My mother’s legacy
“That is where the snipers were.”
I am sitting with my mother and son in an outdoor café in Warsaw in 2014. We are here for the commemorations of the 70th anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising, when the Polish resistance recaptured much of the city from the Nazis and held it for 63 days. My mother was one of the insurgents. As a teenage girl, she served as a courier for the underground “Home Army,” carrying weapons, radios and messages across the city.
She is pointing to a tall building overlooking the city’s historic Jerusalem Avenue. It is a beautiful August day, and the street is full of tourists and old-world charm. But 70 years ago, the place where we are sitting was a war zone — the only passageway across German-controlled territory between the northern and southern sectors held by the resistance.
To get from one side to the other, my mother had to “jump” — run across the avenue along a barricade, head down to avoid the sniper’s rounds. Many did not make it. The street, she told us, was pock-marked with bullet holes and soaked in the blood of liaison-girls like her. But the only alternative was to cross under German territory through the sewers, waist-high in human filth.
If you let out the slightest cough from the noxious fumes, the Germans on the street above would open the manholes and throw in grenades. She preferred her chances on the barricades.
For two months, the resistance held on, waiting for Allied help that never came. My mother vividly recalled looking through field glasses at the Soviet Red Army, which had stopped at the Vistula River, waiting for the Nazis to wipe out the leaders of a free Poland for them. Joseph Stalin refused to let British and American planes carrying weapons and supplies to refuel on Soviet air bases. He allowed just one mission to proceed.
Mymother’s first exposure to America was hearing the roar of U.S. aircraft dropping supplies to the resistance fighters. But despite Winston Churchill’s urging, President Franklin D. Roosevelt refused to push Stalin to permit any more. The Warsaw Poles were abandoned by the West.
When the Home Army finally surrendered, my mother was sent to a POW camp in Germany, and eventually liberated by U.S. Gen. George Patton’s Army. She finished out the war in the Polish Army under British command. She stayed in London after the war because the communists had taken over and her family warned her not to return. Eventually, she went to Ireland, earned a medical degree and made her way to the United States, where she became a U.S. citizen.
She raised me as a single mother while simultaneously treating heroin addicts in some of New York’s toughest neighborhoods. After growing up on the streets of Nazioccupied Warsaw, she had no fear walking the high-crime streets around the clinic she ran in the South Bronx. She worked until just before her 90th birthday and passed away on Monday having just celebrated her 92nd.
Her experiences taught me important lessons. First, we should never take the peace and freedom we enjoy here for granted. All this happened in the lifetime of my immediate family. It could happen again. Indeed, in places such as Syria, people are suffering similar atrocities today. America should not abandon them the way we abandoned the Warsaw Poles.
Second, refugees are a blessing, not a burden.
After the war my mother was a stateless refugee. If America had not welcomed her, I would not be here today. She spent the rest of her life treating heroin addicts in inner-city communities. She made America a better place. Our doors should always be open to those fleeing tyranny and seeking opportunity.
Finally, America’s greatness lies in the fact that it is the only country in human history built not on blood or soil but on an idea — the idea of human liberty.
All it takes to be fully American is to believe in those ideals. My mother’s belief in those ideals is what made her American. When Poland held its first free elections in 1989 after the fall of communism, members of the Polish diaspora were invited to vote. My mother refused. She loved her native land and never lost her Polish citizenship — but she had chosen to be an American and would not vote in another country’s election.
She had a thick Polish accent, and often when someone heard her voice for the first time they would ask, “Where are you from?” She would answer with pride: “New York City.” She died in the city and country she loved. But her legacy lives on in the lessons she passed on to her four grandchildren, who were able to join her for a final visit toWarsaw last summer for the 75th anniversary of the Uprising.
May she rest in peace.