“Can you just slow down? Can you drive slower?” cousin Mary requested as she sat beside me.
“I can,” I assured her as I dropped my speed. “But we’re on the highway and I have to keep up.”
It was 1964 and at that time I had no idea what post-traumatic stress could be, notwithstanding the fact that Mary was in and out of symptoms. Freeway speeds and moving vehicles connected deeply with her past and were the source of major anxiety.
In 1933, she was one of the primary initiators of the Underground in her home village of Gorlice, Poland. When the Nazi’s came for her, they dragged her down the street by her hair. As an elementary school teacher, her additional crime was going to the homes of Jewish children to keep them current with their lessons.
In the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, she lived in the ranks of political prisoners and was sterilized without anesthesia, abused, and used as a slave. One of her imprisonments was at Ravensbruck, a concentration camp for women. Barely past girlhood herself, and living in her own trauma, she worked to protect the young girls from harm, such as beatings and rape. She taught them how to hide and become invisible. Girls started referring to her as Matka, meaning “mother” in Polish. Liberated from the horror by British soldiers, this freedom fighter, my mother’s first cousin, was now sitting beside me as we rode down the highway. On a shared sacred journey, we were traveling towards the Greater Pittsburgh Airport.
The current mission was about another flight from oppression, as we were off to welcome Mary’s sister, who would be arriving from Warsaw. Cousin Stepha was a nursing instructor, and in recent times had been through the Soviet version of imprisonment.
Stepha and her fiancé made the mutual decision that they would not marry in a country that was behind the Iron Curtain. When they tried to escape by breaching the border, her supposed husband-to-be succeeded, and she was apprehended. Once released from a Soviet labor camp, my family was able to acquire a six-month visa on her behalf for medical reasons. I’m uncertain as to how long it had been since these two sisters had seen each other.
Wearing a thread-bare jacket, Stepha disembarked from the plane. There was a visible warmth between the two women accompanied by a noticeable stiffness in their greeting. It’s as though they were in shock. It was evident that they didn’t know quite what to do or say. There was difficulty finding words.
During World War II, messages from the Underground would relate days and times for the transport of prisoners. Stepha and her family would buy tickets to the train hoping to make eye contact with her older sister, Mary. It was too dangerous for them to speak to her.
And Stepha was no stranger to the train. At the age of 14, it was her mode of travel for transporting goats. Boldly arguing with Nazi guards, she would tell them that she must travel with the goat because her “friend (to whom she traveled) was sick” and could only drink goat’s milk. But the “friend” she spoke of was the Warsaw Ghetto, and the goat would serve as food amidst intentional attempted starvation.
It wasn’t so much about what these two women would say to each other at this reunion, but more about where to start. As we waited for luggage, it was understood by Stepha that I am the child of her cousin, Maryann. She hugged me and proclaimed in Polish, “I am in the free land!”
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