Poland Remembered ... and my Father |
Monday Mar 12 2007
By Stu Whitley
Bio
there's a fading, sepia photograph of me, shipboard, clutching my mother's hand
immigrants to a new life, worlds separated by an ocean from all that was then known
taking seven days to cross. now holding the photograph close, it's not easy
to discern what I was thinking, for my expression - fast frozen these many years
tells nothing of the wonder, edged with fear that I surely then must have felt,
for all that was familiar, precious and true to me was about to be surrendered
in exchange for promises of fresh beginnings at journey's end. I arrived, dislocated
in a new life of fearsome opportunity, where anything was possible
some time ago, not long, it seems, though no photograph records it
I stood firmly clutching the hand of what I believed to be certain
yet all that seems sure rarely is, for we cannot know with perfect clarity
all that lies mysteriously beyond the oceans we choose to cross
it's only now I realize the full extent to which it can happen,
that I can be an immigrant once more in a dislocating new world;
a world that has journeyed to me, and anything becomes possible again
My father was born a Pole. I have no recollection of what point in my life I realized this, but for all my adult years, this simple fact had no significance for me. After all, the name ‘Whitley’ is a British one, and I was born, as were my brothers, in Glamorgan County, Wales. Sometime after our emigration to Canada, I recall my fleeting interest as a young teenager when my father showed us official-looking documents advising a name change in consequence of his activities with the ZWZ (the union for armed struggle, the Polish Resistance) against Stalin’s occupation of eastern Poland. The Russians were demanding repatriation of all Poles who had been engaged in the war, but it was an open secret that all those turned over to them were immediately deported to the Siberian gulags. Until liberation in 1989, my father would never consider returning for a visit. Now on his third trip at age 82, he was determined to have my brother and I accompany him so that we might have some sense of our roots on a side of our family hitherto closed to us.
It is a function of aging, I think, that we feel it important that subsequent generations understand the realities that have forged our view of the world. We have ample evidence of George Santayana’s famous observation that a failure to appreciate the lessons of history dooms the future to repeat them. The German philosopher of history Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel doubted our capacity to find out. “Peoples and governments,” he wrote, “never have learned anything from history or acted on principles deduced from it.” But we have to try, for history defines who we are.
The visitor’s eye sees the world differently than an indigenous view. The mind’s eye recalls things more different still, for what is retained in the memory’s repository is at best an uncertain thing. Reflecting on my visit to Poland, I find that the graveyards linger in my recollections. What arrests the eye about these places in Poland is their exuberant life: these are not the dolorous places we know in North America.
First, there are the flowers. Not a grave is overlooked: each has its overwhelming abundance of fresh-cut flowers and votive candle holders. Military graves – and sadly for Poland, there are a lot of them – are adorned with a sleeve of red and white, the heraldic colours of Poland. People are busy attending to graves, carrying away wilting blossoms, sweeping, or sitting quietly in contemplation. On one occasion, I saw a group of men seated around a tomb, eating and engaging with each other in the presence of the departed as if he was present in the temporal sense. Later, I was told that this was a custom of the Roma.
To be continued next week...
Written by eldering at Learning
Tagged with: aging generations grave hegel poland
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