or six decades visiting Poland
I have lost count of my trips to Poland, at least 60. My Polish wife Hanna and I go once, sometimes twice every year. We depart from JFK and arrive at our home base in Warsaw, meet with Hanna’s old classmates, travel around the country, visit family and friends, sometimes go off to nearby places like Budapest, Helsinki, Riga and Vilnius.
The Poland of today is a stark contrast to the Poland I first visited in December 1965 when I went there to get married. Hanna and I met at Purdue University in Indiana where I was a graduate student of biology. She had arrived from Poland to study for a master’s degree in horticulture. She was able to come to the US thanks to her father, who was a professor at the national agricultural university in Warsaw (SGGW) and director of a horticultural research institute in Skierniewice. He had spent two of his young years in the US where he received a Ph.D. in horticulture from Cornell University in 1932. During his studies, he established professional relationships with many American agricultural scientists, and he used his contacts with Purdue University horticulturists to arrange for his daughter’s visit to the U.S.
Hanna and I enjoyed our time together at Purdue until she finished her studies and returned to Poland in 1964 and I had completed my degree and moved on to Michigan State University. But our personal story continued: in December 1965 I was off to Poland to reunite with wife-to-be Hanna, meet her family and get married. The journey from Detroit Metro – via JFK and Heathrow – to the Warsaw Okęcie was routine enough (except for my lost luggage), but there was nothing routine or ordinary in my encounter with the country that was to become close to my heart.
The Poland I observed was firmly under tight Soviet control, and it was obvious to me, as it was to anyone entering from the west, that the system was not delivering. My first dose of culture shock happened as my plane was descending toward the old primitive Warsaw Okęcie. I could see one-horse peasant carts moving along the road right by the airport. The airport was a converted amenity-free army barrack sitting next to a large field, a striking contrast to JFK and Heathrow. The city of Warsaw was a collection of functional but plain communist-built buildings that showed nothing of creative input or artistic consideration. Some buildings still showed bomb damage from the war. Ugly statues dedicated to socialism were scattered about. The shops were stocked with the necessities of life, but little else. I had hard time finding anything suitable when I went to a clothing store in search of some pants that I needed because of my lost luggage. Buses and taxis spewed a blue-grey haze that pervaded the city. The streets were filled with Polish-made Warszawa cars, copied from a blueprint for a 1940s Ford, East German Trabants, Czech Skodas and Yugoslav Yugos, all spewing a smelly exhaust. Communism just wasn’t working.
A 1962 Warszawa Automobile
After landing on that snowy December day and getting the airlines to figure out what happened to my luggage, I was happy to see Hanna and to meet her parents who took me off to their Warsaw apartment for some special Polish food. In the grayness of the city I found in my wife’s family home great warmth, enhanced by my future mother-in-law’s splendid cooking. The family lived a relatively privileged existence due to Hanna’s father’s academic standing. Although not a party member, he was a highly respected professional, and the Chroboczeks lived a better life than most Poles.
Professor Emil Chroboczek and Zofia Gabryl Hanna and Norman Kelker, 2022
Chroboczek, 1972
Wandering about the drab and dreary city I felt a certain fascination with the place. There was something very special, a peculiar charm about the way people functioned, worked and schemed to enrich their lives as best they could. I loved coffee houses, a few restaurants that lacked great décor but offered a decent meal, the rye bread that was beyond good… I admired some magnificently rebuilt historical sites, like the fully restored old city (Stare Miasto). Although it wasn’t fun for the Poles who struggled daily just to keep their lives on track, it was fascinating and a bit dizzying for a young Midwestern American to be in this strange and wonderous place.
After the wedding, two weeks of celebrations and festive social events, we newlyweds left for the US in January 1966 to resume our studies. From our listening post in East Lansing and thanks to our yearly visits we could accompanied closely the bumpy changes of Polish society. Communism’s inherent inoperability and suppression of anything that contradicted Soviet dogma had taken the country to a state of chronic deprivation. In the early 1980s the inevitable first cracks in Soviet iron rule appeared. The communist government’s grip weakened among worsening living conditions. A visit by the Polish Pope brought out huge crowds to the streets and public plazas further undermining the Communist Party’s authority. Mikhail Gorbachev’s decision not to send in Soviet troops also had its impact. Communist rule finally expired following the 1989 agreement reached at the so-called “Round Table” talks between Solidarity and the communist government (with input from the United States government). Poland was free at last.
A lineup of Poles waiting to get into a food store during Marital Law.
The Round Table Talks between the Polish communist government and Solidarity, February, 1989.
In June of 1989, 24 years and two children after my first visit, we visited Warsaw with our 15-year-old son and 11-year-old daughter. We arrived shortly after communism fell and before the new government was organized, a period of high anxiety, massive upheaval and uncertainty about the future. Communism was dead, and in September Tadeusz Mazowiecki became the country’s first non-communist prime minister. The huge task of setting up a free enterprise representative democracy was just beginning. Laws had to be rewritten, monetary policy developed, government agencies re-organized, international relations established, political parties formed and on and on. We could see the effects of all this uncertainty on the faces and in the behavior of the people who seemed to aimlessly roam the streets.
I can maybe best describe the situation as a state of “peaceful uncertainty.” Inflation was skyrocketing. Taxi drivers taped on hand-written notices showing the multiplication factor to apply to the fare indicated on the meter. On the streets we got frequent requests to exchange our American dollars for the fast-devaluing Polish zloty. We entered a bank to do an official currency exchange, and were accosted by at least five different people begging us to do an exchange privately, on the side. The four of us and my widowed mother-in-law enjoyed a lovely meal at an elegant restaurant and paid in zlotys the equivalent of ten American dollars.
What we witnessed first-hand had a lasting effect on us, and after our return to New York we followed Polish events with increased interest. We noted with pleasure the election of the prime minister and the establishment of a functioning democratic government. And on each subsequent yearly trip we observed things getting better and better. Much of the improvement was the result of Poland’s 2004 entry into the European Union. Massive financial input from the EU helped to improve railroads, build roads and highways, restore historical sites.
Well, it’s now 35 years since that 1989 visit when we witnessed the beginning of this magnificent transition. Today, Mercedes, BMWs and an occasional HumVee along with all the Japanese, French, German, Swedish, Korean and American cars choke the streets. Impressive buildings designed by Zaha Hadid, Daniel Liebenstein and other notable architects shoot upward. There are new museums, chief among them the Jewish Polin Museum that displays a thousand years of Jewish life in Poland. Fine restaurants and elegant clothing stores along with MacDonald’s, Starbucks, Burger King, Pizza Hut and KFC are everywhere. Warsaw is now a modern city as cosmopolitan as any capital city in the west. And we continue our yearly pilgrimage to Poland; I teach English young Polish and Ukrainian kids, and we enjoy time together with our family and friends.
Over six decades I have witnessed a grand transformation, and it has been profoundly satisfying. From my 1965 visit to a bleak and dreary Warsaw to that memorable 1989 stay to our most recent visit, I have seen the city rise from third world conditions to a modern metropolis with a new face. Beyond these very significant advances in material improvements, what has most profoundly impressed me is how the transformation from repressive communism has unleashed the creative and entrepreneurial spirit that lay suppressed and dormant for forty-one years. Sure, just as anywhere, there are problems, e.g. right-wing government overreach and disputes about abortion. Issues like an independent judiciary and press freedom have been fought over. The fight for freedom goes on. But instead of authoritarian one-party oppression, there is now a spirit of optimism and opportunity.
Pulaski Day Parade, NYC
Our grandson Aleksander
I have not a single Polish gene in my genome, but I have grown to love and admire this wonderful land and its people for what they have accomplished. I am happy that I have been able to share my love and admiration for Poland with my children and grandchildren. And it is that first visit and the time spent in 1989 that clicks into my memory whenever I ponder Poland and its struggle to free itself and become a land of freedom and opportunity. I feel so grateful to have witnessed this rebirth. My long-time connection with this great land has been a blessing. The land of Copernicus, Kościuszko, Chopin, Maria Skłodowska-Curie and Joseph Conrad is alive, well and getting better all the time.
Hania and Norman Kelker, Warsaw, August 2024
About Me. I was born in 1939 in Chillicothe, Ohio where my father, Aaron Kelker, taught science at the local high school and my mother, Martha Taylor Kelker, was a music school graduate and a home-maker, taking care of me and my brother. We moved to Hiram, Ohio, a tiny village in northeastern Ohio, in 1943, when my father accepted a teaching position at Hiram College. I attended the local public school from first through twelfth grades and graduated in 1957 in a class of twenty students, the largest in the school’s history. (The village of Hiram had about six hundred residents during my time.) The enriching presence of the college permeated the community with art, theater, music and sports. After high school came the big question of what college to attend. Ohio is blessed with a rich offering of excellent small liberal arts colleges, but I chose to study at Hiram, probably because it was in my comfort zone and because my father was so completely committed to his work at the college.
Four years and then graduation and the accompanying shock of leaving home and college life to face the real world. I settled on a graduate program at Purdue University where I received a master’s degree in biology and where I met my future wife, Hanna Chroboczek. I pursued a Ph.D program in the Department of Microbiology and Public Health at Michigan State University. In 1965 Hanna and I got married in her home country of Poland, and we returned to MSU where she pursued her Ph.D. in plant biochemistry. We ended up spending six years of graduate and postdoctoral studies on the East Lansing campus. Schools over, I joined the Department of Microbiology and New York University’s School of Medicine, where I ended up spending 10 years studying bacterial genetics. Hanna also joined the NYU School of Medicine, where she spent most of her career studying the immunology of the AIDS virus. In 1980 I joined Enzo Biochem, Inc., a New York biotechnology company and spent the rest of my career there.
Hanna and I are proud of our family that includes our son Adam, who lives with his wife Michelle and their three children in Arizona, and our daughter Kristina who, with her husband Daniel and their two young daughters, lives in New York City.
My venture into history began after my professional career as a microbiologist, geneticist and biotech executive ended. So, there is me, a scientist turned historian who now immensely enjoys digging into times past: researching my extended family, who left Switzerland on a transatlantic voyage to America in 1743, and learning about Harrisburg and its surroundings, Pennsylvania Dutch country where they settled. It’s been a great experience.
Live, learn and appreciate.
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