Giant Dwarf vs Poland, Part III: Mental Preparation

Let’s start way back, a little more than a century ago when my great-grandparents fled persecution and pogroms, and left their native countries of what is now Poland, Lithuania, the Ukraine, and Austria and headed to the United States for promises of what would literally become a better - and safer - life.

My mother’s grandmother Florence moved here in the early part of the 20th century, with her siblings to follow.  One of her brothers returned to Bialystok and joined his parents and another sibling who had not emigrated.  They all perished in the Holocaust.

My maternal grandmother was born in 1919 and her aunt Gertrude, who was maybe only a few years older than she (we never knew her exact age) arrived in the US several years later.  Because Aunt Gertrude was the youngest of my great-grandmother’s siblings, we all grew up knowing her quite well and spending a lot of time with her.

Gertrude lived in New York City her entire adult life and never married.  She was a garment worker from an early age and was a life-long member of the ILGWU.  She lived in union co-op housing, in a tiny apartment on 28th Street and Broadway, and most of my generation remember trips to the City where we all slept in her studio apartment on the sofa bed or the floor, while Gertrude slept on her day bed.

Gertrude retained her thick Polish accent,  but, as far as I know, she never actually spoke Polish in the United States.  She was fluent and literate in Polish, Yiddish and English and wrote to mysterious relatives in the Hebrew lettering of Yiddish.  

Gertrude remained afraid of Poles her entire life, even in the melting pot of New York City.  She had a basic (and likely self-protective) mistrust and fear of non-Jews.  When I lived in the City for a few months in 1988, I initially stayed with her for a couple of weeks until I found my own housing.  When my rather obvious WASP-y friend came to meet me so I could spend the night with her and her family on the upper Westside, my aunt profusely thanked them for “taking me in” and showed undue deference to my college friend in what later seemed a proactive gesture to both protect my safety and to compliment them on being open to accepting an “other.”

So with this history, you can only imagine how NOT excited I was to go to Poland.  In my frame of reference, this is the country that drove my people out and whomever was left was murdered.  I never felt any national alliance with Poland, never felt that Poles would consider me Polish.  Only once did I think about going to Poland, during my senior year in college when I was learning about contemporary Polish theatre and thought that this was the most exciting theatre at that time.  I talked to my grandmother about this and her response was a crisp, determined "you'll go to Poland over my dead body."  (By the way, she was right....she died almost 3 years ago.)

But my mom really wanted to go and for wont of a less expensive and more appropriate birthday gift, her children were willing to indulge her.  And, to our surprise, my father agreed to go as well.

For months I would tell people that I was going to Poland and their response was always either a hesitant "ooookay....." or an outright "why?"  Hence, the first two parts of this blog post. 

I honestly didn't know how to prepare for this trip.  I thought that it would be brutally hot, but it wasn't, actually.  Maybe we got lucky, maybe I just assumed that the weather would be like the East Coast in August.  I thought we'd experience outright anti-Semitism, but we didn't.  The only hate speech we heard was from some douchebag British guy on our last night, drunkenly trying to tell us how awful America was but not quite getting to the actual reasons (which we already know anyway). 

I did expect, however, to feel haunted.  And that was definitely the case.  This was a country teeming with ghosts.