The Soul’s Journey: Remembering a Legacy of Heroism & Resilience

By Mary Shumilak

All refugees flee the looming threat of extinction. This is a powerful story of one Polish family’s escape from war-torn Europe after the Second World War, and the life they built as newcomers in a small community in western Canada. They brought with them the hope for a better life, but their war time experiences were a constant burden interfering with their inner peace and desire for security. The story of their lives, struggles and successes, aims to create a legacy of hope for their descendants and anyone with a similar cultural history or experience. It is a must read for those wanting an understanding of that era, as well as seeing how the experiences of this family were reflective in many ways to today’s ongoing refugee crisis.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Sep 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9798886936162

Mary Shumilak

Mary Shumilak (nee Grabowski), the youngest of four children and a first-generation Canadian, grew up in Selkirk, Manitoba, Canada. She earned a Bachelor of Education degree from the University of Winnipeg and later a certificate in Adult Education from St. Francis Xavier University. She began her teaching career in East Selkirk. Following her marriage in 1981, Mary and her husband, Tony Shumilak, moved to the province of Saskatchewan, where they lived, worked and raised their boys in a number of communities and where she taught elementary school, in addition to doing some student counselling, administration, professional development and instructional coaching, before retiring in 2018. She now spends her time reading mainly non-fiction, keeping her eye on politics, taking classes of interest, getting daily exercise, traveling and writing. Mary and Tony take great pride in their family that includes two sons, Reagan and Geoff; daughters-in-law, Marla and Vivien; and grandchildren, Ryker, Elly and Macy.

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Why This Story Should Be Told

In 2015, the Syrian crisis was dominating the news. Daily coverage included dismal accounts of dinghies packed with families capsizing on the Mediterranean Sea. The unscrupulous and costly services of human traffickers were often employed to provide anything but safe passage. These tragedies often resulted in multiple drowning victims that would eventually wash up on distant shores. It seemed that the news was inundated with stories of refugees escaping their homelands. We watched scenes of long lines of parents walking with their young children, followed by ageing grandparents each holding a few belongings. The daily news related stories from countries in the Middle East like Syria, Libya, Yemen, Afghanistan, Eritrea, Pakistan, as well as Nicaragua and Honduras in Central America. These refugees would risk everything to escape the dangers of war, political corruption, oppression, gangs, or starvation caused by droughts, floods, or economic disparity. Their attempts to escape often ended with disturbing and tragic consequences. Two questions became a nagging preoccupation in my mind. ’How bad must things get in order for someone to leave their homeland only to become a refugee under further dismal conditions? Did my parents and siblings fall victim to similar struggles during their immigration?’ It would become food for thought.

That year, in response to those deteriorating world events, my husband Tony and I decided to stop buying each other Christmas gifts. Instead, we would use the money to purchase gifts for the children of a refugee family sponsored by our church, St. Philip Neri, in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. It seemed like a simple idea. The first family the church refugee committee assigned to us had recently arrived from a Sri Lankan refugee camp. Originally from Pakistan, this Catholic family had witnessed and experienced growing conflicts between the Islamic (Muslim) majority and Christian minorities. In light of growing tensions and ominous personal threats, they left Pakistan. After a two year wait in a refugee camp, they were able to immigrate to Canada and join the father’s sister and two nephews already living in Saskatoon.

The refugee committee then asked us to deliver the gifts we had purchased, thereby allowing us to meet the family. It gave us an opportunity to visit and drink tea together. The ensuing Christmases introduced us to two more refugee families from Eritrea, and then we enjoyed a return visit to the first family.

These four Christmas visits were our window into the lives of modern refugees. We were able to visit, drink tea and coffee, and share a meal. The children told us about school and sang carols they learned in choir. We also heard of their ambitions for the future that included maybe someday going to university. These families are reconstructing their broken lives and that was made possible by the Canadian government and its partnering agencies.

In 2018, we sold our house and bought a condo. Now that we were retired and our children were grown and independent, it was time to rid ourselves of belongings that no longer served a useful purpose so that our new home would be free of clutter. I put four unneeded chairs up for sale. A young couple came to purchase them. They apologized for being late. This pleasant, soft-spoken woman explained that she wanted to wait until her husband was able to accompany her. Earlier in the day, she had been at a garage sale. As she looked around the tables, the owner of the house easily identified her as a Muslim because she wore a hijab. He shouted at her to go back to the country where she came from. She had already lived in Canada for over a dozen years and her children were born here. She told him that Canada was her home but wondered if that was really true. That day, for the first time, she feared for her children’s safety. I just wanted to get rid of the chairs, but now found myself trying to explain that not all Canadians share those attitudes. I hoped that there was no skepticism in my voice. They had already experienced other negative repercussions from recent growing nationalist sentiments in the United States and similar attitudes fueled by a local talk radio station host. Their experiences and feelings were real. Later, I recalled some stories told by our mom of difficulties they had experienced in their early years in Canada. Again, more food for thought was added.

While unpacking into our condo, I came across a box of binders that included the green one that I had organized years ago. It held my parents’ immigration and citizenship documentation, their marriage license and other information as well as some old black and white family photos. It was organized and secure. The yellowed documents reminded me that there was an important story attached to the contents. To a new, unknowing generation, that binder could easily have been accidently or even deliberately thrown in the trash. I suspect that garbage dumps are the unofficial libraries of too many family histories.

Since I am now retired with extra time on my hands, I decided to write a memoir of family stories recalled from my childhood that I would share with my two sons, four nieces and three nephews, and their families. I suspected that my nieces and nephews did not know very many of the stories that comprised their parents’ and grandparents’ history. The time to write is now as the clock ticks for us all. The contents of the green binder would provide motivation and a starting point. Many stories from our home were easy to recall. The missing details were the actual conditions and events that caused the Grabowski family to enter Canada as refugees. There is no one to ask as our parents and most of their friends who shared similar experiences are long gone. This memoir would require some research to understand the chronicles of deteriorating circumstances in the homeland that once was in order to appreciate the determination needed to build a new life abroad.

As a result, to better understand our family stories, I have summarized some basic European history in the chapter, ‘A Very Short History Lesson’. It was virtually impossible to describe all the events that comprised Poland’s role within this context. This is an attempt to provide enough well-known background information to show why Piotr (Peter) and Wladyslawa (Gladys) Grabowski and their three children, Anna, Zbigniew (Bish), and Jan (John) became Polish refugees. The memoir will attempt to explain the events that would come to shape our family story and connect how their experiences so long ago were similar to the struggles of too many people today. That connection and the empathy I hope it emits in you, the reader, is an important reason ‘why this story should be told’.

A Very Short History Lesson

Crowned White Eagle – National Symbol of Poland

If you should choose to visit Poland during the summer, your flight will take you over a country whose beauty can best be described as breathtaking. You will see rolling hills surrounded by lush fields of grain. There are many emerald old-growth mixed forests with their thick canopies tracing large curving rivers. A web of roadways reveals a population density far greater than Canada’s with a multitude of villages, towns, and cities. Old and new Roman Catholic churches, quiet cemeteries, and even ancient castles still dot the hillsides. On the surface, it will appear tranquil in its beauty and simplicity. Yet deep within the soil that holds the promise of a bountiful crop was throughout its history soaked in the blood of a people marked for extinction.

Chronicles detailing Poland’s turbulent history date back over 1000 years. Before the Middle Ages, the Polish population was very different than it is today. Boundaries between European nations changed frequently depending on the death or birth of a monarch or ruler, changes to trading alliances, expansionist agendas of ruling families or the Catholic Church. This constant state of flux resulted in societies and cultures throughout Europe influencing, and, at times, even adopting each other’s practices. Individual cultures were more theoretical with few distinctions and people had little, if any, concept of nationhood. The borders of Poland would expand and contract with tragic regularity. As a result, Poland housed a diverse mix of minorities from neighboring countries that included Russians, Lithuanians, Belarusians, Ukrainians, Slovaks, Czechs, and Germans.

But the fabric of this largely agrarian society changed in the thirteenth century when European Jews sought safety from anti-Semitic threats in neighboring nations. They were given legal protection in Poland by Casimir III (the Great) in the fourteenth century. This stability allowed them to thrive so that by the sixteenth century eighty percent of all European Jews lived in the region defined as Poland. Even though Poles were Christians and followed the teachings of the New Testament and the Roman Catholic Church, and Jews followed the teachings of Judaism and the Old Testament, they still spoke each other’s languages, and peacefully interacted in business and on the streets. The Polish and Jewish cultures shared one country. They cooperatively lived in mixed communities making it almost impossible to separate their stories, and sadly, unable to navigate out of the inexplicable horror that would become their shared history.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Poland was the largest country in Europe. But toward the end of the eighteenth century, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was partitioned between Russia, Prussia, and Austria. Both Poland and Lithuania were erased from the European map altogether. These three adversaries intended to destroy all evidence of Poland as a nation and did so by melting the crown jewels, and physically taking all written history to Russia where it would be altered or destroyed. Poland and Lithuania remained invisible for the next 123 years. During that period, Poland remained under Russian control, and most citizens lived highly restricted and impoverished lives. Polish nationals continued to be landowners and worked their small farms. City dwelling Poles often worked in factories, mining, and heavy industry. Polish Jews were not permitted to own land, so instead they became peddlers, merchants, and even manufacturers, especially in the fabric and clothing industries. Almost everything produced in the country was sent to Russia, leaving little for locals to live on. Under these strained conditions, Poles, and Jews alike, a once cooperative people now found themselves trying to survive, causing at times deep divisions between them.

Scholars have written volumes of descriptions and interpretations of what lead to and occurred in World War I (WWI), the Bolshevik Revolution, and World War II (WWII). History has shown that anti-Semitism, which was always prevalent through early European history, grew exponentially with the Bolshevik Revolution. In the late 1800s, after the assassination of Russian Tsar Alexander II, Russia blamed the Jews, and in response, systematically destroyed many Jewish communities. A Russian word, pogrom, meaning to wreak havoc and demolish violently, described the horrific attacks by local non-Jewish populations on Jews in the Russian Empire. From 1881 to 1884, there were over 200 violent anti-Jewish events in Russia alone. In response to this merciless cruelty, almost two million Jews left Eastern Europe with many going to the United States. While others known as Zionists looked to form a homeland in Palestine. These were tumultuous times often with confused alliances. In Poland, many remaining Jews successfully fought with their Polish comrades to seek independence from Russia until it finally re-emerged on the map of Europe after World War I. Between 1918 and 1924, in spite of having a destroyed infrastructure and being mired by instability, Poland adopted a modern democratic constitution, legislated an eight hour work day, as well as developed social, basic health and unemployment insurance benefits. It became a nation again. All of these improvements still provided less than two decades of stability and anti-Semitism would continue to grow.

As a result of WWI, Europe was plagued with high unemployment, poverty, depression, racism, and continued anti-Semitism. These were all violations to the human condition that resulted in wide-spread societal instability. Post WW I Germany labored within the restrictions of the Treaty of Versailles. The German army was limited to only 100,000 soldiers and the war reparations the country was forced to make caused the economy to be sucked into a vortex of hyperinflation, evaporating the value of the German mark. The rise of nationalism, a reaction to