Searching for My Mother's Son
Maria Nolan
Australia
09 November 2001
My story about genealogy started 4 years ago when my mother with the onset of dementia told the family that before the WW2 she had a son in Poland. After discussing this with her she asked me to find her son because of her illness I wasn’t certain that she was telling us the truth, but I decided to look anyway.
I didn't have a clue where to start so I hooked up on the internet and started with rootsweb.com where there was a lot of information and help about various archive I could write to. I then wrote to everyone with all the surnames that I was searching. Up until then our parents always told us that their families had died in the war and we believed them and had no desire to find out anything. To make matters worse my parents had no papers and I wasn't even certain where to start, all I knew was that both parents were in Germany during the war and then migrated to Australia in 1950 as Displaced refugees.
My first step was to write to the Australia Archives in Canberra and get the shipping list details and any other papers they had on my parents. Well after a couple of weeks I was notified that they had all the papers, this was very helpful as it listed names of my grandparents as well as the towns in Poland where my parents came from. I then had something to go on. I also contacted the Red Cross in Geneva and asked them to help me search, after 2 years they did send me all the information they had , it told me the dates my parents were taken to Germany from Poland and what happened to them during their stay in Germany. My mother was taken from her family and sent to Germany as a forced laborer, she worked on a farm throughout the war and things for her weren't easy she had to endure lots of hardships and cruelty. My father was arrested by the Gestapo and sent to Majdanek concentration camp , he was also sent to various other camps, Mauthausen in Germany and Natsweiler in France.
All the horrific things my mother went through she relived again with her illness, she lost her short term memory but her long term was very vivid in her mind, and in the last couple of years of her life she went through all this again and we listened and really couldn't comprehend how she survived all that torture. Both my parents never talked about there past they just wanted to forget. It is extremely hard to try and condense a live time of suffering in this short story.
With the information I received I was able to then write to all the Churches in Poland, I thought while I am searching for my mums family, I might as well do a search for my fathers family. I first wrote to Warsaw for permission and then wrote to every church in the town my mother and father came from, I did this several times until after two and a half years I received a reply with birth certificates etc. I also wrote to the Government archives in Poland a few times and I got lucky in December 1999 when a young girl read my letter and took it one step further and checked in the local phone book for the name and bingo I was in luck. She informed my mother's son who was 60 then that I was looking for him, gave him my last letter and he then replied to me , I received his letter 2 days before Christmas 1999 and we took it from there. Mum's memory by then was very bad and she had a few small strokes and things weren't to good with her health, but we as a family in Australia decided to invite her son and his wife to Australia so he could see his mum for the first time since he was a baby.
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We hurried with all the official procedure and they arrived in June 2000 and it was the most emotional experience we had ever felt, when he walked in the door and mum saw him she just looked up and said "son I have been waiting for you", It was very touching. After four days mum had a massive stroke and died, but he at least met her and was able to say good bye. I know that she was waiting for him.
I have been keeping in touch with the extended family we have in Poland, with phone calls and letters. There is still a lot I need to find out about my mothers family and I will keep digging away until I have a clear picture of her life and the families history.
With the search for my father's family things were very different, my father always told me to leave the past behind and was very angry that I was trying to dig up his past and find family in Poland. Apparently he knew that his family were alive all along.
Before the war he was married and had a child - his daughter is alive and I found her through the local parish priest, who contacted her and told her I was searching for family. She is alive but very emotionally distressed, her whole life has been hardship and sorrow. She knew our father was alive and finally made contact with him 9 years ago after her mother passed away. In that 9 years or so they had been corresponding, but we his family in Australia were not aware of this. I came along and opened up Pandora's box.
I started corresponding with her and she was desperate to meet her father, she was looking for something that she missed as a child growing up, she had all these feelings of abandonment. Because we brought mum's son to Australia I thought it was only fair that we give her the same opportunity to meet her father. My father at that time had no problem with this or at least that is what he said. I thought that after he meet his daughter in person he might open up. When she arrived and met him it was very strange, she told me that she felt he was cold towards her, (no emotion). All I could say to her was that he has been like this all his life, never showed emotion it was like there was this brick wall in front of him, maybe it was the product of all the torture he endured during his time in the concentration camps.
The reunion didn't go to well and now my father is blaming me for turning his life upside down. He was happy to just correspond with his daughter, because you can write what you want in a letter but to meet that person face to face wasn't easy for him. I am still corresponding with his daughter in Poland but I now have no contact with my father. I wish things would have turned out differently but sometimes when you dig to deep and uncover family secrets things don't work out how you would like them to. I always thought there was something missing in our lives and now after uncovering the past secrets of our family I was able to put the jig saw puzzle together but it has also created a rift in the family. In the past my relationship with my father was distant and difficult and now it has come to an end. I have acknowledged the past but he just wants it buried.
For anyone doing family history please be aware of what you can uncover.
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Editor's note: This is a two part article. The second part is an article written by Maria's step brother after his return to Poland.
Continue on to Part II
This article appears here with the permission of the author.
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