Posted in Letters from Grandma
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Dear Grandchildren,
There are so many different things running through my head right now
that I have a hard time deciding what I should tell you first.
Maybe I should begin by describing to you Konstancin, which was a
summer resort and a location for our orphanage. There were many
beautiful villas in Konstancin. A villa was a summer home for
rich people who during the winter months lived in the big city of
Warsaw which was ten miles away. The people who owned the villas
were government officials, car dealers, and many others in that
category. For example, right across the street from our house
there lived a family whose father owned a jewelry store. Some
couple of blocks away, the American ambassador to Poland lived in a
beautiful villa called "Julia". He named his villa after his wife
who had passed away and left two young daughters for him to
raise. Of course, the two girls had nannies to take care of them,
he was a busy man himself. We never went to school with the
children of such rich parents. They had their own private
schools. The children who went to the same school as the
orphanage girls were the children whose parents were the caretakers of
those big, lovely villas. Our grade school was never large, and
we knew everybody who attended our school. The children of the
rich people would never come out of their places to the streets.
They had their chauffeur drive them every place that they went.
Sometimes we would see them leaning on their fence and watching us
across the street when we were playing games and running around our
house. They looked very lonely to us.
A block away from
us was a park with beautiful trees, shrubs, and of course, many
flowers. Right in the middle of the park was a huge, round flower
bed. Whenever the girls from the orphanage went to the park, they
went to have a good time. We would walk slowly by two, holding
hands, especially when we had to cross the street, but as soon as we
got inside the park's gate, we were free to run as fast as we
could. We had many relays around that flower bed or
"klomba" as we called it. We wore our everyday clothes which were
patched most of the time. To play as hard as we did, our
clothes got ripped and torn many times.
This park was
for everybody, so at times we would see children sitting with their
nannies on the benches. The children had to listen to their
nannies reading to them or practicing French, while we like a bunch of
wild Indians, laughed, screamed, played tag, and anything to help us
with our energy. How many times we saw the longing on the faces
of the rich boys and girls. They had to be dressed up all the
time, or else, how could people distinguish the rich from the
poor? Poland was very, very class conscious in those days.
Maybe she is even now.
You might wonder how our orphanage
happened to be located in such a rich summer resort. We really
were not welcome there at all, but when the building was being built,
it was with the idea that it would serve as a hospital. For some
reason, they never completed it, and the building was sold to a group
of missionaries from England and Latvia. Mr. Fetler and Mr.
Goetze were the first men to get ahold of this building and open it up
to children whose parents were dead, or maybe just one very destitute
parent remained. Mr. Fetler had eleven children of his own and
had adopted two orphans. Mr. Goetze had seven children. He
was our director or supervisor, and he loved children very, very
much. He was the one who always called me "my daughter". He
treated me as though I was one of his own children and I loved him very
much. He was a minister of the Gospel, but also had a printing
house and printed many books and literature. He would spend
weekends in one of the wings of our orphanage during summer months, but
his children and his wife stayed in Konstancin all through the
summer.
Next Letter: A Sweet
Temptation and Lessons Learned
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Dear Grandchildren,
Today I will tell you stories which happened when I was eleven years
old and when my sister Olga and I visited our mother in the village of
Zaturcy during the months of July and August. My mother was
married again and had three children by her second
husband. The little house which my mother built was
still standing in the same place, but my mother lived in the house of
her husband which was not too far from that little hut.
The other neighbors, our father's relatives kept on doing a whole lot
of mean things to the crop on our fields. One day I went out to
look around and saw many pigs eating the unharvested grain. It
was not yet time for the harvest of that particular crop. I asked
my mother why they were there, and she said that the neighbors always
did things like that.
I decided to do something about
it. I took our dog with me and came to a boy who was supposed to
watch the pigs. I said to him, "Whose pigs are these?"
He answered, "Ours."
I asked, "Whose field is this?"
He said, "Panasiuk's."
I said, "Then what are your pigs doing in our field?" I yelled to our dog, "Go get them!"
You had to see the look on the face of that boy. But he didn't bother us again.
That summer I helped to take care of the cows. There might have
been about ten cows to look after. I had to take them out very
early in the morning to the pasture, and all I had to do was to watch
them so that they would not get into a field of some crop which they
could destroy very easily. There were no fences to mark the
boundaries and it was very important to see that the cows never, but
never wandered away to someone else's field. Sometimes it would
be boring to just stand, or to sit, but many boys and girls would try
to make their time pass by doing something interesting. Many
would sing, and you could hear the singing coming from different
directions. Since no one was very close, one could sing as loud
as one wanted. I guess that was one reason why I offered to help
looking after the cows that summer. I loved to sing, especially
when no one was around. I used to sing one song after another
until I got tired. Usually I took our cows to pasture at sun
rise. You know how early the sun gets up in July? Maybe you
could find out this summer. Sometimes I would be very, very
sleepy, but that was not an excuse. I had to get up around 5:00
a.m. and bring the cows home again at 11:00. the cows would rest
until 3:00 p.m., and I would take them back again until sundown, or
after 8:00 p.m. They gave more milk if the heat didn't wear them
out.
One morning, when I felt especially sleepy and tired, I
decided to lie down for a while, never intending to fall asleep!
But when I finally opened my eyes, I was very frightened. I
looked around and there were no cows anywhere. I thought surely
they must have wandered away to our neighbor's field and by now
destroyed everything growing there. I felt like crying.
Then I looked again toward our house and just then I saw the last cow
disappear into the gate. O what a relief it was to know they were
alright and safely home! What had happened was: I fell so
sound asleep that when I did not return at eleven o'clock, my mother
sent my stepfather to see if anything had happened to me. The
cows did wander away, but they were still on our property so it was
very fortunate for me. My stepfather and I used to kid each other
a lot, and this time he decided to play a trick on me. He rounded
up the cows very quietly some distance away and took them all home to
the barn. I came home dejectedly, but instead of getting a
lecture, they all laughed at me. We had someone visiting just at
that time, and I felt very ashamed of myself. I never thought
that I would fall asleep on my job and sleep through the whole morning!
My sister and I could have stayed with my mother and stepfather, but
there would not have been any future for us in the village of
Zaturcy. My mother encouraged us to go back to the
orphanage. It sounds unreal, doesn't it? But our mother
knew what kind of life we would have if we stayed on the farm.
Before my father died, he made my mother promise him that she would try
to educate her children. She promised. She was very much
aware that she could never keep this promise if we had not returned to
the orphanage. In the orphanage, they cared very much about our
education and girls with learning abilities would have
scholarships. They also had private tutors who helped us with the
German and Russian languages. We had to have classes during the
summer months if we happened to lag behind in any of the
subjects. My mother was thinking of our own good when she advised
us to go back to the orphanage.
Next Letter: Konstancin
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Dear Grandchildren,
I often marvel at the wonderful way that God has created
us. Especially when I think of the human brain and
how it preserves and stores for us the many memories of childhood.
Some things I did so many years ago that it would be difficult to
remember them all, but then a sound, or a touch, or maybe a taste
triggers a memory from a long time ago. Suddenly, I can
hear the same familiar things out of the past. I become a little
girl again. I am lying in bed trying to sleep, but sleep doesn't
come. Everyone else is asleep, and I wonder what it is that keeps
me awake. Then I hear the barking of a dog in the distance.
His bark sounds so far away, but it makes me feel very lonely. I
try to think, why am I so lonely? And I remember. I miss my
father, and I miss my mother. The lonely feeling turns into a big
hurt, because the people I miss so much are not with me anymore and
never will be. I don't seem to think about them too much in the
daytime, but oh, when the night comes, they become so real that I think
they are right with me, and yet they are not there. I wish then
that the dog would stop barking in the distance and not bring back such
vivid memories to me because they hurt...hurt...hurt...
And
now, even when I am sixty years old and hear a dog barking in the
distance, I remember the nights lying awake in the orphanage. It
also takes me back to the time when I was at home with my mother and
often listened to the sounds of dogs barking late at night. The
lonely feeling will always come back to me with that particular
sound. It is even lonelier during the winter months with much
snow covering the ground, because that was when I especially felt like
that.
Another thing which at the touch of it takes me
back to my childhood is the hot soft dust on dirt roads. One
summer day when all the girls from the orphanage went to the river for
a swim, someone came running to me, saying "Jadzia, your mother is
coming here!" And true enough, when my mother couldn't find Olga
and me at the orphanage when she came to visit, someone directed her to
where we were. She didn't want to wait until we were home from
swimming. She was very anxious to see us.
I came
up to her and she took me up in her arms and hugged and hugged me for a
long time. I was six then, and Olga was seven. Olga thought
it was too sissy to act like that. She just came and kissed our
mother and went back to play in the water. I was too happy with
my mother, so I didn't leave her for a second. We got permission
from Mamochka to go to the house, and we decided to leave. Olga
didn't want to come along too, so my mother and I walked a mile back to
the orphanage. I was so happy, I ran ahead of her, then back
again, skipping and singing all the time. While I was walking, I
enjoyed splashing the soft, hot dust with my feet. The dust was
so fine, that when my feet touched it, it went in all directions, just
like water when I stepped in it.
I don't know what
made me think of this particular instance tonight, since it isn't hot
outside, and I don't live by a dirt road, nor was I swimming
today. I guess I must have recalled how happy I was to see my
mother that day. She took me on her lap and told me how she
missed me and how she wished that she would not have to be away from
us. I told her that she was the most beautiful mother in the
whole world. Some of the things which I told her, she reminded me
when I went to spend a summer with her sometime after she got married
again.
Next time: Summer Memories
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Dear Grandchildren,
Something tells me that spring is just around the corner. The
snow is disappearing, the air is mild, and the other day, I heard birds
singing as I walked to the mailbox for our mail. I felt like
singing with the birds and together with them praising our God for the
warmer days ahead. Pretty soon, we'll see flowers spring up from
under the ground. In fact, our tulips are already through and
waiting for the sunshine to encourage them to grow. Maybe they
will be sorry for their impatience when cold winds and frost decide to
make their last rounds before they let the spring reign
completely.
Spring is always welcome no matter where
you live, but especially in countries where winter months have to be
endured and not enjoyed. Where because of lack of proper
clothing, proper food and heating, many people get dangerously sick,
and many die.
It happened also to our mother. We lived
by then in the little hut which my mother built on the one acre which
she managed to reclaim from her husband's relatives: mainly my
father's brother. It was during the very cold winter months that,
one day, after getting up from sleep, my sister Olga and I were rather
surprised to see our mother still asleep. She was up very early
every day, so we didn't know just what to make of it. I was a
little bit over five years of age and my sister was six. When our
mother didn't get up for a long time, we began to cry. After some
time, she asked us to place something cold on her head. She was
so very hot that she felt like she was burning up. To try to cool
her off, we would hold our hands to the cold wall and then place them
on our mother's face. We alternated doing this until we were very
tired. There was nothing in the house to eat, and it was very
cold, because Mother was too sick to get up and make a fire in the
stove. Anyway, we usually had our morsel of meal late in the day
after mother would return from work with some food as her pay
check.
There were neighbors on the other side of us
which was not too close, yet whenever we had fire in the stove, they
could tell that things were okay with us. They could see the
smoke rise from our chimney. But when they saw our house standing
without any evidence of life in it, one of them decided to come over
and see what was going on. He helped us a lot from that time on,
and some time after we went to live in the orphanage, this man married
my mother. His name was Clemente Panasiuk. Later on we
heard that my mother's grandfather who lived in another village and the
grandfather of Clemente were brothers.
After my mother
recovered, she was weak for a very long time. It was that same
year that we went to live in the orphanage. And it was that same
year that my mother became a very devoted Christian. She always
loved God, but she had never known before that Jesus could be her
Saviour. She believed on Him and forsook everything that she
worshiped more than Jesus, for Jesus' sake. She was willing to
place us in an orphanage where they thought that Jesus is God, and
because they loved Him, they wanted to help children who needed
help.
After my mother brought us to the orphanage, she
found work in Warsaw, not too far from Konstancin where we lived
now. The new friend in Zaturcy where she built the little house
looked after the hut and the ground. He planted wheat and rye in
the field and saw to it that she got money out of the sale of this
grain.
My mother didn't work in Warsaw very
long--maybe a year or so, but while she was close to us, she came to
visit in the orphanage quite often. She would have stayed longer
at her job, but because of the trouble that her neighbors began to make
for the man that was helping her out, she decided to go back and take
over the responsibility herself. She then also inquired to see
how many more acres she could reclaim. She walked forty miles to
Lutsk, to the courthouse, and now that we were away, she would stay
many days at a time until she knew that she made some headway in the
city. My mother was a very brave woman, and no one could scare
her when she knew she was doing right, not even her cruelest
enemies. Her life was one struggle after another, and I don't
remember her telling us of any time that was easy for her. When
she was dying in Argentina in 1965, her last words were: "This
life is so hard to live." I was at her bedside when she
died. She was 76 years old then. I guess it would be very
hard to live if you were to make it all on your own, but we thank the
Lord for our loved ones who care for us and make life easier for us to
live. Aren't you glad that you have such loving parents?
Next letter: A Special Visit in My Memory
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Dear Grandchildren,
Do you know that my mother once built a little house for us all by
herself? She walked many miles from the village where my father
was born to the county courthouse to plead her cause. She knew
that some of the land belonged rightfully to the children of her late
husband, but his family wanted to keep it all themselves and would not
give any to us. She walked some forty kilometers to see the
judge. At first the family agreed to give her only one acre of
land. She was glad to get this one acre of land, but it took her
some years before they gave her five acres.
While she
had that one acre, she also decided to build a little hut on it where
she and my sister Olga and l lived for awhile. I am sure that
some good neighbors helped her put up the little building, but I
distinctly remember her standing on top of the roof and Olga and I
handing her some of the bundles of straw with which she made the roof.
This hut was very, very small. It contained only one room.
In it there was a typical Russian stove which served as an oven,
furnace, or a kiln. We slept on the part that was made especially
for that purpose, right over the oven. It is hard for you to
imagine just what I'm talking about, because this type of oven is not a
part of American culture. [Note from Melissa: I did a
Google search and found this link
which may illustrate the type of oven that Grandma writes about.]
Another thing that we had in this room was a bed made of straight boards on which was some straw serving as a mattress. I don't remember what kind of covering we had, but I'm quite sure that we didn't have nice, warm blankets. There was also a little bench on which was a bucket of water drawn from the well. Beside the bucket was a small basin in which we washed ourselves. Then the last thing which was in this little room was a small table with one chair. We sat either on the bed, or on the "pichka" which in Russian means the oven or the stove. There was no floor made of boards, but it was a dirt floor. Sometimes we even saw a few little critters scampering around on it. There were two very small windows and a small door. We lived in it for several months before we went to live in the orphanage.
Many times our mother would have to leave us alone. She would tell us not to let anybody in, no matter who it was. Often after she returned from the days work for other people, or from the county courthouse some forty kilometers away, we would have big stories to tell her. Once somebody passed by our window. Since the hut was so very small, and the roof was so very low, anyone who passed by looked like a giant to us, because we could not see their heads. I would tell my mother that a giant passed by and he was soooooooo tall that he almost reached to heaven. Do you think that my mother believed me?
I also remember when we went with my mother to the nearby woods to bring some wood for our fuel. She carried the wood on her back and we made several trips to the woods and back home again. We carried only a few little sticks, but she would tie her bundle of a large size and would carry it on her back. By the time an evening came, she'd have some supply for a few cold days stored next to our house. Only, we didn't keep this wood very long. Somebody came during the night and stole all of the wood from the side of the house. I remember my mother cry when she saw that all of her work was for nothing. She didn't cry in front of us very often, but she could not contain herself on that day. She was fairly sure who might have done that, but she had no witnesses who could see those thieves stealing from a widow with two small children. Besides, it was not the last time that a thing like that happened. It was only the beginning. But since our land was bordering with the land of our father's relatives, they did many mean tricks to us to spite my mother for reclaiming some of the land that belonged to my father and which was in possession of his family.
Next Letter: Sickness Strikes
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Dear Grandchildren,
Before Grandpa and Grandma got up this morning, we could feel the chill
that took over the whole house. For the first time since we moved
into this house, we found out how it felt like without the heat.
Yes, our furnace went out during the night and by morning the whole
house felt like an old ice box. I turned the oven on in the
kitchen so that we could eat in a warm place. Grandpa got dressed
upstairs, but I was a chicken and brought my clothes to the kitchen
where it was warm to dress. But Grandpa never shrinks from
anything. That is the kind of man that he is. If anything
has to be done, he doesn't wait for the situation or condition to
change, but he does his job well no matter what the condition is around
him. If there is no one else to volunteer to take the garbage out
to the dump from the church, Grandpa always does and he never waits for
the weather to warm up. He always has kept Grandma from doing
anything that heavy or unpleasant. In all of our 36 years
together, he has always been the one who washed our windows, packed and
unpacked heavy loads, and did lots of things that other husbands would
make their wives do. But before you think that Grandma never has
done anything hard and upleasant, I would like to change your mind.
Maybe I'm just getting soft in my old age, but I did plenty hard and
upleasant work in my life. Even when I was very small. Some
of you big enough to help your mother with the dishes might think that
doing dishes is rather unpleasant, even with all the hot water and soap
that each American home has available. And you only might do them
for your family. I'll tell you about how we went about doing
dishes after each meal in the orphanage.
In the first place,
we had to fill a water tank in our coal stove to heat the water.
There were about forty people that got the dishes dirty, and all of the
dishes had to be washed, wiped, and put away. We did not use an
ordinary dish soap, but a very strong white powder which was very hard
on your hands and in the winter time, many times my hands looked raw
after I washed the dishes. Nobody liked that job, and it was one
of the most frequent punishments that we were subjected to when we
disobeyed. We took turns to do the dishes for a week at a time,
and since there were three girls on the K.P. duty, we took turns
washing, wiping, and putting away. Putting the dishes away was
the easiest of the three jobs, and we complained the least about this
work. For rinsing the dishes, the water had to be boiled.
So anything that needed to be done with hot water took a lot of
time. Isn't it nice to go to the kitchen in America, and just
turn the hot water spigot on and there comes the hot water without any
waiting for it!
In the orphanage, we had lots of cold water
which came to our house through the pipes just like in America.
Every morning, we washed ourselves in cold water, and only on Saturday
did we take baths in hot water. Some of you already know how we
did that. In our bathroom there was a tall tank, and underneath
it was a place to burn coal. If it happened to be my turn to have
the duty on Saturday to be responsible for the hot water and the clean
bathtub, I would start working on it right after lunch. We went
to school on Saturdays until noon. The first thing to be done was
to start the fire going and that involved going out to the coal shed
across the yard to fill one or two buckets of coal. The coal in
the shed was in big chunks so that I had to get an axe and break the
coal into smaller pieces. I carried the buckets to the bathroom
and began making the fire with wood. When it got going, I began
putting some coal into it. We had two large bathrooms where we
took our hot baths. There were two girls in charge every Saturday
afternoon. The toilets were separate rooms and we had four of
them which we used in the winter only. During summer months, we
had to use the outhouse.
Many times the taking of baths would
run into the night, and this required keeping the fire going to have
enough hot water. There was nothing that I dreaded more in all
this job as going out to the coal shed in the dark, and trying to break
the coal into chunks until the buckets were full. Since there was
no light in that shed, we used a lantern. A lantern didn't light
up the whole shed, but only the part right next to me. It would
also be very cold until I shivered all over. I always imagined
that someone was hiding someplace in a dark corner, or maybe some dog
would come and jump on me from nowhere, or just some spook that was
waiting for me all the time to come. I was always glad to get
back inside safe and sound.
Next Letter: The House My Mother Built
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Here is a picture of Matthew between his two great grandmothers who are both still alive. My Grandma Nadzia is on the left and Grandma Jennie is on the right.
Grandma Nadzia
Christmas 2004
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Dear Grandchildren,
Maybe I should tell you a little story from my childhood in this letter. After coming to live in the orphanage, I heard more and more about Jesus whom my mother loved so much and about whom she liked to sing all the time. I loved him too, and whatever I did, I could always feel that Jesus was seeing me and He knew what I was thinking all the time. It helped me to be a better girl. Many times some of the girls would take advantage of me , because I would not refuse to do them some little favors like cleaning their room before Mamochka's inspection, or sweeping the hall for them, or peeling potatoes when it was their turn to do it. They many times would promise to do something for me too, but I don't remember that they did. Anyway, whenever I did anything like that, I thought how I could please my Jesus, not thinking of being repaid.
One big day, just before breakfast, we all assembled in a dining room for our family worship which we had daily before we sat down to our tables. We all stood in two rows while Mamochka chose a hymn for us to sing or made us choose one. Then she'd read the scripture passage and pray. We always knelt for our prayers, and then we'd get up and sing another song. And on that day, something different happened.
Our breakfast ordinarily consisted of tea and bread with butter, or oatmeal cooked with half water and half milk, only it was so thin that many times we were laughing at it while trying to count the oatmeal flakes that were in it. On this morning the cook brought from the kitchen a big plate with something that looked like a delicious pastry. She without saying anything placed it at my place! I looked at her and wondered why she was doing it, but then Mamochka began to explain. She said that today they were honoring the best of all girls. They wanted to show that they knew how we behaved, when we obeyed, and how helpful we were to others. She said, "We decided this honor should go to 'Jadzia'." (That was the name by which they called me in the orphanage.)
I just could not believe what I was hearing! I was the girl whom they wanted to honor? How could that be? But I was overjoyed! I divided that lovely pastry with all the rest of the girls (at that time there were only about 15-18 girls altogether) and from the joy of it, I forgot to save a bite of it for myself. To this day, I don't know what it tasted like, but it was the honor in front of all the group that really counted the most. I was happy.
I remember that at the beginning, it was not always like this. There was another breakfast time that I remember, not too long after I came to the orphanage. We had pancakes that particular morning. Several pancakes were left over, but not enough to go around, even if divided in half. That time our Mamochka was going to give the two extra pancakes to the two most popular girls. She went around the table and asked each of the girls whom they liked the most. Some of the girls were mentioned several times and most of them were the ones which were very cute and pretty. I wasn't cute and far from being pretty. No one mentioned my name even once. I felt very sad about it, but never wanted to show anyone how I felt. Some children never think that even the less pretty boys and girls want to be liked by others and need friends too. That time, I thought that nobody really loved me nor even liked me, and it made me sad for awhile.
But children don't dwell on their misfortunes too long. Sooner or later, somebody shows how much they think of you and everything else is forgotten. That happened to me too. And it was not just anybody, it was really somebody. Mr. Goetze was the orphanage director and he began to show favoritism to me. Every time he came to visit us from Warsaw where he lived, he'd come and call, "Gdzie jest moja cora" which in Polish means, "Where is my darling daughter?" The strange thing about it was that none of the girls minded it. I was definitely his pet, but it was okay with them.
Next time: Orphanage Duties
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Dear Grandchildren,
...Now what about the story that I told you last week of how I began to live in the orphanage in Poland. Maybe after you read that story, you thought that my mother didn't love my sister and me and that was one way to get rid of us. That is the farthest from the truth. It was because she loved us so very much that she wanted us to remain alive. But if she kept us with her we had no chance to stay alive, because we had no food. I had a little baby sister whose name was Vyera which in Russian means "Faith". She was only six months old when she died and she died because there was no food to feed her. Poland was a war torn country when we came to live there.
...Shortly after I came to live in the orphanage, I was pointed out as a little girl who liked to sing. Do you remember how old I was then? Yes, I was five. One incident remains clearly in my mind when on one occasion, when we had quite a few people visiting the orphanage, Mamochka put me up on top of a table and asked me to sing for everybody present, a good roomful of people. One song that I remembered so well was "Where He Leads Me I Will Follow". I heard my mother sing that song a lot and I could easily memorize any song that I heard. By that time, I was accustomed to sing before a crowd, because I always had to perform for anyone who asked me to sing. My mother loved to sing too. In fact when she was young and before she was married, she sang in a Russian Orthodox church as a soloist. So I learned to sing from her many songs. After that day when they made me to sing before the audience, I kept on singing for the rest of my life. I sang for school programs, in church choruses, and mainly in our orphanage. How I used to love singing.
Maybe you wonder sometimes why my mother took us away from Russia, when we had a very good life there. I'll tell you why. While my father was still living, he had a very good job, and we had a nice house and never suffered any hunger. But my father was also a communist who had accepted a communistic philosophy of life. All who became communist could not believe in God. Only communists were favored with good positions in the government and could have anything that they wanted. My father was a plain clothes policeman in Moscow. His job paid well, but it also was very dangerous work and his life was never safe.
One day, my father was shot while he was crossing a small river named Moscow which ran right through the city of Moscow. He fell off his horse into the river. It was a bitter cold day in November, and while he wasn't wounded to death, he caught pneumonia and stayed in the hospital until he died.
After his death, the communistic government wanted to place the three small children that my father left behind into their institution so that my mother could go to work. She could not have any more claim on us and would lose us to the state forever. She herself had never become a communist in her philosophy. She loved God and later she learned to believe in Jesus Christ whom she took as her own personal Savior. Therefore, she decided to leave Russia before anyone could take her children away from her. She said, "I'd rather see my children die of starvation than to see them grow up without God."
My mother ran away so that no one would see her. She boarded a train with her three small children and left for Poland without anything else but us and the clothes that we had on. We went to the village where my father was born. She thought that her brother-in-law and her other in-laws would be glad to help us. But they were very angry that she came to them. They knew that part of the land should have gone to my father after it was divided between the children of my grandfather, and they did everything they could to see that my mother did not get any land that rightly belonged to my father. It's a long story about this land business, but after many years of working on this project, my mother was able to repossess some of the land and later she lived on it for several years. The family was very cruel to her and she suffered a lot, but at the same time, she did not give up.
Next letter: A Special Breakfast
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Posted in Letters from Grandma
I have been sharing a precious gift with my children which my grandmother gave to me when I was ten years old.
When we drove back east two weeks ago to attend my grandfather's funeral, I climbed up into my parents' attic and searched a trunk until I found the letters that my mother's mother wrote to her grandchildren back in 1979 and the early 80's, telling her life story.
I have been reading her letters to my children each morning this week with a lot of tears and laughter. My kids won't let me get away with only reading one each day, because Grandma's story is so good. Hers is a story of God's faithfulness and her own faith like a child in her Lord Jesus Christ and her Father God.
Now, I will share her gift with you too. She told me that she would be proud if I posted excerpts from her letters on my blog. I will file them under a new category called "Letters from Grandma" which can be found under the Categories section in my sidebar so that all the letters will be stored on the same page. I pray that her story will be a blessing to those who read it here.
The first letter which I'll reproduce, reduced me to streams of tears which greatly slowed down my reading and had my kids staring at me. I think you'll see why:
Dear Grandchildren,
You are growing so fast that very often I stop and say: "It's not possible that our oldest grandchildren are ten years old already." We can't stop the time from passing, but at the same time, we don't want to pass the opportunities that come our way daily. Your parents, when they were your age, that is, our children, always asked me to tell them stories from my childhood. My childhood was very different from yours. So maybe I should start telling some of those stories to you, too, before time passes all too fast and I will get to be too old to remember them.
Today I'll begin by telling you how my sister Olga and I felt on the first day in the orphanage. As I've mentioned already, my childhood was much different from yours. In the first place, I was born in Moscow, Russia, which is neither Canada, nor the United States. It is in Europe which is across the Atlantic Ocean. I lived with my father and mother until I was five years old and after that I lived for many years in the orphanage. That orphanage was located in Poland, another country also in Europe. When my mother was left with three children after my father died, she could not support them all by herself. She had no place where to live and had no food to feed us. That was the reason why she had to place Olga and me in a place where they cared for orphans and very destitute children.
Now, it was not easy for my mother to part with us, and she dreaded to think that she had to give us up. But in order that she might save us from starvation, she had no other choice than to send us to an orphanage. She never mentioned to us that we would not be living together, so my sister and I looked forward to the place where we would have a nice warm place to live, where we would have enough food to eat, and where each one would have their own bed to sleep in. After we left Russia, we lived in an underground place for awhile, where our bed was made of several boards, some straw, and anything that was available for our covering made our blankets. So the orphanage was very attractive to us when we thought how nice and different it would be from what we had at that moment. Being only five, I thought it meant that we were going to move to another nice house, just like we had in Russia.
It was on March 26,1924 when we arrived in Konstancin, the place where the orphanage was located. The day was fairly warm, because I remember playing outdoors with other children and not wearing a coat. While we were playing, our mother left us without saying goodbye. She didn't want us to see her cry. And besides, that was also the orphanage's policy for the mother to leave as soon as possible to avoid any scene while saying goodbyes.
After a short time, my sister and I noticed that our mother was no place to be found. We decided to go back to the train station and bring her back. We left, not being noticed by anybody. The station was not very far, it was a little bit over a city block. We held hands together, and each time that the train arrived, we ran to it to see if our mother had come back. Every time some woman got off the train, we looked into her face, and disappointedly would say, "No,this is not our mother."
We did this for the rest of the afternoon, until someone discovered that the two new girls, Nadzia and Oga were missing from the orphanage and nowhere to be found. They called the police to come and help to find us. It was dark then, and when the police came to the station, they found us sitting dejectedly on the bench, holding hands and waiting for the next train to come. The train came every half hour, and we were so sure that sooner or later on one of them would our mother return to us.
That night I couldn't go to sleep, and most of the night I cried for my mother. I was frightened to think that I might never see my mother again, and nothing as nice as a clean bed, warm clean house, nor good food could replace my mother to me. I felt lost and forsaken. I hope no one of you will need to experience that kind of feeling as long as you live.
Next time I will tell you some of the stories from my new home to which I slowly began to be accustomed.
Next Letter: Fleeing Russia
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