Advice from a Polish Grandmother

So, for whose of you who don't religiously read my facebook, I have a Polish grandmother. I don't know too very much about her life, although I plan on sitting down with a stiff drink over this coming summer and asking her to tell me about it. I do know that she was born and raised in Poland, in the Eastern part that became Russian after the war. I also know that she was sent to a Siberian gulag as a child, saw her parents shot in front of her, and lived for two years in Moscow before being smuggled to South America. She spent two years in Mexico waiting for permission to come to the United States, and finally made her way to Chicago.

*side note: apparently there were a lot of Polish refugees who never got asylum, and thus there remains a Polish community in the Yucatan. hmm.

So, she has been *somewhat* supportive about me coming here. Needless to say, there is not lost love between her and the Russians. Here are some of the gems of conversations I've had with her over the past year:

"So, you are going to Russia? Yeah... my parents are buried there. That is where they killed them. And you know cousin Lester? He had a little brother who is buried there. He couldn't have been more than... 1 or 2 years old when they killed him"

"How are you eating? Is the food ok? Yeah, when I lived in Moscow, we were eating the dogs and the cats..."

She tells my mother:
"Make sure she gets tested when she gets back. She needs to stay away from the mean Russian boys."

"Make sure you don't go anywhere alone. They kidnap the pretty women, and sell them to Turkey for sex slavery. They would kidnap the children from the work camps when I was growing up. The parents would go off to work, and come back, and their babies would be gone. So they told us to never stray far from camp. Nobody believes me, but I know there are Polish children who were raised in Russia, not knowing what happened, not even knowing their last names..."

I'm sure there are more gems, but I just have to remember them.

In other news, went out to a Slovak restaurant with a bunch of Eastern Europeans. It was pretty good, but I only ordered soup because I couldn't read the menu. When everyone got their food, I realized all the possibilities... This super-cute Czech guy had pirogi! We should be going out again soon! Agata said that we should go somewhere together for Maslenitsa, which is next week! They started off speaking almost exclusively in Russian, and I only understood bits and pieces, but they finally started asking me questions in English. Primarily, they wanted to find out what I thought of Russian boys and the like.