions drawing nearer and nearer and knowing that death is approaching at a rate of 150 miles an hour.  I raise my eyes to the sky.  Instead of the sky darkening with the approach of forty massive Flying Fortresses, it remains blue and cloudless and… blessedly…. empty.    “I ran out of the barracks,” I hear my mother say, “and all I could think about was your brother in the nursery and I started running and I hear bombs exploding, the earth shaking.  From the corner of my eye I could see other women running too – all of us heading in the same direction towards the nursery, towards our babies. I snatched Michael up so hard he starts screaming.  There wasn’t time to think about anything except to run, to run as fast as I could.  I knew I’d be safe if only I could reach the edge of the forest. I could hardly breathe.  My heart was pounding in terror.  If only I could reach the trees!  If only I could reach the trees!”

That evening, as Combat Mission #351 is writing up its report, my mother wanders through the forest in search of shelter. It is early spring and the night is cold.

 “Our squadron crew dropped general purpose and M17 incendiary bombs with good results on this target.  We made four passes at 12,000 feet. There was no enemy aircraft opposition….there were no casualties… returned to base between 1542 (3:42PM) and 1613 (4:19PM).”  Altogether, the Allied mission dropped a total of 461 bombs. By this time, the Allies were using napalm in their bombs.

When my mother creeps back the next day, the German armaments factory where she has been a forced laborer for over two years is completely decimated and in flames.  The barrack containing her pitiful belongings is still smoking and reduced to rubble.  The reconnaissance photographs taken three days later show 15 small buildings damaged or completely gutted. These small buildings were the pitiful living quarters of the foreign laborers – men and women from Belgium, Ukraine, Russia and Poland – who were brought to Unterlüss from their homelands against their will and forced to work,  replacing the men gone off to war and  keeping  Hitler’s German war machine moving at full throttle.  Refusal to work meant either death or a concentration camp – essentially one and the same.

On this ground that I stand on there were, indeed, casualties.  The nursery where female workers were forced to leave their babies while they worked twelve and fifteen hour shifts was completely destroyed.  “Babies and mothers lay dead, burnt, mangled and twisted….babies we held and sang to and tried to care for while their mothers worked their shift in the factory….the babies were always hungry, always crying… there weren’t any diapers to speak of except what we could tear up from our clothes… our milk dried up because of lack of food…..”  Her voice would trail off. Become silent.   I often asked her to tell me more about that day, but she never did.  “Be grateful” she’d say sadly, “that you have never known war.” 

 I was young when I first heard this story. When her hands were busy at some task and her thoughts were free to roam at will, they often traveled back to her experience in the German Reich: how she was taken from her home in Krakow by the Gestapo wearing her apron and house slippers; exposed and humiliated, filing naked past a German doctor whose cursory glance was supposed to determine her fitness for work;   locked in a freight car while Gestapo with guns and dogs prevented anyone from escaping during the long, long journey to Germany; walking 3 kilometers each morning deep into a  forest where the munitions factory was hidden to prevent detection by the Allies; burnt fingers and hands from hot metal each day; swaying from fatigue and hunger; wearing a bag of kasza tied to her waist with a piece of rope to prevent  fellow prisoners from stealing it and assuaging their own hunger; my father throwing her a few beets wrapped in a cloth over the barbed wire fence; constantly under guard by the Gestapo to prevent acts of sabotage;  wearing the obligatory letter “P” on her ragged clothes to identify her as a Pole at all times; witnessing the loss of hope, the attempts to escape,  the suicides.  And always, inevitably, if I remained quiet, she would return to that day when the Allies dropped their bombs and the babies died. Always, she came back to this particular story. It was like a photograph from her past  that she pulled out frequently and looked at over and over again,  looking for answers, looking for a clue.

That day in April when the Allies were dropping their bombs, it was the closing days of the war. Hitler continued to be in denial, but Germany was tottering to its knees.  The Allies were trying to bring it to a swift end.  Air forces were striking from above while ground troops were advancing from the east and west liberating the infamous concentration camps of Dachau, Ravensbruck, Bergen-Belsen, Nuengamme, uncovering Hitler’s annihilation of the Jews and liberating seven million forced and slave laborers- French, Belgians, Greeks, Italians, Ukrainians, Russians, Czechs, Danes, Finns, and Poles.   Their exile was over.

On April 14, 1945, ten days after the bombing by U.S. Combat Mission #351, the British Wiltshire Regiment marched into Unterlüß and liberated the town.  My mother, my father, and what remained of the four thousand  European men and women held captive as slave laborers in that small German town, were free. 

My mother is dead now. Listening to her labor those last breaths I thought about her hard life and especially the war experiences and the day the babies died.  It was right up there with the most important events in her life.  I knew this because she told it so often. When she became infirm, she’d ask me to come to lie down next to her so we would “talk” but I knew it was just a ruse to get me to listen to her talk. That’s what I thought about the night she was dying, how that event, more than any other was now etched in my mind.  From her, to me. 

Even before her death I have begun to search for information about that very small town in northeast Germany. It exists.   Libraries, research, translations from German and many months after her death my heart starts pounding with a discovery.  That discovery brings me here, to this very spot.
 There is no monument of any kind to identify the events that transpired here.  All is tranquil and serene but once, almost sixty years ago, blood was spilt on this ground. It is holy ground and no one knows it.

 From here I go to the local town cemetery in search of the other thing that I’ve traveled so far to see. In one corner of the cemetery there are three gravestones located in fairly close proximity to one another if you just follow the gravel walkway. The first gravestone is little more than a huge rock, its surface rough and unpolished.  It identifies  Russian, Polish, Serbian, Croatian, French and other “unknown” adults – victims of Hitler’s racist policy that forced them to be transported to an unknown land against their will to work, to suffer and subsequently to die, alone and without family. The gravestones do not say all these things but I know this because I have the memory, passed on to me from my mother. 

Further down I find what I have traveled these thousands of miles to see.  On another rough hewn rock lies the testimony “Here lie 34 Russian children.”  The third, located in front of an enormous evergreen, reads “Here lie 4 Italians and 23 Polish children.”  Fifty nine years later I am face to face with the external evidence of the day that lived in my mother’s memory all of her life.  My research discovered that the “57 children killed in the bombings were buried in the local town cemetery. Twelve Polish women in childbed also died in the attack.”

 I kneel and pray. 

 Later that evening I take myself to the one Catholic church in this small, predominantly Lutheran town.  I have never been here before but I know this church. My mother prayed in this church and it, too, loomed large in her memories.  Once a month, the Poles could attend mass. They were forbidden to hear mass with the local Germans and fraternizing with the other ethnic Catholics was also not allowed to prevent collaboration and possible sabotage. Everyone had their own mass. Two armed Gestapo stood at the entrance, checking that everyone who entered wore the obligatory badge: a square piece of yellow fabric with a purple letter “P” sewn to their clothes on the right breast.  Music, singing, or sermonizing was strictly verboten.   The only thing audible was the hacking, coughing, and oftentimes, the crying of the assembled individuals. The priest said mass, distributed the Holy Eucharist and everyone returned to the barracks. 

The church is tiny and the interior rather austere with old wooden benches and hard kneelers. No seat is really inconspicuous in such a small space.  A stranger would be recognized immediately no matter where they sat so I choose a bench in the middle.  I am early which gives me plenty of time to look around and watch the parishioners gather. I must be in someone’s assigned pew because first one elderly women sits next to me and then another on the other side.  I feel strangely comforted. 

The Mass is said in German but it doesn’t matter.  It is the ancient ritual of the Mass known to me from my earliest years. The priest gives a sermon which I do not understand but I catch the soothing tone of his voice and his earnestness and he smiles towards his congregation as he speaks and I wish desperately that my mother could have heard such a voice so very long ago when she was here in this church.   I can’t help myself. I start to cry.  I cry for my mother whom I miss more than I can say. I cry because she mourned the women and children that died that day all the remaining days of her life. She had no way to make peace with their deaths. I cry for a lifetime of her having to take antidepressants to deal with her sadness.   The women sit closer to me but say nothing.

 When everyone has emptied out of the church I go to the stand of vigil lights. I press money into the collection box and light all the remaining unlit candles in honor of all the unknown forced laborers buried in the cemetery but especially the mothers and babies.  They are not and never have been forgotten.   I pray for them and for my mother who lived and could not forget.   And I whisper, yes, mama, I am grateful that I have never known war.

Photo by Edward Knab, Unterluss, Germany.

The fate of hundreds of thousands of Polish women as forced laborers during WWII  is told in: Wearing the Letter P: Polish Women as Forced Laborers in Nazi Germany, 1939-1945

On Saturdays the park is very active. Walking the ring around its perimeter, I pass a black man walking his sweet little poodle. There is a Hispanic couple ahead of me pushing a baby buggy while a toddler, still short of  reaching his daddy's knee, is pretty wobbly on his feet. A man who has had a stroke struggles with his rehab and is as unsteady as the little toddler. On the grassy fields a group of girls are practicing their cheerleading routine. A couple of teenage boys are playing at quarterback and receiver. Families are streaming in.  It's  soccer Saturday and all levels of children in team uniforms are on the field. In one corner are what appear to be five or six year olds, socks bagging around their ankles, braids bouncing on their backs, running every which way.

This was the moment for me:  a family enters the sidelines of a soccer field and are greeted by a friend who has been standing there. The man shakes hands with the dad and greets the young lad who's come to play soccer by putting his hand on the young man's head and ruffles his hair in an affectionate gesture. No one really sees it because the adults are looking at each other and talking but I have nothing else to do but walk and observe.  I see the small smile of happiness on the boy. Genuine happiness. And seeing it, I'm happy, too, because he's happy and growing up in a world where he matters, where the adults, who are in charge of him,  are in a place where they are not preoccupied with what the next moment or hour or day will bring; that they are not in fear that the next minute will bring bombs or explosions, death and destruction; that this young boy can be just that: a young boy, enjoying the attention of an adult, looking forward to a sunny morning of playing soccer.

Maybe it's because I grew up with stories of the war from my mother and how awful it was. Maybe because I've read too much on how lives were lost, families separated, children abused and exploited during that war that the moment struck me so keenly. Maybe because I know this is what my parents wanted for themselves and for us, too, when they sought refuge in America: to walk freely in a park among others no matter your, or another's, color or religion; to have your kids do cartwheels on the grass, or play kickball on a dirt lot and to laugh with their friends.
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Each year on our Immigration Day, April 28, I celebrate my parents, the sacrifices and hardships they undertook so that I could be a happy kid in America, too.

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My parents were named Józef (Joseph) and Józefa (Josephine) and they shared the same Name Day, the Feast of St. Joseph, celebrated by the Catholic Church on March 19.  When I was young, more important to me than their feast day, was the fact that it came during the season of Lent and on this day the church released us from whatever worldly sacrifice we were making as part of our Lenten devotion. This meant I could eat whatever I had given up for Lent. One year it was candy in general, another year, chocolates. The Lenten season I gave up french fries was super hard and getting some french fries was all I could think about.  As I got older I became less concerned about unfasting (is there such a word?) and more interested in Joseph and Josephine, wondering what made them tick.

 Everything was always serious business with my mother. Every action was purposeful, every day a struggle.  Every bit of food was saved, every dime accounted for.  Nothing was easy, very little was fun. She never broke out in spontaneous song.  She wasn't one for teasing or a lot of laughter. She thought anyone who laughed a lot was a fool. She'd quote old Polish proverbs to us, like   "Poznasz głupiego po śmiechu jego," meaning, you can recognize an idiot by his laughter.   Or, "śmieje się jak głupi do sera,"  i.e., he laughs like an idiot [looking] at cheese.  See what I mean?  It really put the kibosh on excessive merriment when we were young  but it didn't have any long term effects on us.  If there is a lasting legacy it's that when my brothers and I get together and we're laughing hysterically about something, one of us will still pipe up and say "Stop laughing like an idiot" -  which makes us laugh even more. 

 Józef, had a dark side to him, too, but I didn't know him that well, not really. I caught him crying a few times when I was young but he never said anything, just hugged me to him. He wasn't one to talk a lot, or tell us stories or share his feelings but there was some merriment in his heart. He whistled. He'd whistle some Polish tune, light and gay, while pacing through the house in his slippers on a Sunday morning, while collecting his shaving paraphernalia, while stropping his razor. He'd pause briefly to concentrate on the sharpness of the razor's edge against his thumb and while running the razor beneath his chin and the area close to his Adam's apple but in between, when rinsing the razor between strokes, he'd resume his warbling. When he was done wiping away the last of  the lather from his face he'd break into a song that dealt with love and romance, aiming it at my mother until she glanced up from shining our shoes for church. She'd tell him to stop his nonsense, that I was too young to hear those kinds of songs and besides, it was Sunday, best to sing a hymn. Józef would look at me and wink and we'd laugh - a brief moment of closeness- and then he'd revert back to whistling his tune.

Maybe my mother did have more songs in her heart before she experienced war. Maybe my father was more garrulous, less guarded before war happened to him, too.  Maybe they'd have been more compatible, or maybe they'd have picked someone else altogether if their situation had been other than meeting when they both were suffering from exhaustion,  starvation, loneliness, fear, despair, threats of concentration camps, and where the spectre of death was not something obscure  but a reality that surrounded them every day. And in the middle of all this they have a child together.

I never heard them say "I love you" to each other.  I never saw prolonged hugs or kisses. What I saw was my father tenderly push loose strands of hair off my mother's forehead, securing the strands back into a bobby pin. What I saw was my mother carefully place a throw over my father  sleeping on the couch  so as not to wake him, so he wouldn't get chilled and admonished us to be silent, to let him sleep, let him rest from his hard job.
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 What are the feelings that tie you to someone who has helped you survive, to live to see the next day? I can't even begin to understand or explore that complexity so their relationship will always be a bit of a mystery to me.  On the approach of their feast day I think of Józef and Józefa and St. Joseph himself,  patron saint of families  and workers.  Did my parents pray to this saint? They never said. But when my father died, my mother ordered a headstone under which she, too, would later rest.  You can't see it in the photograph very well but just above both their names, she had the sculptor inscribe in small letters the words "Together Forever." 

I was at a Whole Foods Store recently, looking for some fresh dill for my boiled potatoes and ended up wandering around the meat department.  I was really only looking half heartedly at the endless array of meats until I spied a container full of chicken feet.  Uh, hello? The last time I saw chicken feet was when they were sticking out of the rosoł, the chicken soup, my mother was making for a Sunday dinner.  The time before that was when she was holding that plucked chicken by those very feet over the gas flame to singe off the last of the pin feathers that stuck to its body. And that was a long time ago, right up there with Sputnik and Russian cosmonauts and the soda fountain at Kresge's.   I took a photo.

 There was this poultry store in our town, on Third Street, called Curley's. In those early years after our arrival in America my mother often took me in hand and we'd walk to the center of town to this Curley's Poultry Market.  Inside Curley's it stank from the droppings of dozen upon dozens of live, cackling fowl in cages stacked one on top of the other. It really stunk in the summer time.

My mother would buy some fresh eggs and because she liked to kill and pluck them herself, she'd pick a live chicken to bring home.  Feet (supposedly) tied together and thrust into a paper bag, the hen traveled home securely under my mother's armpit, giving a low, disgruntled cluck every now and then.  About half a block from home, my mother's shoulder must have started to ache and meaning to shift her burden to the other armpit, she fumbled the package and it slipped out of her hands onto the sidewalk. Before she could react, the chicken, a Rhode Island Red,  bolted out of the paper bag and started sprinting up the street.  My mother starts running, hollering "Zosia! Zosia!" meaning, don't just stand there!  Kids who had been playing in the street caught on and started to give chase.  As if she had a map in her head, the chicken made a left away from our house into oncoming traffic.  I could see one of the drivers, who brought his car to a halt, hanging out the window for a better look,  laughing.  As must have been  the men watching from their stools in the gin mill, but maybe, for want of some entertainment, out they came.  Outflanked,  outmaneuvered, it was there between Czyz's Bar and Borowski's Grocery that we finally caught our chicken.

 I could kill, pluck, and disembowel a chicken if I had to. It certainly wouldn't be pretty, but I could do it.  I watched my mother do it enough times. Chicken feet will always remind be of The Day We Stopped Traffic. They also remind me of how carefully food was used up, how nothing was wasted, how even ugly, runaway chicken feet could find their way into a pot. It brings to mind listening to Polish mass from St. Stanislaus Church on Sundays and finding a chicken heart or  gizzard or neck floating next to the carrot in my bowl of chicken soup.  The rendered chicken fat is another story altogether.
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Who could imagine chicken feet making a comeback? Maybe it's right up there with new found  popularity of pierogi, which has been meriting articles in the New York Times; or sauerkraut now being touted as a healthy probiotic, a food known by my Polish ancestors for centuries.  Chicken feet are recognized now as being high in collagen, contributing to healthy hair, skin and nails. So I'm wondering if soon, in specialty stores and supermarkets,  I'll be seeing bottles of duck blood to make czarnina, AKA duck blood soup, as part of the old-made-new again cuisine.
 

By the time we gathered together around the table on Christmas Eve, the kitchen windows were completely fogged up and you could hardly see what was going on outside.  It gave me a sense of being cut off from the world and that everything that was important was now happening inside.  My mother has been cooking the entire day. The kompot (compote) of apples and raisins, made early this morning is chilling .The mushroom soup is hot. There are pots and pans all over -on the stove, on the counters, and a there's huge board with cheese pierogi waiting to be boiled and  served as desert later on. There's an overall sense of urgency to get things done by dusk.

On the cloth covered table are my mother's best dishes, the ones with the picture of wheat on it that she painstakingly collected  from boxes of Duz detergent.  I set out the silverware she bought when she redeemed  her  S & H green stamps.  In the center of the table, one of the smaller wheat plates, is the opłatek, sent to my mother from her family in Poland.  The white earthenware  pitcher that traveled from Germany, then to France and here to America, is filled with a milky hot tea.  To the table is added a platter of fried fish and then bowls of boiled potatoes and sauerkraut. My mother  covers all the hot food with lids from the cooking pots to keep the food warm and calls everyone to come and take our respective places at the table.

Standing by our chairs in our nice clothes my mother takes off her apron, so that she, too, is at her best. She slowly looks around at all of us, gathers her thoughts  together and begins our Wigilia tradition with the sign of the cross.  "W imię Ojca, Syna i Ducha Świętego. Amen."  In the name of the Father son and Ghost. Amen.    We pray together in Polish. First the Our Father,  then a Hail Mary and then we fall silent to listen to my mother give thanks for the gifts.  " O Jezu, dziękujemy Ci za wszystkie łaski i dobrodziejstwo Twoje i błagamy ci.." (O Jesus, we give you thanks for all your graces and goodness and beg of you...).  When she is finishes, we remain standing for the single, most important part of this night, of this entire Christmas season.  All of Advent, all the day's work and preparation, with all of our ancestors looking over our shoulders, it boils down to this moment: the ancient Polish custom of sharing the "opłatek"(pronounced "oh-pwah-tech"), the Christmas Eve wafer.

In its physical form, the opłatek, the Christmas Eve wafer, is a thin, white, unleavened piece of bread made from flour and water similar to the wafer used during holy communion in many Christian religions. It is considered holy, but it is not consecrated.  In earlier times it was circular in  shape but is now mostly a large or small rectangle.   The word opłatek comes from the Latin word oblatum, meaning  "to offer" or "to bring to, " because in its centuries-old history, this thin bread has always been shared with family and friends and gives it its intangible, symbolic meaning:  offering it to others  is a sign of caring, of friendship and love.  It is also a  symbol of reconciliation and forgiveness because in old Polish tradition it was an acknowledged fact that if you invited your worst enemy to Wigilia to share opłatek, to share bread, it meant that you forgave whatever differences there were between you; that you were looking for reconciliation and words need not be said. The sharing of oplatek is done with an open, accepting, loving, and also forgiving, heart.

It was always my mother that initiated the moment of sharing by taking the plate containing the opłatek off the table and asking my father to join her in the center of the kitchen.  Standing there in front of us, my mother could have said a lot of things to my father. He worked very hard, never missed work, but drank too much and often gambled  but I don't remember any recriminations, any accusations on this night.  In that moment there was only unconditional positive  regard.  Offering him the opłatek she had in her hand  she'd say "Józek, you work so hard to provide for us and I want you to know how much I appreciate that. May you be healthy and strong and be continually blessed..."  My father would accept the wafer she offered to him and then offered her a piece of his opłatek, expressing his gratitude for her housekeeping skills, for being a good mother and  raising the children.  And then it was my oldest brother Michael who approached them and then each of us in turn with both our parents and with each other - breaking and offering each other the opłatek.  
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 I always felt a bit shy and uncomfortable being praised by my parents. Most of the time they were busy correcting me and telling me how to do better but not on this night, not while sharing opłatek.  It felt good to hear the good things - that I was a help around the house, how pleased they were that I was studying hard and doing well in school and to keep at it. It felt wonderful to be recognized for the positives.  That's the power of sharing the opłatek and why the custom has endured over the centuries;  why it remains one of the most significant aspects of the Christmas season for Poles and Polish Americans; why, regardless of wars and governments and separation, it is sent to families across continents and oceans: why the custom is so cherished:  it is a symbolic  bread of love and forgiveness that nourishes the soul and spirit of all those who partake in it.

When I started first grade I didn't know a word of English. I think about this when I hear people discussing issues about the influx of immigrants in schools in a not-so-positive way and how, once, I was one of those kids.

 By the time  I started school our family had been in America for about  five months.  At home  I spoke Polish with my parents and French with my brothers.  We kids had attended school back in France where we lived before immigrating to the U.S.   Playing with other kids we heard a lot of French and pretty soon we were chattering in French, too.   I can still remember the entrance to the school, the building that held the toilets and the fountain with the water spigots in the middle of the school yard where we washed our  hands. I had to wear this required apron - really more like a white pinafore - that my mother had sewn for me, for kindergarten.  So age-wise it was right that I should start first grade that September and was enrolled at our parish school where the Felician nuns, an order that originated in Poland,  also spoke Polish.  I think the consensus  was that, placed in the same class as English-speaking kids, we'd pick up the language and the nuns would be our go-between in the Polish and English worlds.

I must have stood out a bit what with no English and pierced ears and earrings in first grade. This was 1954 when it wasn't in yet. The nun called me Sophie, the American version of Zofia.

I was assigned a desk  along the windows, third or fourth from the front. Next to me a boy had three, long, sharp yellow pencils. I thought they were beautiful but I didn't have the words to tell him.

My first book was about Dick and Jane and their dog Spot.  How I loved that reader! First I loved the pictures because I certainly couldn't read the words.  I can still see Jane losing her roller skate and the long ears on Spot.  Puff, the cat, was in there, too.  Later on educators would highly criticize this reader for being overly simplistic but I'll defend it to my last breath. My very first English words were Run, Jane, run. See, see.  We repeated the words over and over again out loud with Sister leading the way, page after page. For me it was Fun with Dick and Jane.

I felt different, not knowing the language, but I don't remember anybody being mean to me. I only remember one, what was to me at the time, a huge incident.  Again, because I didn't have the words, when I needed to go to the bathroom I'd raise my hand or, if it was quiet time, look-at-your-reader time, I'd walk up to the desk and ask Sister in Polish if I could go. OK, good to go.  But one time, she must have decided it was time I learned how to say it in English.  She stood me up in front of  the class, called everyone to attention and made me pronounce each word slowly after her: May-I-go-to-the-bathroom?  Those words were way, way ahead of anything I'd seen in Dick and Jane. I had to do it though, pronounce each word after her and felt completely stupid and humiliated and was in tears. All those eyes looking at me!   Lesson over, I went to pee and returned to my seat.  I never did see that particular topic covered in my reader  but still...it'll always be me and Dick and Jane.  BFF.

Photo: Google images

​  It was in 1851 that the first railroad, the New York and Erie, reached Dunkirk, NY. The tracks began twenty five miles upriver from Manhattan and reached its terminus in what was then a village of 800 souls. While the town never became a major hub of any kind, the railroad did bring commerce and industry and immigrants seeking work. The Germans, Italians, and Polish developed their own little communities and churches  on the lake side of the tracks. By 1902, Polish arrivals began building in the less populated region on the other side of the tracks called Górki, the hills, and by the time we arrived in 1954 another rail line called the Nickle Plate was running through that neighborhood. A lot of yards ran alongside these double tracks or backed up to it and to undeveloped land that lay further on. These homes had a little bit more property and seemed more rural, tucked in as they were back away from the main streets. One such pocket of homes in the neighborhood was called Goose Shit Alley.

For the longest time I thought it was called "Goshen" alley, which is how I heard the older Polish women pronounce it. It was said that during the rough times of the Depression, when there were no jobs and money was scarce,  the Polish women kept their families going by raising and selling geese. Coal for the winter was expensive, but they kept their families warm by making feather pillows and feather covers, what we call a pierzyna. People said there were so many geese in this neighborhood in those days you could hardly walk by without getting a shoe full.

 My mother connected with these older women of Poland. They looked like the photos of my grandmother - sturdy, aproned women with wrinkled faces framed by colorful kerchiefs tied beneath their chins. Their feet were firmly planted on American soil but many were still rooted in the way of life they had known in Poland. A small town girl herself, my mother understood geese; fattening and killing them; using the blood and gizzards to make soup; rendering the fat to make goose grease to rub on chests for bad coughs; stripping feathers to make your own pillows; making your own homemade baster from the feathers to brush an  egg wash on top of baked goods; using it all up, every bit, every time.

I suspect it was when she was homesick that my mother went to the alley, when she longed to talk to someone whose ears, like hers,  still heard  the wind rustling through the grains of rye, who knew what it was to cut wheat at harvest time with scythes and sickles, and to gather mushrooms in the forest after a rainy spell.  We'd arrive unannounced, like they did in the old country, mostly because we didn't have a phone for a long time but also because it wasn't necessary. They were always home, always working- gardening, hanging out the wash, ironing, stirring a pot of soup.  We'd sit at the kitchen table and they would talk about Poland, about pickle recipes, illness, birth and death and once, rolled down their thick flesh colored stockings to examine one another's varicose veins.   No one cared that I was bored to tears but something of those talks, of those visits, must have stuck, must have silently crept in and rooted within me, too, when I wasn't looking.

When someone in our parish died, the funeral director hung out a basket of gladiolas at the front of the funeral parlor.  In those days, before everyone had phones, it was a way of announcing that someone had died, that the deceased was ready for viewing and friends and family were welcome to  visit.  The first to see it were the guys having a beer at the bar across the street. It had these huge windows that gave them a great view of the neighborhood. Then it was word of mouth over fences or at the corner store that generally spread the news. Sometimes when we kids were pedaling through the neighborhood on our bikes and saw the basket of flowers hanging outside the parlor we'd holler out to each other "Hey, who die?" Hey, who die?" and someone would scream, "Hey, I dunno!" and we'd laugh hilariously, high on the sound of our own voices.  Sometimes, from the safe distance of the street, we'd pedal by really fast and scream it out while looking at the men at the bar but they never reacted to our crazy antics.  If my mother had gotten wind of this behavior she would've pulled out the strap, for sure. The deceased deserve our respect, she'd say, as we walked to the funeral parlor to say our final goodbyes.

 Well, who died was one of the women from Goshen alley and I remember feeling badly about the who die business.  She was a nice lady who had given me tea and always asked me how I was doing in  school.   When it was my turn at the kneeler in front of the coffin to pray for the deceased it wasn't the pink gown and ballet slippers that caught me off guard.  I'm sure she had left instructions or even picked out which outfit she wanted to be buried in. It's what practical Polish people do, so I understood  the wanting to look your very best and she did look lovely. What surprised me was the little satin pillow behind her head: so small, so smooth, so stuffed her head didn't even make a dent in it.

 Instead of saying my Eternal Rests like I should have been doing, I mentally removed the satin pillow and replaced it with one of her own making, of the softest down, covered in a white cotton pillowcase, something you could gratefully sink your head into at end of day. And then I'd turn her head into the pillow so she could smell the sun and the wind that came off Lake Erie as the pillowcase dried on her clothes line and so she could hear the honking of the geese still trapped within the fluffy feathers to help keep her company on her next big journey.

Photo taken in Poland by Sophie Hodorowicz Knab

The Amphitheater and Gershwin practice cabin at Chautauqua. Postcards by Jane E. Nelson

It's the  summer  of  1962. With an inflated inner tube across the handle bars I pedal  my  bike to the lake and  spend afternoons paddling around in the water.  After supper, along with other kids in the neighborhood we  play kick ball in an empty lot next to a railroad line that leads into the locomotive plant, or roller skate  or whatever it is we think up to amuse ourselves.  There chores as well: weed the garden, help hang out the wash, weekly ironing  and that summer I remember an endless round of helping my mother can green beans: wash the beans, trim the beans, pack the beans .  Jars and jars of beans waiting their turn for the canner. What a snooze! On those days, I waited anxiously for the mailman. It was the bright spot in a ho-hum day  if he delivered  a letter from my friend Shirley.  

I had met Shirley the previous fall, in eighth grade, my first year at public school and at graduation we promised each other to be pen pals.  She was leaving town to help her mother run their guest house called The Cooper at some place called the Chautauqua Institute.  She promised to write and I swore I'd write back.

I didn't know a thing about the Chautauqua Institute.   I didn't know the full scope of what it meant to spend summers at  a world class cultural center. I'd  never heard of it, nor been there.  I first learned of it through her letters and fell under a spell.

"Dear Sophie," she'd write, "Today as I was walking past the practice cabins, someone was playing Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2."  I had no idea who Rachmaninoff was. I knew  Chopin  because his Polonaise (in A Major, Op.40 No.1 Military, I was to learn later) was  the opening number for the radio program we listened to every Sunday  but  I'd never  heard of Rachmaninoff.  Just to say the name was something exotic.

Another day, another  letter : "Dear Sophie, the amphitheater was packed tonight. Mischa Mischkoff
performed Brahms. Wish you were here."  Then, as a way of bridging the miles between us, she copied out the entire program for my perusal and edification. I didn't even know what an amphitheater was and, truly, I wished I was there, too,  but I had about as much chance of getting to Chautauqua as Chekhov's Three Sisters, stuck in the country, had of seeing the bright lights of Moscow.   We didn't even own a car and even if we had I doubt  my mother would have spent the money on gas to satisfy my longing for a glimpse of an amphitheater.   As the saying goes: she had other fish to fry.

Writing back was hard work for me. It's difficult to dress up canning green beans.  What do you say?  They're a lovely shade of green? Can't wait to taste them in the winter? It certainly lacked glamour but write back I did because I wanted her to write back, to hear more magical names.

At dusk , our family sits around on the front porch, waiting for the house to cool down. My parents are happy to just sit. We  kids play Monopoly or I listen to my brothers trying to outdo each other in naming the make and year of the car coming down the road. Sometimes I'm enchanted by the golden, pin-point flashes of the fireflies and try to capture their glow in one of the (amazingly) empty canning jars from the kitchen. Soon, another day of that summer is gone.

You can go to the Chautauqua  Institute and work on your novel like Kurt Vonnegut( I wouldn't know where to begin),  or write a new musical score like George Gershwin( I know a treble clef when I see one), or scribble in your journal which is something I could and did do years later.

"Dear Shirley, Chautauqua is as wonderful as you described it all those years ago. Why did you never mention that cars aren't allowed on the grounds?" 

 "Dear Shirley, tonight the amphitheater was packed. The symphony played Mahler's 9th."

 "Dear Shirley, I can't remember. Did you ever mentioned that the police here ride bicycles? Verdi's La Traviatta was wonderful last night. Wish you were here...miss you. "