Zofia is much younger than I imagined. She greets me warmly in her lightly accented English, then leads the way to a restaurant so we can get some breakfast. The enthusiastic waitress greets Zofia by name and leads us to a table, then disappears inside to fetch us some coffees.
“What do you recommend eating here?” I ask Zofia. She grins at me.
“That depends how brave you are. Because what I honestly recommend is the smalec on fresh rye bread, but I’m not sure whether your American palate will appreciate it. It’s basically pork lard. Seasoned, of course. Quite delicious.”
I imagine eating thick, gelatinous lard and can’t hold back a grimace, but Zofia laughs and suggests, “I’ll order a serving—you can taste mine.” She reaches to the little stand where a cash register is currently unattended, and helps herself to two menus. She passes both to me, but points to the top one. “In the meantime, perhaps you can have something from this menu—it’s American breakfast food.”
I settle for bacon and eggs, and while we’re waiting for the food, Zofia suggests, “Let’s plan this trip to Trzebinia,” she says. “It is a very small place but we don’t actually know what we want to find out, right?”
“That’s about the size of it.”
“Well, I did some homework yesterday afternoon with the details you emailed me,” Zofia says, and she withdraws from her bag an iPad. She slips it onto the table between us and loads an ancestry mapping application. “Something a lot of tourists who visit here don’t realize is that very few of our birth, death and marriage records are digitized or even centralized. I drove up to Trzebinia yesterday afternoon as soon as I got your email, just so I could sort through the records at the municipal council. Some people really like to do it themselves, but you just don’t have the time. I did take scans of the relevant records so you’re not missing out on anything.”
“I don’t mind,” I assure her. “But I’m curious...what kinds of things were you looking for?”
“I mostly wanted to see if I could figure out who they all were,” Zofia says quietly. “The good news is, I managed to identify a few of them. Emilia was your grandfather’s younger sister. His parents were Julita and Aleksy Slaski. Now, I couldn’t find a death record for Emilia or Aleksy, but Julita died in childbirth with Emilia.”
A few presses on the screen later, Zofia shows me a scanned page of Polish words that are initially meaningless to me—until Pa’s name jumps out at me.
Tomasz Slaski, 1920.
“His birth record,” Zofia tells me, and I take the iPad and stare down at the page. She reaches across and flips it again to show me a scan of a similarly handwritten page. “And this was one of the other names, Alina Dziak. She was born a few years after your grandfather. Your grandmother also gave you the name Truda Rabinek—well, it turns out that was Alina’s older sister. She married Mateusz Rabinek in the early 1930s. I couldn’t find death records for Truda, Alina or Mateusz.”
“Does that mean they are still alive?”
“Alina would be in her nineties, Truda and Mateusz well over one hundred, so it’s unlikely. I did check the phone book just in case, but no luck there. Unfortunately, in this case, a missing death record is not a reliable indicator that they are alive. Our records from the war era are patchy at best. The Nazis kept meticulous records within the concentration camps, but many of those were destroyed during the liberation, and deaths in the community were haphazardly recorded around here.”
“So these people—Alina and her sister—were they related to Babcia?”
“I have no idea,” Zofia tells me. “I couldn’t find a record of your grandmother anywhere.”
“Oh...” I say, frowning. “She definitely was born here.”
“Well, that’s actually pretty unlikely, given there’s no birth or baptism record for her,” Zofia says. She’s apologetic, but there’s also finality in her tone, and I’m still pondering this when she says, “Now, this other family she mentioned—”
“No, wait,” I interrupt her. “Babcia was definitely born here. We don’t know much about her life, but I know for sure that she was born and lived in Trzebinia. Her whole family did—she had siblings too, and they were all born in the house they lived in until the war.”
Zofia’s immaculate eyebrows draw in, then up.
“I don’t know what to tell you, Alice,” she says, with a careful little shrug. “There’s no records for her. In fact I couldn’t find any record of the Wis´niewski family locally. My best guess is that she was born elsewhere and moved here as a child, that would probably explain it. The same goes for Saul, Eva and Tikva Weiss. Do you know anything about them at all?”
I’m still thinking about Babcia, because I know so little about her life before she moved, but one thing she has been clear on is that her whole world was Trzebinia before she emigrated, and I distinctly remember her telling me she’d been born in the house she grew up in. I force myself to refocus on Zofia.
“No, I’d never heard those names before.”
“Eva is reasonably popular with Christians and Jews here in Poland, but particularly in that era the name ‘Saul’ was popular in Jewish families, and Tikva is definitely a Jewish name... I mean, it’s a Hebrew word. There was no listing for these people anywhere, either, so I tried to search the Jewish records for births and marriages and deaths in the town. Unfortunately, I found no reference to any of them, so that likely means they were also not locals.”
“Disappointing,” I murmur. “Is there anywhere else we can check?”
“Unless you know of another locality, then no. I hope the fates of these people is not what Hanna sent you here to discover, because if it is...well, there might not be a way, especially in this short time frame.”
“I don’t think that’s it,” I say slowly. “She just seems more interested in Pa, to be honest—as little sense as that makes. It was Pa she’s been asking about since we realized she could communicate with us with the iPad.”
“What I found most interesting about the list your grandmother gave you was not that Tomasz was listed there—but the Polish words around his name.” She runs the tip of her finger along the words Prosze˛ zrozum. Tomasz. “This translates loosely to please understand Tomasz. Any idea what that might mean?”
“I don’t know... I mean, how am I supposed to understand a man she lived with for well over seventy years—a man who’s now dead?”
“This letter you sent was also interesting. He starts with something about them sitting together while she’s reading, but she’s laughing at him for questioning that he would make it to where she is. Then he tells her that the war has been chaotic...and life is somewhat risky so he wants her to know his feelings.” She looks up and laughs softly. “Your grandfather was a romantic, it seems.”
“It seems,” I say, then I frown a little, because until Pa was really sick, I can barely remember seeing them so much as touch one another. “Although, that did seem to wear off a little in his old age.”
“Many decades of marriage have that effect on a man,” Zofia laughs. Then she says, “Now some of these words are illegible, but I think the basic gist is that his love for her was the great driving force in his life—and that he would always find his way back to her if they were separated because they were made for each other. I can’t see who it’s addressed to because the first few lines are too faint, but given your grandfather wrote it and your grandmother has possession of it, I don’t think that’s much of a mystery. But these last few lines... I have to guess a little because there are words missing here and there, but I think he is saying they were together when he wrote it. Then he talks about a potential separation, and now she’s asking us to understand Tomasz... I wonder if perhaps they had lost each other for a period during the war, and she now wants to know what he got up to while they were apart?”
“If that is what she’s looking for, that’s surely impossible.”
“Unless by some miracle one of the people on her list is alive and we can find them and they happen to know—we’d never be able to find out something so specific.”
“I know it’s crazy to come here with such little info but...even mute, she can be very persuasive.”
“Is there anything else?”
“A few times she’s said Babcia fire Tomasz—I just have no idea what that’s supposed to mean.”
“Well, in this letter he does talk about their love being the fire that is the driving force in his life, words to that effect anyway. Perhaps she is talking about passion?” Zofia suggests.
“I didn’t think of that. There’s a symbol on her device for love but maybe she couldn’t find it?” I say, thinking aloud. “Surely that must be it.”
“One mystery solved already.” Zofia smiles. “Let’s eat, then we’ll head into Trzebinia and see what we can find, no?”
The waitress approaches with two plates of food. She sets fresh bread and a bowl of smalec in front of Zofia, then slides my eggs and bacon in front of me. Zofia cuts a square of the bread, then spreads a spoonful of the lard onto it and hands it to me.
“Oh,” I say, and I clear my throat. “I’m really not sure...”
Zofia’s eyes crinkle a little when she smiles.
“It’s a delicacy, I promise.”
I pop the entire chunk of bread into my mouth, and as I chew, I give her a surprised look. The smalec is salty and tasty, and the texture is not nearly as sickly as I’d expected. The whole effect between the delicate smalec and the heavy bread grows on me as I chew, until I could very easily imagine myself eating a whole plate of this stuff.
“Well?” Zofia asks, laughing again. “Another day we return for breakfast here and smalec?”
I laugh softly and nod.
“Okay, you’ve convinced me. Smalec next time.”