heaven and the earth behave as if they're no longer friends at all
"Only lovers will survive."
That was the pop song mantra that I'd launched myself on this journey with. I'm on some kind of spiritual odyssey, I told myself and others. Or a midlife crisis. Either way what had I to lose? The long-term relationship I'd been in had come to an end the year before and I was unattached in any traditional sense, although my work as a home care aide had a deep level of attachment with my clients. It was difficult to leave them behind for a couple weeks, but arrangements had been made to properly cover their care needs.
Whatever the case was, I was due for a getaway. I was turning 40 at the end of the year and had never left the American continent. I felt a need to rectify that and begin a new chapter. I may have also had an enormous crush on a Ukrainian superstar that was a large motivating factor...
My journey towards Poland began a year earlier, as things were about half-opened up after pandemic restrictions. During those dark, dreary times, I'd taken on the project of mapping my family tree as thoroughly as possibly. In doing so I began discovering that all my German ancestors had emigrated to America from what in the 1880's was part of the western frontier of Russia but which is now the southernmost western border of Ukraine with Moldova, almost due west of Odessa.
As I traced those roots back further, I slowly but ultimately found that all of the German towns my ancestors had left earlier to settle in Russia/Ukraine were now part of Poland.
I'd always assumed the Hildebrands had emigrated directly from Germany, but now I understood they had settled in and left Prussian Poland for Russia before the Germanic Kingdoms had even united into a modern European state.
They all left Russia in the late 1880s, sailing for America out of the young country of Germany. They must have taken a long train journey from Odessa to Bremen. When they had first gone to Russia 60 years earlier there were no trains to make the trip from central Poland (Eastern Prussia). It would have been a slow journey. I imagine a covered wagon was involved...
The first ancestor who I'd definitively traced to Prussian Poland was my 5th great grandfather Christian Banko, born in Pabianice in 1806. He was the grandfather of my grandfather's grandmother, Magdalena Banko Hildebrand. Her father Daniel Banko was the first in the tree to be born in Russia. In the end the two-plus generations that had emigrated from Prussian Poland would be buried in today's Ukraine, while the two-plus born there who didn't die in childhood would cross the ocean to America.
The Banko tree was particularly intriguing to me, as the name itself was not Germanic whatsoever, but rather Slovakian, Slovenian or Croatian, or perhaps even Hungarian. This was over a year before I'd sent my DNA off and gotten 10% Eastern European back on my father's side. Pure Germanic DNA from my dad only added up to 7%. Sweden & Denmark came in at 9%. Apparently all this inter-mixture is common for a lot of folks with "Germanic" roots, but it was pretty surprising to me.
Initially it was the village of Pidhirne, Ukraine that had most caught my interest. It was the place where the Banko and Hildebrand family trees converged,
when Daniel Hildebrand married Magdalena Banko in March of 1880.
Daniel and Magdalena Hildebrand, probably shortly after arriving in America later in 1880
When my ancestors helped to settle it in the 1800s they called it Kulm, which meant "hill." There is a plaque in the village dedicated to Kulm's existence from 1815-1940.
There wasn't much to see of it online, but what was there was compelling. A large old church building dominated one scene, long ago repurposed after losing its steeple in WWII. No doubt this is where the Banko-Hildebrand nuptials took place
It was Tsarina Katherine the Great, a Prussian-German princess who married into the Russian royal family, who first encouraged Germans to come to settle colonies in Russia, granting them a large degree of cultural autonomy. 100 years later, when Tsar Alexandar II reversed this policy and declared "Be Russian or be gone," my family left and resettled in the Dakotas. There is still today a village known as Kulm, settled by some of these German immigrants, in North Dakota. My kin settled in South Dakota, where my great-grandfather Reinhold Hildebrand was born.
German settlers that had chosen to stay behind in Russia and attempt to adapt to Russian culture never really did assimilate. At the beginning of the war, when Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union made their non-aggression pact, most Germanic-Russians were repatriated back to German territory. After the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union, the few German settlers who remained were looked at with much more suspicion and hostility.
Truth be told, many German settlers in occupied USSR actually did gradually join the Nazi efforts and help perpetuate the horrors of the Holocaust. In the village of Tarutino (now Tarutyne), where some of my ancestors are buried, over 350 Jewish inhabitants were rounded up and slaughtered, their bodies tossed into a mass grave at the bottom of a ravine.
As the vicious Nazi invasion was repelled by the Soviet Red Army, a burning hatred was directed at anyone of German heritage who remained. In retribution for atrocities perpetrated by the Nazi soldiers against the Soviets, Soviet soldiers carried out their own wave of atrocities against German settlers. Sometimes entire villages were annihilated, but not before suffering greatly first...
Poland had been much more of a mixed cultural country before the turmoil and outcome of World War Two. Over 10 percent of the population of the country was Jewish. It had been known as a haven for the Jewish people for centuries. There was also still a considerable German population, much leftover from the Prussian annexation of half of the country 150 years prior, but also stretching back to the middle ages and the Teutonic Knight's control of much of the region of modern Poland. There had been a significant Germanic presence for centuries.
Germany's loss in World War One brought with it the re-emergence of the independent Polish state, albeit with wavering, contested borders for practically the entire inter-war period. The peoples of this era's Poland were a relatively diverse mix. By the end of WWII almost a quarter of that population had been annihilated.
Of the roughly 6 million estimated deaths, half were Jewish. The 3 million Jews that died had constituted 98% of the Jewish population of Poland.
The German population that had existed in Poland was expelled in a similar fashion as it had been in the Soviet territories, with anyone who didn't successfully flee the approaching Red Army suffering their wrath.
As a result of all this horrific turmoil, ever since those terrible times, Poland has been by and large an ethnically homogeneous nation, with only 2% of its current population not claiming Polish ethnicity.
Over 3/4s, perhaps even closer to 9/10s, of that population are practicing Catholics. They say that Catholicism is the one constant over Poland's tumultuous existence, the thing that held together the sense of cultural identity when other empires had swallowed the Polish state and imposed their cultures upon it. When Krakow's archbishop Karol Wojtyła became Pope John Paul II in 1978, it help elevate the Polish spirit so much it almost directly led to the labor protests that would begin to loosen the grip the Soviet Union had held over the country since the end of WWII, ultimately contributing to entire collapse of the Soviet empire by the early 90s.
The Sovietization of Poland that followed the 2nd World War was something I never really knew of before. In Pabianice I saw a monument dedicated to heroes of WWII and after. Perhaps if it had just stuck to WWII it would still be there today. Instead, I later discovered back home, it had been reduced to a pile of rubble just a week later. It glorified the communists, they said. It had been on the chopping block for years...
About sixty years earlier it was the local communist government who had the crumbling synagogue torn down. The Nazis had completely trashed it during the occupation. There were no Jews left behind to restore it. For years after its demolition there was a plaque at the site claiming it had been razed by the Nazis. This had recently been replaced with a new plaque that spelled out its true end.
I had never really considered Jewish ghettos having been established everywhere, not just the big cities like Warsaw or Krakow that we all know. The stories of survivors and witnesses are as horrifying as any better known tales. Over eight thousand people were crammed into roughly 10 blocks. A couple years later they were herded into a stadium at the nearby Kruche-Ender textile factory and left to suffer without shelter or supplies in the cold and rain for 3 days before being loaded onto trains bound for the Lodz ghetto and elsewhere. Many were not even lucky enough to make it that far. Most of those who did later perished in the death camps whose names echo in eternity as monuments to man's inhumanity. Perhaps they are too monumental to even touch us directly today. Perhaps we need smaller reminders in smaller places to bring it home.
In Pabianice it felt as if I walked in the footsteps of my ancestors. Despite it's superficial dreariness, or perhaps even because of it, it felt like I was home. Walking through the heart of the old-town, where they had once walked more than 200 years ago, I had to reconcile that sense of familiarity to the depth of my bones with the recognition that a much heavier vibration hung over the town.
I had made a screenshot of the streets that encompassed the ghetto. It had not been walled off like those of some other cities, but movement outside of its bounds was restricted.
As I found myself standing in a park with a sign for Ukrainian refugee resources, looking across the street at an old brick church, I realized this was one of its corners. The church on its outer border added a kind of sick irony to the realization. Later I found another far corner bordered by a church, this one with it's construction dating back to the late 1500s. I felt as if my brain were somersaulting into my guts with my heart exploding somewhere in the middle. Is that overkill? How do you reckon with Hell without reaching far enough inside to turn yourself inside out? Apparently the Catholic population did so by attending mass...
In all fairness, they too had suffered at the Nazi's hands. The first orchestrated arrests and deportations, if not outright killings, were those of the "intellectuals", the people whose voices the community honored and respected, the learned elders who would speak out when they perceived injustice. They had to be silenced first. Eliminate those who would be the voices of resistance and the remaining population will cower in fear and mind themselves not to get in the way of an orderly operation, lest they suffer a similar fate...
The Pabianice I left behind that day was a place in renewal, it's main street through the old-town half torn up as a new tram-line was being constructed. It's a place looking to shake off the shadows of the 20th century. As it moves forward through the 21st century it still finds many shadows hard to shake. Perhaps rather than shaking them off they should be somehow illuminated instead. The world still has many lessons to learn from the darker corners of its history.
I mean look, I'm from America. This country, in its methods of dealing with the "Indian problem," inspired the Nazis in their search for the "final solution." We're still reckoning (often quite poorly) with the aftermath of the enslavement of African-Americans. We still round up non-legalized residents (let's just call them "unter-citizens" to bring the point home) and ship them off to detention centers where families can often become permanently separated without any real legal recourse, because they're not "real Americans" (as if the U.S.A. is the America "über alles").
And let's not forget the millions of victims of corporate pharmaceutical company greed who were over-prescribed highly addictive pain-killing narcotics and subsequently left to rot on the streets while late stage capitalism collapses all around them.
See what I mean? How can I talk about man's inhumanity to man without looking in my own backyard right now? We literally had a "human trafficking" operation broken up right here in my little island community a month or so ago. The skeptical part of me wonders how much was cooked up to justify what is ultimately a typical ICE raid operation to deport a bunch of undocumented workers. Maybe it was a much darker affair like the authorities claim. When your country lies about its intentions as often as the U.S. of A. appears to, it's hard to take anything the "powers-that-be" say at face value...
I'm reminded of two more tales from my homeland of Vashon Island, Washington, situated in the heart of Puget Sound almost directly between Seattle and Tacoma. The first begins in Tacoma in 1885. The city's mayor had called a meeting to discuss how to expel the Chinese residents of the city. A resolution was passed that all Chinese residents who had not already fled the city must pack up and leave by November 1st. Two days after that date had passed, a mob that included the mayor, the fire chief and others which quickly grew from 200 to 500 men, forcefully removed the Chinese from their homes and places of business and made them march in the rain to the train station that would take them out of the state to Portland. If they couldn't afford the ticket they'd just have to walk the 140 miles there. Two men died of exposure while waiting for transportation.
Here on Vashon at that time there was also a notable Chinese community. They settled along the shoreline that later became known as Manzanita, building a 400 foot wharf there. They were a largely water-based people in the days when many of the communities across the island were settled on the shore, with little inland infrastructure yet established and a "mosquito fleet" of small passenger ferries flitting to hundreds of stops around the Puget Sound.
The Chinese settlers of Vashon were fishermen, they had their own boats to take care of their own business. There was not a lot of overlap between them and the white pioneer families of Vashon. But there must have been enough that they were worried a similar fate might soon await them here. I don't know if animosity had actually been expressed towards them by the other settlers, but almost overnight they abandoned their village and were never seen again in these parts. They weren't going to stick around and see if the "Tacoma Method" would be the same approach Vashon would use...
The Chinese settlers may have left Vashon for good, but in the 1900s a new wave of Asian immigrants came from Japan to settle on the island. Farming families with big dreams, they pioneered cold-packing fruit barreling processes and revolutionized the American berry industry. In early 1942, three months after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, they were rounded up and interned in one of many concentration camps set up along the west coast for Japanese Americans.
Forced to sell their land and belongings at a loss,
fortunately their friends in the community - they had become fully integrated in the
social fabric of the island - purchased the land and held it for them
until the war was over. Thankfully man's humanity to his fellow man won the
hour that time, although not without a few ugly incidences, particularly the burning of four houses by teenage arsonists. Fortunately properties like the Matsuda and Mukai farms were not a part of this malicious spree, and have been preserved today as places to present this complicated history.
Over a decade ago, spray-painted on the pavement in one of the crosswalks of Vashon town's 4-way-stop, was a stenciled graffiti tag that said "Evolve or die." Or at least that is what it first said. Someone had crossed out "evolve" and written "love" instead. For me it was always a direct connection between the two: Evolve in love, or die. At any rate, I appreciated the commentary it offered.
In Lodz someone decided to take a similar if more absurd approach to the soccer hooligan graffiti. Rather than trying to cover it up, writer Jan Waza began putting up their own insults between the teams that were so random and absurd that they bordered on Dada-ist. "LKS fans cook rice in a kettle," "RTS fans hallucinate on field mushrooms," "LKS fans make horseradish out of applesauce." It was nonsensical, in a way that made the whole rivalry seem nonsensical.
And so, as I moved on from Pabianice I sought to leave behind man's inhumanity to man, hoping to find something closer to man's brotherhood through Christ, and the all loving heart of the Holy Mother. I knew someday I would return there; despite the sorrow I felt in my heart, I felt an even deeper sense of love for this strange, spooky place. Like a dreamland you hope will be recurring, there remained a sense of secrets that have yet to be revealed. For now they would have to wait; the next dream was calling...
to be continued...
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