My Life As A Tree

...the beginning of it all

The central role of trees in my life is far from coincidental, though it took me almost half a lifetime to understand the reasons why. Trees accompanied me throughout the many countries I lived in as a child. Neem, mango, and peepul in India. Chestnut, olive and fig in Spain. Baobab and acacia in Tanzania. Evergreen and oak in Romania. I sat on their branches, studied their leaves and ate their fruits. I was comforted by their steady presence in my otherwise transient life.

Yet, when the day came to draw my own family tree for a school assignment at ten- years-old, I was faced with an impossible task. While I knew the family on my father’s side, I had no idea about my mother’s family. Polish-born with a heavy accent, my mother never spoke about her family or her past. Whenever I asked, she managed to side-step my questions, responding with stories about the Family of Man or Louis Leakey or the ancestry of Romania’s Queen Marie. She would speak in metaphors, using her small, perfectly shaped hands to gesture, peppering her answers with phrases in French and Italian, so that by the time I remembered my original question, where am I from, it seemed to fade and shrink with unimportance. Little did I know that my mother had been trained in arts of conspiracy.

Never ask anything. Never tell anything.

Always have a story ready.

If a contact is caught, be ready to move somewhere else

These were the rules my mother lived by as a teenage soldier in Warsaw during the Second World War. Secrecy is what kept her alive. Moving from place to place during the German occupation, she worked undercover as a teenage soldier in the Armia Krajowa, (AK), Poland’s volunteer resistance army. She delivered messages through the sewers and worked as a medic during battle, completing two years of medical school in secret, underground classes. Like all those who volunteered to fight, she concealed the exact nature of her work from her family and those who knew her. At the end of the war, when Poland surrendered to Germany, she was marched out of Warsaw as a prisoner-of-war. She never returned. For the next forty-four years and until she died in 1989, Poland remained a ghost- scape, a place whose history was only ever discussed in the 14th century, during the rule of Kazimierz the Great.

It took days of asking. Only when all the other children began to bring their trees to class, did my mother finally relent. Then she stayed up late into the night to produce a charcoal tree of such awe and wonder that I was never without it. If I knew nothing about Poland, I now had a tree peopled with relatives whose names I memorized and brought alive. The tree was my answer to all the doubts and uncertainties I carried about my mother’s silence. When I went to school I held up the drawing to show I was the product of two complete halves.

While my mother refrained from ever speaking about any of the relatives, she informed me that the family on my grandfather’s side went back to 1025. She noted the conversion of a pagan Prince Mieczyslaw by a Bohemian monk to Christianity. Her emphasis on Prince Mieczyslaw only confirmed for me a world I had long suspected, that we were descendants of the mysterious world of nobility. There had been hints, of course. A gold ring that my mother wore on her fourth finger, crests and shields imprinted on the ring, the vast number of languages she spoke and the way she decorated our house, the giant yellow sprays of forsythia that she ‘forced’ to bloom in winter. There was also mention of “land” and a tin mine in Madagascar, the island off the southeastern coast of Africa, whose red-hot earth was filled with minerals and gems—rubies, sapphires and emeralds, stones my mother loved to talk about. A deep burning sensation filled me as I began to absorb my place on the tree. I started to read novels about Tsarist Russia. I wanted to wear fur. I imagined myself as Julie Christie in Dr. Zhivago, forever surrounded by snow.

---

Some two decades after my mother’s death, when my own children begged to know their history, I began to search for my mother’s story. I traveled to museums and archives looking for her records among the lost soldiers of the Armia Krajowa. I went to the city of her birth. Directed to an old London estate, where the Polish Government in Exile was housed during the war, I met a female soldier from Krybar, my mother’s unit, who recognized her in photographs from a prisoner of war camp.

“Of course, it’s Maryna.” She exclaimed. “We shared the same barracks. We slept across the room from one another.”

When I described the resolute silence that had accompanied my life with her, the woman nodded, confirming what I knew but never dared to say, as any mention of Poland or the past inflicted so much pain.

“We knew Maryna wasn’t who she said she was, but it was the war and we didn’t ask.”

The journey of this discovery and the revelation of my mother’s identity was a long and difficult process of piecing together a past from the rubble of war. Although I had puzzled over her life for decades, there was a part of me that always knew there was a hidden story, other truths. By the time I made these discoveries, my mother was no longer alive and I could not ask her all that I wanted to. The imagined relatives on my tree have now been replaced by real relatives, people who share a history with me, people who look like me. The signs of nobility I was so sure about have been put into context and given a historical frame—all except for the Madagascar tin mine, which remains a mystery to this day.

To have finally achieved the experience of a shared history and the knowledge of my mother’s place in that history has been both exhilarating and confusing. Everything changed and nothing changed. Yet the threads of connection and genetic material that crosses generations--a shared cleft chin, a love for drawing, a passion for trees—has allowed me to retrace myself, not only to find my way backwards but also to move forward and answer the question, where am I from?

Many of the posts that will follow are parts of my story of discovery: branches, leaves, offshoots of my family, both real and imagined.

Thank you for joining me on this journey.