Childhood

I was born in 1966 in Wałbrzych Poland. This city is located in the south western part of the country. My Dad was a musician and he’d travel a lot--at first just all around Poland, but soon, he was traveling to Scandinavia and south of Poland, all the way to the Black Sea.

My Mom was trying to take care of us as good as she possibly could. We didn’t have running water in the apartment. We had to go to the utility room across the hallway, where a toilet and the sink were. No bathtub, no hot water. It was very painful to brush your teeth or wash your face early in the morning. My Mom had to boil the water on the wood burning stove for us to be able to take a bath, which we took once a week or when it was needed. My Sister and I had to share the bath water, because there wasn’t enough of it for us individually.

The earliest memory I have of my dad was of him painting the apartment when I was at the age of 6 months. I was sitting in the crib and my dad was smoking a cigarette and he was wearing a hat made of newspaper. My mom says that dad stopped smoking about that time.

Once my father started to travel to Finland we didn’t see him too much. When he came for a visit, which wasn’t that often, I was always scared of him, because of his low voice and his face was like a stranger's. I remember on one of those visits, my dad got me a stuffed dog. It was a black dog with floppy ears and very soft fur. It was my favorite toy for a very long time. My mom had to fix it from time to time, because I wouldn’t let her throw it away.

In 1972 my mom and I had a chance to go to visit my dad in Finland. I was so excited to go there, but sad that we couldn’t take my sister with us. She stayed in Poland with my grandparents. We stayed in Finland for 1 ½ years, which was enough time for a young kid like me to fall in love with the western way of life, but I didn’t realize that until we came back to Poland.

Once we were back, I was missing my Finnish friends, popsicles, hamburgers, fries, soda, Christmas lights in the store windows and above the streets. At first I thought that most people in Poland were mad or angry, but I realized that they were just sad as if they were walking ghosts without hope and without a future.

When we came back from Finland my dad came with us, because his music contract was over. The Polish music agency, which was a governmental institution, told my dad that he was traveling too much to the western country and that’s bad for his morale. They froze his visa for 5 years. He wasn’t able to go outside Poland to any other country, not even any communist countries. During this time we traveled all over Poland. In some cities we stayed only 3 months, which was hard  on us kids. Just when I  found a friend it was time to move. The last city we moved to before my dad finally got another contract outside Poland was Warsaw. During this time my younger sister was born, it was great not to be the youngest anymore.

In 1977 my dad left for the United States and told us that he is never coming back to live in Poland again. The plan was for him to someday bring us over to be there with him. Life sometimes turns way different then people plan on.  Well, in the next 7 years my parents divorced, we moved out of Warsaw into Łódź (which is at the center of Poland and a pretty big city). Hoping to follow in my dad's footsteps, I started a music band.  I completed an education at a pastry school and went to the university to avoid being drafted to the mandatory military service.

 Early in 1984, light was starting to glow on my hopes of coming to the United States. I loved western culture, and I felt a longing to come to the United States. A few months later, June 23, 1984, I was on the plane on the way to Chicago.