By Nicole Farber '20
I am Polish, and the majority of my family on my mom’s side is still in Poland. We go every year and try to spend as much time with our family as possible, but I still feel the distance. Skype calls can only go so far, and being in the physical home of my relatives has always been important to me. There’s a unique feeling to sitting in the same living room that your family has always sat in, with everyone around you, sharing stories that have been retold hundreds of times.
There’s a house in Poland, in Starachowice, where most of my close relatives live, that has been in my family for 80 years. Housing in Poland works differently than it does here. A house is an extended family project that evolves over time, with every member technically owning a small portion of it, and building it up when they have the money. It is like a time machine, small, wooden, visibly aging, and home to thousands of family memories. My grandma grew up in our “family” house, my mom remembers spending summers with her godmother there, and it was always a required stop on our annual pilgrimages to see our family.
My grandma told me of how in that house, our family was forced to quarter Nazi soldiers during WWII. But, at the same time, they would let the Polish resistance, which hid in the woods behind the house, sleep in the attic when it got too cold. One time, my great-grandma had to give resistance soldiers some supplies and in order to hide them from the Nazis, she taped them to the bottom of her cat and threw her cat out the window of that house.
It was there that my mom would spend her summers playing with her cousins, where she was her godmother’s favorite, and so when she was really little, her godmother would feed her so many sweets that she earned the nickname “ponchuszek,” or dumpling, from her older cousins. For my entire life, I would go there and see what new stray cat or dog my aunt had adopted, since everyone in the neighborhood knew that my aunt couldn’t turn any animal away if they left it in front of the house.
That house was the epicenter of our family history. And now, almost everyone has moved away, leaving the house vacant. Sitting there, it has quickly become a financial burden for my family, but we can’t decide what to do with it. Because everyone technically owns a small part of it, it is becoming a figurative tug-of war. Furthermore, if we sell the house, it has such little monetary value that it will most likely be torn down to build a new property.
When it gets down to it, the bottom line is that this house won’t exist in my family for another 80 years. My family is struggling to grapple with this, including me. We associate the house with thousands of memories, and moments, and our identity as a family. Losing it hurts us all more than we thought it would.
Now, with the house confined to our photo albums, we have to make a shift and the stories become disconnected from the house. As we lose the house, I think we’ll have to become more intentional in our commitment to our family. We have to keep telling the stories. My family will find the value in taking time out of their lives to sit down and reflect on what made them who they are, and the importance of our family. This is what will grow to define us, not the house, but the importance we place on our individual history.