Registered Letter

© copyright Andrzej Olas (andrzej.olas@gmail.com)

On my way to visit Magda in Braunschweig, I stopped in Berlin to explore the recently rebuilt Reichstag. A portrait of Chancellor Adenauer brought to my mind my Mother’s letter. In the nineteen fifties she had written to the Pope; it must have been Pius number something or other, maybe eleventh. She had proposed that he become the Good Will Commissioner, and as soon as she had his agreement, Mom would write to Marshall Stalin, Prime Minister Churchill and maybe even to General De Gaulle (who at the time didn’t perform any official governmental function, but Mom envisioned his huge political influence) to ask each to play a part in the Commission, and together, to solve the problems of the world. Being a Pole, she had excluded the revisionist chancellor Adenauer. Further she stated that, in spite of being an atheist, she was writing to the Pope because of his influence and the problem’s significance. She added that she had been waiting to make her proposal until the ousting of president Truman, imperialism’s primary war monger. She quoted Marshall Stalin, who had said that peace may be saved if the people of the world stand united for the cause of peace. As I carried the envelope to Warsaw’s Main Post Office, with instructions to register the letter, I was full of inner protest. The singular of Mom was conflicting with the plurality of the world’s nations. Standing in the Post Office queue, I decided that never in my life would I send a registered letter.

I don’t remember the details of what happened later – whether she was called into the state security office or if somebody brought the letter back to our home – in any case I saw the letter again later on (it was easy to recognize the elegant envelope that came from Mom’s precious collection of pre-war stationary.) The envelope had been opened, the stamps left unstamped by the Post Office, the Registered tag still attached on the left-hand side; across the envelope, from the bottom-left to the upper-right corners it was written: No more such letters! The rough, red-penciled text was underscored, and seemed to radiate the inner physical energy of the writer. The text looked exactly like what it was meant to be: an order, and it scared me.

Thus, Chancellor Adenauer was never informed about his exclusion from the Good Will Commission, and due to this, in the Reichstag portrait he looked completely content. Nobody knew of the postal cry of my Mom’s despair; I, then a teenager, did not understand her heavy burden – the burden of being an orphan, surviving two world wars, widowhood, and witnessing the German slaughter of civilians during the 1944 uprising in Warsaw. With such thoughts I reached Braunschweig and Magda.

”Scheisse, scheisse, scheisse. This Halt is ein Schweinehund.” Magda threw an envelope onto the kitchen counter, where it landed between a Braunschweig headcheese and a bowl of potato salad.

”You’re exhausting my German vocabulary. I’m left with Hände Hoch, Raus, and Nur Für Deutsche,” I said, reaching for the letter. ”Who is this Halt?”

”Herr Halt is the superintendent of schools here in Braunschweig. He likes to say Nein.”

”What’s the problem?”

Magda pointed to the headcheese she was slicing, “This town is exactly like this headcheese. There are Poles, Ossis (Germans from former DDR,) Turks, Arabs, Italians… But what keeps all this together, the envelope – that’s the local Germans – they keep power just as this shitty, inedible headcheese casing keeps together the entire headcheese. Herr Halt supervises Braunschweig schools on their behalf. To him, I am a dirty Pole and my husband some kind of wasser-Polack – the son of post-war refugee.”

“Son of a bitch, if he only knew the truth,” I thought. I understood that sooner or later I had to tell Magda about the post-war events in Gluchow (a small town in the province of Wrocław.) I knew it, and she did too. Still I wanted it to postpone it as late as possible - in only an hour I needed to head back to Poland.

“Herr Halt’s predecessor forbade my son to learn Polish, and I fought him tooth and nail.” Wild, furious jabs sent half the headcheese flying to the floor, “now Herr Halt says that there’ll be no Polish for my grandson – while he’d never say it, deep down he considers Polish to be the language of untermenschen. In Poland, German is one of the foreign language options, in Germany, Polish is not – shitty European Union and twenty-first century! I told him what I thought of him and he sued me.”

Magda pointed with the knife at the letter on the counter:  ”They fined me 300 Euros or three days in prison…”

“I think I’d rather have a ham sandwich,” I said as I lifted the headcheese from the floor and placed it back on the counter, “So you‘re a Polish White Knight in Braunschweig?”

“A White Knight has armor and a sword,” another jab sent the headcheese right back to the floor. “I have only this headcheese and potato salad.” The bowl sailed through the air on the wings of Magda’s anger. Gravity intervened - soon the potatoes and the broken bowl came to the rest on the floor; the universe however, stayed indifferent.

Half a year has passed since my visit to Braunschweig. An hour after arriving in Gluchow, Magda and I rested on the upper span of the bridge, at the intersection of Kosciuszko and Sienkiewicz streets. The stream under the bridge runs along Kosciuszko Street. The skeleton of a four-wheeled child’s wagon lay half submerged. It lacked the left-rear wheel, and a plastic shopping bag had attached itself to the exposed axle. The cart design suggested it was from the early post-communist era, while the bag seemed to be a more contemporary addition. From far away, the Sowie Mountains observed us silently.

That day on the bridge, the imposing ruins of the Bella factory, which had been called Schreiber’s during the German period, rose up in front of us. In the front wall of the aging structure there gaped an irregular hole, with only darkness beyond. The broken roof above the hole hung precariously. The hole could have been the result of a 155mm mortar hit, but I knew that it was of post-communist origin. We stood in the region of Poland most heavily affected by the transition.

“It all started somewhere here, in this neighborhood. Let’s try to find a trace of what happened, get some information,” said Magda.

I knew much more about how all this had begun than I had told Magda. Shortly after World War II, I had been a middle school student here in Czluchow. On the evening of November 6^th in 1947, already tucked into bed, I was practicing my speech for the following day’s commemorative meeting.

 “We celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of the Great October Revolution as our most important holiday. We are pioneers in this part of Poland, lost for centuries and now regained. We are grateful to generalissimus comrade Stalin who has liberated Poland, and to comrade Bierut who has shown us that our place is here. We are no longer suppressing the proletariat of western Belarus and Ukraine. Soon, the entire world will be united under the banner of communism. We support the French working class, united around first secretary comrade Maurice Thorez, and we support their demands to the imperialist Bi-zone and Tri-zone: ‘Ami go home.’”

“I hope I don’t stutter. Now comes the part about the salvos of the battleship Aurora,” I thought.

I heard a whisper coming from my aunt’ and uncle’s bedroom.

“… this German woman in our neighborhood that worked at Schreiber’s is going to be sent back to Germany.... She doesn’t want to take her daughter with her. She was raped by some Red Army Kalmyk and gave birth…” I heard my aunt say, and after a while she added, “Leave me alone, not tonight.” 

Later, amidst the rustling of bed sheets, I heard:

“But you must promise that we will take her in.”

The rhythmic creaking of the bed came through the wall. I felt a little aroused even though I was only eleven. The next morning, the tale of the battleship Aurora was marred by my terrible stutter, and few days after that Magda became a member of the family.

When I reminisce about that winter, I can still picture all of us arriving at Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve in a coach driven by my uncle’s plowboy. Later that winter, sheltered in the barn, the coach became the place where I commanded Napoleon’s Grande Armée in Jena, the place where I spent countless hours on fine leather seats reading Quo Vadis, Karl May and Sir Conan Doyle. The coach became my personal retreat – my own Never-Never Land.

“You never see such elegant coaches anymore,” I murmured, still far, far away in the past.

“What?” Magda looked at me suspiciously.

“Um... it could be that house over there; my aunt spoke of a neighbor,” I said, pointing out a brown house on the right. Through a door, left slightly ajar, an older woman could be seen, bustling around.

“I still wonder what nationality I was before I was adopted,” said Magda few minutes later, as we were leaving the old woman’s house, “maybe that woman’s right, calling me a Kraut bastard. Maybe a good lawyer could prove that I do not deserve to be any nationality at all. And after that, her grandson, as a good patriot, could beat me with a baseball bat.”

“She was afraid for her house,” I interrupted, “what if you were to show her some legal paperwork and tell her ‘get out, old witch.’ I bet she listens to super-catholic Radio and sends her grandsons on pilgrimages to Czestochowa. She called me a volksdeutsch; is that what I look like?”

“Maybe I shouldn’t exist at all. My conception was a crime. I don’t know the German who gave birth to me, nor my Kalmyk father. In Braunschweig, Germans call me a dirty Pole. Yes, I feel like a Pole. But here in Poland people call me a Hitler-mädchen. I wonder, what would they call me in my father’s Kalmykia. I hear sunflowers and corn are cultivated there, so maybe they would say: ‘Fuck off bitch, go get lost in a cornfield, or go gnaw on some sunflower seeds.’”

I was silent. There was nothing I could say; I had no coach and no leather seats here in Gluchowo. And without those, I could not dream up a solution to our problems.

“Look at these ruins around us. What did I come here for? Is there no place in this world for someone like me, do I have nowhere at all to go? Write a letter for me, a letter all these prime ministers, presidents, and chancellors with one question, just one question: ‘Where should Magda go?’ You hear me? I want that letter.”

“I will write it,” I said, “And I will send it as registered.”