If Attics Could Talk: The Misplaced Objects of Displaced People
The attics of the Lower Silesia tell a multitude of peculiar and complex stories. Even though they often look pretty ordinary, the objects they hold in a dusty embrace tend to form unlikely alliances...
If accessed after years of not being used, the attics reveal an intricate story of flight and absence, presence and persistence, prompting questions of what remains from forced displacements. This is therefore not a story about attics, but about the meaning of objects belonging to those who once had to flee and made choices about what to take and what to leave behind.
When, in 1945, the Red Army was approaching Lower Silesia, some Germans who lived in Hirschberg fled, while others were forced to leave the area. A lot of them crossed the mountains into Czech towns in hopes of weathering the storm and then coming back to their homes. Perhaps it’s why they took only basic necessities, leaving bulk items behind. The families were soon forced to move again, this time within the new borders of post-war Germany; their belongings and attics now subsumed under Polish territories, and their town renamed Jelenia Góra. Soon after, new inhabitants started arriving in transports from Kresy, the eastern part of the Second Polish Republic that amounted to more than half of the territory of pre-war Poland. People from those Eastern Borderlands, the territories that now belong to Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine, were Polish repatriates whose roots were now to be replanted in this new, and still somewhat foreign, land.
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Plac Ratuszowy (City Hall Square) in Jelenia Góra (Hirschberg) before WWII, photo: Wikimedia Commons
When I entered the attic attached to my parents apartment, it resembled a dead garden, covered with black dust, as if the winds of history blew over some dark soil from an unspecified elsewhere. The place was never fully explored by anyone in my family, perhaps for fear of an alleged ‘German bomb’ left by those who fled in 1945 – the previous owners warned my parents about. Or it might as well be that this ‘German bomb’ was simply a euphemism for objects which prompted the memory of people none of us had ever met – someone else’s belongings, none of us ever felt ready to delve into.
The house was built in 1905 and the attic held at least three generations of objects belonging to those who once called that house home. In the shadowy corners of my attic, a few beautiful pieces of furniture peeked out from underneath a cover of dust, just waiting to be rediscovered. Thick books, both in German and Polish, but published at least 40 or 50 years apart, were stacked together in large piles. Volumes of German sheet music were juxtaposed with Polish books from the Communist Party library, topped off with a small publication entitled Ziemie Odzyskane (Recovered Lands), about the so-called ‘recovered territories’ (this official euphemism described the newly-acquired Polish lands, suggesting that Lower Silesia, amongst others, was Polish from time immemorial). Piles of what now seemed to be garbage but which clearly meant a lot in the past. A few antique bathroom sinks, a 1960s Polish TV set and a bit younger vacuum, all similarly broken and tarnished. Next, some very old German skis standing next to a Polish wooden sled, from circa 1970, standing together united as winter necessities, put away by the generations of the house’s inhabitants. Layer upon layer of history inscribed in items with no owners, a silent history of those who fled and those who arrived in their place.
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Maria’s diary, photo: private archive
On one of the shelves there were two gas masks with swastikas on them, one of them child-size. Near that, an unexpected find: a very old notebook, a treasure of sorts. A diary gifted from one Polish sister to another in Drohobych on 31st August 1917. Inside, inscribed with beautiful calligraphy, were multiple entries left by family and friends of Maria – poems and short inscriptions made to last. Entries filled with nostalgia, memory and a sense of loss, all written between 1917 and 1922, mostly from three cities – Przemyśl, Sambor and Drohobych, the last two from the Kresy territories. In one of the entries, a woman with the initials M.J. wrote in verse:
Text
Not everyone can write something down in an album [like this], but everyone is tempted to leave one’s trace in someone’s memory. So I admit it will be very difficult for her to forget about me. Please, remember me.
And here I was, trying to give her what she asked for, remembering her a hundred years later without the slightest concept of who she was. It prompted an additional reflection: can objects ask for memory or can they only embody a memory? Can we sense memories inscribed in them, or are they completely unknown? Apart from Maria’s notebook, not many of the objects could speak for themselves in the attic, or perhaps they simply told a difficult story of flight, absence and loss combined with painful arrivals.
Who was Maria to the attic I was standing in? And who brought her notebook all the way from Drohobych to Jelenia Góra? It held dozens of traces of her friends, who weathered the most turbulent times of war and persecution on the Eastern Borderlands. This artifact was meaningful enough to be packed in a suitcase and travel all the way to the new Western border of Poland, but too meaningless to make its way to someone’s family archive. And there I was in the attic, holding in my hands this abandoned survivor of repatriation, feeling guilty for not knowing what else made its way from Kresy to the ironic ‘recovered territories’.
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A public school in a village in Polesie, currently in Belarus, during a visitation by the Education Commission, 1933/1935, photo: Leszek Kasprzak / Forum
As the granddaughter of two sets of repatriates, was I able to pinpoint the objects my ancestors deemed worthwhile to bring with them? How many attics in what is now Belarus, Lithuania and Ukraine still hold items that didn’t make the cut and were left during a hurried departure? What still remains and what do we – the first and second generations – know about the journey that took place around 75 years ago?
While our contemporaries in the capital of Poland measure the depth of their roots, priding themselves to be of 4th, 5th and 6th generation Varsovians, growing up in Lower Silesia bore some strange similarities to the consciousness of some Americans, who accept a simple truth that they are all from ‘somewhere’, a community of descendants of those replanted from one land to another. Some of us would identify ourselves as descended from the abandoned land of Kresy, from where our ancestors came. There is a saying in Polish which, if translated literally, means ‘you don’t replant old trees’, and yet we were all evidence to the fact the replanted old trees can do just fine.
But what was it like to grow up as a descendant of displaced people? It meant witnessing strange things and accepting them as completely normal. It meant listening to your grandmother sing beautiful songs in Belarusian and understanding close to nothing, but viscerally feeling the strong sense of nostalgia that was never actually yours. It meant dreaming of endless forests you had never seen and yearning to finally be able to visit these mystical places, far away across the Bug river, in order to see the same landscapes that your grandparents frequently went back to in their memories. It meant growing up respecting singer-songwriter Czesław Niemen as the most amazing voice of his time, mirroring the respect of his fellow repatriates. But were there any tangible items that remained, anything to hold on to? In order to find out, it was necessary to dive into the pool of the memories of those who travelled, as well as of those who grew up hearing about this journey.
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Repatriates from the East, pictured: a family with its belongings, Gdańsk, 1947, photo: PAP
In the summer of 1945, the first repatriation trains began slowly moving thousands of people to the West. Their cars were packed with people, cattle and random belongings haphazardly gathered and packed into heavy chests. In theory, each family was allowed to bring with them up to two tonnes of luggage: clothes, shoes, livestock, in short, the basic necessities that guaranteed a smooth transition to a new home. In practice, the trains were also filled with the fear of the unknown, uncertainty, nostalgia and loads of memories. Often, the stories of repatriations were marked by the ubiquitous presence of strong women. Some men were killed during the war, others were still fighting with the Anders’ Army, or were already awaiting their families at the place of the train’s arrival. Thus, for the most part, the women were the ones who selected the items, packed the bags, cut the roots off and stood at the railway stations for days or weeks, waiting for the repatriation trains to arrive, as they were only provided when a sizable group of people was ready, not the other way around.
When asked about the objects his family brought with them, my grandfather, in one breath, responded that I must be crazy to think anything remains after 75 years, asserting at the same time that this event was forever etched into his memory, and that he could tell me all about it. Thus he positioned his memory as much more worthwhile than anything palpable. The objects repatriates took with them were for the most part practical things, documents and only occasionally, other mementos. The stories I’ve encountered in my little quest for memories revealed the random nature of items that made it West: ‘I brought close to nothing,’ said my grandfather, ‘as if I was going on a short trip’. Some, and especially those fleeing Ukraine, brought nothing, as they were escaping persecution. Others, like my paternal grandmother Emilia, who came to the ‘recovered territories’ with her children in one of the last transports in 1952, made sure to sell everything they had before even crossing the border. There are unconfirmed stories of those who wrapped their belongings in canvases of then-worthless paintings which, years later, became valuable. Or those, who instead of bringing cattle, brought Soviet cars for sale. And then there are strange mementos like green velour bedspreads, as if their soft touch was meant to comfort and guarantee a good night’s sleep in a new home. Someone kept and brought their baptism gown; a striking artifact as it testified to their being born – elsewhere, or perhaps brought as evidence of being born Catholic. A whole lot of fabric, meant to tie the past and the future together.
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Kids from elementary school welcoming summer, Kobryn, Polesie, former Polish territories, currently Belarus, photo: Bronisław Bunikowski / from the family archive of Leszek Kasprzak / Forum
There is also a whole category of lost or disappearing objects that exist only in the stories being told about them. Grandpa admitted that back in the 1980s, in one of the storage rooms he found a prewar invitation to a New Year’s Eve ball, a mysterious survivor of the big move. There is also the story of a beautiful pair of leather jackboots my father secretly wore to school one day in the 1970s, almost giving his mother a heart attack because, as he found out later, the thick soles were filled with gold coins – grandma’s dowry turned into practical currency. She hid them in the boots before the trip West and kept them there, for safety. And then there is the szabla (saber), a knife my grandmother Janina cherished her whole life. Although it did not look like a saber, and you have to believe me – it was not even close, Grandma didn’t fail to mention how important it was each time she used it. And she used it all the time because, as she said, she was unable to cut anything with other knives. Szabla was the knife her father used when he worked in a butchery. He died before the war’s end, but the knife made its way to the West along with his story – his life and death being mentioned almost every time bread was being cut. The knife’s handle deteriorated long ago and was replaced countless times, while its blade was sharpened so many times it is now so thin, it resembles a feather. But it’s still around – a family artifact that will hopefully never end up in an attic.
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Maria’s diary, photo: author’s private archive
Objects do, in fact, have the capacity to remember. They remain in attics, storage rooms and drawers, and they persist through the stories passed on from one generation to the next. The process of unearthing their stories resembles the work of digging a hole in search of finding the roots of trees that are no longer there. Sometimes, they appear in unlikely places, like lost pieces of a puzzle, telling the stories of their uprootedness. There are no objects without a story behind them.
With enormous gratitude to those who were willing to share their own and second-hand memories with me: Władysław Dobrołowicz, Krystyna and Bogusław Tumiłowicz, Anna Wójcik, Krystyna and Lech Krucińscy, and Kama Lelo.
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