Re-collections: Of Scrapbooks, Stamps, and the Shoebox Under My Bed
BY MARY KALINSKI
Midnight in Poznań, Winter 1940.
A notebook full of music, a stamp collection, an apartment crowded with soldiers.
And a gun at Jadwiga’s back.
Hearing the hollow thump at the door, Jadwiga had stumbled to the door in her nightclothes; now, she stood barefoot and trembling in her kitchen, as the soldiers ordered her and her children to pack only what could be carried. A train would arrive for them in minutes; by morning, their home would no longer be theirs, but the property of high-ranking Nazi officials. With every move noted by the soldier’s glare, Jadwiga pulled on a sweater and slipped her scrapbook, with its pages of pasted-in headlines, famous silhouettes, and scribbled-down scores, into her purse. She was too ashamed under his gaze even to pack undergarments, and would go two cold winters without.
Meanwhile, the youngest, a boy of ten, scoured his belongings, anxious sweat beading on his forehead.
“Janusz, idziemy!” Jadwiga called, panicked as the soldiers forced her into the corridor.
“Ide!” Janusz cried as his fingers found the well-worn cover of his stamp collection. Taking a final, lingering look at his home, he tucked the pages under his shirt and ran. Within half an hour, they were herded into cattle cars and bound for the south, never to return to the Poznań apartment.
The first time I heard of my grandpa’s stamp collection, I was eleven years old and sitting in our local Chinese buffet. My mother’s serious recounting felt out of place with the modern bustle just outside our booth, but I was captivated, for not only did he still possess it, but his daughter had taken after him, starting a collection of paper napkins at the same age.
“Do you still collect them?” I wondered, dipping a California roll into a dish of soy sauce. She didn’t; the box must have been lost somewhere between Poland and suburban Pennsylvania. Lifting a cherry blossom-patterned napkin from the table, I decided then that I would start my own collection in her place.
And as I write today, a shoebox warms the floorboards beneath my bed with over two hundred and fifty paper napkins, each a remembrance, a connection, a tribute to the story of the Poznań family.
My prababcia Jadwiga collected to outrun the darkness flooding her past: choking memories of fleeing the Russian Revolution with certainty only of her father’s death and her brother’s disappearance into General Wrangel’s troops. She found freedom by immersing herself in the lighter reality of classical music; pasting newspaper cuttings of Chopin and Szymanowski into her scrapbook gave her mind release.
My dziadek Janusz collected to feed his desire to see the world. Forever in love with the unknown, Janusz fantasized about countries tropical and blustery, elegant and ancient; a single stamp was a suitcase packed for one day.
My matka collected to excite, to explore. She felt no higher luxury than the smooth touch of a colorful napkin, brought by a traveling relative from an unoccupied country; even their perfumed, foreign scent foretold forward movement.
Beyond question, my case is different; I do not collect out of necessity. I, who sleep beneath a stable, unchanging roof; I, who has safe, living parents; I whose napkins are hardly a commodity – I collect because even though Dziadek no longer needs his stamps, we need him: the fearful, fleeing boy of ten and the eighty-six-year-old man I saw for the last time, waving with a crow-footed smile as we entered the Warsaw Chopin airport. And while my mother’s collection, that exhibition of her childhood, is lost, perhaps mine can be its expansion.
Because history’s facts do not suffice. The heart’s longing for what is free, what is exciting, and what is beautiful cannot be explained by dates and politics; so neither can memories be contained in the cold and commonplace. In keeping a collection, we expose our humanity – our desire to fight the futile, yet life-giving battle to time. Maybe I become more human each year I live, savoring my grandfather’s language on my tongue and filling my chest with the weight of his history. For what changes artifacts into collections – facts into stories?
Humankind, kochana – we who breathe life into paper and glue.
A notebook full of music, a stamp collection, a box bursting with napkins.
And a story that is ours to renew.
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