The Wandering Monkey

My father's story as far as I know it:
Born in Poland, three siblings. Grew up there on a farm or in a farm community. When World War II began, his own father enlisted in the Polish army and was never heard from again. One day, the Russians came into his town and told his family they had 15 minutes to pack everything they needed and get on a train. He had a younger brother who did not survive the train trip.
My father, his mother, sister, and brother arrived in Russia in a camp. They stayed there for some time, but a manouver by the U.S. State Department got them all technically considered prisoners of war. As such, they gained a status which allowed them to leave the camp.
They and many Poles from the camp travelled by one means or another to many different places. They were in Perisia for a span of about 6 months. They bounced around a few other places, eventually ending up in Mexico where they lived in a Polish community there. They spent many years there, growing up. My father told me at that time you could go to a general store and purchase gunpowder from a bin. They would do so, and use pipe components to manufacture rudimentary guns and shoot them off for fun. I believe the Polish community there had its own school and perhaps some sort of church system.
Around his mid-teen years, the family moved again to Canada, where they spent several more years. Eventually, after quite a long time, they all ended up in Chicago, where as many people know there is a great concentration of Poles.
My father dropped out of high school and joined the army to help support his family. He went on to get his GED and with the help of the Montgomery bill he was the only one in the family to attend college. He eventually got a degree is psychology and went on to work for the Illinois state system treating developmentally disabled people, which he did up to the point of his retirement.

Growing up I never gave too much thought to my father's life. After all, I was just a kid on the block next to another kid and so forth. As an adult I grew to appreciate the profound effects that such an experience brings upon people. And when you consider the challenges put forth before him and what he managed to make out of the entire thing, it's quite remarkable. The family did not plan to come here. They had lost their father and one of their siblings. They knew no language, they had no currency, nor did they have any posessions or especially marketable skills.
During the time when a person would be getting used to their freshman year in high school, my father I suppose had already adjusted to four or more different countries. The frustration in all of this I would imagine arises from trying to then meld into a society. Just try to remember back to your own high school years and the difficulty everyone faces trying to establish a peer group which makes them happy and satisfied. Hard enough in its own right, much less when you don't even have the frame of reference of growing up in the U.S. This was also 1950's America, where race was even more of an issue that it is today. Even when I was growing up, Polish jokes were rampant.

Some days I think how rather lucky that my father's family was in a Russian-occupied area. At the outset of WWII Germany and Russia agreed beforehand to split Poland down the middle. Poland, on its own, was forced to defend itself againt both giants ripping at either side. Poland has never been known for much of an effective army, but what could have been done, really?
Much attention is given to the fact that the Jews got severley harmed in the Holocaust, which is of course true and of course awful. But I have found it amazing to research and discover that the Poles of all sorts in the German areas were killed exactly in the same manner and numbers as the Jews. I found it very disenheartening that so little a deal is made of the Polish deaths in the concentration camps, which numbered three million by my research.
Furthermore, it seems to me the Poles did not organize so well after the war. Not so many high-end professionals, not so many organizations aimed at helping out the Poles, financially or otherwise. I always wondered why this was so.
Anyhow, because my father's family was on the Russian-occupied side, I am here today.
-J