Illustrated by Mary Kirkpatrick The last conversation I had with my father lasted three years and ended the day he died, just a few weeks before his 99th birthday. As his mobility declined, he moved into a long-term care home in Toronto. On my first visit, he talked about something we had never talked about before, the Death March. This was the forced evacuation of concentration and prisoner of war camps in brutal winter conditions towards the end of World War II as the Allies began to close in on the Nazis. I had only read accounts of it from Jewish Holocaust survivors and my Polish father was not Jewish. We knew each other for over 60 years, and that day I realized there was probably a lot I didn’t know about him. And so began our long and final conversation. Until then, I could sum up what I knew about my father in a few short sentences. The trajectory of his life changed dramatically on September 1, 1939 – the day Germany invaded Poland. Until this event, he was living in Warsaw where he was born, dreaming of studying chemistry at university, pursuing a promising career and spending time with his girlfriend. It was an ordinary life with childhood friends, beloved teachers, church on Sunday and family vacations in small cabins in the country to escape the summer heat. He fought in the Warsaw Uprising, which began on 1 August 1944. It was the most important military resistance movement during World War II, aimed at liberating Warsaw from German occupation. After 63 days of fighting, the Polish Home Army surrendered and was transferred to Stalag 344 Lamsdorf, a large and notorious prisoner of war camp in Western Poland. He never returned to his beloved Poland, which was now part of the Communist Eastern Bloc. He immigrated to Canada in 1951 to meet his Polish sweetheart, my mother, who had arrived a year earlier as part of a Canadian immigration program that paid for the passage of displaced persons across the ocean in exchange for a year’s work. My mother was placed as a housekeeper for a prominent family in Montreal. They got married – my mother wore a wedding dress that was a parting gift from her employers – they had three daughters and she never looked back. Based on the hard work and kindness of many people, they built a life in their new country and paid it forward by helping others throughout their lives. It’s a story that’s been repeated a million times over and over again – the quintessence of immigrant success. And that was the story I knew until we started our last conversation. I heard the rest for the first time. On my first visit to his long-term care home, I began to ask my father questions about the war years. He wanted to talk about what happened after he was in the POW camp for three months – the forced evacuation that began on a gray winter morning in December 1944. The captives marched in single file, zigzagging country roads that ran past frozen barren fields. They walked in the villages but always avoided the bigger cities so as not to attract attention. My father walked with his head down, thinking of some bread or a meal, or despairing of when and how the exhausting ordeal would end. Each day, one of the German guards was sent forward on a bicycle to commandeer shelter from a farmer in his barn and fish out whatever food was available, mostly potatoes. Sometimes the villagers left some food by the side of the road, but the POWs risked being shot or badly beaten with the stock of a rifle if they stepped out of formation to grab it. After liberation in April 1945 by the US Army, 30 men, out of the original group of 200, had survived. Men dying from the bitter cold, disease or exhaustion were abandoned by the roadside or thrown into ditches. My father and I followed the route on that first visit, with the help of Google maps, through the Sudetenland (which was the northern part of Czechoslovakia), near Dresden, north of Nuremberg to Bavaria. We estimated that he walked 800 kilometers. At the end of the afternoon, it was time to catch the train to Montreal. I hugged my father goodbye, leaving him on the computer playing solitaire until dinner time. I told him I would come back to visit in a few weeks and call him every day until then. Ever the brave gentleman, my dad took my hand and kissed it. I had time on the train to ponder its amazing history and wonder what else I didn’t know. The story he told that day was like opening a box I had no idea existed. Later I returned home, learned that this was the coldest winter on record, and read more about the enormity of the Death March. My father, Edward, is gone, but I still think about the many conversations we had over the past three years. In one, he casually expressed his regret that perhaps he and my mother had not properly thanked her employers, so long ago, for her wedding dress. It took a while for all his stories to sink in, but I’ve come to think of them as a gift given at the end of a long and worthy life. My father was the most resilient and optimistic person I have ever known. What is it about the human spirit that allows some to overcome traumatic events and rebuild their lives and others not? How did my father maintain hope or religious faith after such an ordeal? After he died, we found a postcard he sent to my mother in Montreal the day before he sailed for Canada. With the address, I found out who lived in that house 70 years ago, found the obituaries of the prominent lawyer and his wife, and found their children to talk to them about the wedding dress. And I thanked them duly. Alice Switocz Goldbloom lives in Montreal.
