This revelation shattered the tidy narrative I'd constructed: a successful career now in the rearview mirror, a happy marriage, two grown children—a life neatly assembled, each piece in its perfect place. Yet here was my father, presenting a jagged piece that refused to fit.

We'd never talked about the war. Why would we? I'd been content knowing my Polish parents were among the fortunate ones who immigrated to Canada after World War II. That fact alone was a significant piece of my life's puzzle, granting me opportunities they never had. Beyond this small gratitude, I didn't care to know more. Their past experiences? Irrelevant to my Canadian life.

You see, I had spent years distancing myself from my immigrant roots. As a child in small-town Ontario, I yearned to belong to a "normal" family—code for not an immigrant one. The desire didn't fade with age. As an adult, I moved emotionally and geographically away from my parents, their mannerisms and accents too foreign, not quite Canadian enough for my tastes.

In their new country, my parents had locked away the memories of the dark years in Poland into a vault, never to be spoken about. They shielded my two sisters and me from the unimaginable events that happened to ordinary people. It took that one conversation with my father to crack open that vault.

After his death, I began a modest project: preserving his memories for his grandchildren. But as I pieced together his story, I found he had only left me with fragments. Understanding him meant immersing myself in his world—the dangerous places, the turbulent times. History books towered by my desk, emails with scholars crisscrossed the globe. The deeper I dug, the more I saw my own experiences through a different lens.

Then, unexpectedly, my research led me to my mother's untold story. Unlike my father, she had carried her past in resolute silence, never uttering a word about her life in Poland or her war experiences. She died two decades ago, and I had resigned myself to her remaining an enigma. Yet, as I followed the thread of my father's story, it led me to a discovery about her wartime years—a revelation that grips me still, refusing to let go.

My parents left only the faintest footprints on this earth, and I followed them to an unexpected place—a place where I had to reassemble the pieces of the puzzle that was the story of my life. But let me start at the beginning. I want you to meet the young daughter of new immigrants in small-town Ontario and the woman who grew up unaware of the extraordinary legacy her parents left her.

What remains as clear as an old photo is my sense of anxiety about being separated from my mother.

It had to be an auspicious day because there was a package of store-bought, chocolate-covered ladyfingers in a little bag I had with me. Plus, my mother was sending us to stay with friends for the day, something she had never done. As far as I was concerned, the store-bought cookies—far superior to the homemade ones we always had—took some of the sting out of my separation from her.

It was 1958, seven years after my parents had arrived in Canada from war-scarred Europe, and our family was moving into a newly built house in Sarnia, Ontario, where I was born. I called it Smalltown, Ontario, population 34,000, nestled on the shore of Lake Huron at its extreme southern point where it flows into the St. Clair River. But I only learned that we had moved at the end of the day when my father picked us up and brought us to our new home.

My mother wanted to complete the move without three small children underfoot. As my father pulled the car into the still-unfinished, muddy driveway, she stood waiting on the narrow stoop at the front door, waving. Relief washed over me as our separation came to an end, and the three sisters dashed along the wobbly planks of wood serving as a makeshift sidewalk. We crossed a yard that still resembled a construction zone and rushed into her outstretched arms.

She was a pretty woman with dark hair and eyes, her figure slightly softened and rounded by the births of three children in four years. I didn't notice it then, but there was an invisible burden that rested on her shoulders. As she leaned down and gathered us up, she may have been thinking about the monumental achievements in their new country: my father's job, three daughters, Canadian citizenship, a used car, and a brand-new house. I know now if she was thinking about those accomplishments, she was also guarding her emotions around them, unsure she could permit herself to be too happy.

The new house was a small bungalow, the first one my parents owned. It was an upwardly mobile move to a new development in the north end, away from the acrid smell of the chemical plants in the other part of town. My mother had chosen the finishings: the peach bathroom fixtures, the avocado-green Formica kitchen counter, an aluminum front door with the letter S, and the narrow orange-coloured bricks on the bungalow's exterior. The brick choice made the outside of our house look different, prompting me to wonder why we didn’t have red or gray bricks like everybody else. It stood on a sandy, barren lot, which my parents covered with grass, cedars, and a hedge of raspberry bushes in the backyard that became a bird feeding station. Soon, more houses were built, standing a few feet apart, one bungalow after the other.

The move was made possible by my dad's promotion at work. The company he worked for, a synthetic rubber manufacturer, had just set up a new lab. His job was creating special products requested by customers—like a rubber seal for their gasket or a component for automobile tires in the burgeoning post-war auto industry. Working in the lab, my father developed several variations of synthetic rubber that the company patented. The company purchased the rights to each patent from him for five hundred dollars. The extra money, along with a small loan from a Polish friend in the community, allowed my parents to save up for the down payment of four thousand dollars and secure a mortgage for our little three-bedroom bungalow.

The new neighbourhood had a recently constructed public school just down the street from our home. I would start there in January, leaving behind my old school and kindergarten class. It was a standard edition 1950s Ontario school building—a squat one-storey structure with six classrooms and a small gym. It stood in a dusty field surrounded by a tall chain-link fence. The kids played on a small asphalt playground where the girls skipped rope and hula-hooped, and the boys jostled at tag or rough games that involved jumping on each other.

I was self-conscious about being different, the only child in my elementary school class with immigrant parents, thanks to a restrictive immigration policy at the time that wanted to keep people like my parents out. I didn't speak English when I entered kindergarten. We lived in a Polish bubble. My parents spoke Polish at home, most of their friends were recent Polish immigrants, and the church we attended every Sunday had a Polish Mass. Language wasn't the problem. By the time I started at the new school, my English had improved. The problem? My family was just different.

My parents named me Alice, a deliberate attempt to give me a Canadian name. At home, I was Alinka, a diminutive of my Polish name Alicja. My parents—Edward Switocz and Maria Wałęsa—became Ed and Mary. But our last name—Switocz—not very Canadian-sounding—was always mispronounced.

A few weeks into the new kindergarten, my teacher, Mrs. Fleet, a plump woman who wore fire-engine red lipstick to match her long red nails, pulled me aside and gave me a note to take home to my mother.

"Can your mother read English?" she asked, stooping down so her red lips were close to my face.

I wasn't sure, but I nodded yes.

"The school nurse wants to visit your mother. We want to be sure she is feeding you enough."

I was a small, thin, and pale child with straight blond hair cut in a bob similar to Mrs. Fleet's own dark bob. Even at five, I knew my mother, who spent all her time in the kitchen, would be upset that a nurse was concerned.

On the day of the visit, a tall woman wearing a white uniform arrived and unfolded herself out of a small automobile. She adjusted the cap perched on top of her high, upswept hairdo and smoothed down the front of her dress.

"Nice to meet you," the nurse said at the door.

"Thank you," my mother replied, motioning for her to follow.

I hung back, peering around the edge of the kitchen door, ready to jump in and, I guess, translate in case my mother needed my help. She showed the nurse the pot of soup simmering on the stove. She lifted the lid so the fragrant steam wafted out. She pointed to the vitamins lined up in little bottles on the kitchen counter and confirmed that I was not a big eater and that she, too, wished I ate more. The nurse left satisfied that the young immigrant mother was doing her best. I watched as the back of her nurse's cap—held in place by four large black bobby pins, crossed to form two X's—receded out the front door and down the walkway.

Food was plentiful in our house and always homemade. Still, I envied my friends, who had chicken à la king or something from a can for dinner and butter tarts for dessert. Every day I hoped there would be a miniature red box of raisins in my school bag for recess snack instead of a slice of leftover babka or Polish apple cake wrapped in wax paper. Most days, I never took the snack out of my bag.

I wished my mother spoke better English and could write notes to my teacher without my help, a task I have come to realize is assigned to the firstborn in most immigrant families, past and present. "Alice did not feel well yesterday," my mother would recopy from the sentence I had written out on scrap paper. Then she would sign her name, Mrs. E. Switocz. The E. was for my father's first name, Edward. Sometimes I balked and told her to get my father to write the note.

Starting in the third grade, we had to prepare and present a speech. The best in each grade was selected to be given in front of the entire school at an assembly in our little gym. My dad sat with me at the kitchen table, reviewed the sentences I had written out on index cards about Marie Curie, and made me rehearse until I had memorized the words. I wanted my classmates to know that the first woman ever to be awarded the Nobel Prize, not once but twice, was from Warsaw, Poland, and that her name had been Marie Skłodowska when she was born. She was Polish like I was.

I hoped the teacher would choose my speech to represent Grade 3. The honour went to a boy who bounced up and down with excitement as he told the class about the raccoon he had befriended in his backyard. I was happy for him. He was the class clown who sat in the back row and always struggled with his schoolwork. Nobody seemed to care Marie Curie was Polish, so that was the first and last time I spoke about being Polish in school.

Instead of being selected to speak about Marie Skłodowska Curie, I was chosen to attend a special class for the type of kids who gave speeches on Nobel prize winners in physics and chemistry. It took place on Thursday afternoons at another school. The first afternoon there, the teacher announced to the assembled group that we would be doing an individual research project. I couldn't think of a subject of particular fascination, so I looked at a book on glass-making and pretended to be absorbed. I lasted for only a year. I felt like an impostor among the kids who were beavering away on their projects. And I was sure it was the reason I was taunted and pushed around by three mean girls who often followed me home from school.

At the age of twelve, at that delicate time on the cusp of being a teenager, I found a photograph of my younger self standing in that dusty schoolyard looking forlorn in a floral dress over loose-fitting plaid flannel pants. A conviction took root that everything wrong with my life was because of the way my Polish mother dressed me.

That young girl who longed to be like everybody else, anybody but the girl in the plaid pants, was decades ago. The pieces that make up the puzzle of my life have come together. And the piece of the puzzle I didn’t even know was missing—the little-known dark, tragic, heroic stories of my Polish parents and millions of people like them—has fallen into place.

My parents made their way to Canada from the wreckage of post-war Europe, and they rebuilt their lives and succeeded in their new country. This narrative has been repeated countless times by others leaving their war-torn countries of origin and arriving in this place of peace. But as a child, none of this mattered to me.

But it does now.

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As I peer back through the prism of the decades of my life, I now realize the significance of this vacation, but at sixteen, I was lost in a haze of teenage angst. I was overly self-conscious of my parents’ accents and striving to measure up to my mother’s unspoken expectations. The girl in the plaid pants who longed to belong was now an adolescent who itched to escape Smalltown forever. There was always a push and pull, between home and how I wanted to see myself, familiar sentiments for anyone first- or second-generation, especially a teenager.

What excited me about the month-long trip wasn’t the novelty of being on a plane for the first time or the chance to skip out of school two weeks before the end of the year. It was purely escape—even a boring vacation with my father offered that.

It would be the first time my father set foot in the country of his birth—the motherland—in twenty-five years. It was his first travel anywhere, except for the occasional short business trip or weekend visit to friends. It might also have been the initial instance he felt financially secure enough to afford overseas travel. With no grandparents or relatives in Canada, my parents had no one to leave us with, so they never did. There was no discussion about who would stay home with my two younger sisters. So I was the lucky travel companion.

We touched down at Okęcie Airport in the early morning and entered a small, austere terminal building with low ceilings and concrete walls—my introduction to Soviet Brutalist architecture. The only passengers in the terminal seemed to be those who got off our LOT charter flight, and our group trudged silently down the long corridor past large windows that framed a low, grey sky and a scattering of small aircraft sitting out on the tarmac.

We reached a single kiosk where a customs official sat in a grey uniform, under an oversized peaked hat embellished with a gold Polish eagle emblem. After what felt like a lengthy consideration, he stamped and initialled the Polish visas that we had in our newly-minted Canadian passports. I did not know then that the Soviet regime had stripped the Polish eagle of its crown.

We stayed with Krystyna, or Krysia, as almost everyone called her, following the endearing Polish custom of using diminutive names. She was the girlfriend my father said goodbye to in 1944, just before the resistance fighters made their last push in Warsaw. At sixteen, I didn’t understand that this had been an important first love for him, and I knew nothing about the resistance.

All I knew was that Krystyna was a close friend from before the war. Throughout my childhood, her cheerful, newsy letters had arrived regularly with contributions to my dad’s stamp collection, which always pleased him.

Krystyna had married in her forties and lived with her husband in a sparsely furnished two-room apartment, a third-floor walk-up in a bleak pre-war building on Linneusza Street on the east bank of the Wisła River—the section of Warsaw spared German bombs. To my adolescent Canadian eyes, two decades before the end of communism, Warsaw might as well have been on a drab dystopian planet. We had left Toronto in 1970 and arrived in Poland several hours later in an earlier era. Even the colour photographs I still have, taken with my new little Kodak camera, look black and white and shades of beige.

There wasn’t much room for the dozen dresses I had crammed into my suitcase, an early lesson in the hazards of overpacking. Krystyna oohed and aahed as I extracted them one by one and hung them in the six inches of closet space she had created for me. I don’t think I ever wore them. Nor did I bother with the makeup I routinely applied as part of my daily ritual back home. In Warsaw, where access to anything fashionable was scarce, even for those who could afford it, my dresses and makeup felt conspicuously out of place.

Krystyna and her husband were welcoming, with formal old-world manners that my parents and their Polish friends had, for the most part, abandoned. She loved books and history, expressing her opinion on current events and just about everything else in a breathless voice as if she were perpetually excited. Tall and lanky, she had fine, mouse-brown hair tinged with grey that looked as though she cut it herself. Her self-confidence matched my father’s, and I found myself drawn to her immediately.

My father was eager to show me Warsaw, but he discovered he was a tourist in his own city—a place that had become unfamiliar to him. The Second World War had erased the familiar landmarks of his youth, leaving only street names as a tenuous link to his past. The subsequent reconstruction had transformed the city, rendering it largely unrecognizable to him.

We walked with Krystyna along Mirowski Square, the street of my dad’s childhood home, and stood where the entrance had once been to what he described as an attractive apartment building. Looking up, we faced a utilitarian Soviet-style block of three storeys with small shops on the main level. Across from the apartment building was a square, as there had been before the war, but nothing about the new Mirowski Square was familiar to my dad. As we walked a few paces farther, Krystyna motioned with a wave of her hand and remarked, “This is where the entrance to the Jewish ghetto was.”

Jewish ghetto? That meant nothing to me, and it would be four decades before the city of Warsaw would officially mark the boundaries of the ghetto with commemorative plaques and five decades before I would give the location of Mirowski Square any further thought.

Within days, we were off on a road trip with Krystyna and her husband in their tiny orange Volkswagen Karmann Ghia, an unusual sight in a country of grey Soviet-made Ladas. The men sat in the front, and Krystyna and I squeezed into a back seat hardly spacious enough for a couple of suitcases.

Our four- or five-day trip followed the typical tourist itinerary, with one exception: a brief detour to the nondescript village of Łambinowice. At sixteen, too preoccupied with appearing cool, I couldn't fathom why anyone would want to visit such a place, and I recall not wanting to get out of the car.

Today, as I write about my recollections, I know the village was once called Lamsdorf and was the location of the POW camp where my father had been interned after the Warsaw Uprising.

During our road trip, finding restaurants and places to stop overnight was a complicated task that required careful planning. After each restaurant meal, Krystyna carefully packed every leftover on the table into paper napkins—from bread to the smallest speck of butter—and tucked them into her handbag. I was embarrassed. I had never been deprived of food and had no idea people were required to use ration cards. Eventually, I understood her resourcefulness and gave her a hand.

In the car, my father and Krystyna chatted incessantly, catching up on their lives, one year at a time. Speaking Polish at home and on Saturday mornings at Polish school meant I could follow the conversation if I wanted to. By the time we arrived back in Warsaw, they were reminiscing about 1963 and almost up to speed on their lives and the friends they had before the war.

There were some hushed words exchanged about my dad’s younger sister, who had left Warsaw permanently for a provincial town in northern Poland, but I wasn’t paying attention as they were chatting about people I didn’t know. There was no awkwardness between them. I search my memory as I write today about the trip but find no hints or references that they were once romantically involved. They seemed to be good friends, reuniting after a long separation and filling in the gaps. But perhaps I was oblivious.

The next leg of our journey—undertaken by my father and me alone—was to a small town near the village where my mother was born. It was a visit to my mother’s family—the three siblings she never mentioned. We were reunited with babcia, my grandmother, who had once lived with us for five years, arriving in Canada when I was six.

Memories of my grandmother in Canada are of an elderly babushka, like someone Central Casting would send over to a movie set to play the elderly Polish woman character. She seemed ancient to me; her deeply lined face made her seem much older than sixty, the age she was when she arrived. She never got used to life in Canada. She never learned a word of English.

After five years, babcia declared that she had ten grandchildren back home who needed her more than we did, and she returned to Poland. The more probable reason for her departure was the chasm separating her life from my mother's new one in Canada. The tension and dynamic between my mother and grandmother, which I had witnessed as a young child, made sense in Poland. The distance my mother had travelled from that small village to Canada was now obvious. But I didn’t realize yet how far she had come.

Here was babcia directing our warm welcome with the confidence of a ruling matriarch, a stark departure from my memories of her. During our whirlwind thirty-six-hour stay, which my father justified by saying he had so much to show me in Poland, we visited each of my mother’s siblings.

I remember Coke bottles lined up in a perfect pyramid on a sideboard, like a champagne tower at a wedding. The soft drink had recently made its debut in Poland, and for the family, it was a status symbol indicating to their "new-world" relatives that they could indulge in life’s finer luxuries. To my sixteen-year-old eyes, it all appeared tacky, and I found myself uncharitably judgmental.

Food was more abundant in the countryside, where people cultivated vegetable gardens and kept chickens and pigs. My aunts and uncles joked that the pigs in Poland went straight to Moscow and bypassed the tables in Warsaw. They were right. Buying food in Warsaw was complicated, and the shelves were often empty.

With barely a day back in Warsaw to catch our breaths, my father and I left for the port city of Gdańsk. We travelled by train from Warsaw, and on our way north, we stopped to visit his sister in the town of Morąg. My Aunt Jadwiga—Jadzia as she was referred to—a soft-spoken but determined woman, lived far from the cosmopolitan life she had known in Warsaw before the war. She had married a hard-drinking, rough man from Morąg, and they had two children. While that was part of the reason she remained in this small, grimy industrial town, the other part was something I would unravel much later only when I understood what had transpired during and after the war.

Back in Warsaw, I was assigned to the care of Krystyna’s niece, Elżbieta, or Ela, to family and friends, who was twenty-one then. I felt grown up hanging out with her, her boyfriend, and their friends. Through Ela, I got a close-up view of the hardships of everyday life behind the Iron Curtain. Plans could change because we spotted toilet paper in a shop and had to rush back to mobilize family members to hurry over and claim their quota of one or two rolls of the scratchy stuff. We queued in long lines at the baker and butcher, where the selections were limited. Buying food, I soon learned, was easier if you had connections and sometimes took place at the back of the shop like a clandestine drug deal. Ration cards and empty store shelves were a fact of life, as was a thriving black market where anything could be procured for exorbitant prices and US dollars.

Two topics dominated discussions during most meals and social gatherings: the war, specifically wartime scarcities and survival, and the current trials of living in a Communist state. Moods turned sour when subjects like meatless Mondays, imitation coffee, rising prices, stifling bureaucracy and the Gomulka government were raised. There were whispers about the prying eyes of the secret police and admissions about the potential benefits of joining the Communist Party, seen as the sole path to career advancement and securing better housing and food for one’s family. People understood the reasons for becoming a party member, and there was a sense of eye-rolling acceptance that they had no choice but to collaborate with the enemy.

Every mealtime discussion with people my father’s age opened my eyes to the reality of the war’s impact. The memories were vivid, the emotional wounds still raw, and the events people had lived through continued to consume them. I reasoned that my father’s life in Canada had allowed him to move on in a way that his friends and family who had remained in Poland could not. This, I thought, might explain why my parents never spoke about the war.

Most people had sidelines, which helped them survive in the Soviet system. Ela’s boyfriend, who had studied graphic art, changed the dates on his friends’ student identity cards, making sure that they remained students eternally, with access to student discounts for public transportation and other services. People struggled but also helped one another, and everyone knew who the enemy was. The end justified the means, and the most important end was to beat a system stacked against them. Most of the time, they didn’t, they just collected their minimum fare in a food line and tried their best to help family members. Their allegiance was to their loved ones, not to the Soviet regime. It all seemed quite foreign to me.

On my last night in Warsaw, I walked around the centre of the city with Ela and her friends, and we stopped at a newly built hotel. It was modern and luxurious compared to every other building I had seen in 1970 Warsaw and stood out like a shiny penny. We explored it like we owned the place, joking and laughing boisterously as I did with my friends back home. Ela turned quiet, and I asked her if anything was wrong.

“One day, you will be able to stay at a hotel like this, but in a million years, I won’t be able to afford it.”

While I was careful not to flaunt how different life was in Canada, I knew Ela’s words were true. We had many decent hotels, even in Smalltown, Ontario.

Fast forward. Today, with all Soviet shackles cast off, Warsaw is a very European city. There is nothing dystopian about it.

The lives of my friends and family have changed with the city. Ela travels and posts photos of her vacations on her social media feeds, just like everyone I know. We formed a bond on that first trip and have remained friends. Over the next decades, our lives continued to intersect at significant junctures—fate and circumstances before we were born brought us together.

What has not changed is the Polish survival ethos and determination. It was present all around me on my first trip to Poland. I have since learned it is part of my DNA. But at sixteen, I had no inkling of this.

And I was oblivious that this seemingly ordinary trip would one day have an impact on the course of my life.

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Despite my determination to leave Smalltown and my parents’ orbit, I remained a dutiful daughter. I made sure to phone home weekly—long-distance calls on Sunday because it was cheaper—undertook the pilgrimage across Ontario a few times a year, and never missed a Polish Christmas. I usually took the train, making a connection in Toronto, and even hitchhiked once—the driver dropped me off right at my parents' door. The rest of the time, I was on my own path.

Carleton University was an eye-opener. There were people in my classes considerably more knowledgeable than me or anyone I had ever met. Despite this, or maybe because of it, academic studies took a backseat to partying until dawn and hanging out with friends. It was a time of expansion, no boundaries, and permission. I was carefree enough to embark on a road trip, with absolutely no fixed plans or cares about crashing on a strangers’ floors, in a beat-up Volkswagen Beetle, with a man who resembled Cat Stevens and was a lecturer in the French department at my university. We travelled across the country down the west coast to Los Angeles and across the United States back to Ottawa.

I muddled through, doing the minimum amount of work required, and got less-than-stellar grades. At the end of four years, I had just one more class I needed to take to graduate. All I wanted was that diploma and a future I didn’t have much of a plan for to take shape.

My decision to enroll in Professor G. Peter Browne's history class was about as random as drawing a name out of a hat for the office Christmas gift exchange. It had to be a night class because I had just begun working full-time on Parliament Hill for a Member of Parliament—my first real job.

By day, I attempted to solve constituents’ problems with their unemployment insurance or pensions and responded to the letters they sent expressing their displeasure with government policies. By night, I planned on completing my history major, by taking the Wednesday night seminar on Confederation, which I was sure would be a complete bore.

Browne was a slight, bespectacled man with a hint of a British accent. He could have played an Oxford don in a 1950s movie. Of indeterminate age, he always wore the same tweed jacket with patched elbows over a crisp white shirt with a stiff collar. And he invariably sported an unfashionably skinny tie, ignoring the bolder and wider ones that were fashionable in the day. He referred to us formally. I was Miss Switocz, which he pronounced correctly on the first try. And he was demanding. Two major papers were required, as were weekly written assignments called gobbets.

Browne defined a gobbet as "the digestion of a tasty morsel." In reality, it was a structured commentary on a short text from a historical document—in our case, one related to the enactment of the British North America Act of 1867. He expected us to consult multiple primary sources—this was an upper-level history course, after all—and deduce the context and political relevance of the passage we were "digesting." Every week our analytical skills were challenged, as were our abilities to be concise and exact in the written word.

Each student examined a different passage for their weekly gobbet and presented their work to the class. Every time, I felt like I was presenting an oral argument in front of a judge and jury. We had to submit the written interpretation to Browne, and he returned the tasty morsel to us the following week, full of red marks and slashes. Every grammar failure was meticulously corrected, numerous sentences were enhanced, and sloppy thinking was critically challenged with pointed comments scribbled in his neat handwriting in the margins, leaving all of us with a sense of inadequacy and insecurity. The damn gobbets took over my life that semester. I considered packing it in multiple times, but I needed the course to graduate.

While Browne loved discussing the British North America Act and was a well-regarded scholar of Canadian constitutional history, he relished debating the finer points of grammar even more. He was a self-proclaimed prescriptive grammarian whose bible was Fowler's Modern English Usage. He referred to it religiously as the final authority on everything written in English.

Particularly passionate about the correct use of the semicolon, Browne maintained that the Supreme Court had misinterpreted the division of powers between the federal and provincial governments because they misunderstood the correct usage of this important punctuation mark in the British North America Act. According to him, the nation's fate was altered by a semicolon.

During every class, we were subjected to the latest developments in Browne's ongoing project for the Dictionary of Canadian Biography. He was writing a short biography of an obscure lieutenant governor, and every word, phrase, and adjective was subjected to repeated and exacting scrutiny and then tested on us—was it better this way or that way?—until each sentence flowed to meet his uncompromising standards of perfection.

A few weeks into the semester, he extended an invitation to everyone to his apartment for a glass of wine at the 10 p.m. conclusion of the class. He lived alone in Centretown, and looking back today, I might assume he was a closeted gay man. But in the late 70s, the thought didn’t cross my mind, and the topic never arose among our student group. Twenty minutes after the class had ended, we were comfortably ensconced in his book-filled, dimly lit living room, feeling like we were on that Oxford University movie set.

A second bottle of red wine was opened only twenty minutes after the first, then a third, and a fourth. New wine glasses were laid out each time Browne opened another bottle of wine. And he asked about our wine preferences—something we lowly university students were unaccustomed to. A large piece of Brie appeared. The discussion became more animated, and before I knew it, several hours had passed. The others were still debating the state of the world when I left at around three in the morning. I had to be at work in a few short hours. I walked home through the deserted Ottawa streets and rolled into bed.

These soirées continued week after week. The only difference was that Stilton sometimes replaced the Brie. We were penniless students, thrilled to be plied with free wine and cheese. We thought Browne lived a monastic existence, his solitude broken only by us, his beloved students. That he was the most eccentric person I had ever met was confirmed a few weeks later when he let down his guard.

First, he unveiled a box filled with identical wire-framed John Lennon spectacles. Several frames had been well-worn, but there were just as many brand-new ones without lenses. The frames were his signature model, and he wanted enough to last his lifetime.

Following the eyeglasses came the detachable collars. He wore white shirts to which he affixed heavily-starched, white, detachable collars. He demonstrated. So British, we thought.

Then he brought out ten identical tweed jackets with already patched elbows. Some worn, some new.

He showed us items from his childhood, including a small tin bowl he still used to pour water over himself when he bathed. Miss Sorenson, the other woman in the class, and I exchanged an uncomfortable glance. Why was he sharing this? But all we could muster were nods and polite smiles.

One evening, he divulged something astounding. He confided that he had become a member of the newly formed secret Hemlock Society, an organization supporting assisted suicide.

His explanation was chillingly simple: "No one would ever suspect."

Between the classes and our evenings drinking wine, I sweated over every gobbet, sneaking in time to work on them during my office hours on Parliament Hill. I struggled with the final essay, completely stressed out because I had spelled the word input as imput on the first—an embarrassing mistake I had made more than once. I couldn't even say it was a typo.

As anxious as I was about the work the course required, I came to look forward to the class, the late night of wine drinking, and the supportive camaraderie that quickly developed with my fellow students. I was proud of my hard work, a first in my university career. And I was awestruck that anyone could be so passionate and rigorous about language.

When the grades were sent out at the end of the course, I was elated to receive my first A. I had measured up to Browne's expectations. He gave me enough confidence to apply to graduate school, something I had not previously contemplated. With my new-found self-assurance, I wrote an exceptionally persuasive letter with my application to the Canadian Studies department and convinced them that although my grades were less than average, I really was an A student, and they should take a chance on me.

Six years later, Professor Browne was found dead in his apartment after he failed to show up for a class. He was fifty-three. We were shocked. The autopsy revealed he had died of a heart attack, but we had our suspicions. I will never know what his state of mind was. It felt like maybe I didn’t really know him.

Not long after his death, his furnishings and books were auctioned. Miss Sorensen, who had married Mr. Kent, another student in the class, bought the wine glasses, all one hundred of them.

Our group held a few reunions in the years following our graduation. Whenever we met, we exchanged “Professor Browne” stories and our firm conviction that his was our favourite class.

From Professor Browne, I learned to appreciate the sublimity of a perfectly constructed sentence with a semicolon. It turned out that if you could write a gobbet, you could write almost anything else. I never had another teacher like him; his ultimate approval remains indelible.

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I had a student summer job as a guide for a federal government program for high schoolers visiting Ottawa. He was another guide, a good-looking, nerdy guy with glasses and a 100-watt smile, and soon enough we were going out.

Within a couple of years, life got real. I got a full-time job with a Member of Parliament, completed my final course, graduated, and started my Master’s while continuing to work. The only roadmap I had at twenty-one for relationships was that marriage was an obvious destination, with the added perks of a Mixmaster, a couch on credit, and white wedding dishes. It didn’t matter that I was young—the good-looking guy was Catholic, and my parents would be happy. I figured I could fix up the rest. The truth is I had no idea about marriage and should have realized that the good-looking guy and I weren't well-matched, but like I said, I was young.

At our meeting with the priest a few weeks before the wedding, he asked us a series of questions, reading in an expressionless voice from a list he had on a paper in front of him. Did we believe in God and the Catholic Church? Would we raise our children in the Catholic faith? We hadn’t even discussed children, but we both answered in the affirmative.

Throughout university, I never attended church except for on the occasional visits home to my parents. Yet here I was, about to walk down the aisle with my father to marry the man waiting at the altar in the Polish church in Smalltown, facing the same large, crucified Christ that I had faced every Sunday of my childhood.

I opted for a flower-child hippie look and wore a long, flowy ivory dress made by a seamstress friend of my mother’s and a halo of flowers in my hair. My dad’s firm hand on my arm steadied my nervousness. My mother beamed in the front row in a long chiffon dress of periwinkle blue as I got to the altar. Following the ceremony, the reception was in my parents' backyard, where my mother outdid herself in the culinary department. I left it all to her, and it was delicious. So far, so good.

Three years later, I left my job and moved to Montreal for a year, where the good-looking guy did his medical internship, and I planned to finish my master’s thesis. I spent my days at the kitchen table, hunting and pecking on a borrowed Brother electric typewriter. The quiet in the apartment at the top of Boulevard Côte-des-Neiges was punctuated by the staccato notes of the typewriter keys, the ding of the carriage return, and an occasional ambulance siren on its way to one of the nearby hospitals. Every time I made a mistake that I couldn’t fix invisibly with liquid Wite-Out, I cursed. It meant I had to start the page over because the university's rules for master's theses allowed no visible typing mistakes.

On Mondays, I took the Métro to the east end of the Green Line and picked up the typewriter left by a university friend with her mother. Then, on Fridays, I retraced my steps, there and back, to return the typewriter so my friend could use it for her school work on weekends.

Every time I trudged uphill to the apartment with that typewriter, facing another week of slow, laborious typing, I cursed my decision to take home economics in high school instead of typing. The ordeal lasted for months because I was too poor to pay someone the dollar a page it would have cost to have them type it for me. During winter evenings, I canvassed door to door for the Liberal candidate in the federal election. Saturdays, I sold china and stocked shelves at the Simpsons store in downtown Montreal to earn some much-needed cash.

The medical internship year ended, I submitted and defended my thesis, and we returned to Ottawa. I was hired by the Liberal candidate, Donald Johnston, who had won his election and was appointed by Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau to his cabinet as President of the Treasury Board. The first thing I did was buy a couple of good suits. My job was to work on correspondence—plenty of experience here from working with the MP—and ensure the minister had his briefing notes for the daily Question Period in the House of Commons.

After a few months, I was promoted to chief of staff. I was twenty-eight and went from typing my thesis at the kitchen table to a position with significant responsibilities, a secretary with a fancy word processor, and my own pass to the rarified atmosphere of the Parliamentary Restaurant. I succeeded by assembling a solid team of smarter people, by being good at asking the right questions, and by knowing when the answers made sense. Luckily, the job provided a little more financial security. With a loan from my in-laws and a mortgage, we bought a house.

Despite its dilapidated state and frozen-in-time condition since the 1940s, the fixer-upper was situated in a good neighbourhood west of Centretown, where I had lived as a student. With limited funds at our disposal, we took on most of the work ourselves, scrubbing the rooms from ceiling to floor and giving them fresh coats of light salmon or dove grey paint. The house remained in need of major renovations, but now, at least, it was clean and freshly painted.

Time passed...fast, fast, fast. Even in those days in my twenties, time flew by for me. Seven years after our wedding, three years after returning back to Ottawa and setting up house, the good-looking guy and I realized we probably weren’t going to make it. There were no heated arguments or long discussions; we were just giving up. I felt sad. Empty. Our feelings that we had different goals were mutual, but just in case the marriage was salvageable, we decided to consult a marriage counsellor.

The therapist, not much older than we were, came highly recommended by the good-looking guy’s best friend, who was completing his clinical psychology degree and would himself soon be counselling couples like us. In the second session—which turned out to be the last one—he asked me to describe my relationship with my mother.

“She’s never said anything about her life before coming to Canada. All I know is that she’s from a village in Poland, and she was taken from her home to work in Germany during the war.”

A floodgate of tears opened. “She has these expectations of me…now I feel like I’m disappointing her.” He handed me the box of tissues.

“I have seen similar emotional fallout in children of Holocaust survivors,” he said.

I was taken aback by his suggestion, given the little I had shared about my mother. What was he talking about? Generational trauma?

No, he doesn’t understand, I thought to myself as I abruptly gathered my things and rushed out, clutching the box of Kleenex.

I did not know enough to make the assessment the therapist did, but I knew that whatever it was, it made for a complicated mother-daughter relationship. I was in my twenties, juggling a busy and demanding job. My mother was silent about her experiences during her childhood and the war, yet the burden of it—her secrets—lingered in the air, subtly and profoundly. I wasn’t about to ask her about them at this point, even if I had time. While I did appreciate his observations that my mother wanted me to be happy and I didn’t have to measure up to anyone else’s expectations, I also remember thinking I would never figure my mother out, and I certainly didn’t have time to go to marriage counselling to try.

I couldn't will myself to love someone, even a man as intelligent, decent, and cheerful as the good-looking guy was. We continued living in the house, each wrapped up in our busy lives, making it easy to avoid one another until it was sold a few weeks later. Then we walked out in different directions, a moment that epitomized how mismatched we were. He took his share of the house sale profits, sold his motorcycle and bought a used pickup truck, put his half of the furniture in the back, and moved to a log cabin in rural Quebec. Reports from mutual friends confirm that he is still there, a much-loved local family doctor.

“I hope you’ll be happy, Alice. But I want you to know I’ve met someone else,” was the gist of what he said when we met to finalize our uncontested divorce. There was no one in my life, and those words pierced. We never spoke again. I put the wedding photos in the trash can and brought the dress to Goodwill in a green garbage bag with other items I no longer needed.

I took my proceeds from the house sale and bought my next fixer-upper landing back in Centretown. I poured myself into work and another home renovation project. The toughest hurdle was telling my mother that my marriage had failed and that her hope for me to live happily ever after was not going to happen, at least not in the foreseeable future.

But it was my life. Getting it together felt like my most grown-up moment to date. A universal coming-of-age moment, but epiphanic nonetheless.

It would be another four decades before the words spoken by the marriage counsellor came into focus again, bringing me back to memories of this other lifetime.

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After Canadian voters tossed out the federal Liberals in 1984, and Brian Mulroney and the Conservative Party took over in Ottawa, I moved back to Montreal for the second time and took a position at a bank in government affairs. Jonathan, a casual acquaintance from the Hill whom a mutual friend had introduced me to, was another casualty of the changed political tide and moved back to Montreal, where he had grown up. We ran into each other on the street.

I wondered why I hadn’t been interested in getting to know him better while we both lived in Ottawa. Despite our mutual friend, our paths had only crossed a couple of times.

Our first date, if you can call it that, was not exactly a romantic invitation. Jonathan asked me to attend a fund-raising dinner for the African projects of the Cardinal Léger Foundation.

“My company is sponsoring a table, and my father is on the board of this foundation. Can you go?”

I thought the evening went as well as could be expected for a business event, but I wanted to get to know him better. He didn’t think I was interested.

Taking matters into my own hands, I asked Jonathan for dinner at a nice restaurant with a group of my buddies, including our mutual friend. I picked him up, brought flowers, and ensured he saw that I could relax and have fun. We enjoyed a great meal, laughed, had a lively dinner discussion fueled by a few bottles of wine, and then went dancing. I knew right then that this guy would always make me laugh. The date ended the next morning, and if he didn’t know whether I was interested before that moment, he knew it then.

And the rest is history. But it almost wasn’t.

I say that because even after our promising real date, our relationship was near-miss. I was reminded of this when I found a little red handbag in the back of my closet during a recent housecleaning spree. I purchased the bag on our trip to Italy a few months after we started dating. Full of enthusiasm and youthful confidence, we had planned to spend two weeks together. The small handbag in my favourite shade of red that I have kept all these years unleashes memories of our first trip each time I hold it in my hands.

I bought it in Florence, at a leather boutique near the Ponte Vecchio. I can still vividly recall the old-world charm of the shop, with mahogany shelves stretching up to the ceiling, filled with exquisite handbags of every colour and size. Along the walls were display cases overflowing with beautiful leather gloves. Everything was expensive. I visited the store at least twice, lingering over the merchandise and attempting to resist the temptation. Finally, I gave in and purchased a small red handbag, disregarding both my budget and common sense.

The bag was stunning, but the trip wasn’t going particularly well. There was tension. I liked to sleep in and needed coffee before I could function. No caffeine meant a headache that felt like a vice-grip progressively tightening around my skull. Jonathan shot out of bed at dawn like a rocket, eager to consult the Michelin Green Guide. He would calculate how many churches and museums we could visit that day. I preferred to spend the late afternoon people-watching in a café or bar, sipping a glass of wine. He needed to see another museum before it closed.

After that inaugural trip, I wasn’t hopeful about our relationship. Yet somehow, we found our way across our differences.

I was nervous, at first, about bringing Jonathan home and introducing him to my family. Not because he was Jewish and my parents were devoutly Catholic, but because my parents' home was modest, they were immigrants, and my upbringing was so different from his own. In high school, my best friends' fathers were the director of a funeral home and the owner of a pizza parlour. My father served Niagara wines, which in those days did not have the cachet they do today. His parents seemed so much more sophisticated and accomplished. His father, Victor, had been a Quebec cabinet minister, was just completing a long tenure as CEO of the Canadian Council of Christians and Jews and would soon become Canada’s Commissioner of Official Languages. His mother, Sheila, was a professor of Social Work at McGill University.

Jonathan’s parents lived in a comfortable home in Westmount situated on a quiet street with handsome two-storey Georgian Revival houses showing off pretty flower boxes and manicured small lawns. This is where he had spent his childhood. It was located two blocks from the private boys’ school he had attended. He and his two siblings had graduated from Harvard. Jonathan’s parents were prominent members of Montreal’s vibrant Jewish community. This was a world apart from where I grew up.

The first time I was invited to meet his parents was for a Rosh Hashana dinner, which marked the Jewish New Year. The table set for twelve was worthy of a magazine spread: three glasses, an array of silver, folded white linen napkins and antique Minton plates at each place. Jonathan’s father presided at one end and his mother from the other. A French wine was served, which his father had carefully decanted into a heavy crystal decanter. The conversation was lively and centred around politics and current events, with Jonathan’s mother asking questions and keeping the discussion animated.

After enjoying apples and honey and receiving an explanation about the symbolic significance, during the lull between courses, Jonathan’s brother took the opportunity to inquire extensively about my background. The others seated around the table listened to this friendly interrogation.

I found a way to escape by offering to help Jonathan's mother finish clearing the first course. In the kitchen, she asked for my assistance in making the mashed potatoes and, to my surprise, handed me a box.

“It's my little secret,” she confided with a smile.

It was an elegant Westmount dinner, yet here was this woman serving instant mashed potatoes. Sheila, I quickly learned, was not known for her culinary prowess, but she was a gracious hostess who could hold her own alongside her accomplished husband. She was the polar opposite of my mother, who had the remarkable ability to single-handedly prepare a delicious meal with several complex dishes but rarely expressed her opinions and kept her emotions in tight check. While the atmosphere at the dinner was markedly different from any that had ever taken place in my parents’ home, I did realize that Jonathan and I were both raised by loving parents.

Jonathan proposed marriage two years later, on December 23, confiding that he didn’t want to show up at my parents’ home for his second Polish Christmas extravaganza without some big news.

In the spring that followed, we married on a Friday morning under a chuppah in my in-laws’ living room with my parents and a dozen close friends in attendance. In my mid-thirties, I was definitely mature enough to be making this decision. Jonathan and I walked down the staircase together. I wore a navy Prada suit. The rabbi, newly arrived in Montreal, was happy to marry an inter-faith couple. He didn’t ask us questions or wonder if I might convert to Judaism. I had no plans to do so.

Conversion was never discussed by either family. Jonathan’s father simply told him he was making a good choice, his only reaction to marrying someone who was not Jewish. My father’s reaction has also stayed with me.

“Where I am from,” my father said, “Jews have not always had an easy time. I hope you know you may witness or experience some difficult moments by marrying someone Jewish. But we think Jonathan is a good man."

My parents were happy for me. The next day our families attended a symbolic ceremony in the chapel at St. Patrick’s Basilica, made possible by my Jewish father-in-law's connection with a Catholic priest. Even in my mid-thirties, the Catholic charade mattered to me as long as my parents were around. In the evening, we invited our friends to a dinner and party.

That Jonathan and I have lasted thirty-five years is a testament to the nice guy he is. Of all the consequential decisions in my life, staying married is the only one entirely dependent on maintaining a high-wire balancing act with another person. Jonathan has made it easy. But then, he is a skilled acrobat.

We agree on the essential things—at least what is important to us—children, politics, money, and the opera. Jonathan also has a strong sense of family, which at times helped bolster my relationship with mine. Regarding the opera, we agree we don’t have to attend. Several years ago, following an invitation to a salmon fishing lodge on the Saguenay River, we added fishing to the list. As beautiful and majestic as the river was, donning hip waders and standing in frigid water for five hours was an experience we agreed we did not need to repeat.

We developed a strategy in our personal and professional lives: divide and conquer, leveraging our differences and respective strengths. Following this strategy, I take charge of all significant home investments and decisions, as practical matters and details seem to elude Jonathan. Asking him to change a light bulb is out of the question, and seeking his opinion on whether it's time to install a new roof would be pointless.

Early in our marriage, I purchased a large piece of furniture for our dining room. The neighbours on the block bet on how long it would take Jonathan to notice its presence after it was delivered. Three weeks!

“When did we get that?” he said one day as he walked through the dining room. He didn’t even pause to examine it.

When we got married, we also started working together at a communications and public relations firm I had co-founded a couple of years earlier after leaving my bank job. Our strategy worked here as well. Jonathan excelled at navigating clients through challenging corporate crises and reorganizations with his ability to zero in on the broader implications of what was at stake with any business issue. Meanwhile, I excelled at managing the intricate details required for tasks like producing an annual report or organizing corporate events. At home, we had a rule: no work-related discussions.

After so many years, I am stunned by how I still feel about the nice guy who sleeps in my bed every night. I have no one else I would rather spend time with. He's my best friend, grounding me when I overthink and nudging me to appreciate the moment. I value his challenges to be my best.

As exciting as those early intoxicating days of love were, I wouldn’t exchange them for anything I have today. The butterflies in my stomach have flown away. What has replaced them is deep trust, unwavering commitment and loyalty, a desire to support, and a quiet, constant love.

Using the jigsaw puzzle analogy, I'd say our marriage isn't just a piece of the puzzle of my life; it's the entire frame. Everything falls into place within it.

The little red bag is a souvenir of our first trip together and a reminder that two very different people nearly missed out on a lifetime of happiness. Jonathan also turned out to be a quick study. On vacations, he still gets up early, but he’s learned to quietly slip out and visit a church or museum and then return to wake me with a coffee.

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Plan A was to start a family. When that failed, we moved on to two depressing years of Plan B fertility treatments. Every passing month felt like a death had happened. It wasn’t the actual loss of a child. It was the shattered dream of a child, the hope for a child, the visceral yearning for a child.

Pragnienie is a rich and nuanced Polish word that perfectly encapsulates the complex and intense emotional state I found myself in. While the English word longing conveys a similar sentiment, pragnienie carries additional existential layers of meaning and emotion. Deep. Desperate. Desire. That’s where I was when we decided to move forward with what I came to call Plan C: Adoption.

To anyone who has embarked on the adoption journey, the realization quickly dawns that many disparate forces in the universe must synchronize perfectly: belief, luck, vision, chance, trust, reality, and perhaps even divine intervention. Even then, adoption isn’t easy.

The first step was meeting with a social worker assigned to conduct a home study on our suitability as adoptive parents. Within a few minutes of meeting her, it became clear who the rumpled, elfin woman with short dark hair and a round face really was: an aspiring writer with a day job. She was Polish and had discovered late in life that she was Jewish, which gave her plenty of writerly material. As a small child at the start of the Second World War, she had been entrusted to a Polish-Catholic family by her Jewish parents. Of the almost one million Jewish children in Poland in 1939, she was one of the survivors.

As someone who is Polish, married to someone who is Jewish, the first sign from the universe was being randomly assigned this particular social worker. There were more connections to manifest. She had studied social work under my mother-in-law, who taught at McGill University. She also knew my father-in-law through his involvement with an ecumenical organization fostering connections between Christians and Jews.

I could sense that she liked us. We told her, in passing, that we might like to adopt a child from Poland, but we hadn’t started. At this early stage in the adoption process, we didn’t want to presume that she would declare us suitable.

The home study, which entailed two meetings in her office, plus her visit to our home, went smoothly. During our final encounter, she mentioned that she had a Polish friend who was also involved with the ecumenical group and often travelled to Poland. Her friend had many connections there.

“I told her about you. I hope you don’t mind. My friend thinks she can help,” the social worker said, beaming as if this were all part of the job.

The friend was a slim and attractive blonde. The afternoon I met her, we spoke a mixture of English and Polish, switching back and forth as I struggled to find words in Polish and she in English. I had no idea yet that the forces of the universe had coalesced or, in our case, collided.

I tried not to get my hopes up, but the social worker’s friend turned out to be a fairy godmother who had a magic wand. She conjured up a lawyer in Warsaw who knew of an unwed mother about to give birth. The young woman had no means to support herself and a child and was dependent on her family in a rural village. Three decades ago, traditional Catholic attitudes were still firmly entrenched in Poland, and her family wanted nothing to do with this out-of-wedlock baby.

Within a few weeks, I was holding a beautiful and healthy baby girl in my friend Ela’s small apartment in Warsaw. Ela, whom I had met on my first trip to Warsaw at age sixteen, her husband, and their two children rearranged their apartment and schedules so that the baby and I could stay with them for several weeks while we waited for the adoption process to proceed.

Fortunately, I had a book on baby care in my suitcase, a last-minute gift from a friend just before I left for Warsaw. The baby slept sixteen hours a day, and I feared there was something wrong with her. The book cleared up the misconception and provided much-needed reassurance. And thank God for Ela, who, with two children, had plenty of parenting experience and showed me the basics—bathing, feeding, burping, dressing, the works.

In 1993, four years after the fall of the Iron Curtain, there were no adoption agencies in Poland, so we were on our own. There was no support for international adoptions and even less for people with no connection to Poland. A cavalier we-can-take-care-of-our-own attitude remained and meant that many children ended up in orphanages. The government wanted Polish parents to adopt healthy Polish children. Sick or disabled children were, of course, harder to place and so could be adopted internationally or remain in the orphanages.

Our lawyer was an older woman with a stern don’t-mess-with-me attitude. She arranged for a doctor’s report fabricating a medical condition affecting the baby, one requiring specialized treatment only available in the West. In those transitional years after decades of Communist rule, a widespread belief lingered that the West possessed far superior resources and expertise compared to what was available in Poland. So, her strategy was plausible.

The lawyer coached me on the answers to questions I might be asked in court about the health of the baby and how the birth mother and I happened to meet and come to arrange an adoption together. I was to say she worked in a coffee shop that I frequently visited. The lawyer also coached the birth mother, so our stories aligned.

On my first trip to Poland with my father in 1970, when Poland was still behind the Iron Curtain, I learned that the end justified the means. People did whatever it took to survive under the Communist regime. That is how the universe always worked in Poland; everyone was in on it: the lawyer, the doctor, and the judge. Now I joined them.

Jonathan, who had left the details to me, arrived to meet his daughter a few days before the court date. When my turn came to face questioning from the judge, relief washed over me as I discovered all those Saturday mornings at Polish school in the church basement had honed my fluency to an adequate level to speak for myself in a Polish court. I confidently conveyed my supposed commitment to raising the child in a nurturing Polish home and showed the judge a letter from my father. He recounted his involvement in the Warsaw Uprising, shared his dedication to preserving Polish culture in his home in Canada, and recalled our first trip to the motherland many years ago.

Jonathan testified through an interpreter. It was all I could do to keep a straight face as he attempted to explain his crisis management and public relations work to a civil servant who had grown up in a system where the state was the only employer, with no need to spin or communicate its message. As we waited on the hard bench outside the courtroom for the judge to render her decision, the birth mother and I sat together and nervously held hands.

“I love her very much,” the birth mother said.

It broke my heart. All these years later, I know exactly how she felt. Her family had given her no choice; she could not return to her village with a baby. She was doing her very best.

When the judge granted our request to adopt this Polish baby, Jonathan and I were elated. There was a waiting period of another month before the court decision was finalized. I returned to Montreal because I had been away from work for too long, and Jonathan stayed to care for the baby. My sister arrived to help him, leaving her own two small sons in the care of my mother, their doting grandmother.

A month later, within twenty-four hours of all the paperwork being finalized, our lawyer used her connections and secured a new birth certificate for the baby, listing Jonathan and me as her parents. The same day, she expedited the issuance of a Polish passport for her. The next day, a final force in the universe lifted a plane off the ground, and father and daughter left Warsaw and flew to Montreal.

We named our Polish daughter, Alexandra. As I write these words, she is thirty years old. In a testament to her Polish heritage, she possesses a strong character and an uncanny understanding that the end justifies the means when it comes to helping family and friends.

The universe aligned. The fairy godmother retired. We were the only couple whose wish she granted.

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“Tell me the story about when I was born,” he asks, holding onto my arm, not wanting me to go.

“Once upon a time,” I start, intending to make it short, “the phone rang super loud in the middle of the night and woke us up when we were sleeping. We got the news that you were born, and we were so excited.”

I describe what it was like flying across the big ocean to Poland and meeting him for the first time.

“You had strawberry-blond hair. It was love at first sight.”

I tell him this even though it took me twenty-four hours to realize I was hopelessly in love.

“I couldn’t have babies, so we adopted you. And we brought you home, and your sister was happy to have a baby brother,” I say, a statement I was no longer sure was true.

“Why couldn’t you have babies?” he asks.

I wasn’t prepared for this question from my three-year-old.

“My tummy was broken.”

“Mmm,” he says after a few seconds, “I was a gift.”

“Yes. You were a gift.”

I kiss him good night for the sixth time and tuck his blanket around him tightly, just like my mother used to do. I close the door softly behind me. Exhausted after nights when two children sometimes wake up, a day of work, making dinner, and fulfilling the evening’s demands, I flop down on the couch and pour a glass of chardonnay to smooth the edges of the day.

In the darkening room, I pour myself a second glass, then top it up with an extra large splash. Just two glasses, I think, it isn’t so much. I wonder what I will tell my son when he is older, and a broken tummy no longer suffices. I probably won’t explain everything. The work. The worry. The determination.

My son’s birth mother was living in a homeless shelter on the outskirts of Warsaw. I arrived with the lawyer, a colleague of the woman who had helped us adopt Alexandra, to meet her and the baby. A new lawyer—the first one had retired—added to the uncertainty around adopting a second child.

Laundry hung over the sink, and a kerosene heater in the corner struggled to take the cold and damp out of the November air. A small wooden box lay on a table, low to the floor in the corner. This was the crib where the newborn baby boy slept.

The young woman rose to her full six-foot height when I entered. She reached down into the box to hand me a sweet, slumbering baby, an infant no larger than a loaf of bread. I was pretty certain, after spending a fair bit of time in Poland at this point in my life, that I understood the situation.

The fall of communism in 1989 marked the start of a seismic change in Poland, with a complex transition to a market economy and democratic reforms. Here it was five years later, 1994, and amidst the excitement of newfound freedoms and opportunities, it was obvious there was a human cost. Not everyone who had known only a paternalistic cradle-to-grave system found the adjustment easy.

This young woman had lived most of her life under the umbrella of state support and limited choices. For her and many others, the shift from a society where basic needs were provided to one where individual initiative and adaptability were paramount was daunting. Estranged from her family and lacking marketable skills, she was unable to take care of herself and support a child.

The baby was so perfect and sweet compared to his bleak surroundings. We began the legal process, which would take four months to wind through the court system. It was the same drill we had been through with his sister. Once again, Ela and her family opened their small apartment to a newborn and me. Jonathan held the fort back home with eighteen-month-old Alexandra.

Nearly three decades later, my son’s words—“I was a gift”—still resonate, and perhaps even more so now that I am no longer too busy or too tired to notice. Motherhood has taught me many lessons, but nothing prepared me for the heartache of being unable to help a loved one. It was anguishing at times to witness my son struggle through his life. He contended with anxiety and depression—a crushing and unrelenting illness—first as a child, then as a teenager, and even into adulthood. New diagnostic criteria allowed him to receive a diagnosis of autism as an adult, which he says enabled him to understand his world better. It opened up a crack, and that’s how the help got in—borrowing from Leonard Cohen’s words. With a good heart, a sharp mind, musical talent, and an abundance of courage, he is forging his own path.

Parents with children who struggle with illnesses and disabilities know the worry and stress, not to mention guilt. Was there something we should have done differently? Despite everything his father and I tried, no amount of love, no drug, no health cure or supplement seemed to help.

I often reflect on my son’s remark that he must have been a gift. He has taught me to see differently, to listen and hear differently, and to be more empathetic. Motherhood has shown me the depths of fierce love. It has revealed my resourcefulness in advocating for and supporting my children.

Motherhood is subsuming. Motherhood. Mother Land. It is an existential place like no other.

We named him Matthew, and he is a gift.

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I called her every day but felt guilty that I did not have more to offer. I had two toddlers and a busy job as a partner in a communications firm I had founded ten years before. It was a life where something was going on every single minute of the day. She had my father, I rationalized, and they seemed to be managing. Looking back, I realize that it was my father who first called me with my mother’s cancer diagnosis. True to her character, my mother kept her worries private.

When I phoned, sometimes my father answered, and we would exchange a cheerful word, maybe two, but he would quickly say, “Here’s your mother.” He had a deliberate but subtle way of trying to close whatever space there was between us. Even more so now that she had cancer.

"I am working on my stamp collection," he often replied if I had the opportunity to keep him on long enough to ask what he was doing. After handing my mother the phone, he returned to his comfortable chair in the den to contemplate what to do next with the stamps he had laid out on the coffee table. At least, this is what I imagined.

I imagined my mother sitting at the Formica kitchen table with chrome legs with a floral-patterned apron tied around her waist. The coiled cord, as long as a transatlantic cable, dangles between the beige phone with the rotary dial on the wall and the handset held to her ear. Her cup of sweetened tea in her favourite porcelain mug rests on the table before her. Behind her is a small bookshelf brimming with cookbooks. The kitchen counters are laden with the paraphernalia of a passionate cook. In front of the patio door, plants hang from macramé holders, some flourishing and some in the process of being nursed back to health. There’s the crucifix—the small metal crucified Christ—hanging above that same patio door. As I speak to my mother on the phone, the kitchen where she sits is as familiar to me as my own, right down to the spatula with the broken white handle in the stuffed top drawer beside her sink.

If it’s Wednesday, my mother might be perusing the grocery store flyers spread out on the table that arrived with the afternoon edition of the local Sarnia Observer, deciding whether there were better deals at the A & P, Loblaws, or the Dominion store. In the end, she’ll shop at all three—a habit—to maximize the bargains and stretch her grocery budget.

My daily call was a casual chit-chat about what she was cooking or the visit of her grandchildren, my sister's sons. I asked how she was feeling.

“I’m fine,” she always said. I wanted to believe it, but how could I know? She had always kept her feelings to herself.

The details I provided were equally superficial. “Yes, the kids are fine,” and “No, I’m not tired.” She had cancer, and I wasn’t going to worry her about my concerns about my children or my work. Neither of us was in the habit of sharing our problems.

"I love you," she said at the end of every phone call.

“I love you, too.” Done. I checked off the task on my mental to-do list.

My mother never spoke about her childhood and how the family managed after her father was robbed and killed while carrying cash from selling a small parcel of land. She was eleven the year this tragedy struck, and I only knew about it because one day, I asked her how my grandfather had died. I imagine she left school—in grade 4 or 5?—to help care for her three younger siblings and the family’s subsistence farm. While I asked about my grandfather, I did not ask if she had been afraid, or cold, or hungry during the war and how much she had suffered working in Germany, which by this point in my life, I knew was forced labour. I sensed that the experience was the reason for her silence about the past.

She never told me how she met my father or what it was like to arrive alone in a new country. She never mentioned the house in Westmount where she had worked as part of a government-sponsored immigration program for displaced people—DPs as they were called. She never remarked that it was a block from where I was raising her grandchildren. I learned the address only years later, after her death, too late to inquire about such things. She never said that caring for three children without help had been too much for her, although she did confide once that sometimes, at the end of the day, she wept from exhaustion. This was a rare admission that she could have used some help.

Health was another topic that my mother did not talk about. Within four years of the diagnosis, the cancer had metastasized. On my visits home, I could see its ravages on her tired face. There were chemotherapy treatments, surgeries, and several hospital stays for another five years. During the final weeks, she was admitted to the palliative care unit at the local hospital, the same one where her children were born and where she had once worked as a nurse’s aide, during the few years my grandmother from Poland lived with us. Palliative care was a sanctuary, a stark contrast to the regular ward, with its incessantly beeping monitors and nurses hurrying in every four hours to monitor vital signs. My sisters joined me in helping our father, and we took turns being by our mother's side.

All I could do, when it was my time to sit with her, was gently push aside the morphine drip that tethered her body and crawl into the hospital bed beside her. I would hold her and run scenarios through my head: was her silence about a childhood filled with hardships and poverty, years of enduring the war, or unspeakable acts of violence or cruelty she had witnessed? I was never brave enough to pierce the silence around her memories. And now it was too late.

For the last two decades after my mother’s death, I chose to focus on the happy memories rather than the secrets and the silence. My mother never sat down, nor did she complain. With three daughters born within three and a half years, and no relatives or extra money for help, she did it all for us. I can't recall her ever asking me to do anything around the house. She was a devoted—entirely—and caring. Her priority was her family. Cooking and baking—busy in the kitchen, preparing her delicious Polish recipes—were her way of engaging or playing with us.

She wasn’t the type that got down on the floor. The rare moments of her pushing us on swings or playing tag existed because they were recorded on 8 mm Kodak film, but in my memories, I do not have access to them. Equally rare were the times she laughed out loud and expressed joy as if she believed these simple pleasures might be snatched from her.

I hold on to all the skating, swimming, Polish folk dance lessons, and piano lessons that my mother took me to. At twelve, I rebelled and refused to go back to the folk dance lessons at the Polish Hall. So my mother bought a second-hand upright piano and started me on lessons with Mrs. Dobrowolska, the wife of our family doctor, a Jackie Kennedy wannabe. I had limited musical talent, but I endured the hour each week, fascinated by the doctor's much younger wife with her soft, breathy voice, just like Jackie’s, and her elegant cashmere twin sweater sets paired with a single strand of pearls.

I hold on to my mother’s love of pretty clothes. It mattered to her that my sisters and I were well-dressed. Sundays required frilly dresses and patent leather Mary-Jane shoes to wear to church. I hold on to the many times my mother told me to dress warmly. For her, a warm winter coat and gloves were of the utmost importance. Are you warm enough, was her mantra.

When I was a teenager, my mom allowed me to pick out my own dresses at the nicest dress shop in town. The moment I entered, I was in a world of matronly salesladies sporting French twist hairdos. I’d peruse the racks and select as many as five dresses to bring home for her approval. I usually got to keep all of them. She had a weakness when it came to a pretty dress.

I remember the rare times she praised what I wore, declaring, “You look smashy!” Her English was by no means perfect, but I knew she approved. Over the years, I graduated to designer labels and indulged in acquiring more pieces than I truly needed. Perhaps they served as a reminder that the little girl in the floral dress and plaid pants had come a long way.

But I couldn’t let go of what I perceived as her judgment. On one visit, probably shortly after she was first diagnosed with cancer, my mother said something that has stayed with me to this day. She watched me look after my young son, who could be difficult. Being in new situations and unfamiliar places, including the annual visit to his grandparents, was hard for him. I did not realize then how changes to his routine overloaded his sensory system. After one of his meltdowns in her home, she turned to me and said, "He’s gonna kill you."

I knew she didn’t mean literally, but had intuited an issue, foreshadowing a challenging parental task ahead. But all I heard was criticism. Maybe I wasn’t a good mother. No matter how much distance I had put between what I perceived were her expectations, her judgment rang in my ears whenever my son had a tantrum or suffered a meltdown and spiralled into panic.

Home, food, family, warm clothing, and, yes, my mother’s expectations were elements that have stayed with me. But until recently, I failed to grasp why they were important to her.

My mother was an enigma. The distance between us stretched from Montreal, where I lived, to Piątek Mały, the tiny village in Poland where she was born. A similar distance had separated her and my grandmother. Where she came from, what she had experienced, why she could not say, made the distance too far.

The silence my mother carried was unsettling for me, but with time, I came to accept it, or at least to push it out of my conscious mind. Her death made it easier for me not to look, and eventually, I stopped thinking about what I didn’t know—the missing piece.

I used to believe I didn’t want what she had settled for. Now, I realize my mother felt like she had captured lightning in a bottle. Against all the odds, she believed her life was extraordinary. It’s taken me a lifetime to figure this out. But I have so much more to tell you before I get to that.

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After my mother died, I continued my long-established daily routine of telephoning. Only now, the person I spoke to was my father. He had an endearing habit of answering the phone with an exuberant “Good Morning” or “Good Evening,” as if he was expecting the call or the caller to have some exciting news to share. Even call centre employees were cajoled into sharing something personal before they could get to their scripted spiels. On those rare occasions when he didn’t answer, I called one of my sisters to see if my dad had mentioned any plans to go out. The three of us kept in close touch with him.

For five years after her death, my father remained in their shared home. Living alone didn't seem to unsettle him as much as I'd feared. Like many who've loved and lost, he simply carried on.

During my daily calls, I often quizzed him on how he was managing without his beloved Maria—my mother—and offered practical advice or instructions.

“Let the water boil before you put the pasta in.”

“Set the oven to 350.”

His desire to remain independent and cook at eighty-four both impressed and worried me. I applauded his efforts and breathed a sigh of relief when he mentioned that one of the Polish women in the community had dropped off a home-cooked meal.

My dad also did his best to fill the void his wife left in his life and in everyone else's. He even took coffee breaks with the woman who came to clean the house every two weeks, exactly as my mother had.

The relationship that evolved with my father after my mother died was unexpected. Without my mother to hand the phone to, we chatted about our day—they were pleasant, ordinary, everyday exchanges. Every conversation ended with "I love you," just like the phone calls with my mother had ended. And he added something new. "I am proud of you." It made me smile every time, and I believed him.

During one of our phone conversations, my father shared some interesting news. He reported that Krystyna, his first girlfriend in Poland and a widow by then, had telephoned him from Warsaw earlier that day and proposed they get together as a couple.

“Can you believe that?” he said incredulously. “I’m not interested at all, and I told her so.”

I believed him. My parents were married for fifty-two years, and I know they considered themselves a fortunate couple on a quiet path together. In my mother’s eyes, my father was a pillar of strength. In his eyes, well…he just loved her.

After my mother died, my father said he spoke to her every day. Maybe it was just after he chatted with God. He remained devoted to her and had faith that they would be together in the next life.

I was not surprised by his reaction to Krystyna’s call. Not once did my father express regret about choosing not to return to Warsaw and to the young woman he first loved in his youth. Throughout my life, the reasons for his post-war decision remained undiscussed. I assumed that living in the free Western world was the obvious choice for him to make. During my stays in Poland for the adoption of our children, I had gotten to know Krystyna quite well, but this late-life call from her caused me to wonder if there was something I had missed about their relationship. Still, I mostly thought about how crazy and difficult it would be for her to pick up her life and move to Canada in her mid-eighties.

At eighty-nine, my father announced that a new retirement home was being built in Smalltown. He was interested. A buddy he knew from church planned on living there.

I helped him choose an apartment from the floor plans provided in the residence's glossy brochure. We selected the one with the shortest walk to the parking spot for his car. The tiny alcove office had just enough space for his desk and room for shelves to accommodate all his binders brimming with his stamp collection.

For my father, moving out of his house proved easy. My mother had always planned and executed their various moves in the past, and he would take the same hands-off strategy time around. He let me pack up everything. He’d always had a sense of what to care about and what was not important and made no fuss about the lifetime of stuff he and my mother had accumulated. A decluttering guru was not required to instruct him to keep only what sparked joy in his life.

None of the lifetime’s accumulation of stuff mattered except for a few essential pieces of furniture—a bed, a couch, a desk—and his precious stamp collection. He wanted to leave the ornate dining room cabinet to the new owner, sensing that the young couple who had purchased his house might appreciate it. The rest could be shared among his three daughters or given away. For three days, I made ruthless decisions on what to keep and what to give away.

My father was happy in his new place, a bright apartment with three large windows overlooking the main entrance where, on sunny days, the elderly residents sat and viewed the comings and goings. Meals in the dining room meant he didn't have to cook. There was always someone with whom to exchange a cordial word.

When I asked him what finally prompted his decision to move, my dad said, “I was so tired after taking out the garbage to the end of the driveway that I had to take a little rest. The idea of not having to do this ever again was appealing.”

Freedom from tedious chores. That was my dad. He much preferred to focus on his stamps.

My father's ninety-year-old buddy from church, who moved to the retirement residence at the same time, informed his children he was giving up driving because he had a younger friend who could drive him to church.

"How old is your friend?" they asked with relief.

"Eighty-nine," the church buddy replied.

Each day, my father and his friend drove to church. When it became evident that he shouldn't be behind the wheel anymore, he sold his car. From then on, he either watched Mass on TV or relied on a much younger acquaintance who worked at the public library for a lift.

In the years following my mother’s death, I grew closer to my dad. It happened effortlessly. In contrast to my mother, he was an open book. The more time I spent with him, the more I observed his gravitational pull around people. He thanked everyone who helped him or extended a small kindness. There was a sparkle in his pale green eyes for every friend or stranger who crossed his path, and he greeted them with a smile or a firm handshake. When strangers asked how he was, he repeated his mantra: "I’m overworked and underpaid." People always chuckled, precisely the reaction he wished to elicit.

In his quiet, decent way, he was a force of good in the world. If he possessed a fault, it would be his unwavering tendency to see the world through a positive lens. Always turning towards the light, he sought the best in every person and situation, a strategy that generally served him well. There were moments when his steadfast refusal to confront, express anger, or address unpleasant matters left me feeling frustrated. It wasn't until after his death, when I delved into his full story, that I truly understood why embracing the light mattered so profoundly to him.

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“Why would you choose such an ugly stamp?” he asked.

“Yeah, you’re right.”

In the world of a devoted philatelist, my choice was indeed a faux pas. I had affixed a nondescript permanent stamp—the ones you buy on rolls with the profile of the Queen—on this envelope. My father, the stamp collector, was not impressed.

In every home he'd ever inhabited, bookcase shelves were filled with binders and binders of a carefully curated treasury of stamps. He loved to show them to any person who indicated even remote interest. If he met someone new, he always asked if they had any stamps. It was a great icebreaker. He wondered if they had stamps from whatever country they or their families were from.

“No relatives? Well, maybe you have friends?”

Everywhere he went, people saved stamps for him. His friends, the bank teller, his priest, shop owners who knew his name, even his family doctor all dutifully saved stamps for his collection. And in those twilight years plagued by a litany of falls and emergency room visits, he asked the nurses and doctors if they had any stamps. What doctor could keep a charming nonagenarian for further tests when, rather than dwell on his latest fall, he would cheerfully inquire about their potential stamp offerings? It was a masterful deflection, his philatelic passion doubling as the perfect get-out-of-jail strategy.

My father cut off the stamps on the corners of all the envelopes he ever received and soaked the little squares and rectangles of paper in bowls filled with warm water to soften the adhesive. Using special tweezers, he'd carefully remove and press each stamp between a newspaper weighted by books to dry. Under a magnifying glass, he examined them—any imperfect edges diminished the philatelic value. I would watch him at his desk holding up his prized finds, squinting and examining the stamps.

If he wasn’t sure about one of his treasures, he consulted the Scott Standard Postage Stamp Catalogue, a thick and expensive volume he received annually for free by charming the local librarian, who donated the previous year’s catalogue to him when the new one arrived at the public library. Sorted piles awaited placement in binders or in envelopes destined to be traded with another collector. As a child, I saw my mother's exasperation as his benign invasion multiplied, slowly staking claim to more shared territory.

Like clockwork, commemorative First Day Covers arrived every few weeks—from Canada Post and his devoted good friend Krystyna in Warsaw. Each time a new stamp was issued, these First Day Covers were sent to collectors. They featured beautiful illustrations related to the stamp's subject—a famous person, event or landmark—and a special postmark. Krystyna's First Day Covers and Polish stamps, arriving for nearly 50 years, were the prized jewels of his collection.

I contributed only one set of First Day Covers to his vast collection. The stamps were issued on April 17, 1982, when the Canadian constitution and charter of rights were signed on Parliament Hill in Ottawa. I witnessed the signing ceremony with Queen Elizabeth and Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. As a young political assistant working for a cabinet minister, I had a seat in the VIP section. I invited my youngest sister to attend with me. We walked to the Hill, and as I presented my fancy embossed invitation card, no one asked us to walk through a metal detector or subjected us to any security inquisition.

The next day, all the newspapers carried a photo of the signing ceremony. Prime Minister Trudeau sat beaming on the Queen’s right, and the Clerk of the Privy Council stood behind her, showing her where to put her signature. The Queen wore a teal suit with the royal insignia pinned on her lapel and a matching hat. I was metres away. As the daughter of immigrants, the privilege of attending this auspicious event was not lost on me.

The four commemorative First Day envelopes I had secured each had one of the corners of the larger stamp sheet. In a blend of historical significance and filial devotion, I had them autographed by the Prime Minister and Minister of Justice, Jean Chrétien, then mounted and framed as a gift for my father. He hung this up on the wall beside his desk in every place he lived.

Throughout his life, my father used the services of an agent named John, a retired teacher he’d met at a stamp show. Over the years, he asked John to sell his duplicates or parts of his collection. They never discussed prices because my father trusted his stamp agent completely. A cheque from John would arrive occasionally, and my father didn’t question the amount. He had made up his mind long ago to believe in people's inherent goodness and honesty, and he was seldom disappointed.

Within weeks of moving to the retirement home, he had everyone there saving stamps for him. He held court during meals in the dining room as one person after another gravitated to his table and brought an offering. Many had scoured old letters, and others came with the ubiquitous permanent stamps like the one I had put on the birthday card. My father thanked each person profusely as if they had bestowed the greatest gift. And so, the stamps always kept coming.

I did not inherit the stamp-collecting gene. But when my father questioned my stamp selection on the birthday card, I understood that my role as the philatelist’s daughter was to purchase the most beautiful stamps I could find to adorn the few letters I mail. Now, I affix a pretty or interesting stamp even if I mail a cheque to pay a bill.

My father was right that day. I have a choice.

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“Has prayer helped?” I once asked.

“Thousands of times.”

God came first in my father’s life. Following his retirement, he attended Mass every day, often joined by my mother in the years before she died. Without exaggeration, while he was saying the rosary, he must have recited the Hail Mary more than half a million times in his lifetime.

I'm unsure if my firmly lapsed Catholicism disappointed my father, though I suspect piety was something he would have wished for me. When I left for university, I abandoned the Catholic Church and all its teachings I couldn’t rationalize or accept. I turned my back on the Baltimore Catechism, the textbook used in Sunday school to instill such tenets as: no salvation outside the Catholic Church, papal infallibility, and the concept of original sin removable only through baptism. While my father never said anything, he quietly demonstrated that prayer and observance were integral to how he lived.

He found comfort in his familiarity with the twinkling votive candles at the back of the church, the fourteen stations of the cross depicted on plaster panels that hung below the stained-glass windows, the priest’s thurible filled with clouds of burning incense, and the birdbath of holy water at the church entrance, where he had paused thousands of times over the course of a lifetime to make the sign of the cross.

Apart from Sundays, he attended the eight o’clock Mass on weekday mornings, when the church was nearly deserted, with only a few elderly people in the pews. During those early mornings, he loved serving as an altar boy while the real altar boys were at school. He fulfilled this function until he was so frail he could no longer climb the steps to the altar. And he loved showing off that he still remembered the prayers of the traditional Latin Mass so many decades after he had learned them. In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti…the words forever engraved in his memory.

Faith was the air that he breathed. If he lost his glasses or misplaced his hearing aid, he prayed to St. Anthony, patron saint of all things lost. And he always found the item. He prayed during the difficult moments of his life and for a good death. I know this because I once asked him what he had been thinking about as he lay helplessly splayed on the floor for hours after a fall, an incident that occurred in his retirement home apartment. He stubbornly refused to press the little button on the gadget around his neck that would immediately summon help.

“If I pressed the button, the ambulance would take me to the emergency at the hospital. I just wanted someone to help me stand up and get back to bed. I prayed not to die this way on the bathroom floor.”

My father’s book of daily prayers was always by his side or within easy reach. He took comfort from that well-worn volume with its faded celadon-green linen cover, its broken spine bound together with tape, and its well-thumbed pages, many marked with little slips of paper. He prayed for family, sick friends, and strangers he thought needed God’s help. He once told me he prayed for me.

“Thank you,” I replied, unsure of what else to say.

The example set by my father has led to my occasional attendance at synagogue services with my Jewish husband. While I never converted to Judaism, I still feel welcome in this Reform synagogue that imposes no conditions on my being there. It’s clear to me that I would feel far less welcome in any other synagogue; there are many conservative synagogues I would not enter. My presence here started with Jonathan’s and his family’s long history with this synagogue, but it’s not why I remain.

Truth be told, I attend services and stay connected because of my admiration for the female Rhodes scholar rabbi and the inclusivity she has fostered. There are several non-Jewish members who have walked in and stayed because they feel the same. And it satisfies some of my hunger for a more structured and ethical framework to navigate an increasingly harder-to-understand world.

I find solace in the lilting singing, the moments of stillness, and the sermons of the brilliant rabbi. The intonation and cadence of the Hebrew prayers hold a familiarity reminiscent of the traditional Latin Mass from my early childhood. Perhaps I appreciate the synagogue experience because Judaism seems more about questions and values than dogma.

For sure, I can remain safely on the periphery—cynical about organized religious systems. In the synagogue, I do not have to contend with the immaculate conception or the presence of God in a communion wafer. Catholic dogma has always perplexed me, and I don’t need to attend Mass in order to have a spiritual life and to understand that creation itself is a miracle or that by the flutter of a butterfly's wings, a typhoon can be set in motion on the other side of the planet.

In the synagogue, my intention is not to replace one religion with another. It's a place where I can contemplate some of the same questions my father may have pondered when he attended Mass. I wonder if my father, too, engaged in silent negotiations with God, just as I do when confronted with life's challenges.

In these moments of reflection, my thoughts inevitably turn to my father. Although I haven't found solace in the faith-based answers that brought him such profound comfort, I admire the unwavering faith that was his bedrock, providing him strength during the darkest moments a human being could endure. I'm certain that if we had discussed my occasional attendance at the synagogue, he would have reached out, taken my hand in his, and offered me an understanding smile.

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It's a dreary, grey March day, cold and tedious as those days when winter drags on far too long. Through the large windows of the airport terminal, the feeble morning light struggles to pierce the heavy clouds. I am thinking about my ninety-six-year-old father's increasingly frail condition and what it means for my retirement dream of living in different cities for a few months each year.

As my dad's physical condition deteriorated, he found it increasingly difficult to make his way to the dining room from his small apartment in the retirement home, even with the aid of his walker. A year prior, the staff had convened a family meeting, which my sisters and I attended along with our father. During the meeting, they described his expected decline and recommended that we start looking for a place that could provide a higher level of care. He sat stoically, navy blazer and striped tie, hands folded on the conference table, taking it all in. The image of him sitting there still makes my heart ache.

The moment we had discussed during that meeting has arrived. Today is the first of what will be many regular trips to Toronto for the next three years to visit my elderly dad. My new retirement plan.

The decision—and my dad’s agreement—to move from Sarnia, where he had lived for sixty-five years, to a long-term care residence in Toronto will make visits more manageable for us, his daughters. One sister lived in Toronto, I could easily visit from Montreal, and the distance for my other sister from her home in Ohio remained about the same.

I knew I would hate the place even before I step inside for the first time. My reaction has nothing to do with my sister making all the arrangements. It has everything to do with my dad slowly dying. Long-term care will be his last home. The last stop.

"Third floor," says the older man behind the desk, his Garda Security uniform and yellow turban lending an air of authority as his finger taps lightly on the sign-in book.

As I wait for the elevator across from the Hospitality Shop in the lobby, where a woman wearing a lanyard that identifies her as a volunteer sells chocolate bars and bags of chips, my gaze falls upon a lineup of wheelchairs positioned in front of what appears to be a common room. Each wheelchair is occupied by a frail elderly person—some slumped over, others seemingly napping, many wearing slippers. Two caregivers, dressed in pastel scrubs and bright Adidas, chat nearby.

"Bingo, Thursday at 1 p.m.," states the sign outside the door.

Shit, I think, I hope they won’t try to get my dad to play bingo. He will flat-out refuse.

On the third floor, I make my way down a long corridor lined with overflowing medical carts—lotions, potions, and blood pressure machines cluttering their shelves. The yellow bio-hazard boxes on the walls beside each room’s entrance announce the activities within. I have a sinking feeling as I walk past a TV room filled with frail elderly women and one lone man slumped in their wheelchairs, watching a rerun or an old movie, their heads drooping as they struggle to stay awake.

I wonder about the end of my own life. This place feels like a stark departure from how I want to live my last years. While providing care for those with dementia or substantial physical needs like my father is challenging, I don't want to end up institutionalized in a place like this.

A tiny woman in a floral cotton dress is pacing in the corridor outside my father's room, muttering to herself and pulling at the sleeve of her tightly buttoned cardigan sweater.

"Is this the hospital?" she stops me, her eyes wide with confusion. "Do you know when I go home?"

I haven't yet become familiar with the anxious and frightened expressions often exhibited by those with severe dementia. Within a few visits, she will become part of the fabric of this place for me. I will say hello and reassure her that her room is right there, that she isn't lost. I will come to know her as the Serbian lady who lives across the hall from my father. Her children have done an excellent job making her room homey with photos and a colourful comforter. They have even brought in a table lamp, providing her with subdued lighting and lessening the institutional feel cast by the overhead neon. Her hospital bed is positioned low to the ground, so she can easily manoeuvre in and out, something I have to accept my father will never be able to manage again.

My father is imprisoned by legs that no longer function. I hate knowing this and thinking about the indignity of having to ring a bell and wait for someone to come and hoist him onto the toilet with a contraption called a “patient lift.” I hate that my father has lost his autonomy. I hate thinking that his life has been reduced to getting up, getting dressed, eating three meals, having a snack brought to his room in the afternoon, receiving an occasional visitor, and enduring the interminable wait for assistance when he rings for help.

If I lived in the same town as my father, would I be able to take care of him at home? He needs support and special equipment for many of his daily activities. Long-term care means no further trips to the emergency room. It’s the best situation for him. But I have trouble accepting that this will be his last home, and his life is reduced to one room with a hospital bed.

After a few visits, I will grow accustomed to the place. The discomfort I initially felt lessens, partly because the residence is Catholic. Hanging a crucifix in my father's room isn’t out of place, and he can attend a daily Mass in the same common area where they play bingo in the afternoons. Many elderly priests and nuns are residents, including Sister Mary Teresa, who lives on the same floor as my father and flits around like a little bird, dispensing cheery hellos and pecks on the head to everyone.

The people who work here are friendly, from the Sikh man behind the reception desk, soon asking about my trip from Montreal and the health of my children, to the caregivers and nurses who seem to be primarily new immigrants from the Caribbean islands and the Philippines, cheerfully greeting me each time we pass in the corridor. It's hard to complain when people are genuinely kind.

On many visits, I find my father seated in his wheelchair at his assigned dining table—his personal spot. Each wing of the long-term care residence has a separate dining room, so the residents don’t have far to go. My father's regular dining companion is cheerful Lillian, one of the few residents on the floor who, like him, still has a clear mind. A round, chubby woman with steel-grey hair hanging limply around her face, she lives next door to the Serbian lady and favours oversized T-shirts and baggy sweatpants. Try as she might to engage my father in casual conversations, he isn’t gifted at small talk.

Lillian always seems pleased to see me and enjoys our chit-chats covering the same topics: where she is from (Pickering), the weather (she doesn’t care since she hardly goes outside), and her children (missing in action). I will sit through many unappetizing-looking meals and chat with Lillian while my father slowly spears each forkful and brings it shakily to his mouth, each bite a struggle. Many residents have caregivers to feed them. Some can only eat pureed food—green, rounded, ice cream-like scoops for vegetables, white for potatoes, and brown for meat.

It doesn’t matter what I will ever think about the place. My father will accept it and his losses with grace. As always, he’ll go with the flow—his mind and spirit, thankfully, still intact. My father will remain his optimistic, grateful, and resilient self.

I reluctantly accept that Toronto will be my most frequent travel destination and that this long-term care home is my father's final stop. But I’ll never get used to the feeling that his life, at this stage, is like the twilight—a gradual fading of the light of day.

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Lying open and face-down on his lap was his constant companion—his book of daily prayers. Frail hands, mottled with age spots and purple blotches, rested on the book. His reading glasses were under the crook of one finger.

A dark thought crossed my mind that he had peacefully slipped away, spared living out his final days in this long-term care facility with other old people institutionalized at the end of their lives. Ninety-six years is a long life. Despite his physical challenges and loss of autonomy, my father was mercifully spared the mental decline that so commonly accompanies old age. His joyful spirit remained intact. I didn't want to see him diminished or suffering. This would have been the kind of death he had prayed for.

My eyes scanned the small room. The TV was muted, broadcasting the noontime weather update. Familiar family photos and a framed watercolour with red poppies had been hung on the walls—mementos from my dad's previous life. On the dresser sat a photo of my parents on their wedding day—Maria smiling with a large bouquet, Edward sporting tortoise-shell glasses. A few binders of stamps stood sentinel—as they had done in every home he ever lived in—on a shelf beside the television. At the end of the hospital bed, a neatly folded and familiar blanket softened the institutional harshness, no doubt placed there to make the room as homey as possible.

I tiptoed across the carpet and put my arms around my father’s bony shoulders. Shallow, rhythmic breaths confirmed that he was alive, and I kissed the top of his mostly bald head, resisting the urge to smooth down the remaining white wisps that looked like bits of milkweed fluff. He opened his eyes and gave me a smile that lit up his face.

"You're here!" he exclaimed in his familiar, heavily accented English, throwing his arms out to embrace me. "How was your trip?"

After a brief exchange about the flight from Montreal, my questions about how he was adjusting to his new situation and his about my children, I settled into his favourite blue upholstered recliner—the sole piece of furniture we'd brought from his previous apartment—and watched as he maneuvered his wheelchair to face me. I hoped we would find something interesting to talk about beyond what he ate for lunch, if it might rain, or whether my sisters had called (which they always did). I was planning to spend more time with him, and we would have to find something to talk about to fill the hours.

Conversations about the political chaos in Trump's America or Brexit were off the table because my father had decided there wasn’t any “good news” and had stopped watching the nightly newscast. Certain topics like abortion were also best avoided, given his firm Catholic views. Memories seemed to be a safe topic.

“Do you remember the day the Germans bombed Warsaw?”

It was just a casual question to start a conversation. We had never talked about the war, and I wasn't particularly interested. Little did I know where this offhand question would lead.

At first, he brushed the it away. "You should have asked me that when my memory was sharper."

But I could see by the look of concentration on his face—the narrowing of his eyes as he brought his fingertips to his forehead—that he was searching through old folders stored long ago in an existential filing cabinet to find something for me.

Until that moment, my knowledge of my father's past could be summarized in just a few sentences: born in Warsaw, he had fought against the German occupation during the 1944 Warsaw Uprising and was taken as a prisoner of war. After the war, he immigrated to Canada and married my mother.

I also knew lighthearted facts, like how my mother never served potatoes because my father joked that he had eaten enough during the war—a lifetime quota. Much later in life, as he became increasingly frail, he would dismiss my entreaties for him to walk and stay limber with a wave of the hand and the words "Dosyć się nachodziłem" —I have walked enough. I knew it was a reference to the war.

These were the bare bones I knew about his past before we began our conversation on my first visit. That day I was not expecting anything like the story he pulled out of his mental filing cabinet. It was a story he had kept to himself for over half a lifetime—or at least one kept from me. Neither did I think the conversation we began that day would continue each time I came back to visit until the day before his death three years later.

As we sat together that afternoon, my father didn’t answer my question about what he remembered about the day the war started. He wanted to tell me about a specific event that began on January 20, 1945, after he'd been a prisoner of war for a little over three and a half months. That winter day, the German guards started emptying Lamsdorf, the POW camp.

“Rumours had circulated for weeks that they would evacuate us to a permanent labour camp,” my father said. “Maybe it would be worse there. Or we thought they would use us as leverage in some future peace deal. No one knew what was happening.”

In the last months of the war, as the Allied forces closed in on Berlin, the Nazis began evacuating prisoners from their POW, concentration, and extermination camps. In some instances, before leaving the camps, the Nazis burned the meticulous records they had kept. Precious evidence, a few grim black-and-white details of a person's existence—a name, a city of origin, a birth date, or a list of the few personal items carried into the camp (and that were confiscated)—were erased.

On the morning of the evacuation, Edward—the 24-year-old who would become my father less than ten years later—woke up earlier than usual. He rose from the upper bunk where he slept alongside six other Polish men, all fellow resistance fighters from the Warsaw Uprising. The bunk had no mattress, and a couple of wooden support planks were missing—burned in the small wood stove at the center of their quarters during the previous days, a desperate measure to keep warm. He had already packed a small sack with his few belongings, including a letter and a family photograph. Other men had already been moved out of the camp, so Edward knew to be prepared.

As Edward’s group of POWs left the camp that grey winter morning, the Nazi flag hung defiantly at the front gate beside the lookout tower. “I looked back at the flag and the walls with razor wire, said a Hail Mary, and started walking. I had no idea where we were going.”

Nine hours later, the weary POW group finally reached a village. The last remnants of winter daylight had faded two hours earlier, and the night sky stretched out like an abyss devoid of stars. The exhausted men crumpled onto the hay-strewn floor of a barn. I asked my father how far they walked.

“We walked about twenty-five kilometres without winter boots or warm clothing. We had just the clothing we had come to the camp with in October.” I later determined the temperature that day was bone-chilling and well below freezing.

Every day was the same. The cold cut through their skin like a sharp knife as they marched single file, zigzagging on country roads that ran beside ice-solid, barren fields. As he trudged along, he was unaware that similar evacuations involving thousands were taking place from other Nazi camps.

“If the artillery from the east got louder, they moved us to the west. If there was artillery fire from the west, we walked east.”

The men walked through villages but avoided the larger towns so as not to draw attention. Edward walked with his head down, sometimes thinking about bread or a meal and sometimes despairing about when or how the gruelling ordeal would end. Every day, one of the guards was dispatched ahead on a bicycle to commandeer accommodation with the village burgomaster or a local farmer and to scrounge whatever food might be available.

Potatoes were the main fare, sometimes eaten raw. At one farm in Sudetenland (a region Germany annexed from Czechoslovakia in 1938), the farmer's wife was Polish and spent the night making pot after pot of thin soup and bringing it out to the POWs in the barn. Sometimes, local villagers would leave a bit of food at the side of the road, but the POWs risked being shot or beaten with the butt of a rifle if they stepped out of the long column to grab it.

Many men had blisters on their toes and feet that became infected. Edward found it impossible to take his boots off. He didn't remove them, except for once, during the ordeal. Nor did he change his clothes. Lice were a persistent problem for everyone.

Those who couldn't keep up with the main column were left behind and shot by the guards. Many died of the bitter cold, disease, or exhaustion. Every day, bodies were abandoned at the roadside or tossed in ditches.

Ninety-four days later, near the farm village of Oberzall in Bavaria, the Nazi guards deserted. In the middle of the night, the POWs realized their captors had vanished. They quickly set up lookout posts on the perimeter of the farm where they had billeted for the night in the barn. Edward and one other POW guarded the main entrance. Before dawn, the US Army troops arrived, almost mistaking them for Germans.

“Jesteśmy Polakami,” Edward shouted. We are Polish. He repeated it in German.

One of the liberators, perhaps a soldier whose parents or grandparents spoke Polish back home, recognized the language and shouted to the other Americans not to shoot.

General Patton's Third United States Army quietly liberated Edward and the other exhausted men on April 24, 1945. The US Army immediately transferred the men who had survived the brutal ordeal to German Army barracks they had seized in the small town of Langwasser near Nuremberg, about two hours from Oberzall.

"I finally could take off my boots. My socks had disintegrated. They gave us clean clothes. I took a shower, and we slept and slept in clean bunks. The Americans told us to eat slowly for the first few days. But we had all the coffee we wanted."

When my father finished his astonishing story, I asked him how many men had been in his group when he left the camp.

"Two hundred."

"And how many were you when the Americans liberated you?"

"About thirty."

“Amazing,” I replied, and meant it.

At this point in the conversation, my father closed his eyes. I couldn't tell if he was thinking of the liberation, how luxurious the clean clothes and shower had felt, or his comrades who had perished. Perhaps he was just tired.

We had talked for nearly two hours.

"Let’s go and get a coffee, Dad,” I said. “Maybe when we get back, we can check Google Maps and see if we can figure out how far you walked.”

I pushed my father’s wheelchair to the Tim Hortons in the lobby of the rehabilitation hospital adjacent to the long-term care residence. In the coffee shop, we settled at a table by the window to view the activities outside—people walking by and cars and medical transport vans pulling up to the entrance. I ordered a coffee for myself, the apple juice requested by my father, and we agreed to split a large cookie. The story he had just told me had not yet fully registered.

Our conversation drifted to banalities. We revisited my trip from Montreal—the travel time, the subway from Union Station, and my terrifying experience with turbulence while landing at Toronto Island airport. My dad smiled, saying it reminded him of some of his own plane trips.

Returning to his floor, we settled in the sunny lounge area and opened the computer available for all residents. Using Google Maps, we traced an approximate route from the POW camp in Łambinowice (renamed Lamsdorf by the Germans) in western Poland. The route took them through the Sudetenland, and south of Dresden and Nuremberg. We calculated that Edward had walked at least 800 kilometres on this 95-day journey.

At the end of the afternoon, it was time for me to catch the train back home. After my morning experience with turbulence, I was happy to return to Montreal on solid steel rail tracks. I hugged my father goodbye, leaving him at the computer playing solitaire until it was time for dinner. I told him I would be back to visit in a couple of weeks and I’d phone him every day until then. Ever the gallant gentleman, he took my hand and kissed it.

I had five hours on the train back to Montreal to contemplate his astonishing story and wonder what other stories he still had to share. The story he relayed that day opened a door into his past and events I knew nothing about. I had long held the belief that my father’s unwavering optimism found its roots in the opportunity to start over in Canada and achieve his version of the immigrant success story. But perhaps overcoming such an ordeal had more to do with it.

Why had my father never talked about the forced evacuation from the POW camp, the cruel and inhuman winter march, or his liberation?

Back at home in Montreal, I discovered that January and February 1945 were the coldest months ever recorded to date in Europe. I also learned that Edward’s group had likely been considerably larger than he thought. Historians estimate there were approximately 15,000 POWs interned in Lamsdorf at the start of 1945, and the Germans divided them into groups of five hundred or more when they began the weeks of evacuation. But my father’s statement that only thirty men survived the ordeal was probably accurate.

And finally, I discovered that the evacuation and trek for hundreds of kilometres was appropriately termed a death march. My father was one among tens of thousands subjected to this horrific ordeal. It had not crossed my mind that non-Jewish people and thousands of Allied POWs had also suffered this fate.

That first conversation marked a shift in how I would come to view my own life's story. Imperceptible at first. I would come to understand how my story was embedded in my father’s. What I didn’t yet know was that this would lead me to my mother’s story and her silence around it. But first, I need to finish telling you Edward’s story.

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The simple statement brought a smile to my face. After our previous conversation, it was evident his life was far from ordinary. It was my second visit since he had moved to the long-term care residence, and as the warm afternoon light filtered through the window, we settled in to chat. My father’s room lacked a chair, so I perched on the edge of the small seat that folded down from his unused walker. He kept the walker as a symbol of hope—a reminder that miracles were possible and he might walk again.

With no specific agenda and no desire to push my father to speak about the war unless he wanted to, I was content to let the conversation meander. But I was also aware that time was slipping away, and I knew practically nothing about his life before fatherhood. November 3, 1920—his birthdate—was the only detail I knew with certainty.

I opened with an easy question: "Were you born in a hospital?"

"Yes, in the Szpital na Karowej," he replied. "It had a long official name, but nobody used it."

The hospital on Karowa Street was familiar to me.

"Wow," I exclaimed. "Your granddaughter was born there!"

I quickly scrolled through photos on my cellphone and showed him one of Alexandra, our daughter adopted from Poland, beaming at the entrance of the hospital during her recent visit to Warsaw. It struck me as remarkable that they had been born in the same hospital, seventy-three years apart.

“I don’t recognize it,” he said, shrugging. “Everything’s changed. But Alex looks very happy. Maybe because she was born in the best city.”

“What about your mother, Julianna? Was she born in the best city?”

“No, no, she was born in a small village called Jedlina, not far from Warsaw.”

A quick Google search indicated the population was approximately 3000.

"Was it larger then?" I asked.

"Noooo, smaller," my father replied, stretching out the word for emphasis.

"Is that where she met your father?"

He nodded.

During the First World War, Julianna worked on a large farm estate near her village, owned by a wealthy Warsaw judge named Jaruzelski. At the war's end, his Polish father, Piotr—a soldier in the Russian Army—was making the long journey on foot back to his home in Lwów (now Lviv). Poland didn't exist during that war, having been partitioned for 123 years between the Russian, Prussian, and Austro-Hungarian empires.

Piotr stopped at the Jaruzelski estate, seeking shelter for the night. The judge, facing a shortage of farmhands in the war's aftermath, offered him work. Piotr accepted. There he met Julianna, fell in love, and never made it back to Lwów.

Piotr and Julianna soon married and, by 1919, had moved to Warsaw, where Judge Jeruzelski found Piotr a clerical position at the courthouse on Leszno Street, delivering court summons, scheduling hearings, and writing up transcripts of the proceedings.

The period after World War I was one of significant change for Poland. The country regained independence in 1918, ending the long years of partition. In those years, Poland faced serious social and economic challenges and a vast discrepancy between rural and urban areas, but it was finally free, sovereign, and once again in charge of its destiny.

In 1923, the young couple, now with a toddler—my father, Edward—and expecting their second child, moved to a larger apartment at 16 Mirowski Square. On a pre-war map of Warsaw, if you were to draw a circle around the city, Mirowski Square, or Plac Mirowski in Polish, would lie at its very centre—the bull's-eye of what was then considered one of Europe's grand capitals.

Warsaw, in the interwar period, was a vibrant capital. It boasted wide boulevards, beautiful parks, cultural venues, and fashionable cafes. On summer weekends, people flocked to the banks of the Wisła River to sunbathe and swim. Mirowski Square featured a mix of neoclassical and modern buildings built after the First World War, with the elegant Lubomirski Palace at one end and St. Andrew the Apostle Church at the other. There was a top university within walking distance of the Switocz family home.

A short block from the apartment, in the centre of the square, was the city’s vast central market, Hala Mirowska. A couple of streets to the east was the entrance to the Ogród Saski, the Saxon Garden, the oldest park in the city, with impressive fountains and Baroque statues—a serene escape from the surrounding crowded streets. The tramcar line was a two-minute walk from Mirowski Square. It was an ordinary urban, bustling, and congested neighbourhood.

“We had two rooms on the top floor plus a kitchen and a bathroom. My mother bought fruits and vegetables from the peddlers who had stalls in the square. And she shopped in the Hala Mirowska almost every day because we didn’t have a refrigerator.”

The Switocz family—Julianna, Piotr, and their children Edward and Jadzia—belonged to the upwardly mobile working class of Warsaw. In Apartment 76, the living space transformed into sleeping quarters each night as the beds were made up, and heavy green brocade curtains were drawn to keep out the cold in winter and heat in summer.

The type of apartment they lived in was called a kamienica, which translates directly to "tenement apartment." However, it was not a tenement in the sense we usually understand. A typical kamienica featured spacious rooms with high ceilings, often boasting wide hardwood floors in a herringbone pattern and large double-casement windows. The Switocz family's residence reflected the modest yet respectable standard of living attainable for industrious working-class families in the interwar Polish capital.

Mirowski Square was the epicentre of the family's life. Piotr's workplace at the courthouse was just two blocks away on Leszno Street, allowing him to quickly arrive for the home-cooked meals they shared each evening. The radio, which broadcast music and children's programs throughout the day, provided entertainment. Every Sunday, they walked together to St. Andrew's the Apostle Church. Julianna's shopping spots were within easy reach, and Edward ventured beyond the neighbourhood mainly to attend school a few tram stops away or meet up with friends.

I marvelled at my elderly father's ability to recall details as he eagerly recounted childhood experiences from nine decades prior. With each resurfaced memory, a warm expression of pleasure crossed his face, as if he were a contestant on a TV game show, and each recollection earned him the chance to open the next door, revealing another moment he hadn't thought of in decades. So the memories kept coming.

“Every summer, my mother, my sister, and I would visit my grandmother in her village for a few weeks. We travelled for several hours in a wagon pulled by horses, and my father came by train on the weekends.”

“What did you do there?”

“Oh, Alinka, it was boring,” he said, looking upwards and rolling his eyes. “Just chickens and cows.”

As he described the meals his grandmother served, his face scrunched up like he had tasted something disgusting or bitter: endless eggs from the chickens in the yard, potatoes with sour milk, and the occasional actual chicken, killed and plucked by his grandmother. I loved listening to these mundane details of daily life.

“Returning to Warsaw and school,” he said, “was a relief.”

After his maternal grandmother died, the family continued the tradition of summer holidays in the rolling hills outside Warsaw to escape the heat. They rented small cabins in different villages and stayed for July and August, with his father commuting on weekends.

It was during one summer vacation—the summer of 1937, when he was sixteen—that Edward fell in love. The family had rented a small cabin in the village of Tłuszcz in the Masovian countryside outside Warsaw. As the long, lazy summer days stretched ahead with certain boredom, a welcome diversion arrived when Krystyna and her Warsaw family rented a nearby cabin. Krystyna was the same age as Edward, and her younger brother, Jan, was the same age as Edward's sister, Jadzia. The four city dwellers quickly became inseparable friends. Ela, my lifelong friend who I met on my first trip to Poland, is Jan's youngest daughter and the niece of Krystyna.

I hoped that, just maybe, my dad was ready to share more about Krystyna, the woman I had also met on my first trip to Poland when I was sixteen. But I was disappointed with the details he chose to reveal that day. "She was a firecracker," he said. Spirited and fun, tall and lanky, attractive but not in the conventional sense, was how he described her.

"Tłuszcz? Doesn't that translate into 'Fat'? Odd name for a village," I commented.

I immediately did a quick Google search and found little. "Let's just say its only claim to fame is that it's where you met Krystyna," I informed my father, acknowledging that this was the first time he had mentioned anything about the relationship.

Back in Warsaw that autumn, Edward and Krystyna remained inseparable. She attended a nearby girls' school, and they saw each other every weekend. Edward was a student at Gimnazjum Władysława IV, one of Warsaw's elite boys' high schools and today the highest-ranked school in the city. Though his parents were working class, they sent their children to the best schools possible. It was in high school that Edward's stamp-collecting hobby began.

All students had to join at least one school club, so Edward joined the stamp club because he was impressed by the collection of his chemistry teacher. The only other stamp club member was Chaim Nagelberg—just the two of them. Chaim's father was an elementary school teacher, and the two boys became good friends.

Chaim and Edward’s friendship was not unusual. Warsaw was home to the largest Jewish community in Europe at the time, with Jews having lived in Poland for nearly a millennium. The city's Jewish population, comprising about 30% of Warsaw's residents, ranged from deeply religious to thoroughly secular.

Many Jewish families might have spoken Yiddish at home but sent their children to either Polish state or private schools. During my next visit, we searched online for Chaim, but he had disappeared off the face of the earth along with six million other Jews. I later contacted Yad Vashem, the Holocaust remembrance centre in Jerusalem, hoping to discover some news to share with my father, but there was no trace of Chaim there either. Like many other Jews who perished during the Holocaust, not even his name remains.

"I was a stamp club member for only one year. I was also involved in track and field. But I failed Latin, which meant I had to repeat the whole year. My father wasn't happy, and I couldn't do both. I chose track."

Edward competed in 100-metre races and became a city champion. He described receiving his first and only pair of black leather track shoes, a gift from his father, after winning an important competition. As he spoke about the shoes, he gestured with his hand as if running it over their supple surface.

"They had the softest leather. I loved them," he said, his eyes brightening at the memory.

Although there were ominous signs of impending war—neighbourhood air raid sirens and drills, newspaper stories, and stored armaments—for seventeen- and eighteen-year-old Edward, other matters occupied his mind. In his life on Mirowski Square, everything unfolded routinely: eating breakfast, embracing his mother before leaving for school, gathering with friends for coffee and gossip after class, pondering where he would continue his studies, and the happiness of seeing Krystyna, particularly at the finish line of his track races. Life was normal; he was happy, and it would be a couple more years before the war started and before Krystyna announced that she would marry someone else.

After we'd chatted for an hour and a half, I sensed my father could use a change of scenery. With nowhere else to go, I pushed his wheelchair to the Tim Hortons in the lobby.

"I wasn't always like this," he said from his wheelchair as we rolled down the corridor. "Once, I could run a hundred metres in eleven seconds."

During our break and over what would become our usual order—coffee, apple juice, and a cookie to share—my father described the process of writing the day-long entrance exams for a prestigious chemistry liceum. This is the school he wanted to attend after graduating from Władysława IV. Each day, over a week-long period, a new group of applicants sat the exam.

"I returned two days later to check the results," he said. "On the outside of the building, they posted the names of those who wrote the exam on the same day that I did and passed. As I got close to the building, I could see the list had only one name on it. Lucky guy to have made it,' I thought. Then I read my name."

I chuckled to myself; here was something else I didn’t know about my father. At least this story was pleasant.

And what happened to Krystyna?

Several months later, during another visit and conversation, I learned more. Her father, an employee of the tram car company, had a serious, dour personality and did not approve of Edward. He found the handsome young man brash, too self-confident and opinionated—his energetic nature was not to his taste.

Edward wasn’t interested in marrying Krystyna. He was focused on continuing his studies. Under pressure from her disapproving father, nineteen-year-old Krystyna married a man of his choosing. He was a small, balding, pin-headed man, meek and slightly older who turned out to have a serious gambling problem, and soon it was known he was collaborating with the Nazis as well. Two years later, after returning home from her clerical job at a dairy plant, she discovered their furniture and wedding gifts had been pawned to cover his gambling debts. Her brother helped press charges against this gambler husband, who was subsequently prosecuted and jailed. After serving his sentence, it was rumoured that he disappeared with Nazi assistance.

She left the gambler. With war raging around them, Krystyna and Edward reunited. It is likely that they had always remained in contact and shared the same circle of friends. She realized what a poor judge of character she and her father had been when her marriage crumbled.

Although Edward did not return to Krystyna after the war, they remained in touch and turned their relationship into a lifelong friendship, and that’s all I ever sensed between them. I called her Ciocia Krysia—Auntie Krysia—and visited her on my subsequent trips to Poland. My parents stayed with her and her second husband on trips they made together in the 1980s and 90s. Her family became mine, replacing my Polish aunts, uncles, and cousins whom I had not sought out.

My father never spoke about Krystyna in a serious romantic context. By this point in our conversation, she had already been dead for a few years, her life ending tragically at ninety. She had just withdrawn money from an ATM and was heading back to her fourth-floor walk-up on Linneusza Street—the same apartment where my father and I had visited her in 1970. As she approached the locked front entrance, she noticed a young man behind her. Assuming he was a neighbour who had forgotten his key, she held the door open for him. It was a fatal mistake. He had followed her from the bank, and upon entry, he mugged her, throwing her violently to the ground.

My parents had a strong partnership that spanned five decades. To me, their relationship didn’t seem particularly romantic. But I was their child, and I didn’t need them to be romantic. I needed them to be rock-solid, which is what they were. But Krystyna always told her family that the man from Mirowski Square was the love of her life.

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The scene I imagine unfolding in the Switocz family’s apartment on the fourth floor at 16 Mirowski Square was likely replicating in countless homes throughout Warsaw.

"Jesus, what was that?" Edward's sister, Jadzia, screams, sitting half-up in her bed across the room from her brother.

Their father, shirt half-buttoned and face smeared with shaving lather, stands frozen in the doorway. Their mother rushes in, bread knife in hand, the eggs sizzling untended on the stove in the kitchen where she had been slicing rye bread.

The early-morning music program on the radio in the kitchen is abruptly interrupted by the resolute voice of the mayor of Warsaw, Stefan Starzyński. His news is grim. This is not a drill; the Germans are bombing Warsaw.

It was a Blitzkrieg—a lightning attack—from the air and on the ground. The Germans aimed to quickly crush the vastly outnumbered Polish forces before France and Great Britain could deploy their troops, as expected after their declaration of war on Germany three days later.

Eighteen-year-old Edward and fifteen-year-old Jadzia rush to the window, pulling back the heavy brocade curtains. In pyjamas, they peer out in horror. Against the blue sky, smoke plumes rise as buildings are set ablaze. Air-raid sirens wail. There is a great deal of commotion as everyone hurries to the basement shelter in the neighbouring building.

As I picture Edward and Jadzia peering out the window, I can't fathom how they feel. Is it possible at a moment like this to sense that everything in your life is about to change?

The barrage of German bombs continues to pummel Warsaw for three days. An estimated 1,500 bombs fall. The incessant noise and the chaotic descent to the basement shelter are all my father remembers. The rest, well, I have had to imagine it.

In what is sometimes described by the Poles as a short-sighted decision, the French and the British never sent in troops. The Polish people felt betrayed by the two countries they had signed treaties with earlier that year—their “supposed” Allies—who had pledged mutual assistance in the event of armed aggression.

The Soviets invaded the eastern part of Poland seventeen days later. Surrounded by Germans from the outset and completely encircled when the Red Army joined the aggression, the Polish Army and the citizens of Poland fought valiantly. However, the Polish armed forces were at a severe disadvantage, with only limited air power and a minimal number of tanks and armoured vehicles.

As the onslaught continued, Poland's situation became increasingly dire. Five weeks after the initial invasion, the last major Polish military unit surrendered to the invading forces of the two totalitarian giants. Hitler and Stalin partitioned Poland according to a secret protocol, an important component of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, a non-aggression treaty their foreign ministers had signed a week before Germany invaded. It was a deadly coalition, and although Poland's government never formally capitulated and continued to resist from exile, the two leaders had effectively decided that an independent Poland would cease to exist.

When the Poles surrendered, 25,000 lay dead in the streets of the capital. German bombs had gutted buildings across the cityscape, their eviscerated rooms now open-air exhibits of private lives suddenly made public. The shops were nearly empty, and people were hungry. There was no running water or electricity. A typhus epidemic had broken out, adding to the misery. But the worst was still to come.

Hitler's plan for Warsaw was to keep eighty thousand of its inhabitants as slave labourers, exterminate the Jewish population, and forcibly resettle the rest. Warsaw would be reconstructed as a small German town of not more than 130,000 inhabitants brought from the Third Reich to live in a new, ideal German city with wide boulevards and monumental structures in the Nazi architectural style built over the spot where the beautiful Polish capital had been. The increasing demands of the war prevented the Nazis from fully executing this plan. What they eventually did to Warsaw was far worse.

Under German occupation, central Poland around Warsaw and Kraków became known by the nondescript term General Government, administered by Hans Frank, a governor appointed by Adolf Hitler. He acted like a despotic sovereign of a penal colony. Polish citizens lost control over their lives.

Life in Warsaw and throughout the General Government was affected at every level. Only Germans were allowed to sit in the front compartments of the tramcars. Residential districts, parks, and cafés were set aside for Germans. People had to step aside to make way for Germans on the streets and remove their hats in their presence. A show of disobedience toward the orders of the German authorities was punishable by death.

The Polish language was curtailed, and German was imposed in many aspects of life—names of streets and buildings, administrative matters, and posted announcements. Cities and towns were given German names.

The Nazis determined the best way to destroy Poland and its culture was to remove the elite and intelligentsia—the latter being a broad term that does not have an English equivalent and simply put refers to an influential group of educated individuals who, throughout Polish history, have been instrumental in preserving and promoting Polish culture, language, and national identity, especially during periods when Poland lacked sovereign statehood. This group was seen as a threat by the Nazis because of their potential to resist occupation and maintain Polish identity and unity.

As a first step, the Einsatzgruppen, the mobile killing squads of the SS (Schutzstaffel), swept across Poland in a spree that targeted the Polish elite and intelligentsia: teachers, professors, lawyers and judges, clergy, physicians, landowners, industrialists, politicians and government officials, and even persons with high school degrees. By the end of 1939, the Germans had killed 50,000 Polish citizens, including approximately 7,000 Jews, all members of the intelligentsia. This campaign intensified in 1940 with the AB-Aktion (Extraordinary Pacification Action), specifically targeting Polish intellectuals and upper classes. By the war's end, Poland had lost more than half of its lawyers, 45 percent of its physicians and dentists, and almost as many university professors, clergy and teachers.

The next step for the Nazis was to curtail education to prevent the rebuilding of the Polish intelligentsia.

In 1930s Poland, the educational system was well-developed, with secondary education divided into the gimnazjum— lower-level secondary school providing a broad general education—and the liceum—upper-level secondary school offering a more specialized and advanced curriculum to prepare students for university studies.

The German invasion and occupation dramatically altered the educational landscape for Polish youth. The Nazis believed the Reich's future slave labour force—an underclass to serve the German master race—required only a basic education. Within weeks, they closed numerous primary schools, most secondary schools, and all universities and higher learning institutes, retaining just a few technical and vocational schools. In response, the Polish underground began running an extensive clandestine educational system.

When the first German bombs fell, Edward had completed his gimnazjum and finished his first year at the Technikum Chemiczne Nr 3, a highly selective, specialized chemistry liceum in Warsaw. He worried whether his classes would continue.

Fortuitously, his chemistry liceum remained officially open. To fly under the Nazi radar, the prestigious school began operating as a vocational institution with an official vocational curriculum alongside secret classes in Polish, history, geography, and literature, sometimes held in teachers' homes. With the University of Warsaw closed, prominent chemistry professors started teaching at the liceum. While this allowed Edward to continue studying and graduate, the broader context was grim, as the war ended his and many Polish youths' dreams of higher education.

The clandestine educational system represented a massive act of resistance by the entire Polish population, with teachers and students risking severe punishment, including imprisonment and death, to continue education secretly. I can only imagine that attending or teaching secret classes under such risks was a significant character-building experience.

The Nazi occupiers immediately decreed that all Poles from eighteen to sixty, who were not in technical and vocational schools or gainfully employed, had to register at one of the local German labour offices (Arbeitsamt), which quickly sprung up. By December 1939, the age was lowered to fourteen. By 1943, all Polish children of twelve years of age had to register and receive work papers like adults.

Finding work and having proof of it was essential to avoid deportation to Germany for forced labour. However, jobs in the General Government, particularly for members of the intelligentsia, were scarce because schools, businesses, libraries, and other institutions were closed. Professionals took jobs as cleaners and factory workers to keep their families fed.

My father spoke about what it was like for him: "To avoid the łapanki (mass roundups) and being sent to work in Germany, you had to be employed and have the proper identification and work papers. As soon as I graduated from the chemistry liceum in 1941, I got my Kennkarte, the German identification card. It had my name, address, date of birth, and a photograph. You had to show it if you were stopped. I also had to have work papers, so my father quickly got me a job at the Leszno Street courthouse, where he worked. Most of the time, I didn't have much to do. Sometimes I wrote up court proceedings. But there was a lot of activity at the courthouse."

"What kind of activity?" I asked, ignorant about what he might be alluding to.

"Helping different people," he replied. "My father knew what was happening, but we never spoke about it. It was dangerous. And I only worked there for a short time."

It was only after my father died that I stumbled upon the activity that was carried on in the courthouse (I write about it in Part Two of this chapter).

"My next job was at Klawe Pharmaceuticals, a successful family business in Warsaw that the Germans took over during the occupation. I was the manager of the supply warehouse. I would order what the company needed for their production lines and fill German supply orders," my father said. "My personal form of resistance was to shortchange or contaminate what we sent from the warehouse to the Germans."

I gave him a thumbs-up. Good for you, I thought, not yet realizing this was a dangerous national pastime and that most Poles working for companies and factories during the occupation engaged in economic sabotage as best they could. Men and women working in factories surreptitiously poured sand into the gears of machinery to bring it to a halt. Peasants in the countryside, commanded to deliver grain to the Germans, operated under the slogan: as little, as late, and as bad as possible. Even Boy Scouts participated, painting over German slogans and posters on the streets. Poland developed an extraordinary culture of resistance, with most citizens considering it their civic duty.

In May 1943, Edward began working at Phillips Electric as their warehouse manager. Within a month, he made what was possibly his most important decision: he joined the Polish Home Army, the primary organization of the underground resistance movement.

The Polish Underground State, with the Home Army as its military arm, was remarkably well-structured. The Home Army had a command structure mirroring the Polish Army and was part of an unparalleled clandestine network. This shadow state included a government-in-exile, secret courts that passed sentences on traitors and those who denounced hidden Jews, and an extensive web of covert schools and publications.

Like all members of the Home Army, Edward had a nom de guerre or a code name—Warda—a version of his first name. He knew only those in his own unit, the Barry squad, a communications group named after its commander's code name. This compartmentalization was a safeguard; if captured and interrogated, a member could reveal little.

"We used planks of wood or broom handles for drill practice," my father recalled. For months, his squad met secretly, usually in homes, preparing for the moment they would strike against the occupiers.

By June 1944, the Home Army had swelled to 380,000 members, the largest resistance force in all of Europe. Active since the war's start, it had been sabotaging German troops and supply lines to the eastern front. It also gathered crucial intelligence for the Allies, infiltrated German communications, and supported a network of underground news outlets. These efforts kept Polish citizens informed and encouraged further resistance. Their crowning endeavour, the Warsaw Uprising, would be a defining moment in my father's life.

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In late 1940, the Nazis constructed the Warsaw Jewish ghetto, an area of hundreds of city blocks surrounded by a tall brick wall topped with razor wire. The local inhabitants, numbering about 100,000, were evicted, and almost the entire Jewish population of Warsaw, totalling 350,000, was forced to live within the walls in crowded and deplorable conditions. Soon, Jews from neighbouring cities were brought to the ghetto, swelling the population to 450,000.

The courthouse had two entrances: one on Leszno Street in the Jewish ghetto and the other on Ogrodowa Street, outside the ghetto walls. This unique location allowed for the smuggling of food, medical supplies, arms for a revolt, and even people through the building. Those who worked there knew about these activities, but they were carried out in secret.

I wonder if my grandfather, Piotr, wanted to protect his son; the less Edward knew about the clandestine activities, the better. In the face of Nazi atrocities, many Poles risked their lives to aid or hide Jews. But even acts as seemingly small as throwing food packages over ghetto walls carried the death penalty.

In the course of examining old maps of the ghetto boundaries, I made, what was for me, an even more startling discovery: Mirowski Square, where the Switocz family lived, was surrounded on three sides by the ghetto walls. The square itself, a few apartment buildings on the square, the Hala Mirowska, and the Leszno Street courthouse were excluded, forming a small peninsula jutting into the ghetto. All the streets of Edward's childhood—Elektoralna with his friend Chaim's home, Chłodna with the bread shop, and Ogrodowa with his aunt's tailor shop—were inside the ghetto walls.

As more Jews were deported to death camps, those remaining in the Warsaw Ghetto staged an uprising that started April 19, 1943, which lasted four weeks. The Jews had no hope of victory; they fought because the alternative was boarding trains to death camps. Just before the Germans brutally suppressed this uprising, families along Mirowski Square, including the Switocz family, were evicted. They sheltered with others in a courthouse basement on Miodowa Street and never returned to their apartment with the green brocade curtains, abandoning a lifetime of possessions—the stamp collection, everything—taking little more than the clothes they wore. One day, their home was theirs; the next, it wasn't.

The Germans destroyed the ghetto and Mirowski Square, bringing Jews from several countries and housing them in a local jail to clear the rubble. During the last talks with my dad, I was unaware of the ghetto boundaries or how close they were to the Switocz home. I never pressed my father about life on Mirowski Square. All I knew was that my father had said they were evicted in May 1943. I had assumed perhaps the Germans wanted the central Warsaw property for their own use.

The more I researched and read, the easier it was to understand why my father never spoke about the war and why memories of this period were locked away. To this day, I can't fathom what living so close to the ghetto walls must have been like. Beyond the atrocities inside the ghetto, Poles themselves lived in constant fear. Random arrests, street roundups for forced labour, food shortages, and public executions were frequent occurrences.

Faced with such relentless cruelty and the systematic destruction of both Jewish and Polish communities, many young Poles like my father felt compelled to act. For Edward, joining the Home Army—the underground resistance—offered a desperate way to resist the occupation and fight against these unspeakable atrocities.

My father's experiences in Warsaw were part of a larger tragedy unfolding across Poland under the brutal occupation of two totalitarian regimes: Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union.

Western Poland was annexed directly to Germany as the Incorporated Eastern Territories, where Nazis planned to eliminate or expel Poles to create 'living space' (Lebensraum) for Germans. Eastern Poland, occupied by Soviets until 1941, saw similar tactics of cultural suppression and mass deportations of Poles to Siberia.

The situation shifted dramatically in June 1941 when Hitler violated the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact and invaded the Soviet Union, with the incursion taking place through the territories the Soviets occupied in eastern Poland. Now Hitler controlled all of Poland.

By July 1941, Churchill had signed a treaty with Stalin, and the Soviets became the “brave” partners of the Allies. The Polish government-in-exile based in London, pressured by the British and Americans, signed a Polish-Soviet pact a few weeks later, but not before several government members resigned.

The Nazis implemented a five-tier social hierarchy in occupied Poland. Germans from Germany enjoyed full rights at the top, followed by ethnic Germans in Poland. Slavic minorities initially held a middle position, though this changed after the Soviet invasion, and they joined the Poles on the lower rung of the ladder. The Poles were considered subhuman or Untermensch and subjected to slave-like treatment and exploitation for labour with few exceptions, like people deemed suitable for Germanization. At the bottom were Jews, Roma, Jehovah's Witnesses, disabled individuals, and homosexuals, all facing systematic elimination.

This system was enforced through hundreds of labour, concentration, and extermination camps across Poland. Hitler's goal was not just military conquest but the destruction of Polish people and culture. The term genocide had not yet been articulated, but when it first was, it referred specifically to the tragedy of what took place in Poland.

Looking at my dad, I saw an old man hunched in his wheelchair, with wisps of white hair on his nearly bald head and softness around his eyes. I saw a man who was content and at peace. I often questioned why I was stirring up unsettling memories.

Increasingly, I came to understand the significance of the silence surrounding the past. This silence spoke volumes about what he and so many others endured. The unspoken experiences formed a language of their own, telling stories too profound for words.

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Months after my father's death, as I delved deeper into Poland's wartime history, a profound realization struck me. The Warsaw Uprising of 1944 must have been the crucible that forged him. In those sixty-three days of desperate courage, the man I would come to know was tested as he had never been before.

As I pieced together my father's story, I realized it was inextricably woven into a larger saga of bravery and tragedy—a history that had been deliberately obscured for decades.

The Warsaw Uprising of 1944 is one of the Second World War's most tragic and heroic chapters, yet it remains relatively unknown. After the war, the Germans had no interest in highlighting the carnage and genocide they perpetrated in suppressing the uprising.

Similarly, the Soviet regime under Stalin and the government it backed in Poland suppressed any official mention of the Home Army and the Warsaw Uprising viewing both as a threat to the ideological narrative they imposed on post-war Poland. Only after the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989 did the sirens across the city start, and the full story began to emerge.

This suppression of information obscured the long-standing efforts of the Polish resistance, particularly the Home Army, which had meticulously plotted to liberate their country from German occupation almost since the start of the war, patiently waiting for the moment they thought the Germans were most vulnerable.

By early spring 1944, several factors converged to create what the Poles believed was their opportunity. They assessed that Hitler had insufficient Wehrmacht troops in Poland to suppress a revolt. Another crucial factor was the Red Army, advancing from the east towards German-occupied Poland.

In this context, and ignoring instructions to the contrary from the Polish government-in-exile in London, General Komorowski, the head of the Home Army, thought the moment had finally arrived to defeat the Germans and stand up to the treacherous Soviets, who he knew had designs on Poland. With this decision, Operation Tempest, the long-planned armed revolt, was unleashed.

Operation Tempest began in Kowel, 137 kilometres north of Lwów (now Lviv, Ukraine, but then in eastern Poland). The Polish forces faced a swift and crushing counteroffensive by the Wehrmacht. A month later, joint actions by the Home Army and the Red Army saw initial success in Lwów and Wilno (now Vilnius, Lithuania).

However, the Home Army's hopes were quickly dashed. Immediately following the fighting, Soviet secret security units—the NKVD (People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs)—disarmed the Polish forces. Some Polish soldiers were forcibly merged into the Red Army, while the NKVD arrested many of the commanders in both cities. Many of these leaders were subsequently executed or deported to the Gulag.

These actions signalled the failure of Operation Tempest and led to the effective dissolution of the Home Army in eastern Poland. Stalin established a Soviet-backed provisional government, the Polish Committee of National Liberation, in the newly "liberated" eastern regions.

Despite these setbacks, Komorowski made one last desperate decision to proceed with the urban uprising in Warsaw. Several factors influenced this choice. In July 1944, there had been an assassination attempt on Hitler's life by Wehrmacht officers, which had shaken the Nazi leadership. Hitler was becoming increasingly paranoid and unhinged, potentially weakening his control and decision-making capabilities.

Komorowski reasoned that if the uprising succeeded, the Soviets would have to recognize the Poles' critical role in Warsaw's liberation. Moreover, he believed the Allies would be compelled to acknowledge their contribution to the overall defeat of the Germans and the end of the war.

On July 31, Komorowski received information that Soviet tanks had entered Praga, the suburb of Warsaw on the right bank of the Wisła River. Believing the primary enemy, the Wehrmacht, was weak and unlikely to launch a counteroffensive and the Soviets would support him against their mutual enemy, Komorowski ordered the uprising to commence the next day, August 1 at 5 pm. It was now or never. This was the Home Army’s last chance, and success meant Poland would be recognized as a free and democratic country.

Secrecy and surprise were essential. Edward did not tell his parents or his girlfriend Krystyna that he had received the signal for the resistance operation to begin. He and his comrades—many still teenagers and only about 10 percent of them armed—optimistically thought it would be over within days, a week at most. Victory was close.

The first days of the uprising caught the Germans by surprise, and much of central Warsaw came under Home Army control. On the second day, Edward's squad, the “Barry” group, captured a German detention centre on Danilowiczowska Street, seizing desperately needed rifles and some ammunition.

The city's jubilant residents, including Jewish inhabitants who had been in hiding for months, took to the streets in droves, assisting the insurgents in building barricades, removing cobblestones and piling up furniture and anything else they could find in the hopes of obstructing the German tanks and forces. As the people streamed into the streets, Polish flags flew from windows and rooftops for the first time since the start of the war.

In these early days, Edward spent much of his time building and guarding barricades, as well as overseeing captured German soldiers at various locations. One of the key sites Edward defended was the central post office, an important building that the Barry group had reclaimed from the enemy. At night, the men in the Barry group took turns sleeping on the stone floors of the basements of the bombed-out buildings in Stare Miasto—the Old Town.

The Home Army's initial success proved short-lived. Hitler, without enough Wehrmacht forces to crush the Polish resistance, ordered the notorious SS under Heinrich Himmler's command to support whatever troops he had. Meanwhile, the Red Army tanks sat like stones on the other side of the Wisła River, ignoring the Poles' urgent pleas for assistance. The Soviet Air Force disappeared from the skies, and Stalin refused to allow the Allies to use Soviet air bases to airlift supplies to the Poles.

The Home Army fought throughout September, continually requesting urgent help from the Allies and Soviets. In what may be one of the greatest infamies of the war, Stalin had ordered his troops to wait until the Germans defeated the Home Army. A successful uprising by the Home Army, a resistance movement that supported a free Polish state, would have thwarted Stalin’s ambitions to create a Communist satellite state in post-war Poland.

The SS engaged in orgies of killing, looting, and raping, particularly in the Wola and Ochota neighbourhoods. They rounded up tens of thousands on the streets and pulled people from basements where they had sheltered. They murdered children in orphanages by smashing their heads with the butts of their rifles. It was a horrific bloodbath. In modern times, except for Leningrad, no other European city has undergone such carnage.

With little help from the Allies, save for a handful of airdrops of supplies and the devastating betrayal by Stalin, the Home Army fighters were cornered by the Germans. Komorowski had miscalculated. In the centre of Warsaw, Edward’s group was among the last of the insurgents fighting. Even on the last day of fighting, the Barry group led a desperate attempt to evacuate the citizens from the Old Town through the city sewers to another part of the city to escape the Nazis.

On October 2, the Home Army surrendered at Plac Bankowy, which happened to be just around the corner from Edward’s childhood home on Mirowski Square. Edward recalls the insurgents had cleaned up, even without water and facilities, to face the enemy with as much dignity as possible on the day of surrender. The brave resistance insurgents had withstood the Germans for a gruelling sixty-three days.

To prevent a complete massacre of the Home Army, Britain and the United States formally recognized the insurgents as a constituent part of the Allied forces, thereby compelling Nazi Germany to treat the Polish insurgents as prisoners of war under the Geneva Convention. The casualties of the Home Army were staggering: 18,000 dead, 7,000 wounded, 16,000 taken to prisoner-of-war camps, including all the high-ranking officers and General Komorowski.

Following the defeat in Warsaw, in addition to Home Army casualties, 200,000 civilians lay dead—this was also in addition to almost all of the city’s Jewish population that had previously been murdered. Half a million civilians found themselves trudging in long columns to Durchgangslager 121, a squalid transit camp surrounded by barbed wire and located at Pruszków about ten kilometres southwest of Warsaw at a former rail yard. Those suspected of being Jewish or members of the Home Army resistance were shown no mercy and instantly shot on sight while marching in the long lines.

Once at Pruszków, the citizens of Warsaw were segregated into different groups based on their perceived health and ability to work. Of the total, 165,000 were deemed strong enough to be exploited further for forced labour, while 50,000 were sent to various concentration camps. The remaining tens of thousands, mostly elderly or people with small children, were crammed into rail boxcars and transported southward. Once the harrowing journey reached the middle of nowhere, the people were ordered to jump off the boxcars and left to fend for themselves without any provisions or shelter. Stranded, they relied on the meagre offerings of local villagers who could offer little aid or comfort.

This was the experience of my friend Ela's parents, Jan (Krystyna's brother) and his wife Barbara, a young couple with their newborn first child—Ela's older sister. Born in the basement where they were hiding, the infant was carried by her parents as they joined the throngs walking to Pruszków. They had no food or water, and Barbara couldn't nurse her newborn daughter as she hadn't eaten for several days. With only the clothes on their backs, they were then loaded onto a rail boxcar, sent to a remote location in the countryside, and left with nothing. Meanwhile, Krystyna, who was living on the right bank of the Wisła River where the Red Army waited, managed to escape to a small village where she found work in a dairy.

In an act of extraordinary courage and desperation, approximately 5,000 individuals defied the Nazis' evacuation orders and chose to hide amid the ruins of Warsaw. Many of these people were Jewish and felt they had no other option. Among them was Władysław Szpilman, a Jewish pianist whose remarkable story of survival would later be immortalized in the film "The Pianist."

The story of Poland during the Second World War is one of massive violence and destruction perpetrated by the Nazi leadership and complicated by Soviet plans for post-war Communist expansion. It's a narrative both tragic and heroic.

Now, as the sirens wail across Warsaw each August 1st, they do more than mark the anniversary of the Uprising. They also mark the stories of countless individuals like my father—ordinary people whose lives changed in an instant.

The day before the uprising started, Edward met with Krystyna and promised her that the war would soon be over and they would be together.

It would be twenty-five years until they met again.

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Despite the provisions of the Warsaw capitulation treaty and the protections afforded to the Home Army as prisoners of war under international law, the actual treatment of both civilians and resistance insurgents was far from humane.

Shortly after I began compiling my father's stories, I filled out several online forms for information from the Arolsen Archives—the International Center on Nazi Persecution, formerly the International Tracing Service, which is currently digitizing the records of millions of Nazi victims. I sent requests for all my relatives, and that's how I found out what happened to my paternal grandparents.

Julianna and Piotr Switocz were among the citizens sent to the transit camp at Pruszków even before the Home Army capitulated. They were taken to Pruszków on September 6, 1944, a full month before the end of the Warsaw Uprising, as the Germans rounded up civilians on the streets. They were deemed well enough to exploit for forced labour, otherwise they would have been executed on the spot. The Nazis would not have bothered to send them on to the transit camp.

In Pruszków they were separated. The Germans shipped my grandmother in an overcrowded cattle car to the Ravensbrück concentration camp north of Berlin and my grandfather to Gross-Rosen, a concentration camp located in the German Province of Lower Silesia.

Gross-Rosen was notorious for its brutal conditions. Initially a forced labour camp for a nearby granite quarry, it grew into a vast complex with nearly 100 subcamps. Prisoners faced exhausting work, severe malnutrition, and rampant disease. An estimated 40,000 out of 125,000 prisoners perished there, victims of the camp's "extermination through work" policy.

My grandmother’s journey would have taken an entire day in a cattle car that finally stopped at Fürstenberg, the town closest to the Ravensbrück concentration camp. The prisoners then walked the last four kilometres. Ravensbrück, primarily for women, held over 132,000 people from across Europe, with up to 90,000 perishing there. From 1939 to 1945, prisoners endured forced labour, torture, starvation, illness, and random executions. In the war's final months, Ravensbrück became a killing facility, with five to six thousand dying in hastily built gas chambers.

By the summer of 1944, the camp was overflowing, the infrastructure was crumbling, and there wasn't enough staff to process the new arrivals. Then, the Warsaw Uprising influx began, and the camp bureaucracy collapsed.

Between August and October 1944, more than 12,000 women and children from Warsaw arrived in Ravensbrück, including my grandmother. With no one to register them and nowhere to place them in the overflowing camp, they were kept outside the camp gates for days. A mass of hungry, exhausted, and sick women sat or lay on the ground, which soon became a field of mud, excrement, personal possessions, and debris.

When my grandmother was finally registered, she faced unimaginable horrors. First-hand accounts describe how prisoners were stripped of clothing and possessions, their heads shaved bare, before being forcibly herded into icy-cold showers. Adding to this degradation, they were given ill-fitting garments from deceased prisoners, as the camp had long exhausted its supply of striped uniforms.

After one month of suffering in Ravensbrück, according to the documents provided by the Arolsen Archives, Julianna was transferred to the notorious Sachsenhausen concentration camp, located fifty-four kilometres to the south. The thought of her undergoing a second arduous journey on foot and then in a cramped railcar intended for cattle is unfathomable.

At fifty-two years of age, she had lived through the First World War and now five years of German occupation and existence on ration cards and fear, but nothing would have prepared her for Ravensbrück and Sachsenhausen. The uncertainty of not knowing whether her husband of twenty-six years was still alive and what happened to her beloved children, about whom she must have worried every single day of the war, must have been unbearable.

The last trace of Julianna was on January 25, 1945. On that day, she was transferred back to Ravensbrück. She is identified as a political prisoner on the list of the women being transferred. This distinction was given to anyone coming from Warsaw during and after the uprising. No trace of her remains after that day.

On April 30, 1945, fewer than 3,500 malnourished and sickly prisoners were discovered alive at Ravensbrück when it was liberated by the Red Army. The remaining survivors, an estimated 20,000 prisoners, were being force-marched a few kilometres away and were liberated in the following hours by another Red Army unit.

Julianna may have died of typhus or in the gas chambers. Piotr may also have died of typhus. It’s a horrific disease that was spread by lice. It ravaged the vulnerable, malnourished prisoners living in barracks designed for a fraction of their number. I know he died within a few weeks of arriving at Gross-Rosen because a letter my father wrote to him from the POW camp where he was sent was returned in December 1944.

Edward’s sister, Jadzia, who had been a courier running messages between the various squads of the Home Army during the uprising, escaped to the small town of Morąg in the Polish countryside. She remained in this provincial town for the rest of her life, keeping a low profile because of her work as a courier with the Home Army and her brother’s resistance activities. They had both fought for a free and democratic Poland and, as such, were considered enemies of the post-war Soviet regime. As I learned more about the war, I finally understood the complexity of my aunt’s situation and why she had been afraid to return to Warsaw after the war.

In retaliation for the uprising, Hitler ordered Warsaw's complete destruction. Trains and trucks carted off everything from dismantled factories and their inventories to precious works of art. The Nazis then systematically destroyed the remaining monuments and buildings, either blowing them up or burning them down. By the time the Red Army entered Warsaw on January 17, 1945, this once-beautiful city had been reduced to silent, sad, smouldering rubble.

The Soviets were now in power, and Poland's subjugation would last another forty-four years. I would never meet my grandparents.

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Twenty-three-year-old Edward, along with 6000 others, found himself in a rail boxcar bound for Stalag 344 Lamsdorf. This large and notorious camp, located near the village of Łambinowice in western Poland—Lamsdorf, as the Germans renamed the village—would be where they remained until the Germans began moving them out a few months later in the last weeks of the war.

Lamsdorf was a vast, low-lying complex surrounded by walls topped with razor wire. It housed a Babel of thousands of POWs of diverse nationalities enduring overcrowding, limited food rations, and deplorably unsanitary conditions that contributed to the spread of disease and death.

"I was prisoner number 102902."

"I'm surprised you still remember that," I said as we chatted in the long-term care residence.

"Alinka, how could I forget?" my father replied, using the diminutive of my Polish name, as he always did. “It was the worst place I have ever been to. It lacked blankets, mattresses, windows, doors, and heat. We were hungry and cold.”

Indeed, food was a reported meagre daily ration of watery soup with a few pieces of potato floating in it and stale bread.

Although Edward’s experience as a POW involved harsh conditions, hunger, cold, and boredom, it did not include physical violence. According to documents received from the Arolsen Archives, he worked in the camp’s post office and storage facility. As a non-smoker, he told me he bartered the cigarettes he received in a Red Cross package from Canada for sausages from the German guards.

“One night, we made the mistake of pouring too much instant Nescafé, which we got in our first Red Cross package, into our lukewarm water. We had no idea how much coffee we should use, and we put several spoons into one cup. A few of us spent a sleepless night,” my father said, chuckling.

He also shared a memorable story about the guards forcing them to search for a wooden table and two chairs that had mysteriously disappeared. Despite knowing it was futile, the POWs searched for the items they had burned the night before to keep warm.

Growing up, I had, on rare occasions, already heard these lighthearted stories from my father. They represented the more comical side of his internment, the only aspects he permitted himself to share. In these rare recountings, my father always used the Polish word niewola (which translates into English as captivity), which to me never carried the same grave connotations as the term 'prisoner of war.’ His stories, the Polish word, still don’t totally explain why I never asked questions.

Edward spent three and a half months at Lamsdorf—a short stay compared to thousands of Allied POWs interned there since the early years of the war—before the Germans evacuated the camp and forced the POWs to march westward. His story of the death march before he died, had initiated an extended conversation and finally my interest in exploring more.

We talked for quite a while that day at the long-term care home, and at some point, I saw it was time for a break. Curious to see what information we could find online about the Warsaw Uprising, I proposed moving to the lounge, which had a communal computer.

The Warsaw Rising Museum had recently opened. We scanned their website, where archival photos had been posted. We saw my father’s name on the list of combatants, along with his date of birth, nom de guerre, unit name, rank—corporal—and the name of the POW camp where he was interned. His eyes brightened, but he didn’t say anything. I could sense he appreciated that his role was acknowledged and that it was part of history.

That afternoon, we also visited the website of the Polish Central Prisoner of War Museum. I knew that my father had donated a letter to the museum in 2008. It was one he had mailed from Stalag 344 in late 1944 to his father, Piotr, who was incarcerated at the Gross-Rosen concentration camp. We found the donated letter on the museum’s website.

The letter is written on the form conveniently provided by the camp. In the space allocated for the sender’s name, he has written his name and nom de guerre: Edward Warda Switocz. Using his Home Army code name was a small act of defiance and pride. He also included his rank and prisoner number, as required. It is a tender, carefully worded communication to avoid censorship, filled with great respect and concern for his father's fate.

Dear Father

With great emotion, I received the package from Józio, and then, with a lump in my throat, I read his letter. The evidence of his friendship is touching, and I wrote to him about it. I was happy to hear that you are well and alive, but at the same time I am saddened that fate has brought you, at your age, instead of a well-deserved peace and rest, hard living conditions beyond human measure. Perhaps the good Lord will soon allow you to reunite with your family, for whose sake you have devoted your entire life. Write back quickly. What about Gorzkienicz? Wiesiek Polkowski is with me and asks about Durkowski, Kutkowski and Bazanski’s in-laws who were at the court with you. Write me a lot about yourself. I am healthy and feel fine. I am leaving for a permanent camp.

Edek

It was returned to the sender with a stamped message in German: Return ! Impossible to deliver as the addressee is not in the camp. Edward carried this letter in his small satchel, and its sad confirmation that his father must have died in Gross Rosen, on the death march. He held onto it for sixty-three years until he donated it to the Polish Central Prisoner of War Museum.

What strikes me are these words: “I am leaving for a permanent camp.” Edward had just turned twenty-four, and he thought his fate was a permanent camp where he would be forced to toil for the German master race.

The contrast between my father's life at twenty-four and my own experience at that age is humbling. At twenty-four, I was married, living in Ottawa in a white stucco house with green trim that we had just bought, working for a Member of Parliament, and studying for my Master’s part-time. I have no words.

Edward carried this letter and one other keepsake as he trudged along on the gruelling death march. He clung tightly to a precious possession that connected him to his past: a photograph of his family taken in Warsaw before the war ravaged their lives.

This cherished image captured a moment of complete normalcy. In the photo, Julianna, his mother, radiates confidence as she strides closely beside her younger daughter, Jadzia, who appears to be around thirteen. Jadzia sports a pair of charming Mary Janes, while her mother has a striped summer dress and a hat tilted at a jaunty angle. Walking slightly behind them is Edward's father, Piotr, dressed in a dark suit and tie; his more serious face is punctuated by a small, neat, dark moustache. With his broad face full of youthful promise and a shock of blond hair pushed casually back from his forehead, Edward pops his head up behind his mother and sister. He has a slightly mischievous smile. I see in his face the father I know. It’s a beautiful, average working-class family. Most likely, they are returning from church on an ordinary Sunday.

My father, and so many others just like him, are not considered casualties of the war. But what do you call someone who lost his parents, education, the only life, home and city he had ever known, and all of his material possessions because of war? How does one encapsulate such life-altering losses? Words fail me again. Yet, despite these immeasurable sacrifices, and whatever I think, my father would have used the word fortunate.

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