"Ouch" … I hollered, as the young man in seat 18G of LOT Airlines’ Boeing 767 had yanked the arm rest back with such force that I thought he had sheared off the meniscus of my left knee, which knee, until that moment, had been comfortably couched in the only convenient space available for it. Startled out of a deep sleep, I glanced up at the en-route video map and saw Newfoundland on the left had been replaced by Ireland on the right; we had passed the mid-point of our flight from Newark to Warsaw. As I was about to close my eyes again, movement a few feet to my left caught my attention. A man was carrying an old woman a foot off the floor into the lavatory with his right arm.
In that first instant, I thought the woman was dead. Her skin was a dull gray. Her arms and legs dangled lifelessly and her head hung to one side, mouth agape. Only her trembling lips, twisted asymmetrically, revealed signs of life.
I closed my eyes, partly to avoid seeing the man and woman re-emerge, but sleep was not possible. The woman was, I thought, about 85 years old. That meant she would have been 16 years old, very likely living in Warsaw as the German Wehrmacht stormed through Poland. In 1939, Hitler had given explicit permission to his commanders to "kill, without pity or mercy, men, women, and children of Polish descent or language".… (which order was never passed on by the better commanders, but there were plenty who did). Who knows what horrors this young Polish woman witnessed, or worse, experienced?
Had she been a Jew in Warsaw in 1941, she would not have been on that plane in 2011.
If she was still in Warsaw in 1945, when she was 22, she saw “Warsaw Rising”, an effort by the Polish underground to initiate the offensive against the Wehrmacht a day or two before Soviet troops were to arrive from the east; this had been pre-planned by “the allies” and, so the underground fighters had been told, agreed to by both Churchill and Stalin. The idea was that by starting the battle, the Poles would earn a stronger voice in the future of a free, independent and democratic Poland.
To the surprise of the Polish fighters, however, after the Soviet troops massed just a few miles east of the Vistula, in full sight of Warsaw, and the battle between Poles and Germans had begun right on cue, the Soviets halted. They remained in place for several days, in fact, and watched while Germans and Poles slaughtered one another with a ferocious brutality. Stalin had duped both Churchill and the Poles.
Then, when both sides had depleted their resources, Soviet troops entered Warsaw with little resistance, committing atrocities against Germans and Poles who were still standing with a vengeance; a vengeance fueled by German atrocities as they headed east a few years earlier, first through Poland, then Ukraine and Moscow, and finally Stalingrad, the turning point of WWII and the beginning of the end for Germany.
In my mind’s eye, the Polish woman got to the US around 1948, married, and had at least one son. That son, now in his early sixties, carried his mother around like a rag doll. I surmised that this trip was her idea, and that there was no arguing with her. His ticket was round trip, I thought; hers, certainly, was one way.
