Visiting Poland

I meet Helena in the shifting morning shadows of Krakow's Main Square. The lingering notes from the hourly trumpet high above in the rafters of St. Mary's Basilica have just announced the top of the hour moments before. Helena's warm features were exactly as I had remembered them when I had met her for the first time at my grandmother's funeral in Chicago. She was my father's cousin that we had never met until that day. Now a year later, I had planned a trip to Poland on a whim and she happened to be visiting her family in the same village where my grandmother had grown up and she insisted on showing me around.

We make our way to the imposing shopping mall that doubles as the main transportation hub of the city. Not long after the bus pulls out of the terminal, the urban landscape begins to soften with lime green hillsides and the occasional horse or cow. The low hum of the bus motor breaks the silence, as we slowly glide alone the paved road, passing advertisements for farm equipment in large block letters, all in a foreign language to me.

The sky is various hues of gray as we pull up to a small stretch of dusty shops and a weathered sign that reads “Iwanowice”. Helena tucks her short-cropped hair neatly under a babushka, almost identical to the one that my grandmother used to protect her perm during summer storms. She leads me around the small town, pointing out the local landmarks: the church where my grandmother attended Sunday mass; the local cemetery high on a hill, where I pieced together the family tree and had the disorienting experience of recognizing my name on a handful of gravestones hundreds of miles from my home, in a town I could barely pronounce.

At the edge of a row of houses, a field opens up with slender grass up to my knees and a stream silently passing by on the periphery. A simple two-story house comes into view, my grandmother’s childhood home. A few solitary chickens strut around an enclosed yard next to the rusted front gate. A moment later, the door opens and a heavy-set woman in a bright blue sweater greets me with a strong embrace. I step back to look at my grandmother’s stepsister and instantly see the resemblance in her watery blue eyes.

More than half a century ago my grandmother was forced to leave her town to work in Germany during World War Two, but now I have come back on my own free will and catch tiny glimpses of her everywhere. It is as if she had never left.