My mother’s legacy lives in her lessons
“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. But 70 years ago, the place where we are sitting was a war zone — the only passageway across Germancontrolled 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. The street, she told us, was pock-marked with bullet holes. But the only alternative was to cross under German territory through the sewers. If you let out the slightest cough from the noxious fumes, the Germans would open the manholes and throw in grenades.
For two months, the resistance held on, waiting for Allied help that never came. My mother 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 to refuel on Soviet air bases. He allowed just one mission to proceed. My mother’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 surrendered, my mother was sent to a POW camp in Germany, and eventually liberated. 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 treating heroin addicts in some of New York’s toughest neighborhoods. After growing up on the streets of Nazi-occupied Warsaw, she had no fear walking the highcrime 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 people are suffering 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. She spent the rest of her life treating heroin addicts. She made America a better place. Our doors should always be open to those fleeing tyranny.
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 — thuman 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, 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 to Warsaw last summer for the 75th anniversary of the Uprising. May she rest in peace.