Prologue: Ordinary People

In the final years of my father's life, he revealed his harrowing survival of a Nazi death march from a prisoner of war camp. His words froze me: ninety-four days in the depths of winter, trudging across Sudetenland and Bavaria, until the American Army liberated the few who survived. How was this even possible? In my mind, death marches belonged in the memoirs of Jewish Holocaust survivors, not to my devoutly Catholic father.

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.