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Hacienda Santa Rosa: a Polish Refuge in Mexico
A harrowing 20-thousand kilometer odyssey ended with an unforgettable welcome in Mexico. Piotr Piwowarczyk, who is making a film about it, tells the story.cosmopolitanreview.com
That's my people. Polish refugees who got rounded up into gulags, then begrudgingly let go by Stalin when they partnered up with the Allies. They got moved out to Iran. Then India. Then to America. Yay, right?! Nope. They were put into a Japanese American internment camp, surrounded by barbed wire again. Then they got bounced to Mexico, where the finally found something like a home.
It always frustrates me that their story never makes it big time. They got the shaft from literally everybody involved in WW2. The Germans made their fighting-age men unwilling soldiers, at least the ones that didn't get murdered as resistance fighters during the takeover. The women were taken as breeding stock to make lots of blue-eyed and blonde-haired Aryan babies. If you weren't useful to fight or breed, you went to a concentration camp. Auschwitz was primarily a Polish camp. Then the Soviets took over and sent the survivors to gulags to die. Then FDR told Stalin, "We can't be allies and have this going on, the American public won't stand for it." But we didn't want anything to do with them because they sounded and looked German and Russian!!
I love a good Polak joke, but it's kinda sick and sad when you realize that the reason Poles got the reputation for ignorance is because Hitler killed the prominent intellectuals early on, and then basically wrote the country and the people out of the books and mandated that they had no need for an education that went beyond being able to spell their name and count. I mull over the sadness of the situation periodically while I listen to and drink some Chopin.
When I was stationed in CT I was a local girl’s house helping her dad build a corral. It was me, her dad and her uncle Eddie.
It was hot and Eddie wore a long sleeve shirt. Struck me as odd. It also struck me as odd that I never did understand a dang word Eddie said, although he didn’t speak that much. In my mind, not to his face, I deemed him crazy Eddie and I would try to engage him in conversation trying to catch a word I understood. Once he pulled his sleeve up and he had numbers tattooed on his arm. I felt like total ****.
After we were done Sandy and I were talking and she gave me the low down. Her mom was Polish and her parents put their kids on a boat to the US in the late 30’s. Her mom never saw her parents again. Eddie’s family didn’t do this. Just damn tragic. Horrible.
Anyway, I discovered that, although all most folks of my generation know about the Poles are the jokes, we were missing out because they cook some incredibly good food. Wonderful folks too.