‘She is the one who gave me my open heart’
Mother’s wartime odyssey a lesson in tolerance, love for Hamilton woman
HAMILTON— There are so many reasons for Stella Serafin to tell her mother and grandmother’s story.
First, the sheer impact. The drama and horrific detail, startling enough during the opening act in 1940, did not just continue, but deepened over the next three years.
Second, who else would tell it? Serafin’s mother and grandmother didn’t want to talk about it, couldn’t talk about it, not, she says, “without breaking down.”
Third, she had to tell it to honour Maria’s and Stanislawa’s lives and their experience during the Second World War. What they went through is a chapter in history not widely known. And, to the extent that it is known at all, it faces the risk of being forgotten.
Most importantly, though, Serafin tells the story to enforce the “moral,” if you will. Because, even more incredible than the story and the eventual survival
of her mother Maria, was the survival in her mother, of “a strong sense of tolerance and acceptance of all people, no matter what ethnicity, religion or station in life.”
“She is the one,” Serafin says, “who gave me my open heart.”
In February 1940, Maria Przychodzien and her family (mother Stanislawa, father, brother and sister), were torn from their home in Poland, dead of night, dead of winter, and put on a train of cattle cars.
This was part of an enormous deportation, whereby Josef Stalin ordered 1.7 million Poles to Siberia and Kazakhstan to work in forced labour camps. Only 115,000 ever managed to leave the Soviet Union.
“My mother was only 16,” Serafin says.
“The (Soviet) soldiers came at three in the morning and gave them one hour, at gunpoint, to collect whatever they could onto a sled, to be driven to the train station. But the soldiers were kind and allowed my grandmother to take meat from a slaughtered pig.”
This was an early stroke of good fortune, if good fortune can have any meaning under such circumstances; it would prove to be the only one over the miserable next few years. The meat from the pig helped them, and others, avoid starvation.
“During that three-week journey from Poland to Siberia, in that freezing train, so many died, especially the old people and babies.”
In the book that she produced in 2016, 11 years after her mother’s death, Serafin writes: “Once in Siberia, (they) settled into filthy barracks with too many families” and no heat, electricity, lights, water or plumbing.
“Throughout the two years of imprisonment in the labour camp, my mother had to work … under the harshest conditions, in the most frigid temperatures (sometimes reaching minus 60 C), in order to get a piece of bread” and watery soup, the only food rations provided a few times each week.
This went on for two years. In 1940, when the deportation happened, the Soviets and Germans were allies and the displacement was part of their carving up of Poland. By 1942, Germany had turned on the Soviets, so the evacuated Poles who could help fight against Germany (and their families) were given amnesty.
Far from being the end of their miseries, the amnesty set in motion ones even worse. First, it meant the father would be separated from them at length, as he was an Anders’ Army (Polish Corps) volunteer.
But before that, the family was put on a train and then a ship to Iran, with thousands of other refugees, destined for they knew not where, in a hastily organized Allied relief effort.
On the way, Maria’s little sister perished of typhus and starvation. Shortly after, Maria’s brother, 13, fell deathly ill. He was taken off the train and left with a priest, never to be seen again, despite later efforts to find him.
By the time Maria, her mother and father reached the refugee camp in Iran, run by International Red Cross, there were outbreaks of dysentery, typhus and scarlet fever, and Maria’s father, Jan, died.
The rest of the odyssey, now just Maria and her mother, Stanislawa, was less tragic, but still terribly disorienting. They were taken in army trucks from Iran to Karachi, then to Bombay, thinking they were eventually going to Africa; but then Mexico announced it would open its doors to the refugees.
In Mexico, Maria and her mother finally knew happiness. Everyone was nice to them. And her daughter thinks Maria fell in love there. But while in Mexico, Stanislawa was sponsored by a Hamilton man who brought her here and married her. Maria stayed in Mexico several more years. But, being all her mother had left of the family, she was sent for. She settled in Hamilton, where she had two children.
Maria always worked so hard for her family, taking many jobs and always being there for her kids, Serafin says.
Stanislawa died in 1978, and Maria in 2005.
Serafin writes: “As a little girl, I remember my mother telling stories of when she first came to Canada. … And some of the Polish people would ask how she could befriend some of the German and Russian women she was working with. Her answer will always stay with me: ‘These individuals did nothing to hurt me.’ Extraordinary love and compassion was shown to her fellow man and I have personally tried to emulate this behaviour in my own life. … Accept and welcome humanity in all its diversity.”
Serafin, largely through her mother, is herself a living lesson in the midst of today’s strife, as this week marks the 80th anniversary of the invasion of Poland and the beginning of the Second World War.