From the bloodlands to the Polish Children’s Camp in Pahiatua, I went looking for Grandma Stefania.
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A shroud is a length of cloth wrapped around a body before burial; a thing that envelops or obscures, so as to conceal from view.
I was baptised when I was seven, embarrassingly later than my peers. It was the age where I felt most porous to the stories told to me about me. I was fat, I was ugly, I had no father, my mother was a whore, my eyes were too big. In the photo I bow my head to the priest pouring water on my head; the water falls like a veil. I wear a velour pink hoodie and a white dress, my hair pulled tautly into two braids. To be baptised is to be cleansed of original sin, meaning – we came to this world already dirty.
My siblings and I all attended a Catholic primary school, at my father’s request. My father was Catholic because his mother, my grandma Stefania, was. When my mama left my father, my siblings and I almost completely lost connection to our paternal side; it wasn’t safe. We left the East of the river to live on the West, and we never went back.
Grandma Stefania was a complicated character, I am told. The only memory I have of her is either mine or from a photograph: her feeding me chocolate cake in a high chair. I was only three when she died. What I know of grandma is made of fractures, remembered by my siblings and mama. Grandma could play piano. Grandma liked to feed people. Grandma was a hoarder; she had multiple chest freezers full of frozen meals, stacks of toilet paper, nappies, clothes, anything you could think of. Grandad would run away from Grandma; she treated him like a dog. Grandma was a staunch Catholic. Grandma’s parents died when she was young. Grandma had a tattoo on the side of one of her wrists; a collection of numbers. Grandma travelled in cattle wagons. Grandma never found her brother.
I turn the rosary beads around and around my wrist. Hail Mary, full of grace. Hail Mary, full of grace. Hail Mary, full of –
I was 11 and sitting on the carpet at my rural Manawatū school when I first heard about the Holocaust. On the overhead projector was a black and white photo of a mound of bodies, piled like rubbish. Next one: heads sticking out of wooden bunks, gaunt, haunted. Next: a pile of teeth with gold fillings, like the one on the side of my Poppa’s mouth when he laughed, but these ones not connected to a body; bodies. A feeling began to reside in me: how come no one ever told me this happened until now? The world I thought existed wasn’t real.
In high school we were asked to do a research project on a family member. I chose Grandma Stefania. My mama suggested I read a book called Krystyna’s Story (1992), because she remembered Grandma saying that Krystyna Ogonowska was a childhood friend of hers, and they had a similar journey to Aotearoa, New Zealand. The book was written by Krystyna’s daughter, Halina Ogonowska-Coates, who like me had only ever known fragments of her mother’s story.
One of the questions I presented to my class in response to this book was – Is it OK to resurface something someone wants to bury?
At the time, we lived in a house that had ghosts. I overheard my mama telling a friend she’d felt something follow her up the stairs. The farmer who died here? I feared if I went too far into my inquiry a ghost would also follow me. I guess it already was.
My teacher asked me if Grandma was Jewish. I said we always knew her as Catholic, so I couldn’t imagine she was. She suggested I call the New Zealand Jewish Archive and ask. When I called, I fumbled my way through my family history, trying to explain the blanks in my knowledge of my father’s side. When I told him Grandma’s name, there was a long pause while he looked in his records. No, she is not here. I thanked him, feeling embarrassed for calling. Wait, he said, with a last name like that, she could have been.
There are places where the shroud is thin – the cloth blowing in the wind – where you get so close you can almost see what’s behind it. Heaven and earth, the Celtic saying goes, are only three feet apart. Are you there, Grandma?
My family is from the bloodlands: a term Yale historian Timothy Snyder coined for the territory that lies between central Poland and the Russian border, covering eastern Poland, Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltic states. According to Snyder’s calculations in his book Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, between 1930 and 1945 this was where 14 million innocent human beings (Jewish and non-Jewish) were murdered.
Both of Stefania’s parents (my great-grandparents) died sometime between their forced deportation from our homelands and their long journey to Siberian camps via cattle wagons. We do not know how they died or where their bodies are.
In most of the camps or Gulag, Polish prisoners were made to work regardless of their age or physical condition – refusal would result in execution. The work included timber logging, mining, railroad and canal building. Along with harsh weather, malnutrition and no medical care, large numbers of people died everyday.
In 1941, Germany’s invasion of the USSR prompted Joseph Stalin to become an ally with Great Britain and the United States and evacuate Polish prisoners and send them to Iran, Lebanon and Palestine. Only 120,000 were evacuated before mass graves of thousands of Polish officers, massacred by Soviet secret police, were discovered in the Katyn Forest. The USSR denied responsibility.
Those sent to Iran entered through the port of Anzali, on the southern coast of the Caspian Sea. Here 2,500 refugees were accepted per day. They were received with immense hospitality. It should be noted that today, however, Poland has shut the door on the influx of refugees travelling in the opposite direction.
Polish orphans in Anzali were sent on to orphanages in Isfahan and Mashhad. They were weak from their years in the camps, suffering from malaria, typhus, fevers, respiratory illnesses, and diseases caused by starvation. Desperate for food after starving for so long, refugees ate as much as they could. Several hundred Poles, mostly children, died shortly after arriving in Iran from acute dysentery caused by overeating.
I read that and think of grandma’s love of feeding people. Her chest freezers.
From 1942, other countries started receiving Polish refugees, including India, Uganda, Kenya, Tanganyika, South Africa, Mexico and Aotearoa, New Zealand.
On September 17, 2021, Russia’s Foreign Ministry marked the 82nd anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Poland with a Twitter post describing it as a “campaign of liberation”, stating that “…peoples of Western Belorussia and Western Ukraine greeted the Soviet soldiers with rejoicing”.
Similar suggested words to “shroud” are: screen, cloud, disguise, hide.
Mama thinks Grandma was between six and 10 years old when she arrived on the shore of Te-Whanganui-a-tara on 1 November 1944, one of 733 Polish orphans. In the 1967 documentary The Story of Seven Hundred Polish Children, welcoming crowds on the waterfront are joyous, waving and smiling, while the children and 102 adults look back startled, blank. They were transported to an old prisoner of war camp in Pahīatua, where they were told they could stay until the end of the war. The camp had vegetable gardens, a chapel, a recreation hall, a dining hall, a library, a gymnasium and a hospital.
A grotto was erected near the camp’s boundary, dedicated to Our Lady of Lourdes. It was built of stones carried from the nearby river by the children.
Our Lady of Lourdes; Saint Mary; Holy Mary; Mother Mary; Virgin Mary; there is a recording of a ceremony in which two New Zealanders, Sylvia Wilson and Sylvia Chapman, gifted the orphans a copy of a bas-relief of Saint Mary carved in secret on a piece of wood by a Polish soldier in the USSR prison of Kozielsk in 1940. During the ceremony the chapel’s priest Fr Michał said, It is like the children are meeting a mother in exile.
There were more than 12 children at the camp who were orphans with no brothers or sisters. These children did not even know their surnames or where and when they were born. Grandma was one of them: she lost her one sibling, a brother, between evacuating the USSR camps and arriving in New Zealand. Unsure, therefore, whether these orphans had been baptised, Fr Michał gave them a special “provisional baptism”, so that they could be included with the other children who were attending first confession and communion.
If – there are a lot of ifs – Grandma, my great uncle, great grandma and great grandpa were Jewish, does that mean that Grandma was forced to become Catholic while in the children’s camp? At such a young age, did she recognise that to identify as Jewish was unsafe? Is this why she was such a staunch Catholic?
I guess the questions themselves are a shroud.
With her pale skin and blue eyes, Grandma became like any other Catholic pākehā living in Aotearoa. She married, moved to my grandfather’s family farm, had two children, ran the farmhouse and went to church on Sundays. She lived with a certain ease of assimilation due to her physical appearance. Mama says she does not remember her ever practising any Polish traditions.
In her essay Becoming Polish New Zealanders, Jozef Zawada writes:
Passing on their culture to the children is of utmost importance to all refugees and exiles, and is seen as a continuation of their fight against a regime which has exiled them.
In the absence of my connection to Polish culture, I find myself making gołąbki and sauerkraut; underlining character descriptions in Polish author Olga Tokarczuk’s semi-fictitious novels, as if they were clues to myself.
My sister is still in contact with my father. She said she could ask him questions and pretend they were hers. Where was Grandma born? I wanted to point to a place; of origin, of loss. The next day she sent a photo of two strangers. These are our great-grandparents, they were both doctors. Dad says they were murdered by the Soviets, so was his uncle. Maybe buried in Russia in a mass grave. The woman looks like me. She is not smiling. They were born in Lwow, Poland now Lviv, Ukraine. It was bombed last year. I google Lviv and see images of castles, snow, angels perched on gothic churches, a clock tower, and then a horizon on fire, an apartment block collapsed to its middle, cars concave and windows shattered.
I look like her, don’t I? When I show my mama the photo of my great-grandmother, my mama’s face is unemotional. She continues making a cup of tea. You look more like Eva, she says. Eva is my mama’s grandmother. I think she is trying to tell me that in our family we have chosen to bury certain things (my father). Shroud translated to Polish is osłona, also meaning: cover, guard, shield, protection. Mama pulls the fabric over me.
In pictures of Saint Mary, she is always wearing a piece of blue fabric draped over her head and shoulders. It is a warm, soft blue, almost lavender. On the psychology of colour and emotion, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote in his 1810 book The Theory of Colours:
We love to contemplate blue, not because it advances to us, but because it draws us after it.
Mary is mythological. All that we have of her are dramatic stories and iconographic images, holding her child, Jesus. Who was she really? How did she look when she was walking? What did her voice sound like in the morning?
A white marble monolith was unveiled on 22 February 1975 at the site of the Polish Children’s Camp in Pahiatua. Its shadow at midday represents a mother holding a child.