Chuck Konkel wrote a beautiful reflection on family, memory, nation, and the souls of our fathers in In the Shadow of Steel Mills.
I grew up in Hamilton Ontario in the mid 1950s, in the very shadows of steel mills that were still vital and a football team that still won games, the only son of a refugee family who didn’t own a car, nor a television, nor a cottage and whose idea of a vacation was a yearly trek to the Canadian National Exhibition in far distant Toronto and a day’s outing to the great and bustling metropolis of Buffalo.
The neighborhood was diverse and vibrant, ringing with the voices of immigrant families from the wasteland that was postwar Europe, Poles, Ukrainians, Italians, a rag tag bundle of hopes and dreams and frustrations who knew their place in the scheme of things, though they might bridle at it, for it was the Irish who were the Lords of the Manor having arrived a generation before. And Canadians who thought of themselves first and foremost of British stock and only with much prodding admitted that they too were once immigrants with the same insecurities finding themselves at the bottom of the social ladder in a stranger and daunting land.
My father worked the mills and cleaned the open hearth and toiled and sweated in the honest labour it took to put food on our table. My Dutch mother learned to make (kapusta) – cabbage in a barrel and (polskie ogórki) – Polish pickled cucumbers and (pączki) – Polish doughnuts. And every night, without fail, we ate hearty helpings of potatoes and red beets and (kaszanka) -black barley sausage and Polish pierogi. Every Sunday we dressed up in our best for church, a long, languorous service held in a language that I could never master (Latin).
I was an altar boy; it was a rite of passage for all Catholic boys at the time. That was just the way it was. There was no shortage of servers for weddings and funerals and at the three daily masses held in St Stanislaus, the Polish parish church, sandwiched between the Irish rigidity of St Anne’s and modernist cubist lines of the Italian St Anthony of Padua. At Christmas, St Stan’s held two midnight masses, one in the church proper and one in the very basement of the building, there were 40-50 altar boys at the High Mass and the church was full to overflowing.
The ushers and sacristans were veterans all, strong, spare men with florid faces and piercing eyes, brushed back straw coloured hair, booming voices and loud raucous laughs and brown pin striped suits. Men with unpronounceable surnames and remarkable personal histories, Tobruk, Monte Cassino, the Eastern Front, Fallaise, Arnhem, the crinkle blue skies over Europe and the turbulent oceans of the North Atlantic. And among them the remnants of the Home Army and the doomed Warsaw Uprising of 1944, heroes – gallant, brave and foolhardy as only a Pole in battle can be.
Such men could be meek as lambs during Mass, kneeling obediently as knights errant before a gilded altar that was the work of a previous generation of equally stolid Poles, as they listened intently to a sermon from a twinkle-eyed Franciscan who’d been a paratroop chaplain at Arnhem; a bridge too far on Poland’s bloodied road to true nationhood.
They were members of the Royal Canadian Legion, one and all, using the Legion Hall to keep alive, if for only a few precious hours a week, the comradeships they so cherished and the memories of the many friends they had lost in far off lands.
Yet if the Legion branch was the heart of the community …the church was its soul. Replete with chanted hymn, “Boże, coś Polskę” (God Save Poland), Byzantine gold, heavy incense and babcie (grandmas) sitting glowering in the first few pews as, with gnarled fingers, they click-beaded their rosaries and waited for the Black Madonna to free a Poland once more enslaved, this time under the Soviet boot.
…
Time has passed. It is November and a fitting time for reflection.
The veterans are almost all gone, the graves of southern Ontario holding the soul of a truly valiant Polish generation; a lilt sometimes holding in the wind like the “Hejnal” so played long ago by that lone trumpeter of Krakow, a whispered dream of wandering souls, a faint fleeting memory in a widow’s failing eye.
Perhaps they are all together about us, singing and laughing forever young in our renewed recollection of their glories. I like to think that and I also like to think that you and I, good readers, though proudly Canadian, do carry their torch.
I buried my father in his 89th year. It was a cold Canadian December day and the Legion provided and escort, frail old men they were with the fire dimming in their eyes. They played the Last Post and uttered the words that all veterans do at the graveside of a fallen comrade.
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old: Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. At the going down of the sun and in the morning We will remember them.
And we answered solemnly: We will remember them!
Then, in the somber tradition of all Poles and dutiful sons from time immemorial, I retrieved some soil from the graveside to keep as a remembrance…
Eternal rest grant onto them O Lord and may the perpetual light shine upon them.
May their souls and the souls of all the faithful departed rest in peace. Amen.
Wieczne odpoczynek racz mu dać Panie, a światłość wiekuista niechaj mu świeci.
Niech odpoczywa w pokoju, Amen.