Ren’s wife Joanna is Polish, a veteran of the high good years of Solidarity, and their daughter Sara has long thought of herself as every bit as Polish as she is American. A one-time linguist turned Africanist, Sara is also an inveterate diarist, endlessly recording thoughts and notes and memories in tight handwritten scrawl across unlined blank notebooks, passages from amongst which she occasionally types up and shares with friends and family. As in this instance from the other day, one which as it happens touches upon several themes we have ourselves been probing in recent Cabinets, albeit in her highly distinctive fashion, and which Sara is allowing us to sample on condition that we make clear that this is but a draft passage from a longer work in progress.
FACES IN THE FOREST
Sara Weschler
This morning, thinking about Gaza and about how long it will take to rebuild, I asked Mommy if Warsaw was still under construction when she was a little girl. “Oh, of course,” she said, almost surprised that it was a question. The Warsaw of her childhood was a city of cinderblock and scaffolding, of gaping façades, and shattered stone still scattered around empty lots. I thought immediately how such ruins must have beckoned to children: so much rubble to climb, so many staircases to nowhere calling out to be scaled. And almost as if she could hear my thoughts—or perhaps precisely because those ruins did entice her as a child—Mommy added, “And munitions. There were munitions everywhere; we kids were endlessly warned never to go into those blown-out buildings, because of the bombs that might still be inside.”
Nor was it only city ruins that were haunted in this way. “The thing I feared most as a little girl,” my mother went on, “was the forest. Because of all the mines.” For years, an older girl tormented her with stories of people stepping upon landmines during strolls out in the woods. It gave my mother nightmares. She mentioned this today, speaking in English because Daddy was in the kitchen with us. But it’s a story I heard many times when I myself was little: “Opowiadała mi, że w lesie były miny, a jak się na nie nadepnęło, to wybuchały i człowieka zabijały,” my mother used to tell me: She told me that the woods were full of mines, and if you stepped on them, they would explode and kill you.
The girl who told my mother this wasn’t lying. After all, she dangled these horrors in front of my mom less than twenty years after the war—and someone found an unexploded munition on the edge of the meadows in Topolina {a rural area outside Warsaw where the family had a cabin} in my lifetime, when I was a young adult, and the war was more than six decades behind us. I was there then, with Bini {Sara’s grandmother} in the cottage, and the sołtys dropped by to ask if we wanted to come out to watch it disassembled, but we said no. Perhaps because Bini didn’t want to; perhaps because I was scared. I honestly don’t remember anymore. Back to the mines, though….
I heard about the mines in the forests, and about my mother’s childhood nightmares, in Polish, when I myself was a child. And the story confused me. Because mina in Polish is a landmine, but it is also the word for a facial expression. So, when my mother spoke of this thing exploding in the forest and killing people, at first, all I could imagine was a massive face springing up out of the ground. And as a weapon, this seemed rather odd to me. Was it meant to shock people? To scare them? To frighten enemy soldiers into running away? But, no, my mother said a mina was something that could kill you.
I thought about this word a lot, thinking of a mina only as a face, and for years not realizing that it could also mean a kind of bomb. I pictured faces buried in the woods, and with the information that I had, I tried to make them something worthy of my mother’s fear. And gradually, they grew sinister, and in my mind’s eye I could see them flowing up out of the soil, livid, seething, looming over people amid darkened trees, until they scared them literally to death. I imagined the Polish forest full of these—whatever they were: Spirits? Ghouls? Ghosts of people killed in early battles of the war? And so, the miny w lesie—the mines in the woods—became the stuff of my nightmares, too.
Two generations on from the war, I filled the forests with something haunting and uncanny. Most of the real munitions were gone by then. I never actually had to worry about landmines, when I walked in the woods. (Well, in fact, I did: but I worried about them years later, as an adult walking in Ugandan forests). As a child, my mother worried about real, tangible dangers the war had left behind in its wake. Three decades later, I turned her concrete fears into ghosts and phantoms. I fashioned eerie horrors out of the legacy of that war, in a way that Polish children of my mother’s generation didn’t have to: there’s no room for ghost stories when there’s still so much real death at hand.
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See you next week!
A few days after we ran Sara's piece, this one appeared in The Guardian:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jul/15/clearing-gaza-of-almost-40m-tonnes-of-war-rubble-will-take-years-says-un
nice!