ALLES GUTE IN AMERIKA!

click to enlarge kit kat kid (1986)

ALLES GUTE IN AMERIKA! (May 2007)

In 1986, you paid 67 cents for a dozen eggs, a postage stamp was 24 cents, a gallon of gas 89 cents, and Harvard tuition was only $10,000. We did not know that yet. We were living in Zell by the Mosel River surrounded by the greens of the vineyards broken only by the white church tower. Spic and span German houses were freshly painted every now and then. And every time after the Mosel's water level rose, it turned the streets of this small picturesque tourist town into another famous tourist attraction… Venice. Only with kayaks instead of gondolas. The nearest train station was Bullay, and we sometimes took trips from there to Coblenz where we shopped at Aldi, an inexpensive grocery chain.
In Zell, we lived in an apartment above the inn, which came in handy when I became pregnant and had cravings for "brot und shmalz" (or bread and lard) and einetopf (an all- in-one hearty soup with chunks of meat).

The "in" movie was "Top Gun," and Huey Louie & the News topped the charts. I was watching "Falcon Crest" and "Dynasty" in German, and we exchanged correspondence with S., minister of a Methodist Church. He answered our worries about finding a job in West Brookfield by writing that the gas station offered a job for $3.25 an hour. We thought that was great, and that we would make it. “If you cannot hold down your first job, there is public assistance to help until you are fully employed. Say "public assistance" and not "welfare." There is prejudice against people "on welfare" he wrote. I guess what he meant was, "come and get a job, don't try to use the system, we don't want any more welfare (ab)users ."

Later on, he was amongst the group who welcomed us at the airport. He played the lyre singing, "This land is your land" all the way from Hartford, CT to West Brookfield , MA. S. and his family came to visit us. I remember that they looked odd to me as the mother and three children were wearing ...capes including the baby. It was November, and the baby was not wearing shoes or socks. Later on, when I saw pictures of the pilgrims, they reminded me of this Methodist preacher and his family.
S' wife took Karolina in for a day when I was in the hospital when Francis was born, but somehow Karolina made it to this old lady Ginny's house, a heavy smoker. Later on, she... ended up with Sally, and all in the course of one day! Sally had geese and a pony, and was fun! She had two children (ages 8 and 9) Gave Karolina a bubble bath, dressed her up in her daughter's clothes, and returned her later scrubbed and fed with a smile and bunch of balloons. Sally took the first pictures of newborn baby Francis. Sally's husband, Mike helped Jacek buy our first car, a Buick Skylark. We paid $500 for it, and in the Spring of 1987 we drove it to Niagara Falls. Mike's parents were from Armenia.
Sally made us a pot roast, and Priscilla K. surprised us with golabki, the Blisses gave us $20 and a Christmas tree. (I won't even mention our closest friends; they deserve a whole article.)
I couldn't recall being hungry back in Germany either. In Reidenhausen, where we moved to from Zell, two elderly German sisters supplied us with fresh produce. They were awfully friendly or maybe they had crush on ...Jacek. Either way, he always brought home eggs, butter, vegetables, and cakes. Herr Massman, a rich local contractor, gave us stuff to send to Poland and offered Jacek a job so we had $400 (!) saved on arrival in the United States. Massman restored an old farm tractor and delivered it to a needy farmer in Poland.

"Oma" and "Opa," with whom we lived, loved Karolina, and their own grandchildren lived far away. That love was converted into countless lollipops our daughter brought back home from every visit (that's why I call our American landlord who's a dentist, a Godsend, as we couldn't afford another Oma & Opa in the US). The whistling sound of their lungs, from a lifetime commitment to smoking, sometimes kept us awake at night in our downstairs apartment. The war did not kill them, but lung cancer probably did.

Oma and Opa (Helmut & Erna Lettgen) spoke only German. A three-year-old Karolina answered them in Polish, and they had quite a conversation. When Opa said, "sagmal, shue" and pointed to Karolina's shoe, the kid quickly answered "not shue … "but" (boot in Polish)," and she went on and on correcting Opa. If the lollipops were meant to bribe her, it did not work. The kid strongly fought germanization on her own.

There were other Poles awaiting immigration to the US, and Germans visited us often. When the conversation stomped upon the sensitive subject of war, the Germans recalled fighting it somewhere in… Russia, and we all accepted it. I wasn't brought up to hate anybody although my family suffered a lot during the war. Later on, my grandparents' house was built by German POWs, and my family stayed in touch with them after the war.
Last week near Naples, a 5-year-old daughter of Polish immigrants, was accidentally shot by an Italian construction worker, Alessandro R. He had an argument with two of her father's friends over the lack of space at the bar where they all went after work to have a beer. After the quarrel, two Polish workers went to the apartment of the little girl's father to take a shower as there was no plumbing in their own apartment. Meantime, the Italian went home to get a gun. Guns in Italy are illegal. A little girl stood in the door by her mother's side when the Italian arrived and gave two shots, and one reached her. The chief of police contacted Alessandro's family and they convinced him to turn himself in.

The Italian press dedicated lots of space to this horrible tragedy. The grieving parents are hardworking people, nice, quiet, and well-liked, but when the bullet struck and the father, carrying his dying daughter, walked around screaming for help, nobody answered. They are returning to Poland where they going to bury their daughter.

Emotions ran high. At the spur of the moment, some blame the entire Italian nation for the act (of murder) of one drunken mason forgetting that the entire neighborhood accepted this and many other Polish families. Forgetting how Italians welcomed Karol Wojtyla even after realizing that the new pope is not an Italian!

The German press can be, just like the American press, unjust, to say the least. My experience with German people was different than my grandparents', but it was my grandparents that taught me tolerance. They had every reason to hate the Germans, but they remained sober and fair and objective in their opinions. I cannot blame "Germans" after the landlord's 5-year-old son in Zell gave me chicken pox, which at my age developed into a terrible experience. Oma Lettgen had a picture sitting on a motorcycle wearing a Wermacht uniform.
Amongst old letters, I just found hers and Franz Massman's letters to us wishing us: "Alles gute, viel Gluck in Amerika!" Now when I think about it, as much as what they gave us, we gave them something too. A sense of rehabilitation.
I liked that international connection, in the form of relations that cement us rather than divide us.
Dividing Poles has become the Polish government's domain.
Their newest idea is to remove all the monuments built by the Soviets. If you ask people on the streets, 99% will say that the monuments don't bother them. Instead of spending money on the removal, why not organize summer programs for unprivileged children? The monuments dedicated to the Red Army, whether we like it or not, are part of history, just like the Palace of Culture in downtown Warsaw. Why not place a plaque explaining that the monument was erected by Soviet occupying forces though most people don't care if they live on a street named after them. They actually think that changing it will cause more problems and surely more bureaucracy. Don’t they have better things to do?

The average person always seem to posses more common sense than that government.

The year was still 1986, the refugee camp in Germany, which was an old athletic complex with dormitory like buildings, an orchard and asparagus fields nearby. Immigrants awaiting medical exams, beginning the process of assimilation, some paperwork, for a week or two. It was the place where you get assigned your future apartment and are given permission to travel in a designed zone.

In the cafeteria, there were two lines to the kitchen counter. One was for people like us who ate pork and the other one stood under the sign, "beef only." Most of the people in line were men, different ages, and mostly Muslim. Each meal came with a piece of fruit. I remember those men seeing me with a little kid, without being able to converse in any common language, they gave me their fruit. I did not know them, and they did not know who we were and where we came from. They just saw a child. That's how I like to judge people by, their good deeds rather than their backgrounds. Isn't that how you would want to be judged by as well?