My assumptions about Janusz Markowicz, about his not being directly affected by the war, could not have been more wrong. Janusz is six years younger than me, which I had mistakenly concluded to mean that he was too young to experience the war in any meaningful way. But Janusz was born and spent his childhood in Poland, so his experience of the war was, in fact, much more personal and profound than my own.
Janusz was seven when Germany invaded Poland on the first day of September, 1939. It was the first thrust of the war in Europe. Nicholas and I were, at the time, blithely riding our bikes around Sheboygan, seeing who could go faster on a downhill straightaway and who could pedal the furthest without holding onto the handlebars, talking about which girls we would like to kiss. Europe and the possibility of war were about as far from our thoughts as adulthood.
Janusz’s parents were Catholic, and of course they were raising their only child in the Catholic faith, but the family stopped openly worshipping soon after the invasion, when the Nazis began marching into churches and hauling priests away. This is part of the story that comes out in bits and pieces, over several days, after things between Janusz and me begin to change. Janusz’s parents believed that their son, their only child, was old enough to know exactly what was happening to their neighbors in Lublin, the town where Markowiczes had lived for seven generations. So they talked, without the usual censorship of adulthood, in the privacy of their home. They talked about the strange and steady disappearance of Jewish families across the city, including a couple who lived in their block of apartment houses and with whom the Markowiczes had become close. It shamed Janusz’ father, witnessing this exodus, to realize that he had remained a quiet observer, and it shamed him that the family had abruptly stopped attending mass. But he knew that whatever happened to the Jews would happen eventually to the Catholics, and others.
After the war, says Janusz, I heard someone reading a poem: First they came for the trade unionists. Then they came for the Jews. I thought about my father. He was not a coward. Far from it. In the end, he was one of the bravest people I have ever known. But that poem is not about evil, and I don’t think it’s about cowardice. Not really. It’s about silence. There was such an overwhelming silence in Lublin, after the German invasion. Silence can be sinister. And empowering. It can persuade the powerful people that the powerless ones don’t care. Or that they don’t care enough to speak up. And if no one is speaking up, it’s easy enough for the powerful to convince themselves that they are doing the right and necessary thing, and that they are obliged to carry on until it’s done.
In the spring of 1940, Janusz’s father was approached about joining the Secret Polish Army. The group was the first important underground resistance organization in Poland and one of the first in all of occupied Europe. It had been created in the fall of 1939 by several Polish military offices who had fought against the invading German army, including a platoon commander named Witold Pilecki who would become one of Mr. Markowicz’s great heroes and inspirations. The Secret Polish Army began operating in Warsaw, but by 1940 it was recruiting men like Mr. Markowicz in cities like Lublin.
I was now eight years old, which sounds very young. But the children in Poland, in 1940, grew up very fast, and I knew without being told that my childhood was over. I was trusted with secrets that would ordinarily have been matters for adults only. By the summer, I knew what the Nazi party was, and what the Secret Polish Army was, and I knew that my father had decided that he would no longer sit on the sidelines while his neighbors were being grabbed in the middle of the night, taken away and never seen again. My mother, being a wife and a mother, was conflicted about it. But, in her heart, she agreed that everyone had to do their part. She was doing her part by keeping me safe, and my father was doing his part through the resistance.
Janusz’s father had heard stories about Witold Pilecki, and he finally met the man during one of the local meetings of the Secret Polish Army in the late summer of 1940. Standing in front of the group, Pilecki talked about an army barracks in southern Poland, just west of Krakow, which had been converted into an internment camp where Polish citizens and other supposed enemies of the German state were being held, possibly tortured, some of them possibly executed. The place was called Auschwitz. The stories seemed unbelievable to Janusz’s father. Even more unbelievable was what Witold Pilecki was proposing to do. He would allow himself to be arrested, he told the group, and sent to Auschwitz. He would infiltrate the camp, talk to the prisoners, learn the truth about Auschwitz, report back to the world.
It all seemed very naïve to my father. It also seemed like the ultimate suicide mission. If unspeakable things were happening inside the camp, if there were prisoners inside who were desperate to break out, as the group believed, why on earth would anyone in his right mind want to break in? But Pilecki thought it was worth the risk, and he believed that he was the man who could do it. There was no point in arguing. And that’s exactly what he did. He allowed himself to be arrested and taken to Auschwitz and given a prisoner number. And somehow, Pilecki not only survived, he managed to create an underground organization inside the camp, just as he had done with the Secret Polish Army. His letters were smuggled out, and they were some of the first reports to the world on how prisoners were being exterminated through systematic torture and starvation. Extermination. From inside Auschwitz, Witold Pilecki informed the world that the Nazis had built an extermination camp on Polish soil. He was an inspiration to my father, and to many others. For better or worse.
Janusz’s father left the family in the spring of 1941. Janusz’s mother told her son that his father had left to keep his family safe, that the German police were infiltrating the Secret Polish Army, identifying its leaders, executing them, arresting their families and confiscating their homes. Mr. Markowicz left in the early morning hours of May 3, the day after his son’s ninth birthday. He had stayed to celebrate with his wife and son. The day had had the appearance of a normal, happy occasion. Chocolate cake with chocolate frosting, music on the Victrola, two gifts for Janusz to unwrap: a diary and a fountain pen just like his father’s. Before he left the house, Mr. Markowicz crept into his son’s room and kissed Janusz on the forehead. Janusz woke, sat up and asked if it was time for him to get up. His father kissed him again and told him to go back to sleep and to dream sweet dreams. Then he left the house, as if this was an ordinary day and he was on his way to work. It was the last time Janusz would ever see his father.
Over the following year, other resistance groups sprung up across Poland, eventually coalescing into what called itself simply the Home Army. There were occasional reports of sabotage – German supply trains being derailed, trucks being blown up, German police officers being killed by snipers – with Janusz imagining his father’s hand in all of it…although members of the Home Army were being constantly hunted down and executed, so it was impossible to know for certain whether or not Mr. Markowicz was even alive. Inside Auschwitz, Witold Pilecki had managed to survive, and he was continuing to perpetuate his own undercover campaign of defiance. By the end of the year, he had fashioned a working radio out of smuggled parts, and he was broadcasting messages about the numbers of arriving prisoners, conditions inside the camp, starvations and torture and executions. If the world had doubted Germany’s true intentions, Pilecki was making sure it knew exactly what was happening, so there could be no excuses for looking away.
Before he left, my father had been working in an insurance agency. The job didn’t pay a lot, but it was enough to support his family. After, my mother received an occasional envelope with a few banknotes inside. She told me that the money was from my father, but it could have just been money that the Home Army raised and sent to the families that had been left fatherless, either temporarily or permanently. In any case, the money wasn’t enough to pay the bills, so my mother had to take a job at a laundry. The work left her exhausted at the end of the day, but she never let me see her discouraged. There were women in Lublin who were involved along with the men in the resistance. My mother was friends with one woman who worked as a courier, carrying messages among the divisions of the Home Army. It was dangerous work, and if my mother did not have me to worry about, I suspect that she might have enlisted. Done her part to support the resistance. But I was her main concern. The survival on her only child.
Despite keeping her distance from the activities of the Home Army, Janusz’s mother was arrested in the early spring of 1943 for her husband’s suspected involvement in the Polish resistance movement. The arrest occurred at the laundry where Mrs. Markowicz was working. The police transported her directly to the train station, where she was transferred onto a train that took her south to Auschwitz. When Janusz came home from school, one of his mother’s coworkers from the laundry was standing on the apartment steps, waiting to tell him what had happened. Janusz would never see his mother again. It would be much later before he would learn where his mother had been taken. He had wondered if she had met Witold Pilecki, and what she might have said to him – this man who had inspired so many dangerous acts against the German occupiers by people like her husband. She must have felt conflicted, Janusz’s mother. No one had sacrificed more for the cause of Polish freedom than Witold Pilecki. But Mrs. Markowicz had also sacrificed. She had lost her husband to the movement, and now she and her son were separated. And along with everyone else inside the camp, Janusz’s mother stood to lose so much more.
Janusz would later learn that, if his mother’s path had crossed with Witold Pilecki’s, the acquaintance would have been brief. On a night in late April, Pilecki and two other prisoners overpowered a guard, cut the alarm wires, and escaped camp, heading east on foot. The men carried stolen German documents with them – more evidence of Nazi crimes inside Auschwitz, which the world would continue to ignore. They were pursued and hunted by German soldiers who came close enough to shoot and wound Pikecki, but they were aided in their flight by local sympathizers, and they eventually found their way to safety.
The woman from the laundry…she and my mother had become close, and she brought me back to her house. But she and her husband had four children, and I knew that they could not keep me, especially knowing that I was the child of two suspected enemies of the German state. So at the age of eleven, I was placed in a Catholic orphanage in Lublin. There is not much to say about living in a Polish orphanage during the war. One of the truly strange aspects of the place was that many, maybe most, of the children housed in the orphanage were not orphans at all. We were simply children with parents who had been taken away and were living elsewhere. At least those who had escaped execution. The nuns were kind to the children, for the most part. Some of them seemed to resent all of these parentless older boys and girls who were suddenly showing up on their doorstep, but they couldn’t blame the children and of course there was no accusing the state. So they swallowed their resentment as best they could, and they went about their work. The food was scarce, and whenever a new child arrived it forced the nuns to ration supplies even more. Everyone was hungry all the time, but the nuns reminded us that there were boys and girls suffering much more than we were, so we should say a prayer of thanks and should not complain. I made friends. You spend every day shoulder-to-shoulder with other boys, you sleep every night in cots close enough that you can reach out and touch the boy on either side of you, you make friends. But living in an orphanage, you learn quickly not to become too close to another child. We all had our stories, but we had our defenses as well.
Janusz and the others, especially the older children, managed to collect scraps of news about the war. The orphanage was as isolated from the outside world as it could be, but news found its way in, and it circulated quietly. Discussing the war, and especially discussing the resistance, seemed like dangerous business to Janusz and his friends. But the German police had bigger things than Polish orphans to worry about, so Janusz felt emboldened. In January of 1944, one of Janusz’s friends began a whispering campaign, reporting that Germany was finally losing its grip on Poland, and perhaps beginning to lose the war. The Red Army was advancing from the east. People in Poland tended to be suspicious about Russian intentions, but Russia was one of the Allied forces, and it had suffered terrible losses in the war. If it was the Red Army that would help Poland oust its Germany occupiers, why would anyone complain? You make friends where you can, and when you need them.
Of course, Russia was interested in Russia. Russia will always be interested in Russia, and to hell with the rest of the world. An ally is only an ally as long as it serves your own interests. Then it can be discarded. We thought we were fighting on the same side. Poland thought the Red Army had come to help liberate us. But just like the Nazis, they came to conquer us. Or to kill those of us who refused to be conquered. Instead of attacking the German Army, Russian soldiers had now begun attacking the Polish soldiers who were supposed to be their comrades, giving them the choice of either joining the Red Army or being marched off to Russian labor camps. We Poles, we were naïve. We thought that Josef Stalin was morally superior to Adolph Hitler. But he was no better. When it was all over – the war, the betrayal – Poland had lost more than five million of its citizens. A fifth of the population, dead. And all we had to show for it was a new overlord.
Janusz had just turned thirteen when Germany surrendered. The country had spent a year slowly losing the war, but it had been a highly productive year. Auschwitz had been transformed into the most efficient extermination site the world had ever seen, featuring state-of-the art gas chambers and crematoria built for killing on a mass scale. Similar camps across Poland, and in Germany, and in other occupied European lands, were doing their best to compete. The war would not altogether end for another three months, when Japan would surrender, but the fighting in Europe was over and Janusz began asking questions, hoping for news about his parents, hoping that the day of reunification might be at hand.
It was one of the older nuns who told Janusz, after talking to an American journalist and to an old friend who had been serving for years with the Polish government-in-exile, that his mother had apparently been taken to Auschwitz and had died there, possibly not long after her arrival. Janusz took the news hard, despite the nun’s assurances that she was in a better place. She was also able to report that Janusz’s father had been captured not by the German Army but by soldiers of the Red Army, during the 1944 campaign that had been greeted across Poland with so much optimism. Mr. Markowicz, it was believed, had been taken to a labor camp somewhere in Russia, where, it was further believed, he had died of starvation or exertion or cold weather or a simple bullet in the back of the head delivered due to an unknown crime like insubordination or insufficient displays of gratitude. Although, like many others – including native Russians whose crime was to openly oppose Stalin – Mr. Markowicz was, apparently, simply erased.
Janusz, now a legitimate orphan, spent another year in the orphanage. In the summer of 1946, at the age of fourteen, a Catholic charity in the United States paid for his one-way ticket to Chicago where a good Catholic family had agreed to give Janusz a home, and a new life.
I felt no great nostalgia leaving Poland. It was the only country I had ever known, but I had lost my mother and father, and my home, and the friends I had made in school, and the few friends I had made at the orphanage. The Germans were out and the Soviets were in, and people had no illusions that Poland would ever be Poland again, that Poles would ever again be true Poles. Not in their lifetime, although maybe their children would live long enough to see it. So I boarded that ship and I watched the country disappear over the horizon, and I felt nothing. No sadness about leaving, no excitement about moving to America.
My new family in Chicago had six children, so I became the seventh. Four were natural children and the other three of us were fostered. It was a Polish family, the Wozniaks, which I’m sure is why I was placed there instead of families with names like O’Mally or Rossi. The other two foster kids – an 11-year-old French girl named Emilie and a 12-year-old boy from Belgium named Jules, both of them war orphans, like me – had been there for more than a year, but apparently there had been never any talk about formally adopting them. So I knew that wasn’t the plan for me, and I was fine with that. I didn’t want it to be a long-term arrangement, and I was glad that everyone was in agreement. Not that the Wozniaks weren’t decent people. They did treat Emilie and Jules and me more like the Help rather than members of the family, but that was to be expected. But we were clothed and well-fed, we went to school along with the real Wozniak children, we received presents at Christmas and on our birthdays, and the punishment for acting up was not excessive. I also learned English, which was a lot more important than I appreciated at the time. So I had no cause to complain.
Janusz lived with the Wozniaks in Chicago until the day after his sixteenth birthday, when he packed what he could into a pillow case, walked to the train station, and bought a ticket to Spokane, Washington. Spokane held no special appeal to Janusz. He had simply decided that he wanted to go west. Minneapolis was still the Midwest, so the destination had to be further. Seattle looked to him as if it might be another Chicago, transplanted to the coast. Nothing between the two cities looked more interesting than Spokane. So Spokane was where Janusz decided to make his home.
The ticket agent eyed Janusz’s pillowcase and told him to prepare for a long journey, but until they were halfway through Montana, Janusz had no idea how enormous America was. In Lublin, he could have boarded a westbound train, crossed several borders, reached the Atlantic Ocean, turned around and headed east in the time it took to travel from Chicago to Spokane. In North Dakota and eastern Montana, there were vast tracts of land, flat and undeveloped, that looked almost as if they were still waiting to be explored and exploited. When the train finally arrived in Spokane, Janusz had been sitting for several hours, trying to nap, and his legs carried him stiffly down the aisle and onto the platform.
I had no idea where I was going to live or what sort of work I would find in Spokane. In Chicago, I had dropped out of school and taken a job at the stockyards. I told them that I was eighteen and they either believed me or they didn’t care, as long as I could do the work. I had been working at the stockyards since the beginning of the year, so I had a little bit of money saved up. But now I needed to eat, and I needed a place to stay, and I needed to find work. I spent the first day walking around Spokane, exploring, getting my bearings. By midafternoon, I was tired and hungry, so I stopped into a café and ordered coffee and a sandwich. I must have looked pretty pitiful, dragging my pillowcase around, because, after I had wolfed down the sandwich, the waitress brought me a piece of pie and told me it was on the house. The place wasn’t busy, so she sat down and asked me what I was doing in Spokane, and we got to talking. She told me areas where I might find a clean room to rent for not a lot of money, and areas to avoid. She took out her pen and drew me a map on a paper napkin. And she said that Kaiser Aluminum was always looking for good workers. She was nice. She told me her name was Valerie. I had never had a girlfriend, and I thought that maybe what Valerie and I were doing was flirting. But she was a few years older than me, and when a new customer came into the place she got up from the table and went back to work. I put the napkin in my pocket and left Valerie a good tip.
Janusz followed the map and found two boarding houses across the street from each other with vacancy signs in the windows. He chose the house with a pot of red flowers on the porch, for no other reason, secured a room, and moved in. The next day, he caught a bus to the Kaiser plant east of the city, where he once again lied about his age as well as his educational achievements. Janusz’s first job was to sweep and mop the factory floors after the day shift, which meant clocking in at five o’clock in the evening and working until one in the morning. With bus fare and rent and food, Janusz was able to put away only a few dollars a week. But he was a diligent worker, and he made friends with one of the floor managers who helped him secure a better-paying day job. Within two years, Janusz had moved into his own apartment, had a good job on the assembly line, and was building up a respectable rainy day fund.
One Saturday, on a lark, Janusz decided to see if he could find the café where he had met Valerie. He knew it was unlikely that she was still working at the same place – but it would be fun, if she was, to tell Valerie how he had followed her advice, found a place to live and a good job with Kaiser. He still had the napkin with the map that she had made for him. Janusz had inherited his sense of superstition from his mother, and he believed that throwing away the napkin would have been a curse on his life, somehow. He had not been back to the café since that day he arrived in Spokane, but it was still there, still open and doing a very limited business. Valerie, however, had married and was now living in Seattle with her husband and young daughter.
The girl who told me all this was a pretty little Portuguese girl named Inez. All of the waitresses at the restaurant must have undergone the same training, because after I had finished lunch Inez came over and refilled my coffee cup and sat down at the table. She wanted to know why I was asking about Valerie. I took out the napkin and told her my story. I was now nineteen, and I didn’t have any reason to lie about my age. Inez had just turned eighteen. And when the door opened and a new customer came in, Inez didn’t get up. She told me that the guy came in every afternoon and always helped himself to coffee, didn’t order any food, left a five-cent tip. So we sat, and talked. A year later, we were married. July 12th, 1952. Three years in a Polish orphanage, almost two years living with the Wozniaks in Chicago, now three years in Spokane. It felt like I was ready for my life to begin.
Married life felt like a gift. Their first child, Emil, was born in the summer of 1953. Two years later, a daughter. Magdalena. Another two years, another daughter. Beatriz. Janusz had stopped believing in God when he had learned what happened to his mother and father, but now he wondered if God was attempting to even the score, to apologize in His way, to make amends for His own excessive punishments. Janusz would reserve judgement, but he would happily allow God to continue showering him with infinite blessings.
God’s blessings ended suddenly on a November night in 1968. One of Janusz’s coworkers at Kaiser had called in sick, and Janusz had agreed to work a double shift. Inez was home with the girls. Emil, now fifteen, was spending the night at a friend’s house. Just before midnight, Janusz noticed the foreman charging across the factory floor, waving his arms. The man stopped, caught his breath, told Janusz that he had just gotten off the phone, that the Spokane Fire Department had been called to a fire at Janusz’s house, that Janusz should get home immediately. When he reached the house, he learned that Inez and Magdalena and Beatriz had apparently died in their rooms, the girls separated from their mother by a short hallway and a terrible inferno.
Emil blamed me. The Fire Department said the cause of the fire was faulty wiring. It was an older house, but Emil wasn’t wrong. I had done some of the rewiring myself. I wasn’t legally responsible for the fire that killed my wife and daughters. But Emil held me morally responsible, and that was worse. That was something I’ve had to live with. Emil was only fifteen, but that’s a year older than I was when I was put on a ship and sent off to live in America. As far as he was concerned, fifteen must have been old enough to be on your own, and I was not one to argue. He left me a note. I don’t want to even think about what it said. I read it once and tore it up. I realized then that the fire had taken everyone, that Emil had left Spokane, that he didn’t want me to know where he had gone, and that he didn’t want anything to do with me. Ever. I considered moving myself, at least to some other neighborhood. The front of the house was damaged, but it was repairable. I wasn’t sure if I could continue living there, after what had happened. But I stayed. It was either inertia or the punishment I thought I deserved.
Janusz remained in the house and in his job at Kaiser for another decade. He went to work, came home, made himself dinner, watched television, went to bed, got up and did it all over again. His coworkers invited him out for drinks after work, but Janusz never cared to socialize. Once, a coworker attempted to set him up on a dinner date with a young mother who had lost her husband. Janusz was not interested.
In the fall of 1978, Janusz realized that the tenth anniversary of the fire was approaching. All evidence of the tragedy had long ago been removed and wallpapered and painted over, but the house still bore the deep imprint of loss. It was serendipity that brought him east, to Wisconsin – serendipity in the form of an odd little feature story in the Spokane Spokesman-Review about a community on the south side of Milwaukee that held an annual celebration honoring General Thaddeus Koscuiszko, a hero of the Polish Revolutionary War. Janusz had never heard of Thaddeus Koscuiszko, and he knew almost nothing about the Polish Revolutionary War. He knew that it was a war against Russia, Poland’s eternal foe, that it closely followed the American Revolutionary War, and that it failed – which pretty much describes the arc of national history in Poland. The newspaper article said that the celebration took place at the Koscuiszko memorial statue in Koscuiszko Park, and that it drew proud Polish Americans from across the Midwest. Janusz had long since stopped thinking of himself as either Polish or Polish-American, but it moved him to know that there were evidently thousands of families in Milwaukee, Wisconsin – a city not far from where he had spent part of his adolescence – who had some shared experiences with his own, however remote.
Within a month, Janusz had quit his job at Kaiser, packed his car with the few possessions he cared about, and made the long drive east. In Milwaukee, it took him only a day to find a satisfactory South Side apartment, a short walk from a Polish restaurant and two taverns owned by second-generation Poles. It took him another week to find a job working on a lakefront loading dock. The business was located on property that was called Jones Island – a narrow peninsula that had once actually been an island, but was no more. During his lunch breaks, Janusz would walk up and down Jones Island, alone, enjoying the lake breezes. On one of these walks, he discovered a small grassy area with a sign identifying it as Kaszube’s Park.
The name sounded Polish, but there was nothing explaining who or what Kaszube was. There were plenty of Poles working at the loading dock, but I hadn’t gotten to know any of them well enough to ask. I had been there a month when one of the guys asked if I wanted to join him and his friends for a beer after work. I did, and that’s when I learned about the Kaszubes. After the Indians were kicked off Jones Island, the Europeans moved in. As it happened, most of them were fishing families from the Baltic coast of Poland. Kaszubes, they were called. I don’t know why, or I don’t remember. For a good while, they had a nice little community going – shops and boathouses and taverns. They were squatters, but no one much cared. And then Milwaukee started becoming industrialized, and lakefront property became too valuable to allow a bunch of Polish fishermen who couldn’t produce a legal deed or a land title to live there. So the Kaszubes were kicked out, just like the Indians had been. History is full of amusing ironies, isn’t it?
I lived alone and worked at the loading dock until I retired in 2006. I could have retired and started collecting a pension at sixty-five, but I was healthy and I wanted to keep working. Of course, I couldn’t do the physical work I was doing when I was younger. But they had made me a supervisor, so the job was easy enough. It kept me active. I didn’t really want to retire when I did, but the company more or less told me it was time. After that, I did a lot of sitting around the house, watching TV, thinking about what a wasted life I had led. I could have married again. I had neighbors and coworkers who tried to set me up. I could have married and had more kids. After what had happened in Spokane, I suppose I felt as if I didn’t deserve that life. I ended up at this place after I had a heart attack. One of my neighbors had come over to check on me, and she looked through the window and saw me lying on the floor. I was in the hospital for a week, and the same woman would come by every day to see how I was doing. She was a nosy old busybody, but I suppose she was looking after me. She was the one who persuaded me to check myself into this place. I did it in a moment of weakness. After a few days of nagging, she had worn me down. I wish I had stuck it out, but the doctors agreed that I shouldn’t be living alone. So I said I would give it a try. I didn’t give up my apartment right away because I thought maybe I’d be moving back there. But, you know. Inertia. You get used to new things, for better or worse. A new place becomes your new home. I shared this room with a Lithuanian. Mrs. Platt, you know – she fancies herself quite the matchmaker. And it was fine, until he died. And then I had the room to myself. And then you moved in.
I look at the photograph on Janusz’s dresser, sitting where he can see it whenever he looks up. Inez, I am sure. I wonder if there are photographs of Emil and Magdalena and Beatriz packed away somewhere. I understand why Janusz would not want the reminders staring at him all the time – the girls for one particular reason, Emil for another. As adrift as I have felt since Thea died, at least I have never been as alone as Janusz is, as alone as he has spent most of his life. I feel especially sad that Janusz more than likely has a son, somewhere in the world, whom he has not seen or talked to in close to fifty years, and that the two of them will depart this life without ever reconciling. If I could do anything more for Janusz than offering pity and sympathy, I would. But I know that this should not be my concern, and the matter is altogether out of my hands.