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10- Orono Weekly Times, Wednesday, May 3, 2000 Home of Uncle Dolek Nowak, who lived next door to the Majorek family in Holoszkowice, Ukraine. The house has not changed since the family was deported to Siberian labour camp with other ethnic Poles in February 1940. The house and land have remained uninhabited uninhabited and all possessions -- furniture, dishes, cookware, linens etc. in the home have been untouçhed since the night of deportation. By: Helen [Bâjprek] MacDonald I recently returned from à journey to 1940; from a small village in what is now western Ukraine' and what was, until WWli came and went, my Polish father's childhood home. This trip began with a peculiar realization of a great gap in the stories of my parents'lives. parents'lives. Too busy being , a child, growing up, joining the workforce, getting on with my own life, it wasn't until I had children of my own that I even noticed there was a gap. . But one day, I did notice. While driving past a childhood childhood place, I heard myself telling my children yet another another story of the antics of one of my siblings, and for the first time saw the moment of story and laughter as an important link to the way in which my memories told my children something of who I am. Suddenly, it dawned on me I rarely experienced such moments of memory with my parents; .for they are both immigrants. It's almost as if they had no life before Canada. Everything I knew of their lives was seemingly grounded in all of my own childhood memories. They married in the Church which we attended each Sunday. We lived within within walking distance of all of their closest friends and most of our relatives, on both sides. It was a working-class community community in which everyone was a post-war immigrant to Canada. Nobody talked about the war or about the tough times during the war or even in the pre-war years. Canada was the place everyone came to after the war: to start over, and to forget all that fell behind in the wake of the ships that, to most, represented represented vessels of immeasurable possibility. And their children children were the future. Why burden them with the past? So I was quite late realiz- - ing how little 1 really knew of my parents. For there are no landmarks--no churches, no neighbourhoods--nothing on the landscape which offers a link to their memories and to the stories such landmarks might prompt. First, I travelled to England. F visited the city where my mother was born. I walked the moors across which she and her sisters and brothers hiked and the strength of the wind told me more about her adventurous nature and her boundless ' energy and dynamic personality personality than anything else ever had. It was easy getting to, and making our way around England., I never imagined I would get to the soil of my father's origins. But I did and so did one of my children. And the village, as it happens, has little changed since 1940. My dad and his family were among 1.5 million ethnic ethnic Poles deported by the Red Army through the years 1939- 41 to Siberian labour camps. It's a terrible story of disease, death, hardship and misery which is seldom told by the survivors to their children. I had heard snippets now-and- then but it wasn't until 1 was an adult that I was able to dis tinguish between the Siberian experience and the Holocaust. None of the surviving Bajorek family members has ever returned to the home village. village. Mostly, because the eastern borderlands of what was Poland until the outbreak of the war, were ceded to Stalin by the Allies. Poland did, however, 'gain' from Germany in the west. But for all those Poles who survived the Siberian experience, there was no home to return to after the war. Some did, but had to be relocated in other parts of the country. Others, as my father and the surviving members members of his family, preferred to immigrate to Canada, for they were uninterested in becoming becoming subjects of Soviet Communist rule; particularly, having managed to flee the oppression of a Siberian labour camp! In 1991,' Ukraine gained it's independence from Russia, as did many other states due to the break-up of the Soviet Union. Suddenly, the door was open to western interaction. And last month, Garrett, my twelve-yr. old son, and I travelled to Ukraine on an invitation from a university university where I lectured for two weeks. Coincidentally, the invitation came from the professor who lived in Bowmanville last summer with nine young people who worked in our community as participants in a Canada World Youth exchange. I accepted the invitation with a special request for help in. locating and visiting my father's village. There are no pictures of the village ^or of the family farm. Only the childhood memories of my dad and his sisters, and so I left'Canada with visual images created by their telling me of the place as they remembered it from 1940. But for the houses burned by invading German forces in 1941, everything is as it was; and as described to me.before 1 left. I was easily able to recognize recognize the place from the descriptions told me: the crossroads leading to the church and the village school. The cemetery behind the church in which my greatgrandfather greatgrandfather is buried in the 'Polish' section. For after the deportation of the Poles in 1940, all that remained Were Ukrainian villagers. Even the roads, thick with mud in the spring .rain and the ducks and chickens and geese waddling past, and the horses and carts carrying farm equipment to the field or worshippers to Church. All as they remembered. remembered. All the same. Such, villages, in what is now Ukraine, are little changed , but for remnants of the era of Soviet collectivization collectivization seen in the shape of huge, now crumbling, grain elevators elevators and farm structures. Certainly, there are many changes in the cities for students students in urban schools have access to computers, and on the streets rush people with their cell phones. But the villages remain in a kind of photographic freeze- frame. The house in which my father was born was only torn down last year and on it's foundation a new same-design home constructed. The small apple orchard my grandfather planted still feeds the family who moved in shortly after the Bajorek's were deported. The pond in which my father near-drowned as a small boy still full and the great open field of thick black peat still stretches across seemingly to meet the setting sun. And the field that fed the family potatoes potatoes and beets and onions and carrots still feeds a family all the same fare. I was taken about the village village as a returning daughter and questioned by an eager . audience for I was as a ghost of hope, as no one knew of the fates of the Poles deported that night in 1940. And my 1 son was embraced with the desperate hug of old people thrilled to touch the future. The woman who was our guide, now bent over from a lifetime of work in the fields, her head covered in a traditional traditional babushka, was the family family neighbour who, at the age of 15 on that terrible February night, 1940, followed the sleighs to the train with a bundle bundle of food. She found the Bajorek family, packed into a boxcar with about 60 others, and gave them enough food to keep them alive during the month-long journey to Siberia. After we followed the old woman, slogging our way through the muck of the road and the fields, and after peering peering into the past, she gave us a gift baked that morning. For it was near Easter; the „ time of rebirth. Pani Malvina Lewandowka gifted us with a mouth-water in g trad itional babka: Easter bread baked with grain grown in the village village field. "And the circle was complete. complete. It was a long and wonderful wonderful journey to the beginning beginning of tfte story. RECYCLE all you can eat BUFFET SPECIAL - $14.30 Full Menu • Licenced by LLBO Give your Mother a treat at... New Dutch Oven Open 7 Days a week from 8 >.m. to 9 p m. Hwy 35/115 Northbound - Orono -- -- Call for reservations 983-5001