I packed our things tightly; we’d be flying standby so no checked luggage. I had the baby in a carrier on my chest, a backpack behind me, the two sets of straps overlapping on my shoulders. Her sister, three years old at the time, had her own backpack, snacks and toys, and their brother, nine years old, carried a backpack far too large for him, but I needed his help. The four of us took the thirty hour journey to spend a few weeks with family, visiting new places, meeting relatives I hadn’t seen in decades.  

We flew to Toronto and reassessed our options. Where to next? Warsaw, Berlin, Frankfurt, Munich; as long as we got somewhere across the pond, I could figure out how to get us home.

The last leg of our journey would inevitably be a train ride, where we landed determined if the ride was going to take three or thirteen hours. I was watching the Berlin gate, I wanted to get there. Berlin was most ideal, although the train might cost me more than from Warsaw, it was the closest to Poznan.

Poznan is where I returned to every year, or most years, for over a decade. From there I’d travel to other cities and towns, after cold calling people who knew my mother, and saying… “Hello, my name is Dorota, I am Ewa’s daughter. I’d like to come and meet you.”

No one refused.

Bit by bit I learned more and more about who she was. I also got to discover the country, my country, in a way I hadn’t as a child.

But no matter the length of the final train ride, it was always the leg of the journey that broke me. By the time we’d land, I had been awake for over twenty hours. Because we flew standby, I never got the nice front row seat that gave parent’s access to the wall mounted bassinet. On these long overnight flights, I was always holding my baby. Sometimes I’d carry the baby sleeping as I walked the aisle, back and forth. This let the two bigger kids lay down on my empty seat and stretch their legs. As long as they kids arrived in good spirits, I’d be okay too.  

We landed. Everyone was a bit groggy, I was nauseous, but we were all excited to see the sun and breathe some fresh air.

“Let’s go kids, we need to find a taxi to the train station.” They never listened to me as well as they did when we were travelling. That was a gift. They were so happy to be coming back to Poland; they did everything I asked, after the first ask.

Poland was our happy place. I made sure it was a good memory. Ice cream every day, sometimes we walked the old city from ice cream shop to ice cream shop comparing them, which we liked better. I fed the pigeons, splashed in the foundations, rode the miniature train, lounged in the underground salt spa (spa is a generous word here, but it felt fancy to us.) Poland wasn’t on the euro yet; part of the European Union yes, but it hadn’t converted its currency yet. Not economically stable enough to do that. On average, my one dollar became three zloty, I basically had three times the amount of money, things were cheaper, my grandmother housed and fed us, those summers were amazing.

We were all looking forward to being home very soon.

“To the main station please”, I asked in German. My German wasn’t great, I was fluent as a child and studied it again in university, but I made mistakes. It didn’t stop me from trying, I liked speaking to people in their language, and it felt more respected. Plus, my effort to use their language was always kindly received by Germans.

“Where are you coming from?” the taxi driver asked.

“Winnipeg, Canada.” I added the Canada in case Winnipeg didn’t ring a bell.

“Oh, I have a cousin in Canada. It’s cold over there.” This was almost always the conversation. I smiled.

“Yes, it is cold.” I was beyond exhausted. Try as I might not to, I couldn’t help leaning my head back and closing my eyes. It was about a fifteen minute ride between the airport and the train station, even that bit of rest would help get me through the next few hours.

“You from Canada?” He switched to English.

“No, yes, no. I’m from Poland but I moved to Canada when I was a child. Are you from Germany?”

“No, I’m from Turkey.”

“Oh, that’s nice. How long have you lived in Germany?” I wanted to sleep but it was clear he wanted to chat. So we chatted.

“Oh, thirty, forty years… so long.”

“Ummmm”, I made a warm sound, smiling. “It’s home for you.” I said this as a statement, not a question, which was naïve on my part.

“Home, no, no home. But life is nice, good job, house, it’s better.”

I wasn’t sure how to reply. I hadn’t intended to go somewhere so personal, I hoped I hadn’t offended him. But I understood what he meant. Nonetheless, it was best to change the subject.

“It is beautiful here. I lived in Germany a long time ago, it is so green.”

“Yes, trees, they love the trees. It is nice. I go to park and play soccer. You play soccer?” he asked excitedly.  

“But of course,” I replied and we started laughing.

There was nothing like soccer to bring people together.

We chatted about soccer until the train station. He helped me out of the backseat and patiently waited as I put the baby carrier back on and strapped her in.  

“Only backpack, no luggage?” He seemed confused by the absence of more luggage.

“No, we don’t need much. Thank you, have a wonderful day.”

The kids and I started walking towards the huge doors. Berlin’s main train station is intimidating. Multiple levels of tracks, you could go almost anywhere from here. We found the ticket office, I bought last minute seats, all that was left was first class (yay) and not quite as costly as I expected. The baby and toddler were free, my son was child fare, my fare was the only full price one.  

I bought croissants at a bakery stand, found our platform, and with time to spare, sat us in a circle on the ground to eat.

“Mama, isn’t the ground yucky?” my three year old was particular about cleanliness and very articulate for her age.

“Yes, we’ll wash when we get home. Just don’t eat anything you drop.” There was no five second rule on the train station platforms.

We boarded our assigned wagon and found our seats.

“Hi, ummm, these are our seats” I said in English to the young woman, likely my peer, seated across from us. On an intercity train between two countries English felt like the most universal choice. Besides, I was too tired to try to speak coherently in any other language.

She smiled and gestured for us to sit down.

I felt like I needed to assure her we weren’t there by mistake. It’s funny, because I also felt like immediately apologizing for invading her space, she looked so relaxed. If she was going as far or further than we were, she was about the enjoy three hours of three rambunctious kids.

“Thank you.”

“Nie ma za co.” [Nothing to thank me for.] She answered me in Polish, politely. I switched to Polish. (Written below in English J)

“Oh, I’m sorry, English comes easiest for me.” It was true; English was the language I was most fluent in. My Polish always betrayed me.

“No problem. Where are you from?”

Uhhhhh, I thought, that question. I couldn’t have said more than two sentences, what did I say wrong, what did I mispronounce?

I exhaled deeply.

 “I’m from Poznan. That’s where I was born. Where are you from?” It felt like the most natural question to ask back. Before we started chatting I saw her speak fluently in German to another passenger, she understood my English, and now we were speaking Polish. Hers was way, way better than mine.

The train hadn’t left Berlin yet, but we were pulling into the Eastern station. Intercity trains run across many countries in Europe, people can travel two, three, four countries in one day. One never knows where someone else is from, until they tell you.

“I’m from Warsaw.”

“Oh, I love Warsaw. We (pointing to my son) visited there a few times. Are you heading home after a holiday or work in Germany?” It seemed like a harmless question.

“No,” she answered rather somberly. “I live in Germany. I’m going home to visit my parents.”

Unknowingly we were walking into what would become a very painful conversation for us both. I don’t believe either of us set out to share as much as we did in the three hours we’d have together, but we understood some parts of each other’s lives that not everyone else could.

“Oh, did you find work here?”

“I moved here because I couldn’t keep living there.”

I didn’t grow up in Poland, not really. Being raised in the diaspora isn’t the same thing as being raised in your own country. I caught the word “couldn’t”, and maybe I shouldn’t have asked, but it felt like this was a conversation she wanted to have.

“Why?”

She looked down for a moment and then looked around at the kids. My three year old was sitting beside me busy colouring, the baby was on my lap chewing on a rice biscuit, and my son was across the centre aisle playing with his Lego.

Within minutes of meeting each other, we had understood that we were foreigners in our own country but for different reasons.

“My father is Black.” She paused. It’s not that I hadn’t noticed, but I still wasn’t making the connection. Again, remember that I was not raised there, I didn’t know the place on a day to day basis, I didn’t know the mentality of some people.

“Even though I was born in Warsaw and I have a Master’s degree in the Polish language, I’m told, mostly by the older women that they don’t understand my “accent”.”

“You don’t have an accent.” I answered.

I finally understood. She had no ‘accent’, her Polish sounded like that of my grandmother, my aunts, like that of anyone who had lived their whole life in a place and learned to speak from the people around them.

There was so much pain in her words.

“Do they ask you about your girls?”

I nodded.

She could see that my son was white, from a different father, but the girls were both women of colour. Their skin tone was similar to hers.

“What do you say?” she asked.

“I speak to my kids in English when we’re here. We’re tourists. If they ask where we’re from, I say that we’re Canadians.”

“But you said you were born in Poznan?”

“I was, but I don’t sound right when I speak Polish. Everyone can tell I’m not from here.”

For a moment we were both quiet.

She started speaking again, describing a childhood spent being treated as an outsider, followed by university years in which many people thought she was a foreign student. She had no accent, I mean, she had a Polish accent, which was perfect. And she had the richest vocabulary I had heard in years. When I spoke I was the one with a foreign accent and a poor, elementary school level vocabulary. She spoke eloquently, descriptively, in a way I never could.

If you could have listened to our conversation without seeing us, there was one Polish woman and one foreign woman who spoke some Polish.

I told her that I was sorry, that I couldn’t possibly understand what her experience was like or how much the racism she endured must hurt.

“It’s awful really, the fact that we’re both asked in our own country ‘where are you from’”, she was upset, not at me, at everything. “I mean, we’re both pretending to be tourists because it’s less painful.”

I was quietly crying. It wasn’t just the exhaustion. It was seeing my children’s future, seeing that they could always visit, but they could never stay. I had spent so much time get them all, all three their Polish birth certificates, registering them as citizens, because ‘by birth or blood’ according to Polish law, they were citizens.

What did that matter, if they couldn’t feel like they belonged?  

She asked if this was my first visit back with the girls. I said it wasn’t. I had been there the year before, when my little one was two years old.

“What was it like to bring her here?” She apologized asking this and said we could change the subject. I said it was fine, more than fine, I had no one to talk to about this who could understand.

“We were stared at, I was asked “polite racist” questions about her “tan”. I stopped speaking to the kids in Polish when we went out. Once they assumed we were foreigners, they just looked, but didn’t speak to me anymore.”

 “Would you move back if you could?” She asked.

“No, I don’t think so, not permanently, at least not now, not yet. I don’t know if I could ever come back and feel like my kids are safe.”

“Would you?” I asked her the same question.

She shook her head. We went quiet for some time.

“You know, it’s changing, Poland, the people. They’re not all like that; many are very global and welcome others.” She volunteered this information like she was trying to convince herself as much as she was trying to convince me. It was said in a desperate way, almost like she was willing it to be true. We weren’t ‘others’ and we both knew it.

Now she was crying.  

“I know, you’re right, of course things are changing.” Now I was doing it, trying to make a bitter truth less awful. “I just don’t belong here anymore, you know. I’m a Canadian. I believe different things, I see the world differently; this place is strange to me. I’ll always love it for the memories, but I don’t belong here. I look around and all I see is white, and it’s weird, Canada doesn’t look like this, not where I live. This isn’t the world I live in; I don’t want to be part of something like this.”

I started breastfeeding my daughter and handed her siblings some snacks.

The coffee cart came by. Yes, coffee, please.

We drank and kept talking. We talked for the entire three hours, hugged each other, wished each other well, said goodbye.