Imperilled

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Until she was in her eighties, my Polish mother never spoke of her 1940s wartime experiences. Occasionally there would be a reference to some distant part of the world far removed from her origins which she never embellished and which left me perplexed.

There was never any mention of relatives, apart from an ancient Uncle in Western Poland, emigrating to America in 1911, long before she was born. When asked why I hadn’t any grandparents, like all the other kids, she would simply say, ‘They died during the war.’ I just assumed they buried them in eastern Poland where they lived before war broke out; like most teenagers, my past was not at the forefront of my priorities, and I never pried.

When she moved in with us, she began reminiscing about her life as a girl. Deep wonderings in uncoordinated fragments emerged, which meandered from here to there and made no sense.

When I delved further, an astounding story emerged, delivered in snippets, according to her flashes of memory. I scribbled down everything in an exercise book, intending later to do something with this jumble of reminiscences. Sometimes, she would grab the biro and draw a shaky map or correct my spelling of a place visited.

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