Oh, Beautiful: An American Family in the 20th Century (14 page)

Over time, for the vast majority of the Polish people, the destiny of their nation became inextricably linked to the spirit of the Most Blessed Virgin. She reigned supreme as their faithful queen, regardless of the shifting fortunes of the Polish royal family.

Unlike many of his schoolmates, Jozef had personal reasons beyond his Polish identity for taking the lessons of Czestochowa to heart. Just as the Polish people had seen their country taken away from them, Jozef had seen his family taken away from him. And just as the Polish people learned to turn to the church when stripped of their country, Jozef learned to turn to the church when stripped of his family.

Two of his earliest religious lessons taught him about family responsibility, and they were lessons that he remembered for the rest of his life. The first lesson he learned is that the greatest gift that God has given human beings is
wolna wola
, or “free will.” Free will doesn’t mean that humans are free to do as they please. On the contrary, it means that humans bear the burden of choosing between good and evil. “It means that we have the responsibility to conform our wills to the will of God,” Jozef explained. “And the will of God is to take care of His own children.” Jozef learned his second lesson from church, from religion class, and from just about everyone else he knew in Deszkowice. The lesson is as follows: “Children don’t beg to be brought into this world.” That means it is the responsibility of both parents, especially the father, to provide for the children. Combining these two lessons taught Jozef that taking responsibility for children is both the greatest duty imposed by free will as granted by God and the greatest obligation that parents can fulfill as brought upon themselves.

In July 1935, gossip spread briskly between the farming towns of Rozlopy and Deszkowice. Apparently, somebody had seen Michal. Supposedly, he was staying with the Godzisz family in Rozlopy. Purportedly, he had been there for weeks, although he hadn’t shown his face in Deszkowice or at least hadn’t been spotted there. Farmers from both towns chatted about the rumors, disseminating them from field to field like the wild onions that proliferated without any effort required. The farmers also speculated about whether Michal, if indeed in town, planned to visit his estranged wife and his lone surviving son in Deszkowice.

Jozef wondered himself. He hadn’t seen his father in seven years. “I didn’t know if I’d recognize him. If it weren’t for one or two old photographs, I might not have remembered what he looked like.”

Meanwhile, Jozef had grown into an 11-year-old boy. He still had sky-blue eyes, but his floppy blond hair had long since turned brown and straight. Would his father recognize him? Jozef wasn’t sure if they’d even have the chance.

In late August, a secret messenger from Rozlopy appeared in the form of Jozef’s seven-year-old cousin, Czeslaw Godzisz. Czeslaw sauntered through the farmlands along the two-mile footpath from Rozlopy to Deszkowice and found Jozef outside the one-room house. Safely out of earshot of Jozef’s mother, Czeslaw passed along his message.

“
Your dad wants to see you,” said Czeslaw.

Jozef’s heart raced.

“
Just you. Follow me.” Czeslaw led Jozef away from the house toward the outskirts of Deszkowice until they reached the footpath at the edge of the open fields of wheat and rye. Czeslaw told Jozef the date and time that his father planned to walk down the footpath from Rozlopy a few days later. “Meet him right here.”

Jozef understood.

“
Make sure you come alone,” said Czeslaw. “Don’t tell your mom.”

Jozef nodded.

Marja had no idea.

At the appointed hour, Jozef waited at the edge of the fields. He looked around to see if anybody was watching. There were people in the fields, but they were busy with their work. Nobody came down the footpath. Jozef waited some more. He had waited seven years. He could wait a few minutes more.

A distant, faint figure then emerged from the stalks of wheat and rye. It was a man. Alone. Carrying no tools. Unlike others in the fields at that hour, he was just walking, not working. Others began to notice. As he approached, Jozef recognized that his father had come all the way from America and through the fields just to greet him.

Recognizing Jozef as well, Michal ran to his son, picked him up in the air, and hugged him. Everyone in the fields stopped and watched.

“
Would you like to go to America?” Michal asked. “In America, my two hands are more valuable than all the land we have in Poland.”

For Jozef, going to America was like going to paradise! Everybody in Poland knew that. “Yes!” he didn’t hesitate. “I want to go!”

“
Okay,” said Michal. “This is what you do.” Michal told Jozef the exact date and time that he should meet his cousin Czeslaw at the statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary that stood in the middle of the farmland between Rozlopy and Deszkowice. If Jozef could arrange to be there at the correct date and time, he could go to America. If not, he would stay in Poland. “But you can’t say a word to your mother,” Michal instructed Jozef. “I’m peeved at her for having twice rejected my invitation to come to America.”

Jozef knew the implications. At the age of 11, he had to choose not only between Poland and America—that was easy—but also between his mother and his father. If Jozef stayed in Poland, he would never see his father again. If Jozef went to America, he would never see his mother again. In one instant, his father had filled his heart with hopes of going to paradise. In the next instant, his father had informed him of the terrible price—and left him with the choice.

Jozef anguished over the decision. On the one hand, everything he had ever heard about America compelled him to choose America. On the other hand, his mother had already lost one son forever, and he couldn’t bear to think how hard it would be on her to lose another. On yet another hand, his father already had been separated from the family for seven years. While his mother was surrounded by family in Deszkowice, Jozef wondered, who did his father have in Detroit? It must have been very lonely for his father in America. Jozef thought about the effort that his father had made to come get him. All that money. All those miles. All those years. His father must have really loved him and wanted him by his side. The more that Jozef weighed these matters, the more he felt indebted to his father. Jozef concluded that he
owed
it to his father to go to America.

“
I ran away from home,” said Jozef. “Literally.” In the middle of September 1935, without speaking to his mother, he walked out of the house with only the clothes on his back and met his younger cousin at the appointed hour at the statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the fields. The two boys walked to the Godzisz home in Rozlopy. From there, Michal took Jozef in a horse-drawn wagon to his aunt’s home nearby to spend the night. Her husband held the tickets for the bus and train that would carry Michal and Jozef the next day from Szczebrzeszyn to the regional capital of Zamosc, from there to the national capital of Warsaw, and from there to the Baltic port city of Gdynia.

That evening, Marja looked for Jozef and called out his name. In the house. “Jozef!” In the barn. “Jozef!” On the riverbank. “Jozef!” It turned dark, and he still didn’t come home.

She knocked on doors. “Have you seen my son?” she begged the neighbors, her voice cracking.

“
We saw him several days ago, raised in Michal’s arms high above the footpath.”

Marja caught her breath. She suspected that Jozef was staying with the Godzisz clan in Rozlopy, but she wasn’t exactly sure where. There were many Godzisz households in Rozlopy. “Thank you for telling me,” she nodded to the neighbors. “I’ll look for them in the morning.”

By then, it was too late. Michal and Jozef were already on their way to Szczebrzeszyn.

As the bus departed the city, Michal leaned toward Jozef and hinted: “You will have a playmate in America.”

Jozef smiled.

Only on the train between Warsaw and Gdynia did Michal divulge more information. “You will have more than a playmate in America,” said Michal. “Your playmate will be your stepbrother. You will have a stepmother and two stepsisters, too.”

“
What do you mean?” Jozef squinted. “I don’t understand.”

Michal was not the type of man who revealed his deepest feelings. He rarely smiled or frowned. His lips usually remained fixed in a horizontal line stiffened by a clenched jaw. His eyes were steady and dispassionate. He was handsome enough to appear pleasant, but his face was hard to read. It was an almost expressionless mask, a blank canvas upon which one could project whatever image one wanted.

Michal inhaled deeply before offering an explanation. “I took an unpaid three-month leave of absence from the Plymouth Corporation so that I could return to Poland,” Michal told Jozef. “I was in Rozlopy for several weeks. Everybody in Rozlopy and Deszkowice knew about it. Twice I’d asked Marja to come to America,” he held up two fingers, “but twice she rejected me. If she’d taken the initiative to meet with me and to reconcile with me during this trip, I would’ve divorced my other wife in America. But Marja didn’t go out of her way for me, so I didn’t go out of my way for her.” For that reason, Michal had no contact with Marja during his two months in Poland.

“
All this time,” Michal continued, “I’ve done the responsible thing by leaving enough money for my wife in America and her three children. That way, they can pay the rent and buy groceries for three months while I’m traveling to and from Poland.”

There was too much information for the 11-year-old Jozef to sort out. He didn’t know what to ask. He gave his father looks of befuddlement but remained quiet.

As the train approached the port city of Gdynia, Michal gave Jozef one last chance to change his mind. “Do you want to return to Deszkowice?”

Jozef could see the ships in dock. He could follow his dreams to America, or he could go home. In his boyish mind, he was already half way to heaven on earth, and his father had brought him this far. Jozef also believed that it would be deeply disappointing for his father to have come all that way, spent all that money, and made all those arrangements for nothing. But Jozef was only 11. He was being abducted under cloak of fraud. Worse yet, he was being persuaded to believe that he was responsible for what was happening. “It’s too late to turn back,” he answered.

In Gdynia, they boarded the SS.
Pilsudski
for the nine-day trip to New York. Upon arrival on September 24, 1935, Jozef couldn’t see the Statue of Liberty in the distance. “It was a cloudy day,” he remembered. From the deck of the ship, he could descry only the outlines of the tall buildings lining the Manhattan waterfront.

He and his father immediately caught a train to Detroit. Once there, Michal led Jozef to a rented two-bedroom house at 4487 Sobieski Street in eastern Detroit in the heart of the city’s Polish ghetto.

Four strangers from another Polish family greeted Jozef at the door: his stepmother, Marjanna; a stepsister, Josephine, 13; a stepbrother, Ted, 11; and another stepsister, Jenny, 9. In addition, Marjanna was six months pregnant.

Michal was the father.

Jozef wrote letters to his mother in Deszkowice but never mentioned his stepmother or stepfamily. “She was crushed already twice,” he said. First, by the drowning of Wladislaw. Second, by the divorce from Michal. “Had I let her know, it would’ve just added to her pain.” Jozef didn’t count his own departure from Poland as a third crushing blow to his mother.

Marja never communicated to Jozef her reaction to his departure. Because she couldn’t read or write, she responded only to specific questions from him that were read to her by the neighbors, and she relied on the neighbors to transcribe her responses into letters to him. Because all of their letters to each other were necessarily intercepted and interpreted by third parties, Jozef and Marja generally avoided raising sensitive subjects.

Jozef soon learned that his new home in America was anything but heaven on earth. His father and stepmother fought incessantly. They stopped fighting only briefly upon the birth of their daughter in December 1935. Her arrival meant that there were seven people living in the two-bedroom house at 4487 Sobieski Street.

After a year in that house, Michal and Marjanna separated. Michal and Jozef moved into an attic a block away. It was the fall of 1936.

Two months later, Michal and Marjanna reconciled. The two families moved back together again. This time, they moved into a rooming house in Hamtramck, a largely Polish-American city adjacent to the Polish ghetto within Detroit. But six weeks later, Michal and Marjanna separated again. Michal and Jozef moved back to their old attic in Detroit. Exhausted by the domestic instability and turmoil, Jozef was relieved to be rid of the “other” family and the constant bickering between Michal and Marjanna.

During this time, in early 1937, Jozef spotted a one-bedroom house for sale at 3875 Sobieski Street in Detroit. It was the smallest house on the block. Jozef thought it would be perfect for him and his father, certainly superior to the attic.

“
Could we buy that house?” Jozef asked his father as they walked by the property.

It cost $2,000, with a $200 down payment. “We don’t have the money,” said Michal.

But Jozef had an idea. He had never met his uncle in Grand Rapids, but he knew that the man who had sponsored Michal’s immigration to America in 1928 was “real” family. “I wonder if Uncle Joe could loan you $200 for the house,” the 13-year-old suggested.