Out in the open

Ciocia Janka and Ciocia Ania greeting me at the train station.

This weekend, I packed my bag and went to visit my Ciocia (Aunt) Ania and Wujek (Uncle) Bolek who live in Wroclaw. Sitting on train on the way there, I tried to remember the last time I had seen them. I could not. So then I tried to think about everything I knew about them. I knew that Ania is my dad's older sister. I knew that Ania and Bolek were in their 70's and have been married and living in Wroclaw for a long time. Multiple people have told me that Bolek is a "good man." I also knew that Wroclaw is a city entrenched with my family history because my dad, aunts and grandmother lived there for a long time before coming to the United States.

The truth is, I don't know much about my father's family. My parents divorced when I was young, and I am not very close with my father. This makes my vision of him, his family and our history something of a fuzzy picture for me. There are bits and pieces, places and faces that I know. But often times I am unsure whether my knowledge is based on fact, or just some memory based on folklore or a dream. Often times, it is a picture that I avoid and ignore; as if it is something I have shoved inside a drawer to be lost and forgotten.

I was nervous about the trip. I was nervous because I haven't seen these people in years. I was nervous because these relatives only spoke Polish which meant that I had to communicate with them in my broken Polish. And most of all I was nervous because I knew my visit would open up that drawer.

It was Ciocia Ania who opened it.

She, her son (my cousin) Jarek and my other Ciocia Janka, who currently lives in the United States and also visiting Poland, greeted me at the train station. Ania hugged me so tightly, I thought I would break.

"I wouldn't have recognized you," she said, with a big smile and watery eyes, "You have grown up so much since I last saw you. Yvonne in Wroclaw. I can't believe it."

When I got to the apartment, I met Bolek and we had lunch and all spoke in Polish rather awkwardly about my trip thus far, my plans and circumstances. And that is when Ciocia Ania literally opened a drawer and pulled out a stack of letters. She pulled one out and handed it to me. It was a happy birthday card with a picture of Strawberry Shortcake. Inside in curly cursive was written in Polish, "We have a girl. She was born October 5, 11:45pm." It was dated 1978.

The letter was about me, and it was written by my grandma. I was so touched that Ania had saved the card, I started to cry. As much as I had always tried keep the drawer shut, I couldn't deny it. This was my family.

I wanted to know more, but it was so hard with the language barrier. I spoke Polish the entire time, not well, but better than I ever did. I would ask questions about my family and point to pictures in the albums we looked through. The photo albums, like my memories, were filled with a disorderly mixture of images old and new. Pictures taken decades apart would inexplicably sit next to each other. I hoped that my questions and pictures would provoke long in-depth discussions about my family history, but usually they only brought simple explanations. Once in a while, someone would go off an a tangent and say something--like when Ania mentioned that my grandmother always wore the same shirt or when Bolek remarked that my father was a good boy when he was young. I would grab a hold of these comments as if I were an archaeologist looking anything tangible, even a sentence, to prove some kind of fact or figure in my memory. I wanted to know everything, anything.

At one point I asked Ciocia Janka why my family decided to move to Wroclaw from Ukraine. And she told me that after their father died, it was incredibly hard in Ukraine. They had no money and were hungry all the time, so they decided to move. She started to tear up. "Even just remembering it now makes me sad" she said, pointing to her eyes.

With her words, for a brief moment, the picture I have of my dad and my family past came into a crisp focus, so bright and vivid was it that it also brought tears to my eyes. I already knew that my family was poor, and I knew that they had gone hungry, however, to see her pain about it all these years later, out in the open, surprised me. I wanted to know more about it. I wanted to know what it felt like, what their days were like, how they managed. However, the barrier in telling me went beyond the language. Janka perhaps had a drawer of her own.

"Ciocia, I am sad," I said, in Polish. "Because I know nothing and that is why I cry." She hugged me.

"How could you know? No one has told you." But she didn't tell me more, and I didn't expect her to.

My birth announcement.