Neither Mother nor I would forget the romantic ending to the infamous letter.
“‘Write to me as you always have,’” Mother quoted from memory. “‘Address your letters to my lady in waiting, Baroness Sophie Buxhoevden, who will guard our secret. Forever your friend, Maria Nikolaevna Romanova.’”
In that long-ago patrician world of Warsaw, young Hania suddenly disappeared. Outsiders assumed that she was cloistered in shame, hidden behind the walls of the Olsezski estate; however, her parents had rushed their only daughter to a covert destination—Gdansk, the Polish seaport city. There they put young Hania aboard an ocean liner bound for America. Not speaking a word of English, she would travel alone.
In Gdansk, Hania cried bitter tears and embraced her parents for the last time. “They tell me, ‘You are only hope for us—have courage to save the family!’”
On the departure deck, Hania listened as her parents gave their final orders: on her first night at sea, Hania was to make her way, unobserved, to the aft deck and fling all her identity papers overboard. On her own, she would have to convince American Immigration that she was a political refugee seeking asylum. She’d have not a shred of evidence to link her with the Olsezskis. Her family’s very survival depended on her ability to disappear, validating the rumors of her betrayal.
While Hania journeyed toward an unknown future, her parents returned to Warsaw to stage press interviews. Publicly, the Olsezski patriarchs appeared outraged and vehement. Their rebellious daughter had not only betrayed her family, she had fled Poland without their knowledge. “Stories about me in all newspapers,” Mother said with a defiant nod as if daring me to contradict her. “I must leave my homeland behind,” she said, pausing to cross her hands over her heart—“forever!”
Arriving at the docks of Ellis Island, New York, a teenage Hania summoned up formidable courage. “I’m looking straight into eyes of Immigration mens,” she said. “They believe my story of persecution in Poland and welcome me to America! But with new name. No more Hania Olsezska—I’m become Harriet Olse.”
When she came to the end of her story, Mother sighed. Her ample bosom rose and fell with subsiding passion. Her eyes fluttered closed. Her cheeks, sagging and badly powdered, were streaked with tears. All traces of her patrician youth and vigor drained away, leaving only an exhausted old woman. She slumped in an ordinary chair and breathed the odors of leftover food in her boarding house kitchen.
Hania in America, 1920s
Was my mother’s story incredible? Of course it was. Yet I consumed it like manna for a starving soul. At night, I dreamt of Hania sobbing into bitter cold winds and flinging her identity papers overboard into the vast Atlantic Ocean. And I succumbed to a fantasy that Mother was not entirely betrayed by her parents, that she had left the Old World with tight bundles of jewels sewn into secret pockets of her clothes. How else could Hania and Juzo have purchased “them bigger and bigger houses” in America?
I yearned to give teenage Hania, arriving alone in America, a special gift—English fluency, a secret skill to make her life easier.
Decades later, advanced technology helped me fact check Mother’s tales of long ago against historical events. What I learned added layers of incongruities to Mother’s accounts of being banished to America. Research confirmed that Hania Olsezska, born in 1892, had arrived in America in 1911 (one year before the ill-fated crossing of the Titanic), when she was age nineteen. Glaring fact affirmed that Tsar Alexander Nicholas II and his family were not executed until 1918—years after Mother actually landed on American soil. Had Mother reinvented her past?
There had been a lot of unrest in Russia before the murders of the Romanovs. Perhaps, given the impending threats to Russia’s rigid class system, Mother’s parents had anticipated the dire repercussions and dangers to neighboring Polish aristocracy. If so, they might well have deemed young Hania as the most dispensable member of their family and sent her off to America in a preemptive defensive move. I had concocted my own mystique about teenage Hania, with her feisty character and sheltered ignorance of political realities—and my fertile imagination had elaborated on the possibilities. For a calculating family, she would have been a vulnerable candidate, easily persuaded to embellish stories about her friendship with the Romanov princess.
Hania was a passionate young woman imbued with a vital mission and destiny that only she could fulfill by fleeing Poland. I had to rationally weigh the historical information I found against Mother’s melodramatic re-enactment that had captivated me during childhood.
However, what I never doubted about young Hania was her formidable courage against adversity. Mother’s stories had become real to both of us. With every retelling, we viscerally suffered and mourned the decimation of the entire Olsezski clan. Mother described them rendered like slaughtered animals on political killing fields. Her insistence, that not a single member of her family had survived the Bolsheviks, was supported by evidence. I would never encounter a single member of Mother’s family—there were no visits, no letters, no communication of any kind from Poland. According to Mother, the Olsezski estate and gardens, every vestige of abundant wealth was stripped, destroyed or redistributed by the Bolsheviks. The legacy of Olsezski wealth was imbedded in mystery. How else was Mother able to purchase a sequence of large properties in America that provoked the endless gossip among Dad’s relatives? Had a fortune of hidden jewels indeed been sent along with young Hania? No matter that my factual research unearthed questions that could never be answered, what I knew for sure was that my mother had been a courageous survivor. Of what, exactly, would remain an unsolved mystery.
•
In America
I had no one to help me understand how young aristocrat Hania from Poland had become the tyrannical boarding house owner in Hartford, Connecticut. Mother refused to join other “foreigners” taking English classes, instead she taught herself a patois of Polish-English. Mother was infamous for bursting out in unexpurgated Polish during fits of anger with boarders. Not surprisingly, I liked to eavesdrop. And I understood Polish very well—a secret I kept until I was nearly six years old.
One day when Dad’s relatives were visiting us, sitting and sipping cups of hot tea in the family parlor, Mother suddenly left the room. What had alerted her? Driven by curiosity, I followed.
Lurking outside the kitchen, I spied Mother lambasting a pitiful boarder. Mother shouted, “Pies krew!”
I snickered loudly because I knew “dog’s blood” was a really bad curse word in Polish. Mother didn’t miss anything—when I laughed at her swear word, she knew I understood Polish. Her punishment was swift. Mother marched me back to the parlor and pushed me to the center of the room to face all the relatives.
“Stand straight!” she ordered. “Danusia so smart, she show how good she know Polish.” She turned to me. “So, you tell something you know very good in Polish. Loud so they hear!”
No way could I repeat the curse word. I thought of only one thing that might not get me in even more trouble—a tongue twister that I’d memorized from listening to a Polish boarder repeating it again and again. It was a real good one, so difficult to say quickly that even native Polish speakers had trouble: “Stól z mieszanymi nogami”—a table with mixed-up legs. The relatives were impressed and tried to repeat the tongue twister. But not a one of them was as good as me. Mother’s eyes began to sparkle as she listened to me besting the relatives. I could tell she wasn’t angry anymore.